16 Guidelines 16 Guidelines “I have been implementing the 16 Guidelines in our classroom over the past three years. During this time, I have noticed that the children’s emotional and social awareness has been greatly enhanced. They have become more aware of their daily interactions with their peers and can often be heard reminding one another of the Guidelines through out the day.” - Linda Manazzone, early school educator, McMaster Children’s Centre preschool program, Ontario, Canada The 16 Guidelines programme provides a simple, robust and flexible framework for developing empathy, compassion and resilience in daily life, suitable for both educational curricula and for personal and professional development. The programme offers a range of practical tools and resources designed to promote reflection on the way we think, speak, act, and find meaning in life, presented through a mixture of exercises, group work and discussion. For more information see www.16guidelines.org.
Bilingual Education: 6 Potential Brain Benefits : NPR Ed Part of our ongoing series exploring how the U.S. can educate the nearly 5 million students who are learning English. Brains, brains, brains. One thing we've learned at NPR Ed is that people are fascinated by brain research. And yet it can be hard to point to places where our education system is really making use of the latest neuroscience findings. But there is one happy nexus where research is meeting practice: bilingual education. Again and again, researchers have found, "bilingualism is an experience that shapes our brain for a lifetime," in the words of Gigi Luk, an associate professor at Harvard's Graduate School of Education. At the same time, one of the hottest trends in public schooling is what's often called dual-language or two-way immersion programs. Traditional programs for English-language learners, or ELLs, focus on assimilating students into English as quickly as possible. The goal is functional bilingualism and biliteracy for all students by middle school. Attention Empathy
Chart: How Inside Out's 5 emotions work together to make more feelings Very, very mild spoilers for Inside Out follow. An important part of the climax of Pixar's wonderful new film Inside Out involves the realization that all of our emotions are important, that feeling sad can be just as crucial as feeling happy, no matter what others might tell you. But the movie also reveals that as we get older, our emotions begin to blend together into newer, more complicated feelings. Early in the film, Riley — the 11-year-old girl whose mind serves as Inside Out's primary setting — is largely defined by very primal feelings. She's either all joy or all sadness. However, once Riley moves from Minnesota to San Francisco, she discovers that her joyful memories of her old home are now tinged with sadness. But as we see in the last scene, more and more of Riley's memories are colored by two emotions at a time. Here's our best guess, in graphic form from Christophe Haubursin. Christophe Haubursin/Vox Vox Video: Keep your emotions in-check at the claw machine
The Science of Gratitude - How it Changes People, Relationships (and Brains!) and How to Make it Work For You Gratitude – we’re all capable of it, but sometimes we need a little reminder, or a little convincing to practice it. There are many reasons to practice gratitude, but we are only recently discovering one of the big ones – its capacity to change and strengthen the brain in remarkably positive ways. Gratitude is powerful. It might not throw itself at our feet and demand our attention in a ‘why oh why won’t you notice me’ kind of way, but it’s powerful. Research has shown that gratitude can improve general well-being, increase resilience, strengthen social relationships, and reduce stress and depression. The more grateful people are, the greater their overall well-being and life satisfaction. Why is gratitude important? Gratitude involves noticing the goodness in the world, but it doesn’t mean being blind to the tough stuff or the mess that can get all of us from time to time. It strengthens our connections with people. It lets people know we aren’t the type to take things for granted.
If It Were My Home Put Working Memory to Work in Learning Working memory involves the conscious processing and managing of information required to carry out complex cognitive tasks such as learning, reasoning, and comprehension. It has been described as the brain's conductor. Memory has long been viewed as a key aspect of learning, but as the emphasis in educational standards has shifted away from rote memorization and toward the knowledge and skills needed to process new information, working memory is increasingly taking center stage. There is an explosion of research today with the aim of understanding how this important function works and how to enhance it. Working Memory in the Brain Central executive monitors and coordinates input and decides which information we will focus our attention on. Working memory is involved in a variety of learning and daily living tasks, such as reading, problem solving, and navigation. Thus, working memory is a key cognitive skill for students and their teachers. Workouts for Working Memory Repeat after me.
