 Hi, this is Tracy Takahama Espinoza. Thanks for the opportunity to talk to you a little bit about mind-brain education and getting rid of neuro myths in teacher practices. So this is a look at a couple of the myths. There are more than 70 of them still out there. So you should be asking yourself now what can you do to eliminate them in your context? Can you please write down really quickly what is something I can do to get rid of the neuro myths in my school? Please give us some ideas. Just write that down really quickly. Okay, so we have to accept that some of the biggest challenges that we have, the main barrier to great teaching, is actually our own unexamined or unconscious attitudes. We think that boys could do something better than girls or that a certain race does something better than another race or a certain person from a certain neighborhood will not achieve as highly as somebody from another neighborhood. Those are things that we have to think about for ourselves. We have attitudes about how students and their families and their makeup influences their ability to learn. We have certain perceptions about how learning processes occur. Do you know enough about how the brain learns to be able to get rid of your own biases about how people learn? We also have, you know, perceptions and attitudes about intelligence. How does it occur? How does it grow? Who has it? Who doesn't have it? Where does it come from? Unless we examine those things, they can morph into myths in our own minds. Attitudes about how humans learn best. Many people think, well, I know that I learn best if I do X, Y, and Z. Therefore everybody must learn that same way. That's not true. Different people need different things to learn the same content based on their own personal past experiences. So teachers, we need to be more critical of the literature that we read and we need to embrace this complexity of the human brain. Third and most importantly, we have to really look at our own beliefs about how people learn and what could possibly be myths that creep into our own teaching practices. This means end of the day, it's up to us to up our game. We have to now accept the brain is the most complex organ in the universe and that is our professional organ. We have to understand the brain a bit more and other people have to appreciate us a bit more. If a doctor, a lawyer, or a dentist had 40 people in his office at one time and all of them had different needs and some who didn't want to be there at all and who were causing trouble. And if that doctor or the lawyer, the dentist, without assistance had to treat them all with professional excellence for nine months, then he might have some conception of what it is to be a classroom teacher. So think about that. Pat yourself on the back, being teachers is really, really one of the toughest professions that we have in society, but it is incumbent of us to now learn a bit more about our profession, including about the brain. So what did we try to do today? We looked at the definition of some key terms and what is mind-bren education, what is a neuro myth, and also what are educational competencies. And attached to that, we looked at competencies as being knowledge skills and attitudes and we talked about how attitudinal things, things that are really the long-term understandings that we have about the world, can be related very closely to neuromythical understandings about how the brain learns, what is intelligence, for example. Then we discussed some of the neuro myths that are still prominent, what and why we need to stamp those out in order to improve our own practice. So the final task for you today, I'd like you to think about three things that you didn't know before this talk today. Write those down. Two things you found so interesting. You're going to continue to research them or you're going to talk to others about them. And at least one thing that you are going to change in your personal or professional practice based on the information you learned today. Okay. Thank you very much for the opportunity. If you'd like to look at other resources related to bilingualism and multilingualism, please have a look at either of my web pages. And if you have any questions, please don't hesitate to write. Thanks a lot.