Karten's Inclusion Conversations Podcast

KIC S1E5 Moving Bodies & Minds: The Benefits of Including Physical Activity in the Classroom Featuring Mike Kuczala

• Toby Karten • Season 1 • Episode 5

Share episode

Karten's Inclusion Conversations S1E5 Featuring Mike Kuczala
Toby and Mike had a conversation that focused on several themes, including the significance of physical activity and movement in the classroom, the advantages of using physical activity to teach content, the importance of inclusion in the classroom, providing modifications for students with disabilities, and the role of passion in teaching; the conversation ultimately highlighted the potential for physical activity to enhance student learning and was led by a passionate educator.

The websites mentioned in the conversation are:

#TobyKarten #MikeKuczala #Karten’sInclusionConversations #KIC #Inclusion #RTC #LaSalle #TCNJ #TheKinestheticClassroom #MovementMatters #ActiveLearning #PhysicalHealth #CognitiveDevelopment #ResearchInEducation #ClassroomConnections #WellbeingMatters #GetUpAndMove #EducationInspiration 

For more information please visit https://inclusionworkshops.com/

Welcome to Carton's Inclusive Conversations podcast. Hi, everybody. Welcome to Carton's Inclusion Conversations. And I am fortunate today to be speaking with Mike Cusala, who's the Academic Director for the Regional Training Center. Mike, we've known each other a bit of time. And since I've known you, you've had a role of at the helm of the Regional Training Center. And you've been involved in so many things in education. Would you mind telling our listening audience a few things about yourself? Sure. I think the most important thing to know is that I come from a family of teachers. Wife, sister, both parents, three grandparents, and aunt and cousin. I mean, it's just what we do in my family. It's what we know. It's what we love. It's what we discuss. And so I've had a life in education and I've loved it. And Regional Training Center, this is my 20th year. It's hard to believe full time. I started teaching graduate courses with them before that, taking the courses. That's what that's what got me is like these courses are amazing. And I taught them and start teaching and I started went to work full time and I started designing coursework for RTC, which led really to this consulting world that I have of authorship. And I've been blessed to do the professional development work and deliver keynotes on four continents. And it's just I've seen places and been to places that I never would have traveled and just been a blessed life and education. And I love it. And I'm a happy husband and I have two adult children, twins. And so, yeah, but that's that's a little bit of my background. Thank you, Mike. And I think since we've known each other, it's been such a pleasure to see professional development on the front stage of of districts across our country, across the world, that it's not everything that you know when you graduate from college, but the experiences and the active learning that occurs. And I'm using that adjective active deliberately. Would you expand upon that adjective for us? Why am I using that word active learning? Because you're a strong proponent in one of my inclusion principles, which talks about having students demonstrate what they know in different ways. You know, working with special students, they might not be able to sit still so long. Right. So why is physical activity in the teaching and learning space? Why is that so important? And does that intersect, which I know you're very involved with the brain compatible learning as well? Yeah. So that's a there's a lot to say there. So getting back to professional development for just a moment and having it being active learning in one of my PDs, I tell people right up front that you're not ever going to be seated for more than seven or eight minutes at a time. You know, we just really experience teachers change. It's been my experience that teachers change for two reasons pertaining to physical activity. They understand the cognitive research behind it and they get to experience it. And that's what really sways them. It is kids just need to move with adults. As I mentioned a few minutes ago, before we started, my second book was for corporate trainers. This is for adults as well. We simply need to move. And to give you a big picture, I mean, researchers say culturally we sit and when we need a break, we stand up for a few minutes. And what they're suggesting more and more is that we stand to learn. Now, we're a ways off from that. But then when you need a break for a few minutes, you you sit down. And so movement just does so many things that are so brain friendly, brain compatible, you know, invigorates the brain and body. The brain demands that the body move. We have to get more blood and oxygen flow around the brain and body, you know, and we create a great emotional state. And so emotion drives attention and attention drives learning. There's just there's so much. The two things that I really talk about in the beginning of any PD are the two reasons that you don't hear about very often. And I'll do this very briefly, but they have to do with memory. A teacher's job is all about long term memory. That's why they signed a contract. That's why people hire you. We want children to use the information again, whether it's content related, whether social, emotional related, whether it's physically related in a gymnasium, we want to use it again. That's the point of learning. So the more you know about long term memory formation, the better you can be. And physical activity plays a role in that in several ways. So a lot of school learning happens in the working memory space, very limited capacity. And some kids that you would talk about in the inclusion space might even have a more limited capacity. So getting information from working memory to long term memory, what I like to tell teachers that something has to happen to it, like something has to happen to the information, find that emotion around it, repeat it a thousand times to a project, teach someone