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“Amygdala. It acts as the brain’s guard dog. The amygdala is an almond-shaped structure deep inside the limbic layer of the brain. It is the seat of our fear system that is involved in emotional processing. It is designed to react in less than a second at the very hint of a social or physical threat. It has the “authority” to bypass the brain’s communication dispatch hub in the thalamus and send distress signals directly to the lizard brain in the form of the stress hormone cortisol. We call this bypass an amygdala hijack. When the amygdala sounds its alarm with cortisol, all other cognitive functions such as learning, problem solving, or creative thinking stop. An amygdala hijack leads to our natural “fight, flight, freeze, or appease” responses.”

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Thanks so much for joining us today!!! We’d love your feedback, and look forward to using it to inform planning for our next discussion.

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Norms & Goals/Expectations (10 minutes)
Breakout Groups (40 minutes)
Regroup & Closing (10 minutes)
Continued Conversation (30 minutes)

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Many of us are feeling hijacked as the school year gets closer and our students are too, how can we name our triggers, and help our students to identify their triggers to have meaningful and courageous conversations in class?

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Speak from the "I"

Take the learning & leave the stories

Embrace messiness & kindness

Equity of voice

Understand intent does not equal impact

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“Language is powerful. When you are able to name a thing it moves out of the realm of mystery into concreteness” (Pg 5) - What have you been able to name recently that has helped you to understand the world in which we live?

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Often there is a “blame the victim” approach to student mindset that suggests students don’t have a growth mindset or they are simply missing “grit”. How do the dominant narratives manifest itself in our school?

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4 Agreements for Courageous Conversations:

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4 Agreements for Courageous Conversations:

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Stay Engaged

Speak Your Truth

Experience Discomfort

Expect & Accept Non-Closure

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WhatIs the Deficit Thinking Paradigm? (pg. 59)

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WhatIs the Deficit Thinking Paradigm? (pg. 59)

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"When operating from a deficit thinking paradigm, educators and policymakers believe that culturally and linguistically diverse students fail in school because of their own deficiencies or because their families don’t value education, not because of social inequities, unfair school policies, or differential treatment in the classroom. There is anill-informed belief that a student's failures are attributable to the student's lack of intellectual ability, linguistic inferiority, or family dysfunction. This deficit perspective suggests that efforts to improve academic achievement should be focused on“fixing” students(i.e., improving test-taking skills) rather than shifting the school culture to support intellective capacity building and identity-safe classrooms so that students can access their academic potential. As a result, teachers’ deficit-oriented attributions of student performance influence their instructional decision making, resulting in giving students less opportunity for engaging curricula, interesting tasks, and culturally congruent ways of learning.

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“An educator’s ability to recognize students’ cultural displays of learning and meaning making and respond positively and constructively with teaching moves that use cultural knowledge as a scaffold to connect what the student knows to new concepts and content in order to promote effective information processing. All the while, the educator understands the importance of being in a relationship and having a social-emotional connection to the student in order to create a safe space for learning.”

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1. Climbing Out of the Gap
2. What’s Culture Got to Do with It? 3. This Is Your Brain on Culture
4. Preparing to Be a Culturally Responsive Practitioner

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-Uncertainty; lack of structure
-Missing connectedness, collaboration; missing out on that feeling of having a greater sense of community

-Solitude; feeling the effects of prolonged isolation
-Recognizing smallness in a bigger world; need time to figure out yourself before engaging with a group

-Words having power; lack of closure, unable to finish things (which made graduation that much better!)
-Solitude vs. isolation--isolation can be much sharper and more painful
-Maintaining gratitude for the little things
-Being misunderstood in the middle of a pandemic

-Dealing with agency/lack of agency
-Misinformation, especially throughout remote learning and coming back to a school environment that will be highly polarized

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-Connects to all our students
-Need some specific strategies
-Brain Science needs to be shared with the kids
-Cultural difference application at ORR? Hoe do we bring it all together?

Discussion:
-Learned helplessness
-Testing/Technology is it closing the gap or making it worse?
-making connections?

-Community/School discussion

-What is our priority for the year?

-How do we accommodate students who are "flighting?"

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-Art has the luxury of embedding mindfulness in the curriculum
-Engaging in practices such as journaling
-Mindfulness, breathing
-Put words to feelings and investigate them
-Working to acknowledge fear and discomfort

-Engaging the whole student before attempting to engage in the learning process
-How do we come up with the right prompts to put visual representations in front of students that help abate their most powerful negative feelings?
-Phones can serve as an example of how distress can rise up quickly in people and take them out of the learning process

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-Looking at collectivism vs. individualism; being forced to be more collective for the first time in a long time (in the US)
-Students are going to look at each of these situations completely differently
-We learn about AFS students's cultures, and we do our best to bridge these gaps; should attempt to do the same for American students
-Learning the stories of marginalized students is necessary to help educators respond
-How do you teach empathy to students?
-Do our best to make the class a safe environment --> make a conscious effort to make students feel they can express themselves openly and safely
-What parts of our school serve as places to process difficult situations and potentially triggering encounters?

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- Discussed empathy and mindfulness
-  How do we teach our students to be resilient
- Helping students to name triggers and allowing them space
- Giving time for pause and a break for meaningful reflection
- Dependent vs Independent learners
- How can we bring back this brain science to all of our staff?
- How do we bring this back to our community? Do parents know about this and how can we give this knowledge to parents
- This is giving us the language to help