Sitting Less and Learning More with Brooke Sydnor Curran of Move2Learn

What if getting young people moving was one of the simplest, yet overlooked tools we have for improving their health, focus, and sense of belonging?

From classroom transitions to community partnerships, we explore what happens when movement becomes part of everyday culture, not just something reserved for sports or PE. We hear how movement improves attendance, reduces disruptions and  supports mental health. And the best part? It doesn’t require big budgets or creating something new, just a willingness to do things a little differently. Because movement matters. And the more we normalize it, the better our youth will thrive.

Transcript

C.J. Stermer (00:00)
Hi, Brooke. Thanks so much for joining me today. I really appreciate your time.

Brooke Sydnor Curran (00:02)
Hi CJ, it's a real pleasure to be here with you today. Thank you so much for asking me to join you.

C.J. Stermer (00:07)
Of course. So Brooke, I know you and I have talked about the importance of getting our young people just moving I'm very curious, What motivated you to start taking action into this type of organization?

Brooke Sydnor Curran (00:18)
Yeah, thank you. That's a great question. The reason why I did this was I wanted to create a school system that I wish I had had growing up. I was a student who couldn't sit still, who couldn't focus in the classroom, who always was disrupting, nicknamed literally the mosquito, because I was always flitting around everywhere that I went. But the consequence of that was distracting the classroom, disrupting the classroom.

things like, sit down, act right, right? And then I felt like something was wrong with me. And that stuff sticks over the years. And so I wanted to create something that could, you know, bring opportunities to students like me who have, ⁓ have challenges throughout the day. when's the last time you sat for seven hours and well, felt good. Felt like you could focus.

concentrate, you didn't have that extra energy that you're bouncing off the walls.

It wasn't until years later in life, that I learned how movement made me feel better. better about my day. I felt more focused, things that for some reason were bothering me and I didn't know what the answer is.

I was a packaday smoker high school and college.

And learning about, Spark by Dr. John Rady, who really put

the science behind it, the dopamine, the endorphins, everything that happens.

And I just stumbled across that book.

And so that

dopamine, that endorphin, all of that I have learned since that you get from smoking is the same thing that physical activity can do for you.

At that point, ⁓ I started picking up running. And then running turned to marathoning.

you know, CDC tells us this, NIH tells us this, there's so much evidence that shows how movement can support mental health, wellbeing, focus and attention. And so was me turning my learned experience

into something bigger and larger.

And so all of these things kind of happening all at once that made me ⁓ just start Move To Learn and had the basic

C.J. Stermer (02:12)
Mm.

Brooke Sydnor Curran (02:21)
overall premise of what movement can do and give students agency over how they learn and how they feel throughout the school day.

so we're an educational nonprofit. We work with K-12 14 elementary schools, two middle and one high school.

114,000 students from many different languages belief is for students to learn more, well, they just need to be in their seats less. And we work with teachers and principals about the

easy ways get moving throughout the school day, you can do it in short periods of time, scattered throughout the day with little to no space, and in a way creative opportunities for before and after school programs Everything that we do is free to students.

So not only programs, but all the materials needed, a shoe, socks, We do all of that. ⁓ Everything is right at schools. So there's no transportation barrier ever. ⁓ No pay to play sort of thing. You know, we love soccer, but not everyone can get across the city at a certain time and have all the gear and you know, sports are expensive.

C.J. Stermer (03:33)
I remember when I was younger in elementary school, right, we had our playtime, and we were outside a lot, and PE. How does that affect young people as they get older?

Brooke Sydnor Curran (03:41)
Most people would say, sure, elementary school students, they should be having recess or sure, they should be moving a little bit more. But the fact is that, you know, our students are moving less either because state

requirements for testing, the teaching tests and taking away time in the playground. not every school does PE multiple times a week or even gets recess every day.

We know as students get older, let's say in middle school particularly,

That's when there is a lot less PE, a lot less recess.

And we know that students are moving a lot less anyway in life. Gone are the days of walking to school,

the freedom to play outside, Gone are the days of kind of the free access to just playgrounds and general space. many feel that way for safety reasons. And so that's why for us it's been really important to make sure that these are accessible in the school and at school.

C.J. Stermer (04:40)
So you're creating this holistic curriculum, not just about movement, there's this whole encompass sort of ideology around you're supposed to be talking about a classroom and adding movement to that. That's really fascinating. It's a really fun way of just adding a little bit of extra.

some of the other things that we also learn in our community is there's just a lot of barriers, not just a movement, but to your point other requirements of these educators. What are some of the barriers that you were finding most common?

and how does the organization get around those?