else. Well, physical activity can be that thing that happens to the information when we use our bodies to learn and embeds learning on a deeper level. So the brain prefers more implicit channels like emotion, like physicality versus all the explicit channels we use in school. I'm not saying, hey, that's wrong or bad. It's just not what the brain prefers as its top choice. I always ask in a PD, you know, who would hear when I'm in the United States, who would hear can remember the top 10, the first 10 presidents of the United States and almost no one raises their hand. And I say, well, how many people here can change a light bulb? And they all raise their hand. And I would say that learning 10 names isn't that much more difficult than changing a light bulb. But you see the difference. Take advantage of that power. One is more explicit. One is more implicit. You tried it once. You had it. You tried it a few times and yourself saw someone do it. You had it for life. That's power. Take advantage of it. And one other thing before I'll stop talking here in a moment. Don't stop. It's wonderful information. Please continue. Well, the other thing I think more important, not more important, but it gets me more excited as I ask teachers to be brain, body, emotional state managers. Right. We're not often taught that in our in our teaching programs, like you have all these things to do. And now I'm asking you to manage the brain, body, emotional states of your learners, because there's two criteria for storing things in the long term. Does it make sense? Does it make does it have meaning? You know, if something is really emotional, it'll we can embed it like that. You have it for life. This is more school content related, where most of the material is not that way. Kids are most often not on the edge of their seats. Can't wait for the next thing you have to say. Right. It's more we have to rely on sense and meaning. So meaning is the more powerful criteria. So the two criteria, non-emotional criteria for putting things into long term memory. The core of a teacher's job is state dependent. Meaning is state. Meaning making a state dependent, meaning how I feel during content acquisition matters. And so your number one available manager of state in any teaching and learning situation, any classroom is physical activity. There is a lot of ways to manage state, but I can change anyone's state on a dime through movement. So those are just a few ways that physical activity intersects with brain compatible learning, intersects with the classroom, intersects with academic achievement. That's wonderful. And what you expressed your passion for that came out. And not only that, but you transfer the passion of learning to our students and gen ed students, special ed students. They're all students. And whether they're professional development adults, teachers, you know, sit and get. No, no. It's not sit and get and learn. It's sit and get and forget, you know. And I like that. Maybe that could be another title for a book coming out. Hey, speaking of books coming up, I need I don't want to forget that. Can you please refresh our listeners memories about some of the books that you've written and maybe the driving force behind it? I know you have a co-author as well. If you could share information about Tracey Lengel also, if you want. How did you come about writing these books? The purpose? So Tracey and I designed the Kinesthetic Classroom graduate course together for Regional Training Center. Mike, can I stop you a second? The Regional Training Center, people might not be that familiar with it. And I'm going to put links about it. When it started out, I was with you a little bit. I think both of us at its infancy more than 20 years ago, almost right. More than that. You know, if teachers were interested, is it open to certain states or how does that work? It is, you know, traditionally we have worked. Well, let me go back and tell the listeners what it is. It's an educational consulting firm based in Randolph, New Jersey. And we partner with the College of New Jersey and LaSalle University to offer graduate courses and graduate programs for teachers. Traditionally has mostly been in Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Maryland. A lot of our program now is online. That that was something that we kind of discovered and came up with during the pandemic for our survival because nobody was taking or couldn't take face to face courses. So teachers can take those online courses from I want to say from in the continental United States, except I'm getting too technical here is there's a territory right at the top of my head, the Northern Mariana Islands that can't and California because they don't have the reciprocity within online learning. But otherwise, yeah, people can take our courses. And so I taught them and I started designing them and I designed the Kinesthetic classroom teaching and learning through movement with Tracy. And eventually we said, hey, why are we using someone else's book at the time? We're using Eric Jensen's book. I think it's learning with the body of my phenomenal book. But then we wrote the Kinesthetic classroom and it kind of changed my life. And it just started this whole consulting world for me. You know, my publisher is Corwin. I know you publish many books with Corwin. They've been just fantastic. And they're always interested in the next project that I have, which is really great. The next book, as I mentioned earlier, I wrote for corporate trainers as a different publisher. Next book went with our second graduate course and it's called Ready, Set, Go! The Kinesthetic Classroom 2.0. And Tracy, she's a dynamo, dynamo graduate instructor. She's just amazing. She she is a health and PE teacher in northern Pennsylvania. And we connected through regional training center. My latest book, we can go right back to the topic we were talking about, but I just released a book in February of 2022, about a year old, and it's called The Peak Performing Teacher, Five Habits for Success. And it's really a reminder for teachers about what goes into creating this well