At the very moment when a student might be gearing up to react to the teacher’s comments as a threat, a sign of the teacher’s personal disapproval or bias, the Post-it gave the student an alternative frame through which to view those comments — not as an attack, in other words, but as a vote of confidence that the student was capable of high-quality work.

By contrast, when students adopt the “growth mindset” message that intellectual struggle expands one’s intellectual ability, they seek out bigger challenges and more advanced work.

When kids feel a sense of belonging at school, when they receive the right kind of messages from an adult who believes they can succeed and who is attending to them with some degree of compassion and respect, they are then more likely to show up to class, to persevere longer at difficult tasks, and to deal more resiliently with the countless small-scale setbacks and frustrations that make up the typical student’s school day.

But the teachers in the second cohort were not being rewarded for their success with their students — indeed, it seemed likely that no one but Kirabo Jackson even realized that they were successful.

It also reflects the noncognitive behaviors and mindsets and traits that enable students to leverage their existing cognitive skills more effectively in school.

Children Who Experience Trauma Often Have Behavior Problems in School

But among children who had four or more ACEs, 51 percent had learning or behavioral problems.

Even small moments of parental attention can help nurture children’s development on a very deep level — burrowing all the way down, it turns out, to our essential genetic code.

More than any other experiences infants have, they trigger the development and strengthening of neural connections in the brain between the regions that control emotion, cognition, language, and memory.