# data[].attributes.body
Flower of Power - Select  pictures from your instagram/facebook/etc.  Analyze your culture/experiences with diversity

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Cultural Safety: Module Two | Peoples Experiences of Oppression

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Take five minutes to write about, or reflect on, an experience you've had or witnessed in which one person/group's behaviour was unfair or marginalizing to another person/group. This is a private reflection that no one else need see or know about. This event might have happened during your work or your everyday life, to you, or to someone else.

# data[].attributes.body
High Leverage Practices

# data[].attributes.body
Royce Kimmons Technology integration PICRAT

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
This matrix builds off of the technology integration framework of RAT (Hughes, Thomas, & Scharber, 2006) to provide teachers with a way of meaningfully thinking about technology integration.

To use the matrix, teachers must ask themselves two questions:

1. What is the technology use's effect on practice?

Replacement

Amplification

Transformation

2. What are the students doing with the technology?

Effective technology integration is a nuanced and difficult thing to decipher, but this matrix helps us to think about practice along two lines. Generally speaking, I submit that effective technology integration occurs more at the top-right of the matrix, while most of our practice lingers around the bottom-left.

Kimmons, R., Graham, C., & West, R. (2020). The PICRAT model for technology integration in teacher preparation. Contemporary Issues in Technology and Teacher Education, 20(1).

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
This matrix builds off of the technology integration framework of RAT (Hughes, Thomas, & Scharber, 2006) to provide teachers with a way of meaningfully thinking about technology integration. To use the matrix, teachers must ask themselves two questions: What is the technology use's effect on practice?

# data[].attributes.body
"Help with Essential Questions"

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
2. Kindergartners Are Still Not Spending Enough Time on Art, Music, and Play

Are kindergartners spending too much time on academics? A study found that in 2010 kindergarten teachers spent more time on literacy and math, teacher-directed instruction, and assessment than they did in 1998-and less time on art, music, and science. The trend continues despite research suggesting that focusing on academics at an early age can be counterproductive.

3. Learning About the Struggles of Famous Scientists Boosts Student Motivation

It turns out that the idea of genius might intimidate young learners. When students read about the struggles of famous scientists-when the scientists were humanized-the students developed a growth mindset, which boosted motivation and science scores. The performance improvements were most dramatic for low-performing students.

4. Students Have Positive Perceptions of Teachers of Color

In the teaching profession, people of color are underrepresented nationally, and a new study finds a compelling reason to recruit more: Students of all races prefer teachers of color. A survey of over 50,000 middle school students found that black and Latino teachers were generally the highest-rated teachers, performing highly on teaching qualities such as ability to motivate students, classroom management, and relationship building.

5. Students Have Difficulty Telling Real News From Fake News

Despite growing up as digital natives, many students have difficulty evaluating the information they find online. More than 80 percent think that sponsored articles are actual articles, and most can't spot fake accounts on social media. Many are fooled by official-sounding organizations making controversial claims, while others accept photographs as evidence of a claim without verifying their authenticity.

6. 46 Percent of Teachers Report High Daily Stress During the School Year

Teacher stress, now at an all-time high, is linked to poor teacher performance, high turnover rates, and poor student outcomes. But the news isn't all bad: Many schools have found success with stress-reduction programs, mentoring programs, workplace wellness programs, social and emotional learning programs, and mindfulness/stress-management programs for maxed-out teachers.

7. Meanwhile, Here's a Simple Way to Address Growing Student Stress

Teachers aren't the only ones. Last year, we learned that high school students feel stressed 80 percent of the time. This year, we heard about a simple daily reading and writing exercise that helped students cope with stress by promoting a simple idea: People can change. After a week, students who participated were better able to cope with stress and had higher grades, compared with students who didn't participate.

8. Racially Diverse Schools Benefit All Students

In this analysis of racial diversity in U.S. schools, researchers found that students of all races benefit from exposure to students with different backgrounds, since the novel ideas and challenges that such exposure brings lead to improved cognitive skills, including critical thinking and problem solving.

9. Game-Based Learning Works by Tapping Student Competitiveness

Games have a lot of potential to boost student learning, and a new study helps explain why. When students competed against each other in a series of quizzes, they did better than students who studied alone. Neuroscientists scanning brain activity found that competition among students increases their ability to focus and improves their working memory-leading to better performance.

10. Student Homelessness Is Way Up (Plus, Some Ideas to Address the Crisis)

More than 1.3 million students are homeless today, twice as many as in 2007. This report provides insight into how homeless students can be supported, including material support (providing food, clothes, and shelter) and emotional support (providing counseling and a safe place to learn).

11. Showing Empathy and Respect Cuts Suspension Rates in Half

Despite the prevalence of zero-tolerance policies over the last few decades, research continues to show that they may not be effective. When middle school teachers were encouraged to adopt positive approaches toward discipline, which emphasize trust-building and empathy, teacher-student relationships improved-and suspensions dropped by half.

12. Lessons Learned From the Best Schools Around the World

The bad news is that the U.S. is falling behind the rest of the world in preparing students for a 21st-century economy. The good news? World-class education systems have a few common elements that we can learn from: a strong early education system, a high-quality professional teacher workforce, robust career and technical education programs, and strong alignment between K-12 and college/career goals.

13. 84 Percent of Parents Believe Computer Science Is Just as Important as Math, Science, and English

Google and Gallup teamed up to explore trends in K-12 computer science across the U.S. While a majority of parents, teachers, and principals value computer science instruction, the survey found that most schools still don't offer these classes.

14. A Growth Mindset Helps Offset the Effects of Poverty

In one of the largest studies so far on growth mindset, researchers looked at a nationwide survey of 168,000 Chilean high school students to explore the relationship it has with poverty. They found that poor students with a growth mindset performed as well as wealthy students with a fixed mindset.

15. One-to-One Laptops Improve Student Scores

Good news for schools interested in starting or expanding a one-to-one program (one laptop per student): A review of 15 years' worth of studies found that laptop programs significantly boost scores in English, writing, mathematics, and science. Students in these programs also had a modest boost to 21st-century skills such as technological proficiency and problem solving.

Want to catch up on research highlights from 2015? Be sure to check out our list of must-read studies from last year.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Education Research Highlights From 2016 | Edutopia

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Are kindergartners spending too much time on academics? A study found that in 2010 kindergarten teachers spent more time on literacy and math, teacher-directed instruction, and assessment than they did in 1998-and less time on art, music, and science. The trend continues despite research suggesting that focusing on academics at an early age can be counterproductive.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
In Susan Cain's Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking, the best-selling author raises a topic I've been thinking about a lot lately. In the chapter "When Collaboration Kills Creativity: The Rise of the New Groupthink and the Power of Working Alone," Cain quotes Apple cofounder Steve Wozniak, who endorsed working alone in his memoir:

Most inventors and engineers I've met are like me-they're shy and they live in their heads. They're almost like artists. In fact, the very best of them are artists. And artists work best alone-best outside of corporate environments, best where they can control an invention's design without a lot of people designing it for marketing or some other committee.

What can Wozniak's views tell us about teaching and about pushing introverts, who typically prefer to work alone, to collaborate? John Aime, assistant head of school at Santa Catalina School in Monterey, California, may have put it best. "It's not whether teachers should have kids work alone or in groups," he told me. "The point is that both methods of coming to some understanding about an unknown topic are valuable. One approach should not be emphasized to the exclusion of the other." Still, I struggle to find the balance in my classroom.

The Power of Questioning

In my high school humanities classes, before each unit I distribute focus questions and focus terms for the students to respond to as a culminating assessment. I constantly encourage them to further their understanding, alone and in groups, by engaging with the text to connect overarching terms, concepts, and themes.