lifestyle so that when you show up to work every day, you are the best you can be for students and for yourself. And so, yeah, it's just something that I've been toying with since the late 90s. It's another part of my world. I mean, I designed a motivation course and a wellness course for regional training center. This book was a natural. It was the end of the pandemic and I needed a project and this was it. Corwin was really interested. Yeah, Mike, you have learning in your blood. I know that. I know that. I don't know your blood type, but I think it's partly L also. I think it is too, more than anything else. Yeah. And coming from a family of educators, I'm sure many kitchen tables, you've heard some of the jargon before. But what I really love is you brought across a point that I hope our listeners walk away with. It's always next. What is the next generation going to learn and how are we going to do that? And, you know, you saw a problem and a challenge. And, you know, even when you saw the challenge of teachers not showing up in person for professional development, regional training centers stepped up to that plate. And I myself, I just have to you know, it's not all about the regional training center, but the regional training center is one of those wonderful vehicles that I myself took a course. And and I remember Diana Ramsey, she is very active and she was one of the founders of the regional training center. She always said, if you have a course inside of you. And I think that what we do, we design the courses, but we allow the content of our courses to live inside of others. And that I don't know about you, but like, you know, I used to be in the classroom when kids said thank you. But when I get a feedback on an eval or something from someone who took the course and they say thank you or a student connects with us on LinkedIn instead of other avenues, there's nothing better than letting the next generation of learners, you know, continue. And we pass the torch with that. And when you say like, you know, kinesthetic learning, some people think I have no time to do that. I have so much curriculum. Mike, could you explain how kinesthetic and physical activity does not disconnect from the curriculum? Yes. So, you know, the common phrase back is you don't have time not to. We are all brain body creatures. You have whatever you have in your class, a twenty five brain body students right in front of you. You have to address those needs. My love and education has been creating the best student possible. And it's the same thing with a performing teacher, create the best teacher possible to engage the crazy amounts of curriculum that students have to deal with. And so you have to pay attention to your students needs and movement meets a lot of them in so many ways. And if you get into Glasser's list of needs or whoever, you'll find that movement meets so many of those. What I tell teachers is this movement becomes your best friend as a classroom manager. Just us. You have a different emotional environment. Kids are going to be they're going to want to be more engaged in the classroom. It's going to be a more enjoyable process. And you know what? I'm not saying all learning has to be a horse and pony show, but it's got to be in an environment that's inviting and emotionally pleasing and into an emotional environment that stimulates intellectual achievement. And movement is just simply a part of that. No matter what grade level you are teaching, it's critical that kids move, because every minute they sit after about seven, eight, 10, 12 minutes, you're going to start to lose them. And remember, the brain is always paying attention, probably does not to you. Then it starts to scan its environment for threats. It's just biological. You cannot get away. The distractions when someone's just speaking to them or they're getting slide overload. Where is the retention? What you mentioned earlier about the working memory. I know you have something that it talks about a six part framework for using the movement and physical activity purposefully. How does this play out in the classroom? You kind of mentioned so much. Is there more that you want to add to that, Mike? Yeah. So Tracy and I created a framework to make it much more user friendly to use moving. If you try something, it doesn't work. You might not do it again. So how can we go about this thoughtfully and purposefully? And so we can prepare the brain to learn. There's actual physical activities that stimulate the vestibular system and also support executive function. We can provide brain breaks, which everybody knows about brain breaks for so many reasons. Sitting too long, not good. We can support exercise and fitness. We know that physically fit kids do better academically. And even if a child is not physically fit, exposure to acute bouts of aerobic activity put their brain on fire for the next 30 to 45 minutes. The data bears that out. Then we can also create class cohesion, build community, team build, building communication between students. We can review content using our bodies and teach content using our bodies. And that those are the six parts. It changed a little bit in the second book. But when I do PD, I really stick to that first one is more comfortable with it. I think Tracy uses the other one, all the same parts. You were allowed to collaborate and not agree on every single point. Is that life perhaps as co-authors? I love that. I love hearing that. And you brought out something else that bring out the strengths in your learners. That's what I heard. That's what we try to do. And that, you know, imagine the kinesthetic learners, so many kinesthetic learners in your classrooms and they have to sit there is unbearable. So you're trying to bring out the strengths by doing this and it differentiates instruction. And you know what else you bring out? Not just friends, but smiles. And then that relates to if nothing else, because smiles are lovely. If nothing else, those smiles help them feel comfortable. That's a principle that I'm non-negotiable about that comfortable classroom, pleasant