Do you hit the brakes or the accelerator when you encounter stress?  What is your stress temperament?

You probably know someone who lives in the eye of a crisis storm; their life is a series of minor dramas, which replay over and over.  You also probably know another person who weathers all kinds of storms yet seems to be happy. Scientific studies have discovered a link between personality, temperament and the ability to deal with stress.  Individual responses to life situations vary greatly.  Instead of beating yourself up for your inherent temperament become aware of how you respond to changes.   This awareness can lead you to develop new habits and promote healthy hormones and neurochemicals.

Once you become aware of the language spoken by your autonomic nervous system you will discover the power you have to create joy, abundance and health the same way you create stress, fatigue and disease. 

The implication of using this information in teaching children in school is powerful.  Every teacher creates their own classroom environment and students respond in different degrees based on their own stress temperament.   The first step in creating a healthy environment is to recognize your own stress temperament.  Ask: how do you respond to periods of high activity and inattentiveness with your students and what methods do you use to calm and discipline disrupting students?  

One way to establish a healthy classroom environment is to factor in de-stressors every day.   Educate yourself about the practice of mindfulness.  The practice of mindfulness is an effective tool to enhance academic performance while promoting emotional and social well being.   Its focuses on developing a student’s capacity for attention and awareness. 

Begin every day with three minutes of silence.  Instruct your students to close their eyes and simply notice their breathing as they focus on the space between their nose and upper lip.  As your students get into this habit they will become more aware of their emotions.  This technique is a system that allows the mind to settle down and focus.  You can develop and expand this practice during the school year by adding more mindful minutes including the practice of loving kindness (sending loving kind thoughts to another person while you are silent).   You don’t have to become an expert to create a different kind of calm for your students you only have to be willing to experiment and create this peaceful space.  

The benefit is not just to your students but also to yourself.  It allows you to be the best kind of teacher; one who is truly present in the classroom engaged with students and subject making the connections that open the mind to real learning.

How much fuel are you putting into your refrigerator?

It’s hard to imagine putting fuel into your refrigerator but that’s exactly what happens every time we buy food.  The average American puts 400 gallons of oil into their refrigerator every year.  This number is calculated by adding up the distance that food travels from farm to plate and the amount of petroleum-based fertilizer used to grow the food.   If every American ate just one meal a week from locally organic produced food oil consumption would be reduced by 1.1 billion barrels of oil per week. 

This one small change in consumption could make a big difference.   But for many of Americans the sentiment is why bother?  For many it seems hopeless to imagine much less attempt a different sort of life.  The inclination is to put faith in market based solutions.  But much more needs to be done and right now.

All across America a quite revolution has already begun and the 1000 students at Martin Luther King Jr. Middle School in Berkeley California are part of it.  This school is home to the Edible Schoolyard Project.   An idea that started with a vacant lot has evolved into a one-acre organic garden and kitchen classroom.  In this program children grow and prepare the whole foods they will eat.   Not only are these students gaining nutrition and ecological knowledge they could be the key to our future.   This systems approach addresses the crisis of childhood obesity while making food production truly sustainable. 

If this urban school of 1000 students can feed itself than the possibility of every American either growing or purchasing locally produced food is not just a talking a point.  

Here are some things to consider:

·      Growing some of your own food sets an example for others. If enough people bother, each one influences the other.  Consciousness is raised, maybe even changed.

·      Planting a garden is one of the most powerful things an individual can do.  It reduces your carbon footprint but it also reduces your sense of dependence.

·      Growing your own food begets a new set of solutions and changes other habits; you learn to provide other things for yourself.

·      The single greatest lesson the garden teaches is it changes your relationship to the planet.  It’s a long season from seed to vegetable and you get to experience it all.

Schools can introduce and nurture this concept with their students.  For many students school is the only way  to experience this lesson.  Every teacher can begin this simply by starting seeds in paper cups.  Start with popular and easy to grow vegetables, tomatoes plants, cucumbers, carrots, radishes are just a few.   Students can be encouraged to take these pots home to plant in the ground or a bigger pot.   Teachers can also introduce students to local produce by taking field trips to farmers markets and local farms.  With a little imagination and planning every classroom can begin to teach sustainability.   Students will discover a new way to provide for themselves without diminishing the planet.  Our future relies more on action than hope.

Schools in America are in crisis.   Is this a system failure or a response to the overall moral failure of our culture?

The history of civilization shows that every golden age is followed by a descent.  Throughout time this descent has taken on different withering forms: susperstition, prejudice, greed.  Perhaps our descent is apathy.  Too many children are at risk.  Neglected in the kind of nurturing that gives them the ability to believe in their own innate goodness.  Every child has the potential to be amazing.  The problem is our definition of amazing is limited.  Amazing has an infinite number of possibilities.  Amazing is not what we do but who we are.   Our children have not been given the right paradigm.   If one generation of children were taught loving kindness, first to love themselves and then to share it the larger problems we face would disappear.   Practicing this would diminish the attraction of competing and comparing because the only measurement needed would be: am I better than I used to be and not am I better than you.

