Learning & Brain: School of Belonging II

David Levine, Ph.D.

Creating a School of Belonging

1. Establish guiding principles
2. Find a common language
3. Listening and Responding
4. Building Conscious Connections with Others
5. Participating in Community

Learning & Brain: School of Belonging

David Levine, Ph.D.
New Paltz, NY

Teaching Empathy

A blueprint for caring, compassion & community

biography
Stoneridge School / High Meadows School upstate New York
work in the south bronx and scarsdale, NY… two different schools; methods, not materials, still the same.
parents were folkies – a mighty wind!, grew up in very musical family, grew up playing multiple instruments, didn’t want to be a musician. Why am I who I am? Music as a vehicle for a sense of community. The High Meadows School is a community… parents and students do 25 hours of community service a term. Wrote book: Building Classroom Communities. Went to UNH. Substitute teaching… school district, Pittsfield, MA – “there will be no teaching positions for many years to come.” Finally got a class that was made up of rejects from other classes and they knew it… hated school, but formed classroom circles to teach, began to wake up. Book – Emotional Intelligence – “people who are able to have healthy, happy social interactions with others will be happy in life.” Stephen Covey – “got to have more deposits in an emotional bank than withdrawals.” The Circle, most underutilized form in classroom process. Class meeting as teaching technique. Kids revealed that they were angry, unhappy and ‘stupid’. Levine taught them a song, they wrote a song together, sang it together. The emotional root of that memory persists in all 18 kids in that classroom for the last 30+ years.

What can we do to express the essence of unity and community in a classroom?

Learning & Brain: Teaching Process over Content

Orit Borkowski Batey, Ph.D.

GOALS:
• To understand cognitive processes involved in becoming an effective learner, with special emphasis on memory and metacognition;
• To be able to develop or adapt teach strategies that maximize generalization and promote active learners.

First W’s:
• Who are we teaching/Who am I as a learner?
• What are we teaching/What am I learning?
• Why are we teaching this information?
• When and where do we apply WHAT knowledge?
• How do we demonstrate what we know?

Learning & Brain @ Avon Old Farms

Blogging the Conference:

Kenneth LaRoque: Welcome
Bob Greenleaf, PhD. : Housekeeping
Begin at 8:00 am tomorrow
Sign-in for CEUs
Book purchasing @ registration
Thanks to 4 vendors: OR&L, Pexagon Technology, Wesleyan GLSP, My Hero Project
Smaller conference than usual

Introduce speaker: Laboratory for Perception, founder of center for law and the brain

end at 9:15

Ten Unsolved Questions of Neuroscience

David Eagleman, Ph.D
Department of Neuroscience
Department f Psychiatry
Baylor College of Medicine
Houston, TX