School's trade project will help Nepal Last updated 10:31, June 9 2015 Rose Cawley / Fairfax NZ The With One Loaf kids now want to sell their sleepout and put the money towards building houses in earthquake stricken Nepal. From left: Felix Allanson, Deklan Matangaro, Rose Bennett and Lotta McNamara. A tiny Auckland building is going up for auction. And the owners, a group of primary school kids, have their hearts set on a big return. The sale of the sleepout is part of a classroom project at Grey Lynn School. One of the first trades was for a toilet. The kids started with one loaf of bread and their aim was to keep trading for items of higher value until they reached their goal - a house for a deserving family. READ MORE: * Students' ambitious trade project * A step closer to house trade But things haven't quite gone to plan. The youngsters thought they had it made when they came in possession of a sleepout. But no one wanted to trade for their sleepout. Things progressed to a kitchen unit. - Stuff
Why Brain-Based Learning Means Always Connecting Old Knowledge With New Why Brain-Based Learning Means Always Connecting Old Knowledge With New by Judy Willis M.D., M.Ed., radteach.com Building and retrieving memories takes place in stages through information encoding, storage in patterns of relational memories, and restimulating these neuronal pathways by review each time the memory is accessed and used. Familiarity increases recall so students with memory-based learning difficulties can preview the coming lesson by skimming the new section in the book before class. On MRI scans when the brain even recognizes a word, even without knowing its meaning, there is enhanced activity in the anterior left prefrontal, left parietal, and posterior cingulate regions. When you help students understand the terms and concepts being discussed throughout the lesson, they can devote more working memory to processing and analyzing ideas, making connections, and actively processing the new information and less working memory will be needed to simply decode new terms.
relationship-skills-video-lesson-plan---the-ned-show.pdf Neuralink and the Brain's Magical Future - Wait But Why Note: If you want to print this post or read it offline, the PDF is probably the way to go. You can buy it here.And here’s a G-rated version of the post, appropriate for all ages. Last month, I got a phone call. Okay maybe that’s not exactly how it happened, and maybe those weren’t his exact words. But after learning about the new company Elon Musk was starting, I’ve come to realize that that’s exactly what he’s trying to do. When I wrote about Tesla and SpaceX, I learned that you can only fully wrap your head around certain companies by zooming both way, way in and way, way out. Not only is Elon’s new venture—Neuralink—the same type of deal, but six weeks after first learning about the company, I’m convinced that it somehow manages to eclipse Tesla and SpaceX in both the boldness of its engineering undertaking and the grandeur of its mission. So wipe your brain clean of what it thinks it knows about itself and its future, put on soft clothes, and let’s jump into the vortex. Contents
Gill Hicks (England) - Forgiveness Project Photo by Brian Moody On 7th July 2005, 52 people died and many were severely injured and maimed, by suicide bombers attacking London’s transport system. On a Piccadilly line underground train between Kings Cross and Russell Square stations, Australian-born Gill Hicks miraculously survived but lost both her legs due to the explosion. Gill’s memoir, One Unknown, was published in 2008. For more information please see: www.bethebridge.co. As I lay waiting, trapped in what resembled a train carriage – but was now a blackened, smoke filled indescribable ‘room’ of destruction and devastation – I was able to think. Incredibly, I believe I was offered the choice of Life. I wanted to live. Within an hour, help arrived by way of the emergency services. When I awoke I was euphoric to be alive and to have survived. And honouring Life is to live without hatred, to not seek revenge or want violent retribution; to ensure that the cycle of conflict ends with me.
Using Brain Breaks to Restore Students’ Focus Early in my teaching career, I was disturbed by a note left by the substitute teacher. She wrote that during the three days she was with my students, they were responsive during the first part of class, but that many of them became inattentive, distracted, and even disruptive after about 20 minutes of her instruction. When I asked the students what had happened, they were of one voice: “She didn’t give us our brain breaks.” What Are Brain Breaks? For students to learn at their highest potential, their brains need to send signals efficiently from the sensory receptors (what they hear, see, touch, read, imagine, and experience) to memory storage regions of the brain. Brain breaks are planned learning activity shifts that mobilize different networks of the brain. The Neuroscience of Brain Breaks For new information to become memory, it must pass through an emotional filter called the amygdala and then reach the prefrontal cortex. Brain Breaks Restore Brain Supplies Timing Mood Motivation