As you plan your summer and back-to-school professional development days, we hope you will look at utilizing Gurian Institute brain-based professional development.  GI has trained tens of thousands of educators and professionals in more than 5,000 schools over the last quarter century.  Our areas of focus are academic and social emotional success in educational systems and school cultures.  Our GI training uses neuroscience linked to hundreds of practical strategies for pedagogical and community excellence.

Today’s blog post makes the case for this training, which has been successful at helping schools and educators close achievement gaps, raise test scores, improve grades and student behavior, increase social emotional learning, and create a culture of dignity throughout the school.  Please email us at info@gurianinstitute.com to start a conversation about bringing our training to your school or district this year.

The Case for Brain-Based Training

Diversity is a key concern for all schools and layered into the diversity is the center, the heart of it all—our students are “brains” at work with diversely gendered brains.  Sex and gender affects academic and social emotional growth because they collectively constitute one of the four primary drivers of human education and progress, yet most of us did not receive training in this crucial educational and behavioral factor when we trained to be educators.

Just how crucial is male/female to children’s lives?  How robust is the research?  These are important questions, especially when we read media headlines that female and male brains don’t exist.  Our colleague, Daniel Amen, M.D., published a study based on nearly 50,000 brain scans, which he summarizes here: https://www.amenclinics.com/blog/women-more-active-brains-than-men/.)  Recently, researchers revealed MRI scans of fetal brains, finding significant difference between female and male brains already in utero (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1878929318301245).  Twenty five years ago, via our two year pilot out of the University of Missouri-Kansas City in six school districts in Missouri,the GI team realized that the most profound and practical way to help professionals and parents meet the success goals in classrooms was to combine brain-based education with sex- and gender-differentiated training.  As diversity in classrooms has evolved, so has our professional development.

Right now in our schools:

*Boys in general are undermotivated-to-learn in comparison to girls (often lost in video games and screens); they are getting more than 2/3s of the Ds and Fs in our classrooms but less than 40% of the As.  Covid has not helped.  Everywhere we look, people are worried about the loss of males in education, especially in under resourced communities.

*Boys are inordinately punished, many times for “offenses” that are not actually abnormal behavior for boys; boys of color are often profoundly abandoned in their search to become good men, forcing many of them into a school-to-prison pipeline very early.

*Boys get lower standardized test scores than girls in general, and in literacy, language arts, and similar fields, the male to female gap is three times higher than the girl-to-boy math gap.

*Depression, anxiety, suicide, substance and opioid abuse, and brain disorder diagnoses are increasing; many of these diagnoses are moving rapidly into pre-pubescent age groups for both girls and boys, and across the gender spectrum.

*Girls’ STEM learning is improving in our classrooms and yet retaining young women in higher level of Tech and Engineering jobs is barely improving.

*Girls are engaged in bullying behavior towards one another and brutal behavior towards themselves at unprecedented rates.

*Pressure on girls to hyper-multi-task their success is partially the cause of increased depression, anxiety, substance abuse, and suicide attempts among girls.

*Social media, screens, smart phones, and other artificial methods of creating the “connective tissue” that girls want also alters their brains, in many cases, toward negative growth.

GI professional development specifically target these outcomes in your school and community:

*Crucial Success Gains in Student Achievement and School Turnaround
*Positive Gains in Student Behavior, including Lowered Discipline Referrals
*Dynamic, Useful, and Highly Practical Tools You Can Use Right Now
*Applied Brain-Based Science Proven Successful in Thousands of Classrooms
*Deeper Understanding of Boys, Girls, and the Whole Gender Spectrum
*Systemic Change Models That Can Transform School Culture.

Gurian Institute Training and Professional Development

Our on-site and online PD and training are both set up to meet the same outcomes.  Michael Gurian and/or one or more Trainers can come to you, on site.  The number of trainers needed depends on the number of students in the training.

Our online courses can also be used to augment training.  Some schools are using a hybrid of the Online Course on Day 1 of PD and a GI trainer or trainers on Day 2.  You can look at our Online Course here:  https://gurianinstitute.com/products/boys-and-girls-learn-differently-online-course/.   You can also hold a Train-the-Trainers to certify GI trainers in your school and they can be certified online, as well.

Indeed, there are many ways to utilize the Gurian Institute.  To learn more about our Summer Training Institute, check out www.gurianinstitute.com.  This link, https://gurianinstitute.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/gurian_institute_information.pdf, and the following pages should be useful in helping you look at your PD needs and initiatives for your school onsite and online.

https://gurianinstitute.com/training-for-brain-based-teaching-%e2%80%8bwith-a-gender-focus/

https://gurianinstitute.com/success/

https://gurianinstitute.com/institute-testimonials/

Pricing is here:  https://gurianinstitute.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/GIpackagesandpricingwithpilots1.pdf.

No two children are exactly alike.  No two teachers or parents are either. We are diverse! That is why both understanding male/female brains and applying innovations to target those brains has become one of the keys to success in classrooms.  To bring our training to you, please email us at info@gurianinstitute.com.

We hope to see you online and onsite very soon!