Relationships MUST be first.

• If a brain is unrewarded or punished for curiosity, it learns to hide, avoid risks, and stick with what is familiar and safe.

• Anxiety is the enemy of curiosity, exploration and new learning.

• Secure relationships not only trigger brain growth, but serve emotional regulation that enhances resilience and learning.

• Good relationships help learning, bad relationships impede learning.

• Effective teams have more to do with the relationships and development of the group, than with skillful facilitation..

• Without mutually stimulating interactions, people (and neurons for that matter) wither and die.

• Your knowledge can be activated through observing and identifying with other people.

• You gain self-efficacy by observing and interacting with peers as they work on difficult problems

• Exposure to a successful model will encourage a person to believe he or she will be successful as well.

• You don’t have to agree with someone’s opinion, but you need to at least be interested in it.

• Relationships are the foundation of deep learning. If you don’t establish a foundation on that idea, you run the risk of having everything else crumble.

**Quotes and research from Cozzolino, Fedrow, Hattie, Tokuhama-Espinosa