During class, students work in pairs to explain their responses, not simply recite what they wrote. This requires introverts and extroverts alike to make sense of and internalize large amounts of information-not merely regurgitate it. Dr. Ken Bain, author of What the Best College Students Do, reinforced my thinking when we spoke about his book. Have students "spend time questioning and questioning each other," he told me. "Students can spend hours reviewing a vocabulary list or an approach to solving a problem, but if someone questions [them] about it and asks [them] to explain it . . . and to think about its applications to a particular problem, [they're] going to learn much more deeply."

The Right Way to Engage Introverts in Group Work

When it comes to fostering creativity in the long term, Dr. Keith Sawyer, a leading scientific researcher in the field, echoes Bain and Aime. "The most effective creative process alternates between time in groups, collaboration, interaction and conversation, . . . [and] times of solitude, where something different happens cognitively in your brain," says Sawyer, who in 2007 wrote one of the first major books on collaboration, Group Genius: The Creative Power of Collaboration.

Sawyer's work rings true to my own teaching experience, but so does Susan Cain's. "I hear too many stories of children who are given the message by very well-meaning teachers that there's something wrong with the way they are," she told me, "I think well-meaning teachers see their role as being to turn introverts into extroverts. We really need to understand that an introvert is a totally normal personality type."

Not wanting to be a teacher who causes introverts to wonder what's wrong with them, I asked Sawyer if group work should be required. He told me, "There is a lot of research showing that introverts can participate in groups and teams, and they can benefit from the additional creativity that comes from collaboration. I would recommend that even introverts do what they can to interact with groups and have conversations that, typically, drive creativity and innovation."

From speaking with Cain and Sawyer, I gather the trick is knowing your students as individual learners, and that includes knowing when to push and when to ease up. It involves hard work, differentiating instruction and assessment to appeal to a wide range of learners, and finding a way for introverts and extroverts to show what they can do with what they know. There is no one-size-fits-all approach.

Keeping Introverts Motivated and Engaged

To be fair, Cain never suggested to me that educators should avoid learning activities that could favor extroverted personalities. Rather, she told me, "I think it is a matter of finding one-on-one time with [introverted] students, figuring out what are the areas that they're really interested in, and maybe calling on them or asking them to participate around those areas."

In my experience, all students, not just introverts, perform best when they sense intrinsic value in their pursuits. When assigning groups, I do my best to match students by shared interests. Last year, for instance, several of my introverted American history students worked diligently on an academic debate in which they passionately defended President Truman's decision to use atomic warfare to end World War II. As advisor to The Gator, the student news site of Brimmer and May School in Massachusetts, I marvel at introverted student-reporters who work alongside others in numerous capacities, including brainstorming story ideas, reporting, writing, editing, and promoting their work.

What sort of balance do you strike between group work and independent work? I would love to hear your thoughts in the comments section below.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Where Do Introverts Fit Into Group Work?

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
In Susan Cain's Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking , the best-selling author raises a topic I've been thinking about a lot lately.

# data[].attributes.body
5 Guiding ideas for emerging educational systems:
Strength in peer to peer networks
Promote collaboration not competition
Be the change you want to see
Too urgent to rush!

# data[].attributes.body
Building Growth Mindset

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
What if I were to tell you that you could increase the odds that your kids will achieve great success in life--maybe greater success than you've had--simply by making a small change in how you praise them and talk about achievement?

It turns out, you can. What's more, this change flies in the face of almost everything we've been told by so-called experts about raising successful kids--at least for the past 15 years or more.

It's all about how we praise our kids for their accomplishments. An emerging and exciting body of research on the subject suggests several key things we might not have realized otherwise:

1. Praising kids merely for their innate abilities, such as their intelligence, actually makes it less likely that they'll grow up to enjoy learning and to excel.

2. Praising kids instead for the strategies and processes they develop to solve problems--even when they don't fully succeed--makes them more likely to try harder and ultimately achieve.

3. And--perhaps the kicker--the effects of these praise strategies can be quantified even when we're talking about children as young as 1 to 3 years of age. (So once again, my 15-month-old daughter will get the benefit of something I've learned while writing for Inc.!)

As you might imagine, this would mean that the so-called experts who told us to praise our kids endlessly (part of the "everyone gets a participation trophy" movement) were dead wrong. (I've written a lot this subject at Inc. and put together a free e-book: How to Raise Successful Kids.)

How does it all work? We'll talk below about two studies involving school-age children, both led by Carol Dweck, a professor of psychology at Stanford University. First, however, let's examine the difference between a growth mindset and a fixed mindset, which underlies the whole thing.

Fixed vs. growth mindset

This is really what this research is all about--teaching kids to develop growth mindsets rather than fixed mindsets.

When it comes to beliefs about human achievement, a fixed mindset is the belief that intelligence, for example, is almost entirely innate. Either you're born with great smarts and the ability to achieve, or you're not.

A growth mindset, on the other hand, is the belief that achievement (again, for our purposes in the intellectual realm) is much more variable, and that intelligence and problem-solving abilities can be developed over time.

You might summarize the whole thing by thinking of Albert Einstein, Dweck suggests. A person with a fixed mindset might say, "Einstein was brilliant." A person with a growth mindset might observe that Einstein solved some incredibly difficult problems.

As for teaching growth mindsets, writer Angie Aker summarized Dweck's work and put it like this on Upworthy: "Praise your child explicitly for how capable they are of learning rather than telling them how smart they are."

The seventh-graders

Back to Dweck's research. A few years ago, she and her team took 373 middle school students, and identified those who exhibited fixed mindsets and those who exhibited growth mindsets.

Then, the followed them for two years--from the start of seventh grade to the end of eighth grade. The dichotomy was stark.

"By the end of the first term, their grades jumped apart and continued to diverge over the next two years. The only thing that differed was their mindsets," Dweck said in a video. As you might expect, the ones who exhibited growth mindsets achieved more than their classmates who had fixed mindsets.

Dweck said she has identified several key differences between the two types of students.

Students with a fixed mindset had one goal in mind: "Look smart at all times and at all costs." That meant they worked to avoid any task that might show they weren't as smart as they thought they were.

Students with a growth mindset, on the other hand, didn't care if their mistakes were revealed to their peers; they saw this as inevitable and nothing to be ashamed of, because their goal was to "learn at all times and at all costs."
2. Attitudes toward effort and failure
Students with a fixed mindset viewed effort and failure as bad things, because the mere fact that someone worked hard or came up short demonstrated (to them) that the person didn't have innate ability. Growth-mindset students, on the other hand, believed that effort was what was required to unlock ability.

Dweck says the notion that effort is a bad thing "is one of the worst beliefs that anyone can have."
3. Boredom and difficulty
Students who demonstrated a fixed mindset were far more likely to complain of being bored in school, Dweck found. They seemed to get into a cycle in which they used boredom as a cover to suggest why they wouldn't try things that they found difficult; in the process they actually became bored.

Growth-mindset students, on the other hand, looked at schoolwork as a series of challenges and puzzles to figure out. They were also less likely to complain that a teacher, or a course, or another external factor, was responsible if they had difficulty.

The 11-year-olds

All of this is great, but if you're a parent, you likely want to explore not just why a growth mindset is advantageous, but also how to encourage your kids to develop that kind of attitude. Fortunately, Dweck has a study for that, too.

She and her team divided a group of 11-year-olds into three groups, and gave each of them a fairly easy but age-appropriate intelligence test. At the end, they praised each of the kids in one of three ways:

They praised one group for their innate intelligence

They praised one group for the processes they came up with to solve the test

They praised a third group, as a control, for a passing score, without mentioning either their intelligence or the process they had used.

Results? The first part won't surprise you. Praising their intelligence put kids into a fixed mindset. Praising their effort and process, on the other hand, pushed them into a growth mindset.