The blame cannot be placed only on schools.  The blame has to be shared by all of us, all of us who have embraced the culture of materialism.   The demands of this culture are huge.  Children are vulnerable to the ideas of looking a certain way, dressing a certain way and having certain things.  The attachment to all of this diminishes our collective goodness.  Instead of cultivating what’s already there, we seek what’s outside of us.

Schools could become the leaders in changing this thinking because what children see and hear everyday shapes them.  Everyday the message in schools can be one of loving-kindness and like a drop in a bucket these drops will eventually fill the minds of our children. 

The challenge is not in doing this but in convincing everyone who is associated with schools to embrace this thinking.   It’s easy to mandate a program what’s harder is to grow it.   Schools are a human endeavor.  There is no product except in evolving the thinking minds of children. This is the ultimate product anyone can hope to be part of. 

So how can this be accomplished? 

Simple  - one day at a time.  Schools can begin by cultivating the spirit of gratitude  Establish daily goals for everyone.  Begin with the law of giving.   It is important to give something to everyone you come into contact with during the day.  This gift does not have to be material; it can be a smile, a kind word, encouragement, understanding, or friendship.  The beauty is this plan includes everyone, adults and students both.   And it is contagious.  The more it is practiced the easier it becomes.

It’s easy to become optimistic about our future by looking at the possibilities.   History shows us that we can find ourselves, in a new renaissance and a new enlightenment that can become a profound shift for a better world.

Gifted or learning disabled?   Can a child be both?

Inside the human brain are one hundred trillion connections most of which are still unmapped.  Mapping the human brain has been the domain of scientists except in the case of one extraordinary woman.   Barbara Young born with an asymmetrical brain made the discovery that allowed her to invent the treatment that transformed her life.     Today she runs the Arrowsmith School in Toronto where children with learning disabilities are literally building themselves a better brain.   Incredible as it sounds the human brain can change itself. 

Children at this school who were formerly taught using compensations are engaged in a form of mental olympics where exercises strengthen the weak areas of the brain as if it were a muscle.   After completing the program they are reintegrated into their public or private school at the appropriate grade level.

This astonishing discovery that the brain changes its own structure and function through thoughts and activity is called neuroplasticity.  The brain can change its own structure and perfect new circuits, when one part fails other parts take over.  Understanding neuroplasticity allows us to change the thinking that limitations and disabilities need not be lifelong handicaps.

Imagine the possibilities in applying this thinking for schools.  Rather than labeling children as learning disabled assessments like those used at the Arrowshmith School could be utilized to look for weak areas of the brain. Learning disabled and gifted do not have to be on opposite sides of the continuum.   The paradox is many children have both, creative talents alongside weak areas of the brain. 

Evidence like this will continue to improve society.  Scientists believe we will learn more about the human condition in the next two decades than was learned in the past millennia.  Developing evidence-based teaching will require a paradigm shift for schools.   Educators need to raise new questions, consider new possibilities, and to look at old problems from a new angle.   We all need to push harder for a system that can adapt and apply this new information. 

The Priaha are a tiny tribe of Amazon natives that live on the banks of the Marci River in Brazil.   This tribe of 360 is in danger of extinction.  By our standards they are undeveloped and primitive.  They have no real language, members of the tribe whistle to communicate.  Although they have one of the strangest languages in the world the Priaha have mastered the essence of cooperation.  To survive this small group must cooperate with each other.  

In this tiny society there is no competition.  Anthropologists who lived with this group attempted to organize a field day, but the Piraha upset the games.  In a footrace when one fellow would get ahead of everyone else he would stop and wait until the other runners could catch up.  The idea of winning was not only novel but also unappealing.  For the Piraha it’s we cross the line together or we don’t cross it at all.  To have a great time everyone had to win.

Unselfish cooperation might be the key to our future. Schools can be the best place to promote this type of cooperation.  Cooperation that not only feels good but also is good because it fosters the best environment for learning.  Cooperative learning results show that students who are given a chance to work collaboratively learn faster and feel more positive about school.   In a cooperative group every student has a specific task, everyone must be involved in the learning project.  The success of the group depends on the successful work of everyone.

There are five elements of cooperative learning.

