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The NeuroPacific Classroom™ is an online space for anyone who has an interest in discussing how current neuroscience can be used to help early childhood educators manage difficult classroom behavior. It is designed to recast academic research into accessible chunks of insight for busy education professionals. It is also an interdisciplinary approach that combines research about the neural basis of empathy with basic education theory. This approach strives to document the importance of knowing how the brain’s empathy network functions. (Hint: It is a “network of networks”.1, 2) The approach also considers the topic through the lens of how physical and social pain are processed.
This Classroom is for Anyone
Adults who study the topic have a range of academic degrees, different critical perspectives, and a common desire to foster the best experiences for very young children. Our classroom is an interdisciplinary space, for anyone, regardless of experience or respectfully shared point of view.
Key topics in this classroom include the the brain behind the behavior, an exploration of educational philosophies and adverse childhood experiences, and an examination of how empathy can be dysregulated in the brain. Most important, we’ll look at steps researchers are taking to understand the problems, and what future scholars might do to resolve them.
- Educators will learn what is new in science.
- Scientists, especially neuroscientists, will hear what is important to educators.
- Psychologists can help teachers to understand early childhood behavior.
- Educators can help psychologists to understand the day-to-day realities of practicing theory.
- Early career scholars will have an opportunity to hear directly from the generations that have practical experience, and become inspired to refine their ideas. They can make professional connections in different fields, and begin to tackle some of today’s research challenges collaboratively.
Takeaways for Your Classroom
The compassionate hearts and deeply held pedagogical beliefs of preschool teachers inspire a dream of helping all students. Capable teachers reach most of the children, and a small number seem unreachable. Disharmony reigns, and learning suffers. It may truly be that a child’s unseen neural differences undermine everyone. That’s because intangible, even ephemeral, brain experiences are disrupting social interactions. To compensate, your behavior management strategies must match the child.
Staying abreast of scientific insight will help you to make meaningful adjustments to classroom management strategies. Long term, it may reduce the number of children who grow into antisocial adults. It is a strenuous, but important, task to protect the needs of children with behavior struggles, while simultaneously protecting preschoolers who socialize well.
Finding appropriate mental health interventions, based on a knowledge of neuroscience, is an emerging field. It centers on the idea that there are distinct neural differences in negative behavior traits, which are influenced heavily by environmental and community experiences. Those neural differences, in turn, affect responses in the developing child’s mind. Preschool classrooms are an important environmental community, but they are managed using a variety of educational philosophies.
It will be important to use the information in this approach to begin pairing and documenting educational interventions with the mental health strategies that best match the state of a child’s mind. It’s a new field of study, but the body of reference material is growing rapidly.
Website Features
Use these icons to guide your study:
Filters insight from a substantial collection of published articles and synthesizes the information so that teachers, administrators, and the health agencies that regulate them will have an ongoing source of current, accessible, and empirical content to help with classroom management. There are also links to additional published resources.All links are for your convenience. Please follow all applicable copyright laws.
Points out topics that need further exploration by future scholars. When conducting research about this topic, try these keywords: empathy, empathy network, neurology, neuroscience, conduct disorder, perspective taking, emotional understanding, emotional regulation, fear processing, pain processing, disgust processing behavior problems, early disruptive behavior, callous-unemotional traits, physical pain, social pain, education, pedagogy, interventions, classroom management strategies, behavior management strategies.
Provides a link to an application that helps you to learn more about regions of the brain.
Provides a Twitter feed for further discussion. Use these hashtags to search for topics:
#NP_Education, #NP_Neuroscience, #NP_Empathy
In addition, you may search for blog topic content using the provided hashtag.
Interprets academic work. Don’t have time to do academic research yourself? Sign up to receive blog posts that abstract and simplify the concepts from academic articles in a variety of disciplines. Some of the original articles are philosophical, and some are highly technical records of recent experiments. You may find them intriguing and easy to follow or dense and confusing. Either way, they will be explained so you can have access to valuable insight!
The frames we use to discuss early childhood education are as varied as the organizations that serve children. The NeuroPacific Classroom™ aims to encourage interdisciplinary study of themes that affect classroom behavior. So, it will be helpful to confine our conversations to that topic. Every blog will provide an opportunity for comment about your ideas that arise. There will also be questions to stimulate your thinking. You may even be inspired to read the article and the related references. The choice is yours! If an article has a common copyright, there may be a link directly from the website. If not, obtain the article from your library. The ground rule for the conversation is that comments be respectful. We must also acknowledge that the solutions to problems in education won’t ever be resolved in the comment section of a blog post. Feel free to share your thoughts on our Twitter feed, using the featured hashtag. Remember to connect with people who share your viewpoint as well as with people who offer a different perspective!
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