Judy Willis presents: How Emotion Impacts the Brain’s Learning & What To Do About It
Neuroscience research has spotlighted boredom and frustration as the stressors that frequently lessen students’ abilities to engage in successful learning.
We’ve recognized that when these stresses are recurrent, they can alter the brain’s neural networks, promote a fixed mindset, and decrease effort and motivation. What happens? Students can give up. They have more difficulty managing “top-down” control of the brain’s reflective processing needed to sustain engaged, successful learning as their brains flip into more reactive, survival modes.
In this session, you’ll gain new insights about how emotions and stress impact all aspects of attention, memory, and learning, as well as practical strategies to unlock the stress blockade that prevents the brain from doing its best work. For example, you’ll learn interventions to promote motivation and perseverance by applying principles from the neuroscience of the game model. These include strategies for increasing brain effort and learner engagement through buy-in, personal relevance, prediction, achievable challenge, variable options to achieve mastery for all learners, and recognition of individualized student incremental progress.
Perhaps best of all, you’ll leave better able to guide all students in moving from frustration to empowerment as they build their academic, emotional, and cognitive success.
Dr. Judy Willis combined her 15 years as a board-certified practicing neurologist with ten subsequent years as a classroom teacher to become a leading authority in the neuroscience of learning. Dr. Willis has written nine books and more than 200 articles/interviews about applying neuroscience research into classroom teaching strategies. She is on the adjunct faculty of the Williams College.
