Conversation with Brain Power Wellness Founder Dave Beal About Student Engagement

Dave Beal is the founder of Brain Power Wellness, a holistic, school-based wellness organization that supports healthier, happier, more focused school environments. The mission of Brain Power Wellness is to help transform the culture of its partner schools through self-development, mindfulness, community building, SEL, holistic wellness, and brain training for teachers, students, parents, and administrators. 

Brain Power Wellness was founded by Dave Beal, a 5th-grade teacher from Brooklyn, New York.  Passionate about empowering his students, Dave saw that they needed help managing stress, and he explored ways to do this in his own life with mindfulness, yoga, and tai chi. After seeing positive changes in his health and a greater connection with his students, Dave integrated mind-body exercises into his classroom. When school administrators saw the results, they asked Dave to develop school-wide mindfulness and SEL programs.

Eventually, Dave left the classroom to share these powerful principles with more students, staff, and schools. Since 2007, Brain Power Wellness has impacted more than 25,000 teachers and half a million students in 500 schools worldwide.

There is a concern about maximizing instruction time when kids are dealing with non-academic issues. How does your research connect to looking at school data?

A big part of what we do is teach simple one- to two-minute brain break exercises for teachers to utilize just to maximize the engagement level of the class. And what we typically find, we get a lot of resistance from teachers initially because everyone feels that we don’t have enough time. So my question to them is always the same: “Are you stressed about time or about productivity? What do you have to get done in that amount of time?” Everyone understands it’s a productivity and efficiency issue.

So I say, “If you have 45 minutes to teach a math lesson, and you read the room, and energetically and from an attention standpoint, the kids just aren’t there, would you rather just kind of push through for 45 minutes with their limited engagement or take one to two minutes and just reset the energy, get them up and moving and energized and focused? Then you have 43 minutes of a more engaged classroom, which is going to be a more successful lesson.” And they kind of buy into that idea. Then they see in actuality that when we push in, and we actually do the work with the kids, that’s when you see the excitement.

Because the kids feel that they have agency in the lesson, right? They’re having fun with each other. They’re creating a safe space where they feel trust and genuine connection with their peers. So then they can kind of let those walls come down and really jump into the lesson. So it’s actually a much more efficient way to teach.

How do you use the term “reset” to have better learning and better use of the time but also so the students are more engaged?

I think engagement is the number one issue of anything with learning. So when we’re engaged, our brain lights up. When we’re in it, we’re going to remember better. So if we’re having fun and enjoying the experience, we’re with people that we trust and enjoy being around, and we create that atmosphere, we’re just going to learn faster, and we’re going to remember better. So it’s not so much about the amount of time that we’re taking on a particular lesson. It’s about how impactful that lesson was on that student. Are they going to forget it that afternoon, or is it going to become part of their long-term memory?

How are you helping with those areas of instruction time engagement and ultimately helping students?

As a classroom teacher, I lived this 15 years ago. I saw the difference that having a toolset of very simple exercises and activities to engage the students made; it became from me as the teacher from asking them to pay attention-- “Come on, guys, we have to do this” -- to: “We’re in this together.” It’s just a different kind of paradigm in the classroom when the kids take ownership of the learning and genuinely want to be there.

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