Brains in their natural state as narrated by Sir David Attenborough

In which our intrepid hero (aided by the intel from the Justice League) studies the natural state of the brain in an attempt to ward off the zombie apocalypse.

I don't think anyone will argue with me if I state that the brain is amazingly complicated. I always impress upon my students the importance of using more than one method to learn an idea, to look at things a different way each time because the brain is elastic and strengthened by new ideas and techniques. Build those synapse connections, kiddos! It's our mental sweat-work!

One thing that stuck with me at PZFOL this summer was to beware of any "easy" neurological techniques. Anyone who says that doing something this one way is the magic pill for learning is selling educational snake oil and we must be vigilant and wary. We've seen this as one of the primary criticisms of the High Stakes Testing Movement, namely the belief that all students should be able to reach certain standards by a certain time if teachers are doing their job, thus, all students should be able to answer these certain questions on this certain test. However, consider how little that accounts for brain-based differences such as learning disabilities. A standardized test requires a student to read questions and read possible answers, but how does that affect the student with a reading disability taking a standardized math test? Essentially, the score reflects their reading, not their math, and then we're down the slippery slope of ethics.

But so long as we're on ethics, let's include social and cultural differences, such as the case for ELLs and the many accommodations that such students need (and I would argue they deserve) that the tests do not provide. Or questions that may ask a student what a yacht is when a student may not have ever been exposed to a yacht. (Consider if I replaced "yacht" with a "dhow", how many people would have a clue what I was talking about and is it reasonable for me to expect people to know?) Or we can talk about how socio-economic differences affect testing. David C. Berliner makes an excellent point on this front, arguing:

"...out-of-school variables account for about 60% of the variance that can be accounted for in student achievement. In aggregate, such factors as family income; the neighborhood’s sense of collective efficacy, violence rate, and average income; medical and dental care available and used; level of food insecurity; number of moves a family makes over the course of a child’s school years;…provision of high-quality early education in the neighborhood; language spoken at home; and so forth, all substantially affect school achievement." from "Effects of Inequality and Poverty vs. Teachers and Schooling on America's Youth"

If our brains alter and change based on so many environmental as well as developmental factors, is it really appropriate for us to determine a child's efficacy based on a singly-presented test?

In short: the brain is complicated, and one method isn't a cure-all.

So, what do we do? Throw up our hands in defeat and curse the heavens? Heck, no. We study the brain and determine what we DO know and how we can use that knowledge to our advantage.

Study One: The Brain's Default

In "Rest is Not Idleness: Implications of the Brain's Default Mode for Human Development and Education", Mary Helen Immordino, Joanna A. Christodoulou, and Vanessa Singh look at how the brain operates at rest. Assuming that a brain has not been damaged by any sort of trauma or developmental means, then the brain has a functional "default mode" or DM that the brain turns to when it is at rest. At rest means when a person is awake but appears to be in a non-attentive state. This default mode is where we process memories and imagination and introspection and it is "toggled" to the networks needed to maintain and focus attention. Research shows that those who have higher DM connectivity perform better at such cognitive tasks as "divergent thinking, reading comprehension, and memory". Essentially, students need time to be "idle" using time to play in younger grades and day-dream in older grades "both for social-emotional well-being and for their ability to attend well to tasks." Yes, you can train students to monitor and respond to outside environmental stimuli as part of the executive functioning needed to complete a goal-oriented task referred to as "looking out" by the authors, essentially being aware and attentive to the task. But "looking in", or at rest, helps to co-regulate and is codependent on the functions of "looking out". Furthermore, one can be predictive of the functioning of the other. 

To get real: The brain needs time to be "inattentive" to be attentive in the long-term.

It looks like other research and observation is supporting this. For quite some time, there has been a movement toward play-based education in younger grades. Reggio-Emilia arguably takes this a step further by encouraging students to direct their learning based on their experiential world. This would include time to observe, play, and reflect, all required for that DM brain development. Inquiry-based learning, a hallmark of the International Baccalaureate (IB) programs, also accounts for the need to observe and react as the first step toward meaning-making and reflection in the end is necessary in order to fully comprehend the concepts taught.

Likewise, we are beginning to see the negative effects of high academic rigor at young ages: Angela Hanscom, pediatric occupational therapist and fellow-blogger (but of a far higher caliber than yours truly) recently published in the Washington Post about how the decline in play has affected sensory issues in students. She noted increased anxiety and inability to play alone in her own child, and that administrators and teachers were noticing a decline in emotional and physical development. Hanscom has done a lot of work on why kids are squirmy in the classroom which is supported by Immordino, Christodoulou, and Singh who noted that children with abnormalities in DM functioning are students who are often identified with cases such as schizophrenia, attention deficit disorder, depression, and autism.