environment. Nobody wants to walk in. OK, get out your books. OK, whoa, slow down. Less is better. And I think not only less is better, but more is better in terms of movement, in terms of connection. It fits so neatly with SEL, which is on the front of everyone's minds. Absolutely. The cognitive benefits of both aerobic activity and being physically fit are enormous. Is there some that our listeners should be very well aware of? Yeah, so it just changes the brain chemically if we're talking about aerobic activity. More and more research is being done with anaerobic activity, you know, which is more sprinting, weight training, that kind of thing. But with aerobic activity. So let me let me go back a second and recommend a book to your listeners. And it's Spark, The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise in the Brain by John Rady, who's an associate professor of psychiatry at Harvard. The book's almost getting old by our standards this 2008. But Mike, could you repeat the title again? I want to make sure our listeners get it. Sure. It's called Spark and the Colon, The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise in the Brain. When you aerobically exercise, it's like taking a little bit of Ritalin, a little bit of Prozac without the side effects. So it takes your neurochemicals and balances. And that's why you feel better if you're really stressed out or tired and go for a workout anyway. There's other factors as endorphins, et cetera. But, you know, when you aerobically exercise, you encourage neural networks to communicate more effectively and more efficiently. You raise levels of BDNF, brain derived neurotrophic factor, which is critical to learning. There's so many reasons to move. And then we, you know, when you look inside a child's brain who is physically fit, they have done this research. Dr. Charles Hillman did some of this research, University of Illinois, and that was at Northeastern Boston. But you find a more effective and efficient brain. But again, if kids are just exposed to it, even if they're not physically fit, I think it is a lot of things for their life in general, but it does turn their brain on for learning for the next little bit of time. Yeah. And what we do influences students' decisions in life when they're on the job and the emotions they're experiencing when things don't always go right. What could they do instead? And a lot of our kids these days are experiencing anxiety, depression, some factors that are going on. And I'm not getting any way talking about the state of our world politically, but the kids hear it and they hear discourse, whether it's on a television set or in a movie, something or a song or whatever is going on. My takeaway from so much of what you're saying is we can still control how we react to things by our movement. Is that right, Mike? Would you add to that? Because you're so much more attuned to the research within this field that I appreciate you sharing that, because what we do as educators is a lot of research-based instructional decisions. And what you have put forth with that is just non-negotiable that we should all do that. So somehow I asked you and then I stopped and didn't wait for that answer. So you go for it, Mike. Yeah. So it just puts you in a better state of mind. It puts your brain, body, emotional state in a better place. Going back to John's book, when you bring up anxiety and depression, the first chapter, if I recall correctly, is about the brain-body connection. Second chapter is about school learning and what they did in Naperville, which is in suburban Chicago. But the rest of the chapters are about anxiety and addiction and stress and depression and different types of Alzheimer's. Mike, I'm working with a lot of students and their teachers and the students have experienced trauma. And we can't change. That was the one thing I always wanted to do is have that power to erase, erase some of the ugly that some students experience. And we can't do that. But what we can do is so much more from what you're saying, right? Yeah. The brain just demands that the body move. And it's just good for our emotional state and for all these things we've experienced. Trauma, stress, anxiety, depression. It just is. It should be second nature to all of us. We, to borrow from my very good friend Gene Moyes, who is a great mentor to me, we live in a culture of sickness versus fitness. And to borrow from Dr. Rady once again, we are literally shriveling our brains because of it. So it's natural to us to move, to support everything else in our life. We need to be daily movers. All of us, as I get older, that's at the top of my list because of all the research I know that's going to preserve everything as long as possible. We're all going to decline at some point, but we might as well be moving as long as we can until we get there. I couldn't agree with you more. During the pandemic, when I wasn't traveling as much and stuff, my dog got so many walks. I would just move, go along and just, you know, try to do that. And that's what we do. We help move our students literally and figuratively to better. And since we've spoken on this podcast, I haven't allowed you to move. So I'm going to say, Mike, Kuzala, thank you so much for your time. Thank you for sharing your expertise with our listeners. And thank you for reminding us of the importance of movement and connections to so much more than what's just perhaps in a book. Mike, any closing words that you would like to say to our listeners? Well, I just thank you all for the support. I encourage you to look into some of this research and make it happen in your classrooms. Toby, I want to thank you for having me. I thank you for the invitation. It's been a pleasure. Right back at you, Mike Kuzala. Thank you so much. All right, everyone, stop listening to this podcast and get up and move. Have a great one, everybody. He can feel the stairs and hear the words unspoken. Not so unaware of a world that thinks he's broken. And who never even knew the kid with the different point of view. No, they never really knew the kid with the different point of view.