Brooke Sydnor Curran (05:09)
For our educators, there's been a 56 % increase in classroom disruptions since the pandemic. And teachers indicate that disruptions are one of the top reasons why they leave the profession altogether. So introducing creative movement opportunities to actually buy teachers extra time is a way for them to

get more teaching time in there. And so in the classroom, that's specifically something that we do along with ⁓ providing materials, say ⁓ active seating, stationary bikes, under desk cycles, these cool accordion stools the extra energy That way also they're not bugging their neighbor a teacher's instruction.

and able to learn better because they're more focused

C.J. Stermer (05:58)
Wow, yeah. Do you find that this these sort of barriers also affects different types of communities differently that you find that there are some schools that are being impacted by barriers more than others?

Brooke Sydnor Curran (06:11)
there are some schools that are impacted further. mean, depending on where your school is, know, our work supports every student's learning. However, we particularly go towards schools and students that can ⁓ really be most supported where these barriers are

lack of access, lack of opportunity, ⁓ lack of understanding. Some could be cultural, some could be, literally just in translation because many of our students come from other communities and come from other parts of the world where English is not their first language. And so for us, it's really interesting then talking with their families. And so not only are we, you know, helping that student, supporting that student, but helping

C.J. Stermer (06:46)
Hmm.

Brooke Sydnor Curran (06:55)
support the movement piece for their families as well.

C.J. Stermer (06:59)
So you're helping to reduce those barriers to increase access in multiple ways. That's fascinating. I like also how you said like the pay to play, like one of those barriers is people can't afford it. They can't do transportation. So let's keep it in the schools. Let's find a way that we have access to playgrounds. We have access to fields. Why don't we use them kind of thing? Right.

Brooke Sydnor Curran (07:16)
Absolutely, absolutely.

Yeah. One of my favorite stories is one of our running clubs that happens at elementary school that in an under-resourced community. On any given day, you see 40 to 50 students come to school early, 45 minutes early, so they can

run and be with their friends. So from the student's perspective, they're just, hey, I'm getting to hanging out with my friends and I get to be outside and this is great. From the school's perspective, they're like, my gosh, know, attendance, my students are there on time, right? And they're getting extra movement in. So when they come into the classroom, they are more focused and engaged and ready to learn.

they high-five their coach, they put on their predominators and then head out the door to do this walk run with their friends. And on most days, they get almost two miles in before the school day even starts.

C.J. Stermer (08:11)
Whoa.

How did you get them to do that? First of all, two miles is a long way to get a young person to just voluntarily walk. And then you're getting them to come to school early. What was the motivation? How did you get these young people to just want to show up to school that early?

Brooke Sydnor Curran (08:17)
Hahaha

Yeah. Yep.

You know, it is to be with their friends that school is a place for them. You know, I belong here. I want to do this. You know, the teachers that help us run this program are also, connectors, building relationships with their students. So the students are like, my gosh, I get to be with Mr. know, Mr. This and that, or I get to be with Ms. This and that.

C.J. Stermer (08:49)
Right.

Brooke Sydnor Curran (08:50)
And then they work up towards a community goal. it's a simple answer of being community and wanting to be with each other and doing it in such a fun way.

no hard plan as to, you have to do it this way. It has to be done now. It has to be done, you know, during these certain hours. when we talk with educators, we creatively find solutions for them and with them. I'm not telling you, you have to be doing this sort of in a physical fitness program. It's taking a passion that a teacher already has. We had a teacher passionate for running and

C.J. Stermer (09:04)
Right.

Brooke Sydnor Curran (09:25)
You know, she then engaged a couple of folks to join her and so all of them together, you know, run this fabulous club with their students.

C.J. Stermer (09:34)
Wow, so you're almost changing what's normal by using what's normal. Like you're not reinventing a wheel. You're not designing this big complicated program that we have to go ask funding, then go have to ask permission, and then do all this red tape. And it was really, the motivation was they just wanted to.

Brooke Sydnor Curran (09:40)
Yeah

Mm-hmm.

C.J. Stermer (09:51)
because their friends were there. Like it was that simple. And you found a faculty member that this is what they like to do. So why not just do it during a time that the students could also do it with me? It was that easy.

Brooke Sydnor Curran (09:55)
It's that simple.

Yeah,

yeah, CJ, absolutely. In other schools and clubs, we have 15 different clubs this school year. So we've got multiple walking, running clubs. We also have yoga clubs.

They know they have to be in school to do this club, and so they make sure that they're at school and then on time, because we can only allow 20 to 25 different students the session. so those are just natural incentives for the student.

