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Innovations in Education

EduCenter is an informational resource for educators or anyone interested in growing their knowledge of Education reform. As the generations change, education must change with them so that all children and adults have an opportunity to learn according to their intellectual ability. We provide videos, articles, and books from the top minds in education, psychology, and creativity in order to improve our approach to teaching those entrusted to us as educators. Everyone is capable of thriving in the right environment.

We encourage you to leave a comment to exchange ideas with other educators and parents. The more minds that a community puts together, the more experience we can gain from one another. Let us know what you think of the videos and books or what you are doing in the classroom to reinvent education.

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Passion and Learning

Learning with Passion and Enthusiasm releases dopamine, which means it works better and is more fun Learning happens inside our brain when new information connects with existing memory. When we are excited or enthusiastic our brain happens to do that much better. In a famous experiment American psychologist, Hans Breiter put cocaine addicts into an MRI. The effect of the drug excited the addicts and the researcher saw a lot of activity in what’s called the Nucleus Accumbent. German scientists did the same experiment with young men and pictures of Porsche cars, which caused the same area to light up. When they did it with pictures of a Daihatsu.. it didn’t. What’s going on here? As soon as we expect something nice to happen, the brain releases it's happiness chemicals dopamine and endorphin as well as other neurotransmitters. While dopamine and endorphin delight us, the other neurotransmitters send information from A to B. This connects new information from outside the brain with ...

Raising Independent Children to be Functional Adults

Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime. - Maimonides (1138-1204) Independence is a problem when 55% of young adults in the U.S., between ages 18-34, are still financially dependent on their parents. That is more than half! As a teacher and director of child development centers for over a decade, I've encountered children who were about to transition to kindergarten without being able to dress themselves, pour milk into a cup, or even string an intelligible sentence together. It's not because these children aren't capable, but they haven't been given the time and training to develop those skills due to impatience or enabling. This has been called learned helplessness. Before the advent of public education, children would work as farm hands and operate machinery in factories as young as five or six, meanwhile our progressive five-year-olds cannot even tie their own shoes. I'm not advocating for child...

Unschooling: Why Parents Remove Their Kids from School

A growing number of parents believe in unschooling — the process of learning through life, outside classrooms. Similar to homeschooling it usually happens at home or within the community. But while homeschooling usually follows a formal curriculum, unschooling doesn’t. So how does it work, and why do parents advocate for it?

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