1. Positive Interdependence (sink or swim together)

·      Each member’s efforts are required for success

·      Each member has a unique contribution to make

2. Fact to Face Interaction (promote each other’s success)

·      Teach each other

·      Discuss concepts being learned

·      Checking for Understanding

3. Individual and Group Accountability (no loafing)

·      Keep the group small

·      Give individual test to each student

·      Observe the group

·      Students must teach what they learned

4. Interpersonal and Small Group Skills- Students learn

·      Leadership

·      Decision-making

·      Communication

·      Conflict-management skills

5. Group Processing

·      Students learn to evaluate and access themselves

Every classroom is its own tiny society with its own culture.   Creating a culture of trust and respect can be achieved with cooperative learning. The greatest purpose of school is to unlock, release, and foster this wonderful capability.

In the news recently there was a very unsettling report about six high school cheerleaders who filmed the beating of another girl.  The beating took place in a private home and lasted thirty minutes.  At one point in the film the victim was knocked unconscious.  This beating was posted on You Tube for the sole purpose of entertainment. The six girls were arrested and could possibly be tried as adults (all are under the age of 16).   None showed any remorse at the time of their arrest instead expressing frustration at missing a cheerleading practice.

As unsettling as the story was a psychologist made an even more disturbing comment.  She suggested that the six teenage girls who did the beating are typical, claiming any teen is capable of crossing this line.  One has to worry if this is true or just speculation.  Our culture has a powerful impact on young people.  The most influential people in their lives are not their parents; it’s their peers, their neighborhood, their school, and the media. The standard is a high stakes quest for popularity and acceptance and the result is a loss of innocence.   It’s in this destructive atmosphere of compete, compare and win at all costs that educators are striving to provide some type of character education, some framework to teach core ethical values.

Character education must be done well and early to put students on the right path, to give them the moral courage to know how and when to walk away from risky and dangerous behaviors.  But not just walk away become the model that others strive to be.  Become better.

Teaching character requires a holistic approach.  You can’t just talk about character you have to model it so that it reflects back and creates the kind of attraction that is impossible to ignore.   Public schools were founded not just to educate but also to create citizens capable of contributing to the common good.  It’s a greater challenge now.    Teachers have a powerful role they can promote this positive development in several ways.

·       Build caring and supportive relationships in the classroom.  The environment should show safety, trust, respect and concern for the welfare of others.  This is the essential foundation

·       Model positive behavior.   Walk the walk just don’t talk the talk.  Students are attuned to their teacher’s behavior and will reflect what they observe.

·       Become a democratic environment where students can make decisions, act on them and reflect on their results.

·       Teach essential social and emotional skills like listening, recognizing and managing emotions, disagreeing respectfully, and resolving conflicts.

·       Involve students in moral discourse.  Discussion about morals is the essence of educating children to be moral individuals.  Teachers can further this understanding with teachable moments, themes in literature and the media to create a dialog.

·       Make learning meaningful and relevant.  Look for ways to show how learning particular subjects is important to helping them achieve their personal goals.

This approach can be part of preventing the occurrence of a wide range of social problems among our youth helping them avoid the pitfalls of life and develop into caring and responsible citizens. 

Human birth is an astonishing natural phenomenon.  There are approximately 130,000,000 births around the world every year.  Despite all the measures modern medicine has acquired some percentage of these births are destined to end badly.   In the 1950’s one in thirty newborns died at birth, the same odds as a century before.    Then a doctor named Virginia Apgar  had a simple idea that transformed childbirth.  She developed a score that has become universally known as the Apgar score.  This score allows nurses to rate the condition of newborns on a scale of one to ten and intervene accordingly.   Over the years this rating system has had hundreds of adjustments and has produced dramatic results improving infant mortality rates.

Virginia Apgar is a positive deviant.   Her work made a worthy difference in the world.   Virginia Apgar had no authority to challenge the medical system so  she took a less direct approach and broke away from the norm.   She looked at the situation for infants and made up her own system to improve things.  

To become a positive deviant you have to change how you think.  When you do this new ideas emerge and you discover new ways to solve problems.  To create this paradigm shift it’s necessary to practice new habits by doing several key things.

1. Improve relationships.  Be a model of respect and kindness for your students.  Know your students; ask questions, listen and work to be a light instead of a judge.
2. Stop complaining.  When you gather with co-workers fight the natural pull of the conversational gravity to complain. Complaining doesn’t solve problems. It sets you up to be in a permanent state of against, this thinking will also contaminate other areas of your life.   Ideas and innovations come from interesting informative conversations.
3. Count something.  Become a researcher in your own classroom.  Keep your own statistics about student learning.   You will discover information that can improve your own teaching.
4. Write something.   Share your thoughts with others, keep a blog or a  journal about you observations.  Don’t underestimate the contribution you can make to improve things.
5. Change.   Become an adopter.  Don’t be attached to any one method, seek out the best solutions and be willing to recognize your own inadequacies.

Doing this makes you  a powerful proactive agent.   Instead of feeling like a clog in the machinery you become a person of influence.  Ultimately it’s those who influence who lead and make something better!