‣ Board-Certified Practicing Neurologist And Classroom Teacher For 25 Years
‣ Member of Board of Directors for Hawn Foundation
‣ Prolific Author of 9 books & over 200 articles on Neuroscience Teaching Strategies
Dr. Willis, with her background as a neurologist and classroom teacher, is an authority on brain research regarding learning and the brain and correlations of this research to best teaching practices.
After graduating Phi Beta Kappa as the first woman graduate from Williams College, Judy Willis attended UCLA School of Medicine, where she was awarded her medical degree. She remained at UCLA and completed a medical residency and neurology residency, including chief residency. She practiced neurology for 15 years before returning to university to obtain her teaching credential and master’s of education from the University of California, Santa Barbara. She taught in elementary and middle school for 10 years before dedicating her time to giving presentations and conducting workshops for educators and parents nationally and internationally. With her unique background in both neuroscience and education, she has written 9 books and more than 200 articles about applying neuroscience research to classroom teaching strategies.
She has been a distinguished lecturer at ASCD national conferences, was honored as a finalist for a Distinguished Achievement Award for her educational writing by the Association for Educational Publishers, and writes extensively for professional educational journals as well as consulting for the media including The Wall Street Journal, Education Week, USA Today, and NBC News Education Nation, among others.
Dr. Willis is a research consultant and member of the board of directors for the Hawn Foundation, an international foundation developed and directed by Goldie Hawn. She contributed to the Foundation’s MindUp book for curriculum, which provides teachers with strategies to help students use mindfulness to increase their emotional control, stress management, and attentive focus.
Dr. Willis also consults with California congressional lawmakers and educational policy makers to provide correlations from neuroscience research to educational policy. Her current collaboration in this area is to promote the incorporation of the neuroscience of learning into teacher education curriculum. Willis participates as an adjunct professor at Williams College. She also travels nationally and internationally to give presentations and workshops and consult about learning and the brain.
KEYNOTE 1
Bestselling & Highly Popular
JW1 (New!) Obtaining & Sustaining the Brain's Attentive Focus for Independent Learning in the Digital Age
BY Prof. Judy Willis
Synopsis
Multimedia access has changed the way students attend to their environment. The digital age presents a new set of challenges to the brain’s attention system. Fortunately, neuroscience has revealed the stimuli and circumstances that grab and sustain the brain’s attention. After experiencing the power of the attention filter that controls what sensory information gets into the brain, you’ll be able to use the applications to procure and sustain learner attention. In addition, you’ll have insights through which to encourage students to achieve independence as they come to understand their own attention filters and best practices.
JW2 (New!) Building Powerful Executive Function Skills for Creative Problem-Solving
BY Prof. Judy Willis
Synopsis
The brain goes through accelerated phases of development during the school years, making this time key for building students’ executive-function skills. Neuroscience research has provided insight into how these critical skills can be strengthened by activating these developing neural networks in students’ brains.
Students more effectively build these executive function neural networks when provided with opportunities to activate these control centers throughout their learning experiences. When you guide them and provide practice (with feedback) on these skillsets of organizing, prioritizing, decision making, planning, judgment, critical analysis, and cognitive flexibility you facilitate the strengthening of these critical neural networks in their brains. This is the preparation they need to adapt their understanding as facts undoubtedly change, become creative innovators, and collaborate in response to the new problems and opportunities arising in the twenty-first century.
JW3 (New!) Unlocking the Brain's Emotional Blockades and Promoting Its Efficient Memory Construction: Neuroscience-Based Tools to Joyful and Memorable Learning
BY Prof. Judy Willis
Synopsis
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.
*Please note that not all hours of the masterclass will be made up of videos. The total duration of the video presentations varies for each masterclass. Time allocated for activities is inclusive within the total masterclass duration.
SPECIAL PRICE
435SGD
385 SGDPer View by 1 Pax
Self-Paced Virtual Format:
✅ 4-hr Masterclass made up of pre-recorded presentation videos & activities*
