Resiliency Expert and Author Horacio Sanchez on "Finding Solutions to The Poverty Problem"

Welcome back to the Neuroscience Meets Social and Emotional Learning Podcast episode #111 with our 3rd returning guest, whose interview episode #74[i] made an impact on many of our listeners (and me) as we were right in the first few months of the Pandemic. If you are new here, my name is Andrea Samadi, and I’m a former educator who created this podcast to bring the most current neuroscience research, along with high performing experts who have risen to the top of their field, with specific strategies or ideas that you can implement immediately, whether you are an educator, or in the corporate space, to take your results to the next level. If we want to improve our social, emotional and cognitive abilities, it all starts with an understanding of our brain.  You can watch the interview on YouTube here.  Going back to today’s guest and our first interview—while many of my questions for our guest,  on episode #74 were focused on Horacio Sanchez’s, book The Education Revolution [ii]published by Corwin Press, that addresses the decline in empathy, increase in obesity, and the impact of implicit bias on minority students, our conversation turned to focus on the problems we were seeing in the world at that moment (July 2020) highlighting the need for racial change through an understanding of race and culture. I knew that Horacio was deep into his next book, The Poverty Problem: How Education Can Promote Resilience and Counter Poverty's Impact on Brain Development but had not read it, nor made the connection between this book, the implicit biases that we all have, how to understand where they originated from in order to self-correct them and where to even begin to make these changes. If you have not yet watched our first interview, I recommend reviewing it before this one.[iii] A Bit About Horacio Horacio Sanchez who is recognized as one of the nation’s prominent experts on promoting student resiliency and applying brain science to improve school outcomes as they relate to diverse topics such as overcoming the impact of poverty, improving school climate, engaging in brain-based instruction, and addressing issues related to implicit bias. His new book was just released in January of this year, The Poverty Problem: How Education Can Promote Resilience and Counter Poverty's Impact on Brain Development and Functioning.[iv] If you follow Horacio on Twitter @ResiliencyInc, you will see the excitement this book is creating with educators around the country who are receiving their books, attending his trainings and learning how to Improve outcomes for students in poverty by understanding their developing brains. I highly recommend following Horacio on LinkedIn, as he has a daily brain tip where he shares brain tips and how they are relevant for student learning. Horacio’s new book covers how economic hardship is changing our students’ brain structures at a genetic level, producing psychological, behavioral, and cognitive issues that dramatically impact learning, behavior, physical health, and emotional stability. But there is hope. He offers solutions that will change minds, attitudes, and behaviors. You will learn about how problems develop between people of different races, how the brain develops in persistent poverty, and how it might react to solutions. In addition: The lack of culturally competent instruction and its impact on students of color Poverty's effect on language development and how it can be positively influenced The importance of reading How to counteract the effects of the widespread stress in lower SES environments Remember: “Children make up 23% of the U.S. population and account for almost 33% of those living in poverty, making the education system our most distressed institution. In The Poverty Problem, you’ll learn how to increase students’ perseverance and confidence and positively impact outcomes by arming yourself with research-based instructional strategies that are inspiring, realistic, and proven to w