 Hi, my name is Tracy Togohoma Espinosa, and this is a video to talk about educating the whole child. This is a look at what we actually found during times of COVID, during these terrible months. What happened when we decided to go back to the basics to celebrate basic human needs, to prioritize mental health over subject area knowledge, for example, and how many institutions actually saw that as a bump and an improvement on silly things like standardized test scores, which nobody would have guessed given that particular shift where we took time off of direct content knowledge to think more about the individual holistically. And so we'll do that in this workshop, in this session, beginning with a really basic explanation of how the human brain learns and through all of its senses and the dynamic exchange it has, you know, individuals with their environment and what happens in school situations. We'll talk about that a little bit and then really hone in on some of these roadblocks to learning. You know, why is it if your brain can't help but learn? It's its own natural process. It learns to survive, right? And so why is it that sometimes school learning is difficult? And so what are some of the risk factors that might exist in some kids' lives that prevent them from easily taking in new information? And so we'll look at this from, you know, kind of a macro scale. You know, globally we had a pandemic, right? Our particular communities could have been hard hit in other ways. Or our communities might have been places that were rural and didn't have internet. And so that, you know, also limited access to education. That's a risk factor, right? Or families. Unfortunately, some kids lived in some very broken homes and that caused a lot of attention. Or maybe they lived in great homes, but they didn't have a lot of resources. So maybe they had one computer between, you know, brother, sister and mom and dad on work and everybody had to try to share the resources. And so your family can be a protective factor, you know, and being supportive, but they can also be a risk factor in the context in which we live, right? And then there's other risk and protective factors related to the individual and what we do to our body and how that impacts what our brains can do, right? And then thinking about these psychological elements of mental health. And so we're going to look at all these different scales of impacts or roadblocks to learning and talk about the risk and protective factors. How do we balance that in each kid's life? And we're going to approach this by sort of scaling up, thinking about things that are physical causes. Some kids who just don't get breakfast aren't able to learn well, right? Or who don't sleep well. We know they have a problem there and being able to focus in class. But sometimes we think that same distracted kid, maybe he has an attention problem. Well, he might have an attention problem, but that doesn't mean that it's neurological. He might not be able to pay attention for physical reasons or psychological reasons, not necessarily neurological reasons. So we'll talk about teacher practice in which we kind of scale up our interventions with kids, starting with the simplest things first and then moving up to those kind of deeper diagnosis of learning problems that do have differences in neural networks in the brain. We'll talk about that and sort of how to do that in a practical sense as far as teachers are concerned in their classroom situations. And when we meet, we'll hover around some very specific ideas, you know, how the impact of sleep or nutrition or stress and anxiety or the role of social contagion, how all of those things can influence student learning outcomes, how they can serve as risk or protective factors, how physical activity, the use of drugs, intrinsic motivation to learn, and how all of us are just so different. Human variegation, the expecting things, one thing for all of our kids is really wrong because there's just a huge range of human variation. Concretely, I'll give you the example of sleep. We know that sleep is vital for human learning. We need to be able to sleep, to be able to pay attention, and we need to dream, to be able to consolidate memories. It's a different set of chemicals in the brain at that point. And so we need sleeping and dreaming to learn. But how much sleeping and dreaming is necessary varies greatly by individual. You know, four and a half hours to 12 is absolutely normal. You know, eight might be the average, but normalcy has got a big range. And so we're going to talk a little bit about how to put our finger in the pulse of what the range is of the kids in our classroom as well. And then we'll talk about human potential and where is it derived from, you know? Kids come to our class with so many different skill sets and abilities and potentials for things. But where does that come from and how do we maximize whatever kid comes with, right? And then the final biggest lesson that we hope to convey to kids and to teachers in general is we have to know ourselves better. We spend a lot of time using other people's skills or measurements and especially in school. You know, the kids all wait for you to tell them if they're good or bad. They've forgotten how to self assess, you know, that. So we're going to talk a lot about how we can look at the whole child from all of these different angles, including the body and the mind and the brain, but taking all of these different things into consideration, emotional regulation, interaction with peers to see if we can find an easy way to bake that into our normal school curriculum. These are not typical school subjects that we talk about, but they became the main points of departure and in our contact with students during COVID. And so what lessons can we learn from that and how can we take advantage of that moving forward? You know, how can we treat? What are the things we can do to help the kids in our lives understand their own risk of protective factors and to leverage those protective factors to be the best that they can be in all aspects of their life? So we'll dig deeper into psychological roadblocks to learning, these neurological and chemical-based blocks to learning, psychological roadblocks to learning, social and environmental roadblocks, as well as emotional roadblocks that might keep some of the kids in our lives from learning at their peak and what we can do about that. The main message being that a good diagnosis is has half the cure. As we mentioned before, you know, a kid who has sleeping problems has almost identical observable behavior to a kid who has ADHD. So we might jump to conclusions about the problem that a kid has without knowing the root causes, we really can't treat it because you treat ADHD differently from sleep problems, right? So figuring out what are the root causes and the challenges that our kids are facing is part of our job as teachers to be able to help them maximize the potential as learners in our classroom. So I'll leave you thinking about this big idea. You've got to know yourself. This is the oldest Greek piece of advice for educators and especially for learners, you know, do you know yourself well enough to be able to have that self-care? How do we help our kids know themselves better to actually care for themselves better so that they can feel their best, perform their best in school and also live happy lives? And so we'll be focusing on all of these bigger, slightly philosophical concepts when we get together. If you think that there is something that you really want to be sure that we cover when we're in the session together, please take the time to send me a quick message and email and just let me know. I'm gonna be attending the workshop on educating the whole child and I'd really love it if we could spend some time talking about X. Go ahead and send me that email. I'll be sure to integrate it into our session. Thanks a lot. Looking forward to seeing you.