Be A Study Neuro_Ninja BHASVIC

1. Be A Study Neuro-Ninja – Yes You Can!

2. You are amazing. And
yes you can do this.
There is no doubt.

3. The human
brain
operates at 1
exaFLOP per
second. A
billion billion
calculations
per second.

4. The world’s
biggest
supercomputer
takes 40 mins to
process just 1
second of brain
activity for just 1
percent of the
brain.

5. So you have everything you could
ever need at the top of your neck…

6. What’s stopping
you?
What has the
biggest impact
on available
cognitive
bandwidth?

7. Preparing for you’re A
Levels is like preparing for a
marathon...
How can you become a
study athlete?

8. Who am I?
SENDCO
MA in education
Biology teacher
Academy consultant
21st century parent
Acting headteacher
Specialist leader in education (SLE)
Parent of 20 and 18 yo, 20 yo has ASD
Deputy head with 25 years experience
Studying neuroscience & psychology for 20 yrs
Used these strategies 1:1 as a SENDCO with families

10. 21st Century
Parent

11. 8 Seminars.
1 Mission.
Helping students & parents go from
brain slaves to Neuro-Ninjas.
1. Well-Being Is A Skill
2 & 3.Being Anxiety Aware 1 & 2
4. Through Anxiety & Beyond
5. Brain Science of Meh
6. Tuning Into Your Mental Bandwidth
7. Your Brain On Other People
8 Way Of The Neuro-Ninja

12. You’re not
just
attending a
seminar,
you’re
joining a
movement…

13. How to respond to this material.
It’s learning Jim, but not as
we know it

14. We Support Professionals, Parents, Children &
Young People to become Neuro-Ninjas
Person-Centred Development Work

15. Going from a brain slave…

16. …a Neuro-Ninja

17. Our focus this evening:
* How to build the best version of ourselves every day
* What hits our cognitive bandwidth most
* How to manage negative emotion & stress
* The most effective ways to learn & remember.

18. What activities and habits are going to
improve our cognitive bandwidth the most?

19. Key Ideas

20. Amazing news…our brains are
plastic…throughout our lives…

21. We get to keep
what we use…

22. Brain As A Projector, The Mind As The Image

23. 50% of how we feel
everyday is down to
what we’ve done in
the last 24 hours!

24. We can build the best
version of ourselves
every day if we look
after our brains and
bodies…

26. If we don’t do them we go
wonky…

27. Treat Well-Being Is A Skill

28. Rock 1: Sleep

29. Less than 6 hours sleep
30% less memory the next day
More anxious the next day
More emotional the next day
More socially clumsy the next day
Less immune cells the next day
Higher blood pressure the next day
Higher blood sugar the next day

30. Sleep Hygiene
Protecting your sleep
• regular bed and get up time.
You manage the sleep
environment to maximise sleep;
• dark
• cool
• no distractions
• no technology

31. The Very Bad
News About
Alcohol

32. Rock 2: Exercise

33. Improves concentration, memory
and learning – Brain-derived
neurotrophic factor (BDNF)

34. Sympathetic (Go
System)
&
Parasympathetic
Nervous Systems
(No Go)

35. Accelerator
& brake
pedal, two
parts of our
automatic
nervous
system

36. 8 of the Rocks Open the Parachute…
Rock 1, Rock 4, Rock 7, 8, 9, 10, 11 and Rock 12

37. Rock 6:
Emotions,
notice, accept
& share.

38. Social Pain and
Physical Pain
registered in the
same parts of the
brain.
Anterior Cingulate
Cortex

39. Emotional pain and
impact on
cognition….
Imagine trying to do
an exam with
toothache…

40. Sticks and stones may
break my bones but
names will never hurt
me – NOT TRUE!!!

42. One small step –
Emotions
• Take 5 minutes Write
down:
• What happened
• How you felt about it
• What emotions were
involved

43. Emotional Granularity is the skill where we learn to describe our
emotional state to ourselves with accuracy.

44. Name it to tame it…

45. Let’s talk about stress and
anxiety…

46. Living In The Age Of Uncertainty (21st century)

47. Pre-Frontal Cortex

48. Amygdalae –
Risk and
Rewards
Changing In
The
Environment

49. Amygdala is pre-loaded with some threats (spiders and snakes for example)

50. And yet,
some people
love snakes
and spiders…

51. The Pre-Frontal Teaches Our Amygdala What Not
To Be Frightened Of…

52. Year 6 Camp

53. Let’s Talk About
Stress and The Two
Halves Of Our
Autonomic Nervous
System

54. Accelerator
& brake
pedal, two
parts of our
automatic
nervous
system

55. They evolved to deal with a very different world…

56. Not chronic stress…

58. You can end up with an
enlarged and overactive
amygdala which the PFC is
unable to sooth…you can
literally get locked up
inside your head…

59. When we’re anxious or
stressed the brain
deploys cognitive
distortions to get our
attention…
These are worse case
scenarios; they’re not
necessarily true…

61. Cognitive Distortions

62. Blame is a cognitive distortion…

63. Get kind and curious
towards the issue…
Ask:
What kind of
distortion is this?
What is the evidence
this thought is true?