Perhaps even more alarming is that the research on DM functioning and mental acuity including IQ, reading skills, and memory is best studied in adults (though, notably, the "looking out" and "looking in" cross-processes can be observed in real-time), which means that ignoring the DM functioning in the younger years will be most noticeable far further down the road than in the immediate. And in our classrooms, there is a demand on the immediate abilities a child can demonstrate. This creates a real paradox for teachers-- be academically rigorous and show those results in the short-term as is increasingly demanded in our brave new academic world, or allow for play and day dreaming and show results in the long-term well past your teaching time with the kiddo. It's a real challenge and warrants serious discussion in schools across the learning community including parents, administrators, teachers, and policy makers.

But not to be all gloom and doom, there are some things you can do in the classroom or at home to support that DM functioning:

1) In class, students need choice time structured into the day or week and it needs to be non-negotiable.

I know the anxiety of a fast-paced curriculum at a busy school-- I work in one! But I think that there is always a way to find a little wiggle room and if you have a good administrator (as I have always thankfully had) you can make a case for structuring in that time and work with your team to find a solution. For example, as a workshop teacher, I get there is a lot of pressure for kids to perform on a highly-coached genre study piece. But I remember my sixth grade teacher, Mr. Antonioli, giving us time to write whatever stories we wanted, and how much I valued that. And since I still have my stories from the sixth grade, I can see how much my stories improved that year because I had the time to hone my skills and study my work. It gave me the chance to indulge in the fantastic worlds in my head and develop realistic characters. I would lay in bed at night (and still do) working out dialogue and conflicts. In the last two weeks, this has been my non-negotiable and I have seen students who were described as "writing resistant" excitedly relate their stories to me and they are eager to write and help others with their stories. They have better stamina for their writing both because of enthusiasm, but also because they have to make up far more than they do in a more focused story. Isn't that what workshop SHOULD look like?

2) For younger children, particularly elementary and arguably middle grades, don't assign so much homework.
Kids need to go home and play, socialize, decompress, and poke things with sticks. Arguably, we all do. If you can't provide adequate time to do that in school, then there needs to be time to do it at home. Yes, kids are becoming increasingly over-scheduled outside of school, but I don't think that should be because of teachers. Alfie Kohn has done extensive work on the homework debate on the one hand and Harris Cooper has done extensive work on the other hand regarding the efficacy of homework. There's a lot to be said on either side. Mind you, I'm not against homework. I believe it can build important skills in self-reliance, organization, and if the homework is meaningful, it can extend classroom learning. For example, reading homework is a given in my classroom because kids should read every day to build stamina, fluency, and to practice comprehension skills. But there are a lot of considerations that go into the homework debate that include culture, socio-economic backgrounds, and the kind of homework assigned. Like the brain, it's complicated, so be wise with your homework choices and don't just assign it to meet a time requirement.

3) There needs to be "un-plugged" time both mentally and digitally.

There's been a load of research on mindfulness (fabulous link for educators at all levels, check that out) and meditation in the classroom and a lot of concern about attention and focus in the age of texting and social media from self-regulating behavior to sleep. The DM research suggests that one reasonable extrapolation of the research is that time not spent away from digital distractions can be harmful to DM development:

"If youths overuse social media, if they spend very little waking time free from the possibility that a text will interrupt them, we would expect that these conditions might predispose youths toward focusing on the concrete, physical, and immediate aspects of situations and self, with less inclination toward considering the abstract, longer term, moral, and emotional implications of their and others’ actions. ... Conversely, higher levels of texting were consistently negatively associated with measures of moral reflectiveness, for example, with motivation to promote social equality or justice in the community, and with perceived importance of living with integrity."

So much for positive global active citizens! Like homework, I am not anti-digital sources in the classroom. In fact, as evidenced by past posts, I'm very pro-digital literacy. I believe in the post-modern world (#pomolife) and I'm eager to be a part of it. But part of digital literacy requires knowing when to step away from the device and pick up a book, talk to a friend, or go on a walk instead. Teaching students when to unplug and enforcing it can help them to make better choices in the end.

I could probably go on forever, but these are three suggestions I think can happen right away in our classrooms and at home. What other solutions or research or counter-claims do you have?