Brain Fact Friday "Using Neuroscience to Lessen the Impact of COVID-19 on Learning"
Welcome back to the Neuroscience Meets Social and Emotional Learning Podcast, for Brain Fact Friday and episode #129. If you are listening on iTunes, click here to see the images. In this episode, you will learn how to lessen the impact that COVID-19 has had on our mental health, well-being and learning by understanding: ✔︎ What brain research can teach us about new ways to position learning for our students. ✔︎ Tips to re-build our student’s brains after the impact of the Global Pandemic. ✔︎ The importance of motivation, learning and the brain. ✔︎ Why neuroplasticity is the most important change in the understanding of our brain in the past 400 years. (Norman Doidge, MD). Welcome back, I'm Andrea Samadi, a former educator who has been fascinated with understanding the science behind high performance strategies in schools, sports, and the workplace for the past 20 years. If you have been listening to our podcast, you will know that we’ve uncovered that if we want to improve our social and emotional skills, and experience success in our work and personal lives, it all begins with an understanding of our brain. We also know that “mental health is brain health”[i] and that research demonstrates that “students who receive social, emotional and mental health support achieve better academically. School climate, classroom behavior, on-task learning, and students' sense of connectedness and well-being all improve as well”[ii] As May is Mental Health Awareness Month, it’s clear that mental health disorders are a worldwide concern, magnified with the effects of the Global Pandemic. Here in the United States, 4 in 10 adults have reported symptoms of anxiety or depressive disorder…up from 1 in 10 adults who reported these symptoms from January-June 2019”[iii] before the Pandemic, and we know that “young adults are already at risk for poor mental health”[iv] but these statistics, along with some comments from some of the educators I speak with often got me wondering “What will be the long-term impacts of COVID-19 on the mental health of our students in our classrooms, let alone the havoc it’s created in the workforce.” Since leaving the corporate world in 2012, I have been focused on creating content to help students and educators implement social and emotional skills, character education, practical neuroscience and leadership,[v] with a focus on well-being, but the recent changes in our world have got me thinking: What are the long-term impacts of COVID-19 on our students’ well-being? How has wearing a mask every day impacted their self-image, their self-esteem, and confidence levels? What will happen to those students who struggle (or are still struggling) with Distance Learning? What are some solutions to these questions that we can implement to bridge the gap that was created with this Global Pandemic? I don’t think I’ll be able to solve everything here in this episode but it’s a starting point. What are your thoughts? I’d love to hear from you with what issues you are facing in your schools and workplaces in different parts of the world, a year after the global pandemic. These questions bring us to this week’s brain fact Friday, and a reminder from our last episode where we reviewed Dr. Daniel Amen’s book, The End of Mental Illness, that we are not stuck with the brain we have. We can change our brain and change our results. Whatever impact the Global Pandemic has had on our student’s social, emotional and cognitive thinking in our schools, or on those in the workplace, I strongly believe that this impact will not last forever, especially with the application of brain science to guide us through this time. For this week’s Brain Fact Friday DID YOU KNOW THAT: “Nature has given us a brain that survives in a changing world by changing itself?” –Dr. Norman Doidge, a Canadian distinguished scientist, medical doctor, a psychiatrist on the faculty of the University of Toronto and Columbia University in New York, and the author