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March 10-14 is Brain Awareness Week. Take a moment to learn more about how brain awareness can actually change your students’ attitudes about their own brains—and even help them be more successful in school.

Teaching Tolerance director Maureen Costello talks empathy as a means to move forward.

It was more than just a change of scenery for Cole Archer. Today, he moved from his usual center lunch table to the front of the lunchroom to sit with five schoolmates he generally only sees in the halls and in classes.

Every marking period I contact the parents of my most remarkable students to tell them how great their kids are. I do this for a few reasons. Too often, my attention is consumed with kids who need refocusing, redirecting and all the other IEP-mandated practices teachers do anyway. But mostly I contact the remarkable students because I’ve noticed that the kids who do good work often go unacknowledged.

At first the idea sounded too simple to be anything worthwhile. Have students sit with someone new at lunch? How much effect could that really have? After years of perusing and using Teaching Tolerance’s other resources, I finally felt compelled to try to Mix It Up.

On the rare occasion that I spend time with people who are not educators, it’s inevitable that someone will drop the word “retarded.” The “R-word” has been used colloquially for decades to describe and degrade anyone or anything out of the ordinary, inferior, or somehow slow. I can still hear the snickers from my own classmates back in 10th-grade health class when we read the words “fire retardant” in our textbook.