But Dweck said things actually went further: "The most astonishing thing to us was that praising intelligence turned kids off to learning."

The babies and a few examples

So, how early is too early to start praising strategies and processes over innate ability? Very early, according to Dweck. In fact, her research shows that the way mothers praise babies as young as 1 to 3 years in age can predict the child's "mindset and desire for challenge five years later."

(Dweck says that after conducting her research, she's been known to interrupt moms she's seen in airports telling their babies that they're geniuses.)

So what should you do instead? Here are a couple of ideas. Instead of praising a child for solving a puzzle or accomplishing an easy goal, Dweck suggests saying something like, "I'm sorry I wasted your time. Let's do something hard--something you can learn from."

Or, instead of asking your kids at dinner how school was today, go around the table and ask everyone to share a story of how they struggled with something. (You have to share, too!)

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Want to Raise Successful Kids? Science Says Praise Them Like This (but Most Parents Do the Opposite)

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
What if I were to tell you that you could increase the odds that your kids will achieve great success in life--maybe greater success than you've had--simply by making a small change in how you praise them and talk about achievement? It turns out, you can.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Thus, it shouldn't surprise us that such a potent emotion resonates across mind and body, influencing behavior and brain function. That is exactly the case. Empathy has the potential to open up students to deeper learning, drive clarity of thinking, and inspire engagement with the world-in other words, provide the emotional sustenance for outstanding human performance.

I see this regularly in my work with project-based-learning teachers who create classrooms that hum with good vibes and focused work. But to understand the full potential of empathy, let's connect some dots. Those dots may appear unrelated at the moment, but they constitute a scatterplot with a trend line, predicting that empathy will eventually not be an add-on or 'soft' skill or one component of a middle school advisory program, and in the process confirm that a school system focused on cognition and testing alone cannot bring forth the greater purpose, focus, collaboration, and creativity necessary for 21 st century students.

I see seven 'dots', if you will, that begin to paint this emerging picture of schooling in the future:

Empathy underlies collaborationAs social-emotional learning becomes more necessary to help students navigate life and work, empathy is getting more popular by the day, for good reason: Empathy lies at the heart of 21 st century skillfulness in teamwork, collaboration and communication in a diverse world. Speaking or listening to someone without radiating empathy narrows the channel of communication or blocks connection altogether. Particularly in the new reality of a global world, without empathy you're not ready to engage the 21 st century, either in the workplace or across cultures. It has to be taught, practiced and coached.

Empathy is healthy
In the last twenty years, discussions about emotions have taken a radical turn. For years, negative emotions dominated theory and research. Today we know that positive emotions enhance well-being, health, relationships and personal strengths. At the top of this pyramid are the emotions associated with empathy: curiosity, openness, appreciation and gratitude. Empathy simply powers up the mind, body and spirit.

Empathy promotes whole-child learning
A critical dot, overlooked in our brain-centric world, is that empathy may activate the heart. As I've written many times, the heart has a role in learning equal to the brain. In fact, science does not support the mistaken notion that the brain does all the work. Research on heart rate variability and emotions shows that the heart engages the brain in constant conversation, using the language of emotions to direct the 'state' of the brain. To perform its role, the heart contains upwards of 40,000 neurons identical to nerve cells in the brain; eighty percent of nerve traffic then travels upward from heart to brain, making it clear that the heart influences brain function. While we don't fully understand the implications of this partnership, two findings have been confirmed: Anxiety and negative feelings alter the coding of the messages sent by the heart to the brain, resulting in stress or fight or flight responses; at the same time, positive emotions such as gratitude and appreciation-close cousins of empathy-show pronounced, positive effects on brain processes.

Empathy 'opens' us up
The frontal lobes of the brain, at least as much as we know now, are the seat of planning, execution, problem solving and creativity-and when the frontal lobes are working well, so are we. In that well-documented 'flow state,' humans function at their peak, moving into a whole-body feeling of openness, relaxed focus, and creative possibility. If we know empathy activates the frontal lobes, why can't we imagine intentional lessons about empathy and openness designed to put students in an optimal state for learning?

Empathy powers up inquiry and project based learning
Instruction is clearly headed in the direction of student-centered approaches such as inquiry and PBL. These approaches succeed in an atmosphere of care and positive relationships, both between student and teacher, and student and student. Classrooms that lack this foundation cannot succeed at project based work or open-ended questioning that relies on students' ability to care about their learning. Setting up a culture of care is very much an exercise in making empathy central to daily work.

Empathy triggers creativity
Beyond rounding out the skills of collaboration and communication, empathy, design and collaboration are interconnected pieces of the creative puzzle. Empathy is now identified as the first step in the design process, whether crafting new software for a user or creating form-factors that inherently please the consumer. Right now, empathy is described as 'step.' But that easy designation belies a very deep process in which a designer must, for lack of a better term, 'sink into the mind of another and take on their persona'. That is a deep descriptor of an ultimate form of empathy-and it may be a necessary component of an educational system increasingly tilted toward design and inquiry.

Empathy unites
The list could have started here, but on a planet that is now close to completing the globalizing process, empathy assumes a special role as the key emotion critical for seven-plus billion people to live in harmony and cooperative relationship. For our Stone-Age brethren, fear and separation were appropriate mechanisms for survival. But that has been flipped by sheer numbers, technology, resource scarcity, and environmental impact. Empathy is required curriculum, and without it, eventually our current focus on high test scores and fulfilling college requirements will be rendered meaningless by untoward events.

The takeaway? Ready or not, education is entering an age in which social learning is the new norm. Pure academics are giving way to increased opportunities for students to work together; teachers increasingly take on the role of co-learner and facilitator; listening, learning, and teaming are the new core skills. At the heart of this new skillfulness for everyone is the ability to forge deep connections lead to creative problem solving and positive pursuits. Taken all together, this makes empathy critical to schools. In fact, very soon we will need to invent a new taxonomy of learning that makes empathy the base of the learning pyramid.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Why Empathy Holds the Key to Transforming 21st Century Learning | KQED

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Thus, it shouldn't surprise us that such a potent emotion resonates across mind and body, influencing behavior and brain function. That is exactly the case. Empathy has the potential to open up students to deeper learning, drive clarity of thinking, and inspire engagement with the world-in other words, provide the emotional sustenance for outstanding human performance.

# data[].attributes.body
Overview of Restorative Practices

# data[].attributes.body
http://lifehacker.com/the-seven-golden-rules-for-collaborating-with-great-peo-1680691691

# data[].attributes.body
Article

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Thus, it shouldn't surprise us that such a potent emotion resonates across mind and body, influencing behavior and brain function. That is exactly the case. Empathy has the potential to open up students to deeper learning, drive clarity of thinking, and inspire engagement with the world-in other words, provide the emotional sustenance for outstanding human performance.

I see this regularly in my work with project-based-learning teachers who create classrooms that hum with good vibes and focused work. But to understand the full potential of empathy, let's connect some dots. Those dots may appear unrelated at the moment, but they constitute a scatterplot with a trend line, predicting that empathy will eventually not be an add-on or 'soft' skill or one component of a middle school advisory program, and in the process confirm that a school system focused on cognition and testing alone cannot bring forth the greater purpose, focus, collaboration, and creativity necessary for 21 st century students.

I see seven 'dots', if you will, that begin to paint this emerging picture of schooling in the future:

Empathy underlies collaborationAs social-emotional learning becomes more necessary to help students navigate life and work, empathy is getting more popular by the day, for good reason: Empathy lies at the heart of 21 st century skillfulness in teamwork, collaboration and communication in a diverse world. Speaking or listening to someone without radiating empathy narrows the channel of communication or blocks connection altogether. Particularly in the new reality of a global world, without empathy you're not ready to engage the 21 st century, either in the workplace or across cultures. It has to be taught, practiced and coached.

