Horacio Sanchez

Neuroscience has identified self-regulation to be the greatest predictor of academic success and behavioral control. When the school environment promotes self-regulation, all students will benefit because it increases the opportunities for students to work to their capacity. There are three specific elements school environments need to promote self-regulation:

The first element is the ability to create a highly ritualized school climate, which promotes the perception of safety and predictability. This foundational element promotes and helps maintain homeostasis—the range of chemical functioning required for individuals to maximize performance.

The second element is the ability to cultivate a social climate in which students from diverse cultures and backgrounds can establish positive interpersonal relationships. This element can be achieved by specific strategies designed to focus on what students share in common and by learning to work cooperatively. The social climate strongly dictates how the emotional brain, the amygdala, performs:
enables students to maintain emotional control, accurately interpret social cues, and be less prone to exhibiting extreme behaviors.

The third element is to improve focus. Teachers can be trained how to help students regain and maintain the focus that is diminishing as a result of increased interaction with technology. Learning begins with focus. As students lose the ability to concentrate, their academic performance suffers regardless of intelligence. However, it can be easily restored through some specific exercises designed to improve focus and learning. When students experience success in the classroom due to improved focus, it will increase their motivation. The brain chemically reinforces things we succeed at; thereby, creating new habits.

This training provides educators with a process for understanding and even predicting human behavior, as well as teaching participants how to promote the three elements identified in the research to promote self-regulation. In addition, this interactive training not only provides the latest information on self-regulation found in neuroscience but also provides concrete solutions.

The human brain produces bias as a natural process of how it learns. The brain associates things easily and this process can lead to a person consciously thinking one thing while the brain subconsciously associates it to something else. These subconscious associations influence what we think, how we react, and even how we behave. It has been determined that individuals can even develop biases that contradict the values and beliefs that are most important to them. This means that educators who are strong student advocates can unwittingly develop subtle behaviors that undermined students.

Biases are developed by societal patterns and no one is exempt because we live in the same society. In addition, biases can be shaped by patterns in a school or district. Whenever students belonging to a group consistently unperformed or misbehave, it is almost impossible for all staff not to develop some biases related to students belonging to that group. Complicating things further is the fact that biases are often mislabeled as racism and this mistake increases tension and division between groups. The truth is that we all have biases; it is a byproduct of the human brain.

However, if educators learn:
What bias is
How it occurs
And how to identify societal and environmental biases
Then they can help mitigate its negative impacts.

Learning about bias will help individuals across races and cultures improve their ability to work with on another and better understand the dynamics that occur during daily encounters that influence attitudes, behaviors, and perceptions.