We, of course, we pay stipends to the teachers to run these programs for us to help identify the students that would be, who would most benefit from these programs.

C.J. Stermer (10:41)
Who are some of the students that would benefit this most and how do we present the opportunities to them?

Brooke Sydnor Curran (10:46)
it's a student that has a hard time feeling like they belong. A student that has a hard time sitting still in the classroom, a student who couldn't pay to or club elsewhere or couldn't get transportation as a barrier.

and then those students who have an IEP, an Individual Education Program. So we have movement, built in to their IEP so they can be learning their best.

C.J. Stermer (11:13)
how do we approach the students that may seem to be reluctant, right? There are going to be students that I think, you know, sometimes have the social anxiety or maybe don't want to or feel reluctant at first. How do we approach students like that to get them to want to participate in something like this?

Brooke Sydnor Curran (11:30)
Well, we certainly would never say to a student, have to do this. And I think that's part of it, saying that, you you do not have to do this, but it turns into a want to do this when they see their friends doing it. And we never finger point and, you know, single out a student ⁓ in front of other students. So we work with teachers to identify the student that we really should be focusing on and moving more with. ⁓ When it becomes, when...

When you start movement, it becomes part of the school culture. It becomes part of the classroom culture. It becomes just, this is what we do here. And that's the piece that we really do spend a lot of time working on with educators across our city to change the culture and how they think about movement, supporting their students' learning in the classroom. And then also from the principal's perspective, the AP's perspective, the school board's perspective.

about the benefits of movement.

educate the educators in a way. So when a principal is walking by a teacher's classroom and he or she sees the teacher having her or his students up and moving, they're not going, ⁓ why are they doing that? That's not learning because movement for us is learning and is the key to it.

C.J. Stermer (12:40)
Right.

Brooke Sydnor Curran (12:45)
And so it's something that everyone wants to do or perhaps you don't want to do jumping jacks, but give the students a choice. no problem. Pick movement of your choice that's going to be right in your circle here. march in place. students like to do pushups off their desk.

There are many different ways changing the culture is really the piece where change is minds that, ⁓ okay, this isn't that hard to do.

C.J. Stermer (13:06)
Hmm.

I like how you say change the culture. I think that's a that was a that's a big phrase for me, because if we change the culture, we could change what's normal How have you seen changing what's normal, changing this culture? How have you seen that actually change the classroom?

Brooke Sydnor Curran (13:14)
Mm-hmm.

We've seen it change the classroom changing their mind like, okay, didn't understand how movement can support my students, how movement could support me, how movement could make my job easier

One of my favorite programs is at our middle school. And we work with a variety of different ⁓ groups. We lead the HCAT, the

Healthy Community Action Team through VFHY. That is a community garden that we have right in the middle of the school itself. that the students have grown, planted and grown, really learning about how to grow fresh fruit and vegetables, and then how to maintain a care harvest. And then

One of the innovative ways that we played into that was, well, how do you water What we do is we capture rainwater, and then we have stationary bikes pedal away, that pumping process that then waters the garden itself.

And so it's just a ton of fun, but also for students to get the science back behind all of that and moving a whole lot more as well.

And for students then to understand to agency to empower students to say, know, Ms. Curran, need to learn in the back of the classroom. Can I do that and be, you know, on the stationary bike at the same time? You know, it's making movement cool, you know.

C.J. Stermer (14:51)
Right,

Brooke Sydnor Curran (14:52)
cool in

C.J. Stermer (14:52)
You mentioned earlier too about school board members, administrators, principals even, and then walking by the classroom and asking what's going on. I can imagine in all kinds of jobs where people work with young people, there's administrative red tape, right? You have someone that you need to answer to for something. Do you encounter that a lot? Do you encounter a lot of the questions or reluctancy from people that aren't necessarily the educators, but people in more administrative roles? And then how do you solve for that?

Brooke Sydnor Curran (14:56)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah, so to answer your question, CJ, about any reluctancy, I think everyone would say moving more is better, just in general. I would look at it from the opposite side of, well, we can move later. They can move a different time. We've got more important stuff to be doing right now.

So I think about it from that angle. It's that, we have our state testing happening. And so I need to make sure that my students know these particular things at the fourth grade, know, SOL, instructional, this and that. And so it's sidelined.

C.J. Stermer (15:58)
we'll get to it. It's on the list. It's on the list

Brooke Sydnor Curran (15:59)
Yeah,

exactly, exactly. For us,

It's not convincing people that it's good idea to move more. sharing easy, adaptable ways to make movement part of the school culture. It could be like during morning announcements. It could be during transition times. There's so many opportunities to slide in two minutes of.