Empathy is healthy
In the last twenty years, discussions about emotions have taken a radical turn. For years, negative emotions dominated theory and research. Today we know that positive emotions enhance well-being, health, relationships and personal strengths. At the top of this pyramid are the emotions associated with empathy: curiosity, openness, appreciation and gratitude. Empathy simply powers up the mind, body and spirit.

Empathy promotes whole-child learning
A critical dot, overlooked in our brain-centric world, is that empathy may activate the heart. As I've written many times, the heart has a role in learning equal to the brain. In fact, science does not support the mistaken notion that the brain does all the work. Research on heart rate variability and emotions shows that the heart engages the brain in constant conversation, using the language of emotions to direct the 'state' of the brain. To perform its role, the heart contains upwards of 40,000 neurons identical to nerve cells in the brain; eighty percent of nerve traffic then travels upward from heart to brain, making it clear that the heart influences brain function. While we don't fully understand the implications of this partnership, two findings have been confirmed: Anxiety and negative feelings alter the coding of the messages sent by the heart to the brain, resulting in stress or fight or flight responses; at the same time, positive emotions such as gratitude and appreciation-close cousins of empathy-show pronounced, positive effects on brain processes.

Empathy 'opens' us up
The frontal lobes of the brain, at least as much as we know now, are the seat of planning, execution, problem solving and creativity-and when the frontal lobes are working well, so are we. In that well-documented 'flow state,' humans function at their peak, moving into a whole-body feeling of openness, relaxed focus, and creative possibility. If we know empathy activates the frontal lobes, why can't we imagine intentional lessons about empathy and openness designed to put students in an optimal state for learning?

Empathy powers up inquiry and project based learning
Instruction is clearly headed in the direction of student-centered approaches such as inquiry and PBL. These approaches succeed in an atmosphere of care and positive relationships, both between student and teacher, and student and student. Classrooms that lack this foundation cannot succeed at project based work or open-ended questioning that relies on students' ability to care about their learning. Setting up a culture of care is very much an exercise in making empathy central to daily work.

Empathy triggers creativity
Beyond rounding out the skills of collaboration and communication, empathy, design and collaboration are interconnected pieces of the creative puzzle. Empathy is now identified as the first step in the design process, whether crafting new software for a user or creating form-factors that inherently please the consumer. Right now, empathy is described as 'step.' But that easy designation belies a very deep process in which a designer must, for lack of a better term, 'sink into the mind of another and take on their persona'. That is a deep descriptor of an ultimate form of empathy-and it may be a necessary component of an educational system increasingly tilted toward design and inquiry.

Empathy unites
The list could have started here, but on a planet that is now close to completing the globalizing process, empathy assumes a special role as the key emotion critical for seven-plus billion people to live in harmony and cooperative relationship. For our Stone-Age brethren, fear and separation were appropriate mechanisms for survival. But that has been flipped by sheer numbers, technology, resource scarcity, and environmental impact. Empathy is required curriculum, and without it, eventually our current focus on high test scores and fulfilling college requirements will be rendered meaningless by untoward events.

The takeaway? Ready or not, education is entering an age in which social learning is the new norm. Pure academics are giving way to increased opportunities for students to work together; teachers increasingly take on the role of co-learner and facilitator; listening, learning, and teaming are the new core skills. At the heart of this new skillfulness for everyone is the ability to forge deep connections lead to creative problem solving and positive pursuits. Taken all together, this makes empathy critical to schools. In fact, very soon we will need to invent a new taxonomy of learning that makes empathy the base of the learning pyramid.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Why Empathy Holds the Key to Transforming 21st Century Learning | KQED

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Thus, it shouldn't surprise us that such a potent emotion resonates across mind and body, influencing behavior and brain function. That is exactly the case. Empathy has the potential to open up students to deeper learning, drive clarity of thinking, and inspire engagement with the world-in other words, provide the emotional sustenance for outstanding human performance.

# data[].attributes.headline
Approaching Racial and Cultural Sensitivity

# data[].attributes.subject
Approaching Racial and Cultural Sensitivity

# data[].attributes.body
Edutopia

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Some indicate they would go out of their way to give these students special treatment. Others talk about tough love, looking for a way to establish a connection, not being overly reactive to their anger while holding them to the same standards of behavior as other students.

These are the opening moments in a workshop on racial, cultural, and social class sensitivity in a teaching intern class at San Francisco State.

I want to be clear that neither my class nor this post is about racism per se. Most of those students were glad to be teaching in culturally diverse environments. But every one of them, like me, also needed to become more aware of the subtle insensitivities and prejudices that even good liberals harbor.

Subtle Prejudice Towards African-American Males

We then watched a short scene from the film Higher Learning. Two newly-arrived freshmen at a Southern California university enter a dormitory elevator. One is an African American male. The other is a blond, very upper-middle-class-attired, young woman. She looks at him from the corner of her eyes and then places both hands firmly on her pocketbook, He sees her do this, rolls his eyes, and subtly shakes his head with a knowing smile as they emerge from the elevator.

I asked the students to describe what they saw and indicate whether any of that resonates with them. Two of my African American male students said that it happens to them all the time. I asked them to explore possible reasons for her response, and also discuss whether she would have had the same response to an African American female. Overwhelmingly they agree that, for this scene, the student had to be male.

I then shared a story. I'd recently spent time assisting, teaching, and interviewing students in Woodside High School. It's in a wealthy area south of San Francisco that has many African American students bussed in from lower-income East Palo Alto. In the class I was observing, I noticed that the female white teacher had established a close rapport with three African American girls, but that the moment two tall African American boys walked into class each day, she tensed up. She never called on them, and her behavior showed fear and discomfort. I interviewed these boys. They felt this continually. They were good kids and fit no stereotype of potential delinquents. The problem was hers, and she was unaware of how differently she responded. I worked with her to get her through that fear, learn to relax with them, and engage in some of the occasional banter she had with the girls.

Examining One's Own Prejudices and Insensitivities as a Teacher

The famed psychologist Fritz Perls wrote, "Contact is the appreciation of differences." My goal with my workshop students wasn't to help increase tolerance, but rather to develop appreciation and contact. Tolerance certainly beats intolerance. But if I just tolerate you, it's a far cry from connecting. And to work effectively with students, we need to connect to them.

On the second day of the workshop, I assigned a one- to two-page paper in which students examined their own prejudices. To model this self-reflection regarding racial, cultural, and social-class attitudes and feelings that could get in the way of their teaching, I first shared some of mine. I told them that although I had friends and/or close colleagues of different races, cultures, and sexual orientations, I was still working on my own subtle insensitivities and prejudices.

Students wrote their papers in class and shared in small groups, reading each other's work. They then discussed how these attitudes and feelings might interfere with their reaching some kids, and how they might begin to change. I believed that their new awareness would lead to change for most of these interns.

A Tale of Two Letters: Cultural and Social Class Prejudice Explored

For the final workshop exercise, I handed out a copy of a letter written by two Asian parents to the teacher of their two boys. The letter described how the parents felt their boys were being discriminated against by the teacher, ignored at times and unfairly chastised at other times. Now here's the catch: half of the letters were written in perfect English on the letterhead of a university. The other half, containing exactly the same content, were written in broken English with many grammatical and spelling errors. The interns didn't know this. The letters were loosely based on a real case and were designed by my colleague Dr. Penelope Flores.

The teacher interns then wrote a response to the parents, after which I disclosed the differences in the two letters, before having them get into small groups mixing students who had received and responded to each of the letters. They shared their responses. Before the groups dispersed, I asked them to decide if there was a difference in tone and/or content between those who had the letter from the university professor parents and those who had the letter from the less-educated, probably new immigrant, parents. In every single group, the students agreed that there was a clear difference in tone and content and that the less-educated parents had been responded to with more condescension and less respect.

