 So one thing I'm going to introduce as a framework to understand how we learn and how we function as learners, but just as humans is something called the window of tolerance. This is actually a neurophysiological concept, but I promise I will bring it to a level that's a little more approachable for everyone. You didn't get trapped into a biology lecture here. The window of tolerance is a way of describing how much stress you as an individual can handle at any given time. So when you're in your window, you are able to learn. You are able to have a detailed conversation with someone you're able to listen. Oftentimes, though, for various reasons, we will go out of our window. When you do, you can either go into hyperarousal, where all your systems come online. So your heart rate goes up, blood pressure goes up, and your thoughts generally start to race at this point. So everything is faster. This is also where you would categorize fight or flight if you're familiar with that term. When you think about it, fight or flight is really an evolutionary response. It was very helpful when we were cave people and there was a bear and you needed to get away from the bear. What fight or flight does neurologically is it diverts all of your resources cognitively to the part of your brain that's designed for survival. So you're keyed into emotions like anger and fear, and higher order thinking essentially goes out the window. When you are being chased by a bear, that is great. That's exactly what you want. But if you're knocked out of your window because there's a pandemic and you're sitting in a classroom, hyperarousal is still going to happen, but it's not particularly helpful. It does remove any chances of meaningful learning in that moment. In other words, you feel jittery and you can't really calm down. Now, hyperarousal has the same results in terms of learning. You're not able to in that moment. Hyperarousal can also be called freeze. So it's actually fight, flight, and freeze. Freeze isn't often talked about. But this is the act of shutting down. From an evolutionary perspective, this is playing dead if the bear is coming after you. So here, everything in your body will slow down. Become numb, lethargic, your system's slow as much as possible. Again, to direct resources where they need to go. In classrooms, you may see this as shutting down behaviors. So students that suddenly disengage, whereas a student who's in hyperarousal maybe is a little more reactive, defensive, or they're having trouble focusing on one thing. And certainly we all have periods of hyper and hypoarousal. And you probably have one that you're more likely to go toward, hyper or hypo. So one thing that we're going to explore today is all of these strategies are designed to help make our own windows bigger and our students windows bigger. So what's nice is this is really a strengths-based approach. It's about how big can we make these windows during a very odd time. It becomes an opportunity for our students to learn in more environments. And really that's what we want in higher education anyway. Windows of tolerance also change contextually from day to day. If you haven't had any water recently, if you had a bad night's sleep, if you're feeling sick, your window's actually going to be a bit smaller. So one thing we're going to invite you to do is think a little bit about what probably influences your window of tolerance, but then what also influences your student's window of tolerance too. And you'll find that those two things often can play on each other, right? So if you're distracted or hyperaroused, you may start behaving in a way that elicits a similar response from a student or if you've ever had a conversation with a family member or romantic partner, I'm sure you've seen this happen before. One other thing we really feel is important to clarify here is that being in your window of tolerance is necessary for learning. Your window of tolerance is not your comfort zone. We should not conflate those two things at all. Your window of tolerance means you are safe. You are safe from external threats. But as we also know from learning theories, you often have to be a little uncomfortable cognitively or emotionally in order to elicit real change. And so one thing you may want to consider is when do you know that you're uncomfortable compared to when you're unsafe? And actually this is an exercise I will do with some of my classes, where at the beginning of the semester we generate examples of what it means to be uncomfortable and what it means to be unsafe. Another way to think about it is if I am training someone at the gym, I don't want to make things comfortable for them. I wouldn't remove all the weights from the gym. So part of this is being mindful with these strategies that we want our students to still be empowered to take accountability for what's coming this semester. We also want to make sure that we're responding to them and engaging with them in a way that allows them to widen that window as we go through. So it's a neat opportunity for us and them to figure out how to develop some more resiliency and resources here.