Let's take out the Move, Learn, Fitness Cube and let's roll the die and let's do what it says until math time or during these 30 seconds that we have.

C.J. Stermer (16:35)
This isn't a let's take time away from something to create something new. This is utilizing what we already have to think differently about the way that we're doing it. How do you get these administrators or these principles to do that? what actions do you all take to get them to say, okay, let's try it.

Brooke Sydnor Curran (16:44)
Mm-hmm.

We frequently are at the new teacher orientation. We frequently go to principal meetings, leadership meetings. We make sure that everyone has one of our educational toolkits that come with our fitness cube You can roll the cube. The teacher can do it. The student can do it. Multiple different languages

One thing particularly with our administrators that they find very helpful is we take their

School Improvement Plan

those are the requirements that they have to report back to the state. And each school has

unique goals. And so we work with them about ways to incorporate movement into the school day to meet what they're already working towards, because we never want movement to be one more thing that we're supposed to be doing during the day.

And so we work with the schools to create a movement plan.

where movement can support their already established goals that they're working the school year at end of the school year.

C.J. Stermer (17:50)
So it can help with attendance because the kids want to get there because they're motivated to hang out their friends. It can help with behavior problems because we're reducing disruptions in the classroom. we're finding these tangential intersectionalities where movement actually improves a more holistic view of the student in school. It's not just a let me move. It's it's a lot bigger than that.

Brooke Sydnor Curran (18:11)
exactly. It's a lot bigger than that. And students to realize how supports them, helps make them feel get out extra anger. Some of our students come to school angry from whatever happened in their home space.

C.J. Stermer (18:24)
What kind of feedback are you getting from the actual teachers and

the people that run these programs in the schools?

Brooke Sydnor Curran (18:29)
So every school year, we survey our teachers. This last school year, we had over 400 our city school teachers tell us how we were

In that survey, we asked things like focus attendance. before or after school clubs, social and emotional learning in the field. And majority

of our teachers tell us that they like their job more implementing Move to Learn programs.

C.J. Stermer (18:55)
Wow. That's huge.

Brooke Sydnor Curran (18:56)
It is, it's a huge thing that, you know, you can change how an educator feels job, the stress and the burnout that we know teachers experience,

they've got a lot on their plates so making their job better easier something that we're very proud about.

C.J. Stermer (19:12)
Right? not only are we creating programs where we're getting our young people moving, we're also creating less disruptions in the classroom. We're also creating unique partnerships growing gardens and finding ways to incorporate our own curriculums. We're helping school administrators and decision makers. We're making teachers' lives easier and reducing stress.

there's just so many solutions this is creating and it's absolutely fascinating. How can we empower?

the folks listening to think differently about what they're doing and to think differently about what's normal to be able to get people moving or to branch out to create similar solutions that you will have found.

Brooke Sydnor Curran (19:49)
Well, with anyone across the country about ways to bring movement into the school day and ways to engage the community to do that. This is the proactive upstream work because we know that our students are our future workforce. And so how do we proactively solve or mitigate a problem before it happens? And the sense of community along with that.

⁓ is pretty amazing. I know that we work with our local, not only our local school system, but our local healthcare system. work with also ⁓ smaller health initiatives within the city. We work with lots of business leaders across the city, the Chamber of Commerce, you know, because this is why this work matters.

For community leaders, it's really about normalizing movement. It shouldn't be complicated. Take that five minute transition time, the 15 minutes once a week that you have, and bring a fun movement activity to the doctor's office, to the dentist office, walking classroom throughout the school day.

the local PTA meetings, school board, it could be really any way to encourage the understanding of movement and how it makes us all feel better.

and making sure that everyone knows movement matters.

C.J. Stermer (21:13)
Movement matters.

Something is so simple as your move to learn cube right there. There's something for five minutes. If you're not sure what to do, roll the dice no matter where you are and find a way to get people moving.

Brooke Sydnor Curran (21:23)
Yeah, absolutely. We also have a wealth of information on our got movement videos there happy to provide something that you could put on your wall and have something right there in order to go, ⁓ right, I can just look there and get my idea. I don't need to think this through. does not have to be complicated. It does not have to require a lot of equipment

You can find us at movetolearn.org.

C.J. Stermer (21:45)
Brooke, thank you so much for taking the time to talk today and to show us that it's not complicated. We don't have to reinvent the wheel. And there's lots of ways to get students motivated and that just moving does a lot more than just physical activity. It's lot bigger.

Brooke Sydnor Curran (22:00)
Absolutely, CJ. Well, it's been a pleasure to be with you today. I encourage everyone to get moving more, to feel better, to learn really bring our community