The message was clear and needed no further elaboration.

To conclude the workshop I had them role-play, in groups of three, a meeting between the two parents and the teacher. My questions after the role-play were:

1. To what extent did the teacher begin by first listening to the parents and hearing their concerns?

2. To what extent were they able to take the role of the parents and really appreciate how they felt?

3. Was there real contact established?

Again the message was clear.

By now, the workshop's primary goals should be obvious:

An examination of one's prejudices; an effort to truly understand and take the role of the other; the development of an appreciation of differences, and, hopefully, the establishment of real contact. All are necessary for effective teaching and connecting to all students.

Now for a moment, imagine if this type of training were required of the police in every community, not just Ferguson.

Further Exploration and the Implications Beyond the Classroom

There are many resources providing similar work with kids of all ages, but here are some of my favorites. First, English teachers might think about using the story "String Music" from The Martini Shot by George Pelecanos, a writer who really understands African-American adolescents.

Then take a look at each of these:

As an educator, how do you approach racial and cultural sensitivity issues?

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Approaching Racial and Cultural Sensitivity | Edutopia

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Some indicate they would go out of their way to give these students special treatment. Others talk about tough love, looking for a way to establish a connection, not being overly reactive to their anger while holding them to the same standards of behavior as other students.

# data[].attributes.body
Growth Mind Set by  Carol Dweck
TedTalk

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
The power of believing that you can improve

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Carol Dweck researches “growth mindset” — the idea that we can grow our brain’s capacity to learn and to solve problems. In this talk, she describes two ways to think about a problem that’s slightly too hard for you to solve. Are you not smart enough to solve it … or have you just not solved it yet? A great introduction to this influential field.

# data[].attributes.body
Teach Like a Pirate by Dan Burgess

# data[].attributes.body
Article

(Research should be what they inquire into and collect insight into, yes?I think this should be listed as a "Resource")
Getting over our experiences of being a student - Dan Lorti - apprenticeship of observation

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Free Educational Articles | Education.com

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Education and parenting articles offer expert tips and information on raising kids. Read educational articles, parenting articles, & more

# data[].attributes.body
Website: p21

# data[].attributes.body
Prezi: Sir Ken
Paradigm Shift in Ed

# data[].attributes.body
Website: Brain Rules

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Brain Rules: Brain development for parents, teachers and business leaders | Brain Rules |

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Brain Rules by John J. Medina is a multimedia project explaining how the brain works. It includes a book, a feature-length documentary film, and a series of interactive tutorials.

# data[].attributes.body
Text

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
"What is the purpose of education? This question agitates scholars, teachers, statesmen, every group, in fact, of thoughtful men and women," Eleanor Roosevelt wrote in the 1930 article, "Good Citizenship: The Purpose of Education," in Pictorial Review.

If you were to ask even a relatively small group of teachers, administrators, students, parents, community members, business leaders, and policymakers to address the question of purpose, how difficult do you think it would be to reach a consensus?

You might have better luck asking, "What is the meaning of life?"

In the United States, historically, the purpose of education has evolved according to the needs of society. Education's primary purpose has ranged from instructing youth in religious doctrine, to preparing them to live in a democracy, to assimilating immigrants into mainstream society, to preparing workers for the industrialized 20th century workplace.

And now, as educators prepare young people for their futures in a world that is rapidly changing, what is the goal? To create adults who can compete in a global economy? To create lifelong learners? To create emotionally healthy adults who can engage in meaningful relationships?

"There are many different points of view on this topic," says Jonathan Cohen, cofounder and president of the National School Climate Center. "I think that my view, and most people's view, is that the purpose of education is to support children in developing the skills, the knowledge, and the dispositions that will allow them to be responsible, contributing members of their community-their democratically-informed community. Meaning, to be a good friend, to be a good mate, to be able to work, and to contribute to the well-being of the community."

Not only should children learn civic knowledge-how the electoral college works, the history of political parties, and so on-but they also need to master civic skills, which include respecting others, working collaboratively, acting in a way that is fair and just, and being an active participant in the life of the community, Cohen says.

Are we on track to fulfill this vision? "We are not on track," says Cohen, who believes that the No Child Left Behind Act's narrow focus neglects social and emotional learning, although they are interrelated with intellectual learning. Cohen's National School Climate Center is an organization that helps schools integrate crucial social and emotional learning with academic instruction.

In his Harvard Educational Review article "Social, Emotional, Ethical, and Academic Education: Creating a Climate for Learning, Participation in Democracy, and Well-Being," Cohen looks at the disparity between where we are and where we say we want to go.

"There is a paradox in our preK-12 schools and within teacher education. Parents and teachers want schooling to support children's ability to become lifelong learners who are able to love, work, and act as responsible members of the community. Yet, we have not substantially integrated these values into our schools or into the training we give teachers," Cohen says.

Cohen hopes to see greater support for state departments of education to establish school climate measurement systems. He says states and districts also need guidelines, tools, and resources that would help them engage educators, students, parents or guardians, and community members in creating safer, more supportive, engaging, and challenging schools.

James Harvey, a senior fellow at the Center on Reinventing Public Education , holds a similar opinion about education's purpose. "K-12 education should prepare students for life-for college, for work, for living within a family and within a community, and for participating effectively in the democratic process," he says.

Although future employment is probably necessary for most young people, K-12 education is more than just job training. "Schools have always been about developing students for life and work-and life is much more than earning a living; it is also living a life," Harvey says.

Cohen and Harvey are but two voices in a much larger ongoing global debate.

To engage the global community in a debate around the question, "What's the purpose of education?" Doug Belshaw and Andy Stewart founded Purpos/ed, a nonpartisan, location-independent organization. Launched in 2011, fosters dialogue through activities such as the 500-word campaign, which encouraged people to take a stab at defining the purpose of education and then leading conversations on their own individual blogs.

Earlier this year, Adam Burk facilitated a rousing discussion on TED.com (which is now closed to new comments) asking, "In your opinion, what should be the purpose of education?" When Burke closed the discussion, there were as many different opinions as there were respondents.

"There are 365 comments and 365 distinct articulations of what the purpose of education should be," Burk said. "The process to develop a consensus on this is beyond the scope and purpose of this conversation. However, I do hope that it is understood that this question and its answer are the shapers of education systems and, in turn, cultures."

Despite any dilemma that varying opinions and perspectives pose, healthy debate tends to inspire innovative ideas. However, as we face the challenge of educating young people for life in the 21st century, we also know that some things will remain constant.

Dr. Gene R. Carter, chief executive officer and director of ASCD, explains in the Good article "What's the Purpose of School in the 21st Century?" that good teaching never goes out of style.

"We know that there is one education reform movement that works, and unsurprisingly, it's the same formula that has worked since we had those old textbooks, chalkboards, and red apples in the classroom. Research, policy, practice, and common sense confirm that a whole child approach to education will develop and prepare students for the challenges and opportunities of today and tomorrow," Carter says.

Harvey agrees that there's no need to scrap what has served us well in the past: "The most significant skill [young people] can develop in the 21st century is the same skill that served them well in prior centuries: a mind equipped to think, the most important work skill of them all."

There still may be hope for our future.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
"What is the purpose of education? This question agitates scholars, teachers, statesmen, every group, in fact, of thoughtful men and women," Eleanor Roosevelt wrote in the 1930 article, "Good Citizenship: The Purpose of Education," in Pictorial Review.

# data[].attributes.body
Text

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
The video tells the story of Malala Yousafzai, the Nobel Peace Prize winner from Pakistan who at 15 survived being shot in the head by the Taliban while riding a bus in 2012. "I want to get my education, and I want to become a doctor," she says, adding that the Taliban throw acid on some people's faces and kill others, but "they cannot stop me."

