Judy Willis: Brain-Based Learning Strategies Webinars
About the Presenter
Dr. Judy Willis, a board-certified neurologist and middle school teacher in Santa Barbara, Calif., has combined her training in neuroscience and neuroimaging with her teacher education training and years of classroom experience.
She has become an authority in the field of learning-centered brain research and classroom strategies derived from this research.
Webinar Archives
Descriptions and Handouts
Ask Dr. Judy: From Negativity to Motivation
November 19, 2013
Due to technical difficulties, we regret that the archived recording of this webinar is not available.
Math understanding builds executive functions, abstractions and innovation – skills needed for academic and career success. In this webinar, Dr. Judy Willis offers strategies for increasing students’ motivation in math by reducing math anxiety, stress, and frustrations and engaging their curiosity and making mathematical connections to the real world.
Ask Dr. Judy: Increasing Students' Reading Motivation
June 6, 2013
The brain seeks patterns, and patterning is the basis for literacy. Dr. Judy Willis offers strategies for building vocabulary, fluency, and reading comprehension that correlate with neuroscience research. You'll find new practices—and tweak existing ones—that use patterning and pleasure to build literacy skills, comprehension, and memory to help students read with more enjoyment and success.
Patterning to Construct Transferable Concept Memory
February 26, 2013
Patterning is key to forming new memories, constructing durable long-term memories, and extending those into expanded neural networks of concept memory. Through opportunities for transfer and use of executive functions, students can build their enduring understanding as previously isolated rote-memories are connected into extended neural networks of concept memory available for future application to novel problems and creative innovations.
The Essential Neuroscience of Learning
December 11, 2012
Teachers can guide students in how best to use their most powerful tool. If we want to empower students, we must show them how they can be in control of their own cognitive and emotional strength and success. Teaching students how the brain operates is a huge step. Students of all ages can learn how neuroplasticity works, how to use conscious strategies to reduce the stressors that reduce focus and memory, and what conditions are best for their own best learning and studying.
How Can Resisting Immediate Gratification and Long-Term Goal Development be Developed in Students?
August 14, 2012
Ability to delay gratification has been correlated with students’ academic performance in secondary school and found to be greater predictor of academic performance than I.Q. However, until young adulthood the brain is wired to seek immediate gratification. The executive functions of gratification delay, planning, and achieving long-term goals are still developing into their mid twenties. This webinar will describe ways educators can incorporate, into existing units of instruction, guided opportunities to strengthen the neural networks that resist immediate gratification and promote goal-directed habits in students in all grade levels.
What Makes the Adolescent and Teen Brain So Different and What Should Educators Do About These Differences?
April 5, 2012
In the adolescent and teen brain, the rate of change exceeds that of even the body. The highest cognitive brain networks in the prefrontal cortex undergo their most profound maturation during the school years. What has neuroscience research revealed about the very unique adolescent brain that has important correlations to planning instruction and teaching strategies? From seeking immediate gratification and risk, to developing and achieving long-term goals, educators are critical caretakers of these executive function circuits and the social, emotional, and cognitive tools students take with them into adulthood.
Ask Dr. Judy: How Can Students Remember Next Year What I Teach This Year?
December 7, 2011
Once information gets through the brain filters and becomes working memory, it needs further processing to become long-term memory. Strategies of mental manipulation are needed to develop neural circuits of long-term memories. This webinar will connect the most recent memory research from neuroscience with classroom instruction strategies that promote accurate, durable, and efficiently retrievable long-term memory.
Ask Dr. Judy: How Can I Help Students Remember What I Teach?
August 10, 2011
The key to forming new memories and storing information is the brain’s practice and experience recognizing and constructing patterns. The best glue to promote the consolidation of new information into short-term memory is activation of prior knowledge. In this interactive webinar you will take a journey through the brain and learn proven neuro-logical strategies for building patterning skills, activating prior knowledge, and more.
Strengthening the Brain’s Executive Functions: The Real Higher Order Processing
April 13, 2011
The last part of the human brain to “mature” through pruning and myelination is the prefrontal cortex, the seat of executive functions such as judgment, critical analysis, prioritizing, deduction, induction, imagination, and more. Discover strategies that promote executive functions and goal-directed behaviors, especially critical during the school years when this highest cognitive system undergoes its most profound changes.
Ask Dr. Judy: How To Promote a Learning-Receptive Emotional State
February 2, 2011
Learn which neuro-logical strategies promote information to pass through the brain's emotional filters to reach the most powerful cognitive control centers in the prefrontal cortex. And discover the interventions that reduce the "behavior management problems" as they reverse negativity, promote positive attitudes, increase participation, and build student confidence to persevere through challenges.
Ask Dr. Judy: Strategies for Maximizing Student Memory
October 14, 2010
We all know that we learn from making mistakes, but did you know that participation and mistakes are the keys to memory and intelligence? This webinar explores classroom strategies that lower student resistance to active participation. Learn how you can use the newest research about neuroplasticity, the dopamine-reward system, and active student participation (including making mistakes) to increase long-term memory.
Ask Dr. Judy: Motivating Students to Achieve Their Highest Potential
July 20, 2010
Some students come to us already discouraged with negative baggage about their own potential, school in general, or the subjects we teach. How can we change that negativity to motivation? The keys are to connect with their curiosity; help them recognize incremental progress to appropriately achievable individualized challenge; and use other neuro-logical strategies to reverse negativity and sustain a positive attitude by increasing interest, relevance, confidence, foundational knowledge, and active participation in a climate where students are not stressed by the fear of mistakes.
Ask Dr. Judy: Why Don't My Students Pay Attention?
May 11, 2010
You've made lesson plans with objectives, assessments, and learning style accommodations. You already know and probably use the most neuro-logical strategies, but some students just don’t seem to pay attention. This webinar examined the use of curiosity and prediction to maximize and maintain attention