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We think and learn about things that matter to us, that are emotionally relevant because we perceive them as important to our physical or social survival and well-being.

Motivation, engagement, perseverance, creativity, optimism, resilience—pretty much all the so-called “soft skills”—are rooted in emotion.

If students’ programs of study include significant, meaningful opportunities for them to follow their expanding and changing interests during their many years in school,  motivation and perseverance will spontaneously combust because, as some students told me, “my interest and involvement in my studies became personal. I felt like my school had meaning, like there was purpose.”

regression is essential to learning because each time the learner rebuilds the network, the more stable and automatic it becomes. Regression is not failure, although it is often treated as such.

natural process of learning—building, regression, rebuilding

So what matters to students? What are they learning in school that forces them to focus on what matters to adults?

Because emotional goals motivate and direct people’s thoughts and behavior, as Immordino-Yang suggests, understanding students’ goals can provide insight into what they are likely to learn and help educators understand how they might change their practices

Engagement in school does not always reflect engagement in the sort of deep, meaningful learning—developing intellectual skills and conceptual understanding—that educators value.

how to rethink school designs and create a new conceptual model for schools—a model that combines and finds an effective balance among the goals that adults have for students and the needs that students have for themselves, a balance between what matters to students and what matters to adults.

more effective model will offer real opportunities for students to pursue personally meaningful interests and questions

we don’t need to try to make all students masters of all disciplines.

Instead of insisting that all students collect identical promotion and graduation credits by meeting minimal standards to “pass” anywhere from five to seven courses each year in discrete, unrelated subjects, educators might be more successful ensuring that all students work each year on a body of specific essential skills—perhaps communication, collaboration, creativity, critical thinking, and problem-solving, which are getting so much attention today—that can be learned while working in any subject area.

Some of the changes that make this new model possible involve significantly reducing the number of traditionally required courses, creating individualized rather than rigidly standardized courseloads, giving students more control of the subjects they study, and establishing graduation requirements based on skill development.

Donnery notices that the gross motor skills of many of her kindergartners are underdeveloped, noting that usually means that fine motor skills are also lacking. “Developing those gross motor skills is just critical, can impact so much of later learning,” she said.

You’d be surprised at the importance of play.

lacking in the attention needed to learn, with more than 10 percent of the school population diagnosed with some kind of attention disorder.

occupational therapist Angela Hanscom opined in the Washington Post that there’s good reason our kids are so fidgety: more and more students come to class without having enough core strength and balance to hold their bodies still long enough to learn.

“In order for children to learn, they need to be able to pay attention. In order to pay attention, we need to let them move.”

A recent study by psychologists at the University of Colorado shows an even stronger reason for free play: children who experienced more undirected free play showed signs of stronger executive function, a strong predictor of success in school. “The more time that children spent in less-structured activities,” wrote researchers, “the better their self-directed executive functioning.”

Reading and recess are important enough that we need to do both.

While this kind of adult-led movement is a far cry from the nearly unstructured free play of a forest kindergarten, it does serve the school’s purpose of high academic standards for their kindergartners, in hopes this prepares them for future academic success.

The gift of play is the way it teaches us how to deal with the unexpected.

The irony is that over the long term, both children’s and adults’ play does lead to practical benefits. But it does this precisely because the people who play, whether they are children or adults, aren’t aiming at those practical benefits. The fundamental paradox of play is that in order to be able to reach a variety of new goals in the long run, you have to actively turn away from goal seeking in the short run.

If it had no other rationale, the sheer pleasure of play would be justification enough.

Well if you look at the skills employers constantly cry out for: empathy, communication, teamwork, agility, flexibility, and the ability to design and make solutions to multidisciplinary problems

chief among their soft skills is a sense of confidence in their abilities to tackle problems and communicate with adults and each other.

Evans acknowledges that creating a school culture that encourages productive conflict, the hashing out of ideas and differing opinions, is particularly hard because the qualities that make someone a great teacher — nurturing, extending beyond themselves, pulling out the best in people — are not typically the characteristics of someone who is skilled at adult conflict

“Almost all of us would rather work with someone who disagrees with us, but who is clear, than with someone who seems to agree with us, but isn’t clear,”