A 15-year-old boy watching the clip on a laptop inside the University of Southern California's Brain and Creativity Institute seems unmoved by Yousafzai's story-his face is blank, his shoulders slumped. An interviewer asks how it makes him feel.

He shrugs: "I don't know." Nothing. The researcher moves on, asking what kind of person he hopes to be when he grows up.

67

47

"Nice," he says.

"Do you want to go to college?"

"Yeah."
See all of the best photos of the week in these slideshows
"Do you have plans after college?"

"I haven't thought about it."

"What kind of job do you want?"

"I haven't thought about it."

He is one of the 73 low-income teens USC neuroscientist Mary Helen Immordino-Yang has been tracking in a five-year study designed to understand how culture, family relationships, exposure to violence and other factors shape the human mind. Test subjects from throughout Southern California watch 40 video clips, each depicting a different true story told by the person who lived it. Some stories-like Yousafzai's-were chosen because they are heart-tugging and inspirational. The teenagers watch parts of the clips again while inside an MRI machine, and their brain responses are recorded. Two years later, they are called back to the Brain and Creativity Lab, a hybrid learning center and campus innovation hub with an MRI-scanning lab, meeting offices, modern art and photography galleries, as well as a performance hall that offers literary readings, scientific presentations and cello concerts featuring Yo-Yo Ma. The testing process is repeated to track changes over time.

Early results show a troubling trend: Kids who grow up with higher levels of violence as a backdrop in their lives, based on MRI scans, have weaker real-time neural connections and interaction in parts of the brain involved in awareness, judgment, and ethical and emotional processing.

Immordino-Yang's work is contributing to a growing field called the neuroscience of poverty. Though it's still largely based on correlations between brain patterns and particular environments, the research points to a disturbing conclusion: Poverty and the conditions that often accompany it-violence, excessive noise, chaos at home, pollution, malnutrition, abuse and parents without jobs-can affect the interactions, formation and pruning of connections in the young brain.

Two recent influential reports cracked open a public conversation on the matter. In one, researchers found that impoverished children had less gray matter-brain tissue that supports information processing and executive behavior-in their hippocampus (involved in memory), frontal lobe (involved in decision making, problem solving, impulse control, judgment, and social and emotional behavior) and temporal lobe (involved in language, visual and auditory processing and self-awareness). Working together, these brain areas are crucial for following instructions, paying attention and overall learning-some of the keys to academic success.

The study, published in JAMA Pediatrics in 2015, examined 389 people between 4 and 22 years old. A quarter of the participants came from homes well below the federal poverty level ($24,230 annual income for a family of four in 2016). Children from the poorest backgrounds showed greater diminishment of gray matter and scored lower on standardized tests.

The second key study, published in Nature Neuroscience , also in 2015 , looked at 1,099 people between ages 3 and 20, and found that children with parents who had lower incomes had reduced brain surface areas in comparison to children from families bringing home $150,000 or more a year.

"We have [long] known about the social class differences in health and learning outcomes," says Dr. Jack Shonkoff, director of the Center on the Developing Child at Harvard University. But neuroscience has now linked the environment, behavior and brain activity-and that could lead to a stunning overhaul of both educational and social policies, like rethinking Head Start-style programs that have traditionally emphasized early literacy. New approaches, he says, could focus on social and emotional development as well, since science now tells us that relationships and interactions with the environment sculpt the areas of the brain that control behavior (like the ability to concentrate), which also can affect academic achievement (like learning to read). "We are living in a revolution in biology now," Shonkoff says, one in which new findings are finally giving us a real understanding of the interaction between nature and nurture.

A Constant State of Fight-or-Flight

When she thinks back to her South Los Angeles middle school, 19-year-old Stephanie Vergara sees metal detectors, police dogs and riots. Her school was once in lockdown for a week-kids couldn't leave campus or move freely in the hallways because campus officials were worried about gang activity outside of its gates.

Vergara's sister, Vanessa, 16, remembers worse scares, like walking onto her physical education field with a friend and getting jumped by five girls. They beat Vanessa's friend until she bled because they thought she was trying to "act tough," Vanessa says. Neither sister ever really felt safe at that school. Strangers, both kids and adults, would force their way onto the campus through broken bars over windows. Gang members would show up after school and linger. "They were always strapped," Vanessa says, "and they would wait for kids to come out."

High school was better but not always. Vanessa remembers one code-red lockdown following a shooting near the campus. All students were directed to the gym as one of the shooters ran across the campus, still carrying his gun.

Vanessa and Stephanie grew up in a 950-square-foot home, along with an older sister and brother. Their parents were immigrants who met while working in a sewing factory; they bought their house in 1999 after years of scrimping and saving to get the cash for a down payment. At least four rival gangs control their block and the surrounding ones, but, the family says, at least their house is within walking distance of several schools.

In 2013, Vergara joined Immordino-Yang's study as a test subject, watching the series of videos and undergoing MRI scans. (She remembers the story of a girl with terminal cancer who tried to raise money for her treatment with a lemonade stand.) The experience piqued her interest, and when she learned that Immordino-Yang was offering internships, Vergara put her name in. She got the job and helped recruit test subjects from her neighborhood, where 43 percent of families live below the poverty line ($24,230 a year for a family of four in 2016, according to U.S. census data).

Even before she started working at the lab, Vergara knew how people in more affluent neighborhoods viewed her life and why researchers were interested in studying her and her classmates. But then Vergara started to see the MRI scans of classmates and understood that something profoundly unsettling was happening: "Our brains don't really develop the same as people who live in other communities."

Vergara did not yet know that there is a direct connection between the body's stress-response system and brain development. And being poor is inherently stressful. The sisters always knew when their area was in "a heat," which meant gang violence was surging. They knew which blocks belonged to the Bloods, or Back Street Crips, PJ Watts Crips, Main Street Crips or Hoover Criminals. They knew which men on their block were lifelong gangsters and which kids from their elementary school were new recruits. Vergara never saw anyone get shot, but she heard bullets flying outside her bedroom more than a few times.

You don't need to see anyone take a bullet to the chest to be affected by violence, according to Immordino-Yang. When all of this turmoil is in the background, "it tells your biology you are in a scary social world," she says. "It's a dangerous, mean place where anything can happen. You can't trust that other people are good." In such a stressful state, brain structures shift. Neural synapses are altered, and your neurons fire differently. The stress hormones that permeate your brain go into overdrive.

For most people, being held up at gunpoint kicks in a fight-or-flight response, releasing hormones, including cortisol and epinephrine, that shoot energy and vigor to muscles. Neurotransmitters like norepinephrine, adrenaline and dopamine are released into the amygdala, which stimulate the brain to tell the heart and lungs to beat and breathe faster. Emotions and acuity are on high alert, and the body gears up to run or fight for its life. It's beyond stressful-a study out of King's College London analyzed 106 mugging victims and found that 33 percent ended up with post-traumatic stress disorder, while 80 percent reported feeling excessively fearful of people.

Now imagine seeing dozens of violent criminals every day. Imagine they are likely to pop out of the shadows at any moment to beat you, rob you, rape you, shoot you. Your stress hormones would be constantly amped up, and after a while your body wouldn't be able to turn down the volume. Your brain would get stuck in a constant state of fight-or-flight-the kind of chronic stress that impedes the development of stem cells, brain connections and neurons. Immordino-Yang's lab is running analyses to see whether exposure to violence interferes with teens' development of abilities to effectively plan, set goals, make moral decisions and maintain emotional stability. "Their brain activity is less organized," it appears, "less well developed and less systematic," Immordino-Yang says.

Similar harm is seen in response to family chaos, neglect and abuse. This biological-neural effect grips teenagers and children, but it is also seen in toddlers and newborns. One study of 77 children by University of Wisconsin-Madison researchers found that children as young as 5 months old from low-income families had reduced regions of gray matter in their frontal and parietal regions compared with babies and toddlers from wealthier families. This and other research on baby brain activity indicates that such early effects of poverty may lead to slower brain growth.

