Teaching to Every Kid's Potential: Simple Neuroscience Lessons to Liberate Learners

“Teachers hold the potential to provide a student with frustration or opportunity every day―and those states are closer together than you might think.”

When students repeatedly lose track of directions or take a long time to solve problems, it’s easy for teachers to see the distracted or off-task behavior, but not always to see the root of the problem. Quite often the same child who has an underdeveloped skill may have an opposing but hidden strength: a slow processor of information may also be a deep thinker.

Teaching to Every Kid’s Potential is an invitation to teachers to improve the learning in their classrooms, one student at a time, using practical, evidence-based strategies. Focusing on four big concepts from neuroscience―flexibility, readiness, connection, and masking―the author shows how to apply them to build on the strengths of students. Each chapter unpacks the science; shows how talents can compensate for neural processing issues and suggests small but powerful adjustments to classroom practice that can allow kids’ gifts to emerge.

10 black-and-white illustrations

Layne Kalbfleisch, MED, PhD, is dually trained as an educational psychologist and cognitive neuroscientist. A resident of Abiquiu, New Mexico, she teaches in the College of Education at Northern New Mexico College and is the founder of 2E Consults® LLC.