Professional Learning for Busy Educators

The human brain is constantly changing with every experience and interaction. Although experience-responsive brain growth occurs throughout our lives, and the brain’s most rapid growth occurs during gestation, there’s an intense second period of accelerated growth between ages 2 and 5. The brain responds particularly robustly to learning experiences, environmental influences, and emotional interactions during these childhood years. This is where preschool teachers come in.

These structural changes, reflected in children’s accelerating understanding skills, and in their cognitive, social, and emotional maturation, are the result of neuroplasticity, which is the activation of a group of neurons connected in a memory circuit that makes the connections stronger. That is the amazing process of learning. Neuroplasticity generates these changes in neural networks in response to knowledge and experience, enhanced by each new and repeated activation of the network.

A new study uses brain scans to determine that for preschoolers, one type of story is just right.

To support young children’s social and developmental skills, preschools have had to get creative with what were once mainstay classroom practices.