The Social Neuroscience Of Education Optimizing Attachment And Learning In The Classroom The Norton Series On The Social Neuroscience Of Education

Creating a healthy, social classroom environment. This book explains how the brain, as a social organism, learns best throughout the lifespan, from our early schooling through late life. Positioning the brain as distinctly social, Louis Cozolino helps teachers make connections to neurobiological principles, with the goal of creating classrooms that nurture healthy attachment patterns and resilient psyches. Cozolino investigates what good teachers do to stimulate minds and brains to learn, especially when they succeed with difficult or “unteachable” students. He explores classroom teaching from the perspectives of social neuroscience and interpersonal neurobiology, showing how we can use the findings from these fields to maximize learning and stimulate the brain to grow. The book will have relevance to anyone concerned with twenty-first century learners and the social and emotional development of children.

Teaching teachers the importance of social connection in the classroom. Human brains are social, and a student's ability to learn is deeply influenced by the quality of his or her attachment to teachers and peers. Secure attachment relationships not only ensure our overall well-being, but also optimize learning by enhancing motivation, regulating anxiety, and triggering neuroplasticity. This book presents a classroom model of secure attachment, exploring how teacher-student rapport is central to creating supportive, "tribal" classrooms and school communities.

Improving student learning with the tools of neuroscience and mindfulness. How is expanding students’ strengths more effective than improving their weaknesses? Why is creating a school where staff and students feel safe necessary for learning? How can anchoring with simple mindfulness practices prevent classroom behavioral problems? There is more to a classroom than just a teacher and a group of students. All classroom interactions have “invisible” neurobiological, emotional, and social aspects—the emotional histories of students, the teacher’s own background and biography. In this book, Kirke Olson takes lessons from brain science, mindfulness, and positive psychology to help teachers understand the full range of their students’ school experiences. Using its classroom-ready resources, teachers, administrators, parents, and policy makers can make the invisible visible, turning human investment in their students into the best possible learning outcomes.

A new model of addiction that incorporates neurobiology, social relationships, and ecological systems. Understanding addiction is no longer just about understanding neurons or genes, broken brain functioning, learning, or faulty choices. Oliver J. Morgan provides a fresh take on addiction and recovery by presenting a more inclusive framework than traditional understanding. Cutting- edge work in attachment, interpersonal neurobiology, and trauma is integrated with ecological- systems thinking to provide a consilient and comprehensive picture of addiction. Humans are born into connection and require nourishing relationships for healthy living. Adversities, however, bring fragmentation and create the conditions for ill health. They create vulnerabilities. In order to cope, individuals can turn to alternatives, “substitute relationships” that ease the pain of disconnection. These can become addictions. Addiction, Attachment, Trauma, and Recovery presents a model, a method, and a mandate. This new focus calls for change in the established ways we think and behave about addiction and recovery. It reorients understanding and clinical practice for mental health and addiction counselors, psychologists, and social workers, as well as for addicts and those who love them.

An orientation to affective neuroscience as it relates to educators. In this ground-breaking collection, Mary Helen Immordino-Yang—an affective neuroscientist, human development psychologist, and former public school teacher—presents a decade of work with the potential to revolutionize educational theory and practice by deeply enriching our understanding of the complex connection between emotion and learning. With her signature talent for explaining and interpreting neuroscientific findings in practical, teacher-relevant terms, Immordino-Yang offers two simple but profound ideas: first, that emotions are such powerful motivators of learning because they activate brain mechanisms that originally evolved to manage our basic survival; and second, that meaningful thinking and learning are inherently emotional, because we only think deeply about things we care about. Together, these insights suggest that in order to motivate students for academic learning, produce deep understanding, and ensure the transfer of educational experiences into real-world skills and careers, educators must find ways to leverage the emotional aspects of learning. Immordino-Yang has both the gift for captivating readers with her research and the ability to connect this research to everyday learning and teaching. She examines true stories of learning success with relentless curiosity and an illuminating mixture of the scientific and the human. What are feelings, and how does the brain support them? What role do feelings play in the brain's learning process? This book unpacks these crucial questions and many more, including the neurobiological, developmental, and evolutionary origins of creativity, facts and myths about mirror neurons, and how the perspective of social and affective neuroscience can inform the design of learning technologies.

Optimizing Learning Outcomes provides answers for the most pressing questions that mental health professionals, teachers, and administrators are facing in today’s schools. Chapters provide a wide array of evidence-based resources—including links to video segments—that promote understanding, discussion, and successful modeling. Accessible how-to trainings provide readers with multiple sensory-based practices that improve academic success and promote behavioral regulation. Clinicians and educators will come away from this book with a variety of tools for facilitating brain-based, trauma-sensitive learning for all, realizing improved learning outcomes, improving teacher satisfaction, and reducing disciplinary actions and suspensions.

The first teacher's guide to the proven counseling approach known as motivational interviewing (MI), this pragmatic book shows how to use everyday interactions with students as powerful opportunities for change. MI comprises skills and strategies that can make brief conversations about any kind of behavioral, academic, or peer-related challenge more effective. Extensive sample dialogues bring to life the "dos and don'ts" of talking to K–12 students (and their parents) in ways that promote self-directed problem solving and personal growth. The authors include the distinguished codeveloper of MI plus two former classroom teachers. User-friendly features include learning exercises and reflection questions; additional helpful resources are available at the companion website. Written for teachers, the book will be recommended and/or used in teacher workshops by school psychologists, counselors, and social workers. This book is in the Applications of Motivational Interviewing series, edited by Stephen Rollnick, William R. Miller, and Theresa B. Moyers.

Along with development, parents and children are involved in reciprocal exchanges within which both co-adapt their emerging relationships. With this transactional assumption, the eco-cultural approach stimulates researchers to study parenting from a complex perspective and to consider multiple influences shaping children’s and families’ lives. This book offers a wide, concrete eco-cultural perspective on parenting, addressing current issues such as wellbeing and emotional security, sibling relationships, vulnerable children, family-school partnerships, digital parenting, adolescence and risks, resilience in adversity, and immigration and cultural diversity. Written by researchers from all over the world, the twelve chapters in this volume testify to the strength of the plurality method for approaching parenting.