65. And finally let’s talk about the Negative,
Nasty Voice We All Have In Our Heads…

66. What’s going on when we beat ourselves up…or put ourselves under too much pressure

67. Circuits to
keep us safe
and away
from pain
and
discomfort…

68. Circuits that want to learn and try new things…

69. They are in a tug of war…you get to decide which circuit wins.

70. Learning is struggle…
Learning can involve pain…

71. My Maths Horror Story…

72. Life is pain…
Pain of regret…
or
Pain of struggle…

73. Step One - Identify A Challenge

74. Step Two –
Write A SMART
GOAL for your
Challenge
Be specific
about what
you’re going to
do and what
success looks
like

75. Introduce Desirable Difficulties to Challenge
Anxiety Circuits

76. Emotional and
Cognitive
Processing
Networks

77. Being a Study
Athlete…

78. Plan Your Day. Every Day.

79. Deliberate
Practice.
Deliberate
Rest.
Repeat.

80. #neuroninjawisdom

81. You want to learn or
remember something?
Repeat it.

82. If you don’t
repeat, your
brain will
delete…

83. Why?
1 day later – they have
forgotten 70%

84. Why is that?

85. When we’re learning something new
action potentials move at 15 metres per seconds (quite slow)

86. Established skills the action potential moves at 150ms (10x faster)

87. Long Term Potentiation
at a Synapse
Synaptic Clefts: 40 nm
Human Hair - 75000nm
2000x smaller than a human hair

88. Learning Involves Chemical Changes At Synapses Called Long Term
Potentiation (LTP)
Neurones That Fire Together, Wire Together.
An action potential is basically an
information packet
It arrives at the
synapse (gap)
And is (sometimes)
received by the receptors.

89. Why only
sometimes
received?

90. Information packet
rings the doorbell but
no-one answers
Action Potential Fires But
Doesn’t Change the synapse
between 2 neurones

91. Long Term
Potentiation
causes
myelination…

92. How can we
ensure this
information is
‘received’?
Long Term
Potentiation causes
myelination

93. Pomodoro
Technique.

94. 25 mins focused study.
Between 2x and 4x a day.
Four Days A Week.
One day at the weekend.

95. Self-Directed Study Slots – Deliberate Practice

97. Menu for Deliberate Practice Sessions
Study Review – 25 mins
Break – 5mins
Past Paper for learning 25 mins
Break 5 mins
Flash Cards – 10 mins
Knowledge Maps / Retrieval Activity – 15 mins
Break – 5 mins
Summarize a video or piece of content – 25 mins
3 Pomodoro Slots

98. Study
Review:
What did I
learn today?
How well
have I
remembered
it?

99. Use A Study Review Sheet

100. Memories move when we sleep. The memories we touch more often get reinforced more
often.

101. Menu for Deliberate Practice Sessions
Study Review – 25 mins
Break – 5mins
Past Paper for learning 25 mins
Break 5 mins
Flash Cards – 10 mins
Knowledge Maps / Retrieval Activity – 15 mins
Break – 5 mins
Summarize a video or piece of content – 25 mins
3 Pomodoro Slots

102. Past papers one of the most effective learning strategies.

103. Lots of students don’t use it as much as they should. Why?

104. The difficult emotions exam questions throw up.

105. How Can We Help Them To Embrace the Desirable Difficulties Of Past Paper Questions?

106. Emotionally Agile Learning – Expect the sting, do it anyway.
I’m not doing this question for testing, I’m doing it for learning

107. The solution to
fear is re-framing
through curiosity…

108. SMILE at Past Paper
Questions
Surf emotions
Mantras for Learning
Interrogate like a
detective
Learn key points
(distill)
Engage key points
Repeat.

109. Menu for Deliberate Practice Sessions
Study Review – 25 mins
Break – 5mins
Past Paper for learning 25 mins
Break 5 mins
Flash Cards – 10 mins
Knowledge Maps / Retrieval Activity – 15 mins
Break – 5 mins
Summarize a video or piece of content – 25 mins
3 Pomodoro Slots

110. Flash Cards to Build Schema

111. Moving ideas from working to long-term memory –
from electrical encoding to chemical encoding.

112. If you have schema in your
head, representations of key
ideas, you can hang items
from short term or working
memory on it.
Schema are neural
structures of “wired and
fired” neurons.

113. So your schema
develop baubles
and decorations of
new knowledge

114. If you are
learning
something
totally new
with no
schema, this
is likely to
happen to
new
knowledge.

115. Key Words
Build
Schema –
Make sure
you do at
least 5 a day
using Flash
Cards

116. Photosynthesis
foe-to-sin-the-sys

117. A process where green plants use
sunlight energy to make glucose.

118. Spacing Your
Learning

119. Sleep before and
after learning is
key to memory
consolidation

120. Menu for Deliberate Practice Sessions
Study Review – 25 mins
Break – 5mins
Past Paper for learning 25 mins
Break 5 mins
Flash Cards – 10 mins
Knowledge Maps / Retrieval Activity – 15 mins
Break – 5 mins
Summarize a video or piece of content – 25 mins
3 Pomodoro Slots

121. Recall &
Review
Activities…

122. Curious
Questions.
Mental
Associations.
Knowledge
Maps.

123. Menu for Deliberate Practice Sessions
Study Review – 25 mins
Break – 5mins
Past Paper for learning 25 mins
Break 5 mins
Flash Cards – 10 mins
Knowledge Maps / Retrieval Activity – 15 mins
Break – 5 mins
Summarize a video or piece of content – 25 mins
3 Pomodoro Slots

124. Or Curious Questions: Why Don’t
Plants Eat Crisps…

125. Inspiration Gets
You Started…Habit
Keeps You Going

126. Build a Wonder Wall In Your Room.

127. We Believe In You!

128. Your friends and families believe in
you…

129. If you can believe in you…you
are unstoppable.

130. We Believe In You.
Your Parents &
Carers Believe In
You.
When You Don’t
Give Up…