Unlocking Emotional Blockades: Neuroscience-Based Tools to Optimize Self-Regulation and Joyful Learning

Stress can block successful learning, emotional self-management, and memory. Neuroscience research has highlighted stressors that cause learners to "act out," "zone out," or give up, resulting in decreased learning and reduction in emotional self-management. The most frequent stressors directly linked to learning experiences are boredom (from having already mastered the information) or frustration from repeated goal failure in a skill, topic, or subject (with the goal ranging from not getting the desired A+ to not achieving satisfactory mastery). The research also reveals that these stresses, when recurrent, can change the brain's neural networks and promote a "fixed mindset" with decreased effort and motivation.

In this webinar, you will learn about the effect of emotions and stress on all aspects of learning and about keys to unlock the stress blockade. You will understand how the "video game model" applies to teaching for motivation and perseverance through achievable challenge and helping students recognize incremental progress, and you will leave with strategies to reduce the stressors that prevent the brain from working from its highest thinking and control centers.

Judy Willis is a board-certified neurologist who combined her 15 years as a practicing neurologist with 10 subsequent years as a classroom teacher to become a leading authority in the neuroscience of learning. 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.

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Malana Willis has taught elementary school across the grade levels in Oakland and Santa Barbara, California. Willis presents annually at the Learning and the Brain summer institute in Santa Barbara, California, and has been writing and presenting with her mother Dr. Judy Willis on the neuroscience of learning since 2010.

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