In this dynamic keynote presentation, Dr. Gurian will explore how the minds of boys and girls learn and grow, including brain differences that impact K – 12 education, early childhood, and social emotional development throughout the lifespan.  He will provide insight into best teaching, parenting, counseling, and mentoring practices for both girls and boys, and safe, effective electronics and technology standards for various stages of child development.

Michael’s presentation will include PET, SPECT, and MRI scans that display brain differences, and he will bring the latest research in both of his newest nonfiction books, Saving Our Sons (2017) and The Minds of Girls (2018), focusing on educating, raising, and counseling boys, and educating, raising, and counseling girls.

Michael will also lead two working lunch discussions.  The books that underlie these discussions are Saving Our Sons and The Stone Boys (2019) for Saturday and The Minds of Girls for Sunday.  We hope you will read these books ahead of time.  In these working lunches, we will study and strategize regarding violence/suicide prevention, and mental and emotional health in our school communities.

A note from Michael Gurian:   “While we are all human and thus we experience many similarities with one another, fifty years of brain research also show us implicit and explicit differences in the various ways boys and girls experience life and education.   Though these differences appear on a spectrum, contrary to what some people argue, difference is not a bad thing.  The German poet Rainer Maria Rilke has a beautiful line, ‘What locks itself into sameness has congealed.”  Dynamism lies much more in diversity than we might realize.  For human institutions such a family and school systems to succeed with all children and the whole child, they must succeed first and foremost with boys and girls.”

Dr. Gurian’s Second keynote focuses on poverty- and trauma-informed classrooms, with a powerful eye towards empathy and resilience-building.  Michael will help teachers, counselors, parents and others to develop trauma sensitive classrooms and environments across the socioeconomic and school spectrum.  He will discuss the impact trauma has on the brains of children at various ages, and boys and girls specifically, including hidden trauma in the last year of the pandemic crisis, nutrition issues,  sleeplessness, food allergies, and endocrine disruptors that constitute cellular and brain trauma.  Participants will learn practical strategies for building strong relationships and attachments with traumatized children, as well as those raised in poverty.

Michael will also tell a bit of his own story.  A product of early childhood trauma, he scores a 7 out of 10 on the Adverse Childhood Experiences, ACE survey.  The publication of his newest book, The Stone Boys, made public some of his own trauma.  We hope you will read The Stone Boys ahead of time for a deep dive into boys’ potential trauma-responses in particular.