BioStacking for Schools

Are you looking for a competitive advantage in your classroom, in your school, or in your district?

To discover true competitive advantage and sustain it in the classroom for your students , yourself and in your life, start with the brain. Over the past decade, the neuroscience of peak performance has been widely researched. With state-of-the-art tools leading to multiple discoveries, scientists have found that all humans are innately designed and genetically programmed through evolution to do their best. However, optimal performance is dependent on your state of mind, and the state of mind most closely correlated with optimal performance is called the “Flow State” or “Flow” for short.

Flow can be thought of as being in the zone. It's when your brain is supercharged, your productivity is off the charts with seemingly little effort, and you are experiencing a heightened sense of well-being. Flow is the state of consciousness where you feel most alive, intensely productive, and innovative. The good news is that this state of being has a specific neurological footprint in the brain. It can be measured, and even more importantly, this footprint can be reproduced on demand with certain specific interventions.

I've spent over a decade building a formula for optimizing human performance in the workplace and in the classroom based on neurobiology. This formula consists of stacking proven individual neuroscience interventions on top of one another to move the brain closer to a Flow State, a process we have termed BioStackingSM. BioStackingSM leverages the latest knowledge in neuroscience research to improve students' focus, memory, learning, complex decision making, creativity, emotional regulation, and sense of well-being, resulting in dramatic improvements in personal human performance in the classroom.

The key neuroscience interventions included in BioStacking are:

This is a form of meditation with the goal of activating the parasympathetic nervous system and rebalancing the neurotransmitters in the brain for optimal performance.

The concept of Mindfulness is simple. It's living in the now. We spend 70% of our time worried about the future or obsessing about the past. That activates the stress response, which scrambles up your neurotransmitters in your brain, moves the blood flow from the thinking part of your brain to the reflexive part of your brain, your emotional part of your brain, which reduces your performance. Where Focused Attention balances your neurotransmitters in your brain, Mindfulness keeps them that way.

Now that you have your neurotransmitters and your brain working in an optimal fashion, Future Visions is the next element. Future Visions is based on the premise that every human being has self-imposed limitations for themselves that they believe are real. They believe they can't do this or that. They have a dream about what they could do, but they don't even start because they have so many reasons why they can't do it. These are self-limiting obstacles that aren't even real. What we do with Future Visions is help students identify what their self-imposed limitations are, help them remove them, and help them start to dream again - dream like they were when they were a little kid. We help them start to build clarity in their goals for the future - their one year, three year, five year, even 10 year goals, and help them attach those goals to passion and purpose.

The fourth element is called Metacognition. After we balance our neurotransmitters, remove self-imposed limitations, set goals, and make action plans, we need to have some more tools in our tool chest as students to be able to achieve those goals. Metacognition is the act of thinking how to think, how to be a better analyzer, better memorizer, and a better decision maker. These sets of exercises performed with metacognition will arm the students with a set of skills to better reach their goals.

The fifth element is called the Science of Recovery and is based on the concept that downtime is actually productive time. Here we're looking at life as not a marathon, but more like a set of sprints, and we're athletes. Our students are athletes literally, but they're also athletes in the classroom. What they're doing amounts to a marathon; going through a whole six- or seven-hour class with minimal breaks. The typical attention span after which there are diminishing returns for students is around 20 to 30 minutes. So, we try to encourage teachers and their students to take breaks every 20 to 30 minutes. It may just be getting up and using movement to help them have some downtime. It may be having the class go for a walk. It may be people just chatting with each other for three or four minutes. It would be up to the teachers’ discretion where it's appropriate to add these breaks in. The idea is that during these breaks, the students are actually processing and organizing all the information they just heard in the past 20 to 30 minutes. Breaks literally allow students to become better learners and better memorizers and help them to comprehend lessons if they take these kinds of breaks. We also talk about nutrition and sleep, both very important items for recovery.

When in Flow, you not only have a greater capacity for learning, you also have a greater capacity to connect and collaborate with others and also reduce your overall stress. All of these things are important to student performance. As teachers and schools continue to invest in the well-being and development of their students, the neuroscience interventions of BioStacking become the key to satisfying an ever-evolving and dynamic student body.