And when it comes to brain development, if you start behind, you might never catch up.

The New Eugenics?

The headlines around this emerging neurological research are startling and troubling-" How Poverty Stunts Kids' Brain Development." " Poverty Shrinks Brains From Birth." "Why Poor People Seem to Make Bad Decisions."

Shonkoff says this type of language is a "dangerous, slippery slope. It's one thing to say, 'We on average see less gray matter, less surface area.' It's another for people to conclude, 'Oh, you're brain damaged....' This unfairly stigmatizes people." Without context, poverty-brain research could fuel misguided beliefs involving racial disparities in intelligence or the inherent inferiority of the poor. It could also be used to justify racism.

"We run the risk of these findings becoming fodder for a nouveau eugenics movement," says Matthew Hughey, associate professor of sociology at the University of Connecticut. "The easily dispensed adage that 'the poor's brains are different' is an all-too-easy, scary and simply wrong-headed approach."

It's true that some minority groups living in poverty "greatly exceed" the U.S. average, according to the National Poverty Center at the University of Michigan. As of 2014, the national poverty rate was at 14.8 percent, according to U.S. census figures: 26.2 percent of African-Americans and 23.6 percent of Latinos are poor, compared with 10.1 percent of whites and 12 percent Asian-Americans, proving that poverty is not equally distributed among ethnic groups.

Young minorities who are more likely to experience poverty-and in turn more likely to face the cognitive development challenges laid out by science-could end up shouldering another burden, says W. Carson Byrd, assistant professor of Pan-African Studies at the University of Louisville: the assumption, based on these studies and headlines, that minority children "are less capable than their white peers." Growing up as a poor minority in America alone does not make someone inherently more prone to brain development impacts-but the manifestations of poverty, along with how society treats poor minorities, can have an effect.

Housing discrimination against minorities living in unsafe, dilapidated buildings, implicit racial bias by teachers, malnutrition, and underfunded schools in poor communities can hamper normal brain development. All of these factors combined can make learning nearly impossible and influence why African-Americans, for example, are more likely than whites to be entrapped by poverty. It's easy to see how a sound bite about smaller brains "can end up as fuel for narrow views of social inequalities and the people that endure them in society," Byrd says. It begins to dangerously echo racist arguments from past generations by so-called scientists who claimed that black people had smaller brain sizes and were therefore less intelligent than Europeans.

The scientists behind these brain studies agree their work tends to be oversimplified in mass media articles and even research abstracts. "For example, they imply causality when we really only have correlational evidence at this point," says Columbia University neuroscientist Kimberly Noble, who led the Nature Neuroscience study. "Portraying the findings this way often misrepresents the science. The brain is not destiny. I can't predict with any accuracy what a particular child's brain size will be based on their family income."

How much money a child's parents make is just one piece of the puzzle: Shonkoff points out, "You have kids living in poverty whose brains are perfectly fine." That's because poverty is on the one hand just a measure of income. It alone does not equate to a neurobiological life crippled by the stress of violence or abuse. Certain kids in impoverished neighborhoods ruled by gangs can still grow up feeling safe, because their parents shielded them and emotionally prepared them to handle adversity.

Through relationships with parents, teachers and other adults who make them feel secure and teach them coping mechanisms so their fight-or-flight systems are not constantly keyed up, these children are able to develop resilience "buffers" that protect their brains from adversity. "It's about getting that stress system down to baseline and building a capacity to deal with burdens of violence or poverty," Shonkoff says.

These subtleties, in fact, are what hint at a potential solution: We need to teach kids who grow up poor to deal with stress from an early age. Even if your neural foundation is weak because of adversity early on, "it's never too late," Shonkoff says. "The brain continues to develop." Neural circuits are open to being shaped by environmental influence. The brain's neuroplasticity-its ability to modify its own structure-is highest around birth and early childhood, and it decreases over time but never to zero. And between the ages of 15 and 30, the brain undergoes a second spurt of increased plasticity, which means that adolescents and young adults, with coaching and practice, are primed to adapt.

To help that happen, child behavioral experts agree that we need to rethink the social programs and policies in poor communities, investing in programs that reduce crime, pollution, overcrowding and abuse, and focus on helping parents during the first five years of a child's life. New programs would focus not just on the children but also on the mother who grew up in poverty and as a result hasn't developed coping skills and is therefore highly unlikely to be passing them on to her children.

Schools could add social and emotional learning courses to their elementary through high school curricula, designed to help children recognize and pay attention to their feelings, especially while coping with trauma and stress. Such courses could become requirements, like reading and math. That would require a massive re-evaluation of the priorities of our educational and development institutions-and some way of funding any new programs and tools deemed necessary.

Getting that to happen could take the kind of power wielded by Congress, local governments, school boards or the U.S. legal system. In 2013, Clancy Blair of the New York University Neuroscience and Education Lab, led a study that found the time a child spent in poverty, and in a household filled with chaos, was significantly related to higher levels of the stress hormone cortisol. Blair says similar findings could be leveraged the way research in the past linked detrimental health outcomes to tobacco, sugar-filled drinks and junk food, and ultimately changed policies and regulation of those industries. Similarly, findings like those in Blair's study could be used support legislation or even a landmark lawsuit targeting overcrowded living conditions, or unaffordable housing and child care.

Other systems that reinforce the cycle of poverty-inferior schools and community infrastructure; poorly protected neighborhoods and unchecked child abuse; environmental pollution; or lack of health care, public transportation and green space-could face legal challenges or new laws.

Several Angels

Almost two years have passed since Vergara completed her internship with Immordino-Yang. She graduated high school in 2015 with a 3.8 grade point average and the highest SAT scores in her class. Now she's studying biomedical engineering at San Jose State University on a full scholarship. She says some see her as a survivor-when college classmates find out where she grew up, they sometimes ask: "How did you make it out?"

She knows how. Growing up, her home was a refuge. Her parents could not control what happened out on the street, but they held total control over anything inside their gates. Theirs is still one of the lushest yards on the block, with spiraling rose bushes blooming pink, peach, red and yellow. Inside, the living room is spotless, with walls painted the color of those pink roses and decorated with framed family photos, like one of Vergara's sister in a white gown, holding a bright orange bouquet for her quinceañera . Dozens of small, cheery, painted figurines-a panda, a turtle, a mother lion with her cubs, the Statue of Liberty and several angels-adorn a television stand.

Vergara shared one bedroom with her two sisters and a nephew. Some might say that sounds crowded, but she considered it cozy. When her parents struggled with money, they didn't let their kids know; Vergara remembers their frugality as delicious home-cooked meals like pork, potato and carrot tacos. Her parents climbed the work ladder in the same factory where they met, eventually overseeing assembly lines as managers. This year, they paid off their mortgage.

Vergara's parents were also strict, with firm rules about homework and socializing. Vergara played on her high school's soccer and volleyball teams, which kept her too busy to party. But she always felt comfortable enough to speak openly with her parents, and they encouraged her and her siblings to seek out other adult role models and protectors. The kids grew up knowing the names and faces of all the gang members on their block, but they also knew who would protect them if trouble erupted-like the owner of the ice cream store down the block and the friendly neighbors with the Dalmatian.

Her high school volleyball coach studied science at USC, which is how Vergara learned about biomedical engineering. She later decided to major in it. He introduced her to Immordino-Yang, and the researchers at USC took the time to not only teach Vergara about the brain but also help her with writing college applications.

