Workshop Focus
Whether you’re guiding a classroom, designing learning experiences, or navigating your own cognitive process, you’ve likely sensed the tension between open exploration and focused progress. Neuroscience identifies how we shift between two key networks in the brain:
• The Default Mode Network (DMN): where reflection, imagination, story, and emotion live, and
• The Task Positive Network (TPN): where structure, clarity, and goal-focused effort take over.
These networks rarely operate at the same time. Yet, when we move fluidly between them, learning becomes more engaging, more meaningful—and more sustainable.
What We Will Explore
This workshop will guide you to:
• Recognise how DMN and TPN show up in how you think, learn, and teach
• Experience what it feels like to inhabit each mode, and how transitions between them affect focus and creativity
• Co-create visual, metaphorical, and sensory prompts to engage both networks
• Design rhythms that intentionally sequence imagination and structure
• Begin to cultivate flow*—the sweet spot where these networks interact in a way that feels both natural and deeply productive
Who This Is For
This workshop is designed especially for educators—but also welcomes facilitators, learning designers, and reflective professionals across contexts.
Whether you’re planning a lesson, designing a program, or trying to get unstuck, this session offers fresh language, neuroscience-backed tools, and collaborative energy to help you cross your own next divide.
*A Note on Flow
Flow, as defined by psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, is a state of deep engagement where challenge, meaning, and skill align. It’s not something we can force through effort alone.
Flow arises when the brain has space to wander and connect (DMN) before being invited to focus and build (TPN).
Designing with both in mind creates the conditions where flow can emerge—where learning feels both absorbing and effective.
Research shows that flow enhances:
• long-term retention
• creative problem-solving
• emotional investment in learning and work
Please click on the facilitators’ name in the session info to view their bio.
Session Duration: 2 hours
Session Resources
- Session slides
- Recording on YouTube (also embedded below)
