 One of the great topics that we're going to be exploring together has to do with this concept of social-emotional learning and we want to approach this maybe in a slightly different way from an educational Neuroscientific perspective from a mind-brain education science viewpoint and that's to consider mindfulness Activities and how that contributes to social-emotional learning, but also understanding what are the underlying or underpinning neural Mechanisms that occur during mindfulness practice and we're going to explore something called the default mode Network which has to do with this space in your brain, which is activated when You're not really thinking of anything in particular Your brain is never never dormant. It's never just doing nothing. Your brain is always doing something, right? And so I'm going to try to understand this concept a little bit better because the sort of free-floating Connections that are made when your brain is not asked to do anything in particular just sort of please lie still there what happens in your brain and How is that related then to this balance that we can find related to social-emotional learning? We're going to spend a teeny bit of time looking at mindfulness mainly from Ellen Langer's perspective I'm at Harvard who does a lot of work and research in this particular area and her perspective basically that no matter What we're doing? It's either mindful or mindless everything that happens in a daily basis is either mindful or mindless And so are we conscious of how that is occurring and it's kind of big and terrible and awful idea But it's also wonderful is that we think we know what we're doing We think that we're always being conscious, but the more sure we are of something Certainty is pretty much mindlessness And so to confuse a stability of our mindsets with the stability of underlying phenomena is a really common occurrence And so trying to understand what it means to be mindful of our own thoughts our own actions our own decisions And the way that we interact with others is a big idea and it's easier expressed in words than it is in actions And so we'll look at that a bit to when we're together as well and the key takeaway idea sort of if we can reach this level of being mindful being open to Uncertainty and then there is a greater possibility that we can do other things So the enhancement of creativity the openness to being innovative can grow there's some really Interesting neuroscience behind this it talks about decision-making models and how do people actually? Choose when they're willing to dare to air to make wrong answers or to launch or to try and to think and And the way that interaction occurs in our classrooms really depends on us Do we celebrate the errors that our students make are we dismissive of anything that's less than the correct answer? Part of this has to do with the idea that your brain adapts to what it does most so have we created this habituated environment in which the kids are Applauded for being open to new ideas or have the kids become accustomed to thinking that I'm better not open my mouth Because I definitely don't have the right answer. We'll talk about that when we're together as well We'll take some time. We're together Yeah, I want you to choose one of your favorite quotes here either from Schopenhauer or Gandhi Einstein or Edison About what it means to have that open space that open mindedness To be so mindful that you're open to Possibilities to be able to reach that level of creativity. Is that possible? Is that something that we value enough to take the time to become more mindful more conscious about how to do that? explicitly in our classroom settings and a related concept very very different but related in the sense that it has to do with the Attitudinal approach that we take to new learning is the concept of mindsets by Carol Dweck Which we'll also look at when we're together and I'm aware that many of you have been working very very conscientiously With your students to work on these growth mindsets We'll talk about some of the strategies that others other teachers have managed to use to implement this in their classroom settings as Well to share that idea those ideas with you then we'll move on to explain a little bit more technically the default mode Network what's going on in your head when you're told don't do anything? So how how is it that those thoughts go ping-ponging around and what is it that actually occurs in your brain? And why is that something that might be potentially a positive thing? And what are the studies that exist now? Showing the relationship between the default mode mechanism and creative or divergent thinking and Sort of illustrate the connectedness of these neural networks in the brain It's not really the specific area that they're located in it's so important that what we want to Emphasize is how certain things are related we didn't realize for example until the case of Phineas cage how closely tied Emotion or affect is to cognition and so we're going to look at some of these really interesting case studies to sort of Illustrate those points of how some things that might not intuitively be related are actually very closely related in the brain Connected to this has to do with you know the way that we perceive others especially through Faces and tones of voices so we'll look at Paul Ekman's work Related to universally perceived emotions and then we'll circle back to something that many of you are very aware of or know about Emotional intelligence finally will link emotional intelligence to this idea and neuroscience of social contagion and social cognition How it is that an individual can actually change how others act and feel about their context Based on their interactions together. So that's the quick preview of what we're going to be working on together If you have any questions beforehand go ahead and write to me beforehand the idea is that we're going to really take the time to unpack all of those things that we went over super quick right now in This video and explore how this has implications for what you do in your own classroom settings So please come with tons of questions so that we can make this encounter as interactive as possible and really related to Your own classroom settings. Thanks looking forward to seeing you