Vergara knows she is lucky to have a nurturing family and mentors like these. Friends she grew up with didn't have those same opportunities or support systems. Growing up, she always noticed how some teachers and administrators divided students between kids they believed "have potential and kids who don't," treating each group differently. But this new science illuminates more than surface behavioral or learning problems. When it comes to the development of the brain, it's much more complicated than that. "It could be an eye-opener," Vergara says.

This scientific revolution is only beginning, says Immordino-Yang, whose work has also found that teens who are more reflective about the violence they have witnessed show brain connectivity patterns that may be linked to higher resilience, as well as increased feelings of compassion and inspiration. "We're starting to get an appreciation of the richness of the social story-the social stress of poverty that is really driving these kinds of effects and shaping brain development and biological development in ways that we think are going to persist through a lifetime."

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Growing up poor is so stressful, it can affect brain development

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The video tells the story of Malala Yousafzai, the Nobel Peace Prize winner from Pakistan who at 15 survived being shot in the head by the Taliban while riding a bus in 2012. "I want to get my education, and I want to become a doctor," she says, adding that the Taliban throw acid on some people's faces and kill others, but "they cannot stop me."

# data[].attributes.body
Text

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Income inequality is growing in the U.S., and the problem is much worse than most people believe. For children, growing up poor hinders brain development and leads to poorer performance in schools, according to a study published this week in JAMA Pediatrics.

It has long been known that low socioeconomic status is linked to poorer performance in school, and recent research has linked poverty to smaller brain surface area. The current study bridges these converging lines of evidence by revealing that up to 20 percent of the achievement gap between high- and low-income children may be explained by differences in brain development.

Using a sample of 389 healthy children and adolescents from age four to 22, psychologist Seth Pollak and his colleagues at the University of Wisconsin-Madison compared scores on academic achievement tests with tissue volume in select areas of the brain. Researchers placed subjects in a magnetic resonance imaging machine to scan and measure gray matter volume in the temporal lobes, frontal lobes and hippocampus-brain areas that are critical to cognitive processes required for academic success and vulnerable to a person's early environment. Some of the individuals came back for reassessment after 24 months and returned for follow-ups over a period of up to six years.

The researchers found that children who grew up in families below the federal poverty line had gray matter volumes 8 to 10 percent below normal development. They did not find differences between children from middle class and affluent families but those only 50 percent above the poverty line showed gray matter volumes 3 to 4 percent below the norm. In other words, more money does not necessary mean better outcomes but at a certain point a "drop-off" effect of income occurs where a lack of financial resources is detrimental to development. "The reason I think we're not seeing a continuum is that humans are very hardy," Pollak says, "I think the human child can learn to accommodate quite a wide variety of circumstances-what's happening in extreme poverty is that we're moving out of the range where the human brain can cope."

Pollak was hoping to see the gap closing as children grew older, spent more time in school and outside their homes, but this was not the case. The gap in brain development was still present at age 22.

To solely address the effects of low income, the researchers excluded children who had other factors known to negatively affect brain development, such as a family history of psychiatric diagnosis or a risky pregnancy. The results were clear-the effects of low socioeconomic status are apparent even in kids who grew up otherwise healthy. "This was an important study," says Joan Luby, a psychiatrist at the Washington University School of Medicine in Saint Louis who was not part of this study. It went one step further than the existing literature, she notes, and created a link between poverty and academic achievement. "It gives us a clear road map for future public health action."

A recent report from the National Center for Education Statistics revealed that in 2013, 51 percent of students in U.S. public schools were from low-income families. Children who grow up in low-income families are exposed to more environmental stressors, such as less access to healthy food, unsafe neighborhoods and stressed parents. Pinpointing the specific causes will be difficult but in future studies Pollak and his group hope to identify how different social programs, such as free lunch programs or housing vouchers, can help children who grow up poor. "I used to think about poverty as a question of social policy. Now I think of it as a biomedical problem, an environmental condition or toxin that's affecting children," Pollak says.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Poverty Disturbs Children's Brain Development and Academic Performance

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Income inequality is growing in the U.S., and the problem is much worse than most people believe. For children, growing up poor hinders brain development and leads to poorer performance in schools, according to a study published this week in JAMA Pediatrics.

# data[].attributes.body
Text

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
An 8-year-old named Ben is sitting quietly by himself in a bean bag in a classroom in Mountain View, Calif. He's writing in his journal, an assignment he created himself.

"This one was, 'What I Wish We Would Have More Of,' " Ben says, reading to me from his notebook. "I hope we have more field trips." He stops and looks up. "I have more entries, but I don't want to share them."

That's cool; it's your journal, Ben.

I ask him, What is it you like about your school?

"You can move at your own pace," he says. "You don't have to be with everyone else. I like that."

About an hour away, in Oakland, an eighth-grader named Khalil is finishing a small speaker and audio recorder he's building.

"This is just a spring coil, so I'm going to solder right now," he explains, unpacking a small soldering iron. He's also an expert with a glue gun, a needle and thread, and basic welding and power tools. "I just love making. Exploring different things. I can be creative, do what I want," Khalil says. "It really helps me calm down."

Two very different schools. Two very different classrooms, both exploring the idea that children like Ben and Khalil learn best through firsthand exploration - choosing their own assignments and working at their own pace.

Both of these schools are considered cutting-edge, but learning by doing, of course, is a very old concept.

The Socratic method of inquiry advocates direct, experiential learning. Plato wrote that the best way for students to learn his dialectic method was by using and practicing it.

Aristotle, too, wrote about the value of personal experience and its connection to perception and memory.

Italian educator and physician Maria Montessori designed her schools in large part around the value of self-directed learning; the power of young people to learn from each other and their surroundings.

And, of course, the 20th century American philosopher John Dewey made the case that students aren't passive, empty vessels to be filled with knowledge. The deepest learning, he argued, happened when inquiry was guided by the students' interest. Education "is a process of living and not a preparation for future living" Dewey famously wrote.

So, if these concepts are ancient, vital and powerful, why haven't they found their rightful place in mainstream education? Why haven't more schools embraced those ideals in the classroom?

To see how these concepts could be applied, we took a close look at the schools that Ben and Khalil attend.

Both schools place student-directed inquiry at the center of teaching and learning. They've made big breaks from the whiteboard, lecture, sit-at-the-desk pedagogic model that still dominates American classrooms.

Ben is a student at the experimental Khan Lab School, a private school founded by Sal Khan, a pioneer of online education through his Khan Academy.

And, Khalil goes to the progressive maker program at the public Lighthouse Community Charter School in Oakland.

While both are at the forefront of student-centered learning, they have very different student populations. Lighthouse serves an economically and ethnically diverse community. The Khan Lab School serves mainly higher-income families living and working in the heart of Silicon Valley.

Yet, each in its own way, these schools believe in these old ideas about student self-agency, project-based inquiry and the value of learning by doing.

And in the process, they've created classrooms that are challenging, interesting and, very often, fun.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Freedom To Explore: 2 Schools Where The Students Call The Shots

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
An 8-year-old named Ben is sitting quietly by himself in a bean bag in a classroom in Mountain View, Calif. He's writing in his journal, an assignment he created himself. "This one was, 'What I Wish We Would Have More Of,' " Ben says, reading to me from his notebook.

# data[].attributes.body
Video: Transforming Education

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.entities[].name
Coca Cola Africa Foundation & Discovery Education Transforming Education

# data[].attributes.body
Ss answer:
"What do I need to know and be able to do to be a paradigm-aware teacher?" in the 6 TPE areas or our dimensions???

# data[].attributes.body
is a screen shot of their word cloud...

# data[].attributes.body
Each group copies and pastes all members' google doc text into a word cloud to visualize consensus

# data[].attributes.body
as individuals on a shared Google doc in their own Google Drives. We can push out the doc via a link

# data[].attributes.body
Essential question/s

# data[].attributes.body
Sir Ken or that viral video about schools not changing???