In this masterclass, you’ll gain new insights about how the impact of emotions and stress on all aspects of learning and how best to promote learning and enhance memory. Understanding the brain’s most efficient networks of information processing increases your success at guiding students to enduring understanding and long-term memory.

For example, neuroscience research has spotlighted boredom and frustration as the stressors that substantially lessen students’ abilities to engage in successful learning. We’ve recognized that recurrent stressors can alter the brain’s neural networks, promote a fixed mindset, and decrease effort and motivation. What happens? Students can give up. They encounter considerable difficulty managing “top-down” control of the reflective processing the brain needs to sustain engaged, successful learning when their brains flip into a more reactive, survival model.

We’ll uncover how the science generates 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 for all learners to achieve mastery, and recognition of individualized student incremental progress.

Once through this emotional filter (amygdala) the spotlight is on facilitating learners’ construction of the information into memory. Neuroscience research has revealed much about the stimuli and circumstances that promote the brain’s most powerful information-processing networks and thereby increase memory construction, accuracy, durability, and retrieval.  

We’ll discuss the science and the practical applications regarding how the brain constructs physical links between new information and prior knowledge to successfully capture and retain learning. The correlations from this research will be linked to ready-to-use relevant classroom strategies. Topics include the latest research on neuroplasticity, the power of patterning to increase transfer of new information into memory, and mental manipulations for durable understanding for long-term memory storage, retention, and transfer.