Ka Tikaka O Ka Raro - The developing brain- Nathan Wallis
Spending two days with Nathan Wallis was easily one of the best learning opportunities I have been involved in. He comes from research and evidenced-based outlook, has worked with leading scientists and researchers from around the world and he had some strong messages for us. Obviously, his comments use population data meaning that of course, things are not always the case but most likely based on evidence. He makes generalisations but they are incredibly useful. Read the information, take from it what you will and pose some questions for us to ponder!
Our understanding of the brain continues to evolve with modern technology. In the 90’s we learned more about the brain than the previous 300 years.
The first 1000 days of a child’s life are absolutely critical. Life outcomes are not coming just from genes. Statistically, the oldest child makes more money, is more highly qualified. There are two categories - Child one and all the other children.
A dyadic (interaction between 2 things) 1-1 relationship is the most important determiner in how successful someone will be.
Why is this the case? The first child gets more attention, more face to face time, more interaction than the other children, simply because it is the only one there, as others come, the attention naturally lessens.
The brain is most active and alive during a conversation with a loved one, much more so than doing a calculus question, the latter feels harder and you may think it engages the brain more but this is not the case.
Face to face interaction with the one you love the most activates and engages the brain more, this is the same for babies.
If you have $50,000 and want to spend it to improve the chances of your child having a positive life outcome, to be more qualified etc… Where should you spend it? Most people will say a private school, while this will help, the best way to spend that money would be to allow the primary caregiver to remain home with the child for the first 1000 days. A private school will help but won't have the same benefits as that time with Mum, Dad or the key caregiver.
Fact- 84% of people currently in prison came from foster homes. It is highly likely that a huge number of these prisoners did not have these benefits. They likely moved around multiple houses, with multiple caregivers.
If we want to build resilience, we often need to do the opposite to the risk factors.
Things like these all support this positively :
- Parent stays home
- Extended family available
- Speaking more than 1 language
- Playing a musical instrument (especially before 7)
- Having the same teacher for more than 1 year
- Having a strong relationship with that teacher
The following are a few examples of risk factors :
- Parent with a mental illness
- A parent going to jail
- A child being put into care within the first year
- Parents separating
When children are younger separation has less of an impact. 11 years old is the worst age to separate, research-based. If there were 4 children involved in a separation aged 7,9,11 and 13, we already know that the 11-year-old is most likely to be impacted.
Most of us will have been subject to risk factors, it doesn’t mean we will end up in jail or with a bad job, it simply means we then need to counter those with many more positive influences. My parents separated creating a risk factor but due to all the other positives, this has not had an impact.
“The human brain is designed to be moulded by its environment”
Scandinavian countries spend a lot of money in the early years. This is where their tax goes, our system does not. Formal learning does not start until 6 or 7 years, children are not ready for formal learning until 7 years old. A lot of our tax goes to prisoners when students are older, we are missing an opportunity here based on a NZ cultural lens, not a fact-based research one.
We have 4 different brains. Brains 1,2 and 3 are needed but dogs also have these. Anything we can do but a dog can’t is via brain 4.
Brain 1 is for survival- Fight, flight, freeze. This takes over all others when needed.
Brain 2 is the cerebellum, this deals with movement
Brain 3 is our limbic system, emotions, feelings
Brain 4 our frontal cortex, for thinking and learning. Brain 4 sets goals, gives us empathy, makes us smart.
The skull stops growing at 12 but the brain develops until the mid-late ’20s (on average)
The female brain matures between ages 18-24, the male 22-32 years.
All humans follow this model. We must look after brain 1 then 2 then 3 in order to access 4. We can not skip to four, which is what a lot of people, especially teachers tend to do.
There is a concerning irony between Early childhood centres and schools. They are trying to set them up a bit like schools with specific rooms for each year group, moving through the rooms when we reach age milestones. Schools are now setting themselves up with Play-based environments, especially in the first few years. Schools and ECE’s need to be more aligned.
It is research and evidenced-based that students are not ready for formal learning until 7. Child-led, free play has so many more benefits and develops the skills that matter. There are even links to youth suicide from this data. The child coming from the rich, child-led environment has already had to make decisions, problem-solve, show perseverance versus the child who is taught the numbers, colours, and alphabet. The fact is by 8 years old, the cognitive info can not be distinguished between the two different environments but when these students hit the teen years, there is a notable difference.
“Schools must set themselves up so that children want to be there so that children love learning and aren’t switched off it.
Should we be getting children ready for school, no, we should be getting the school ready for the child!
Te Whariki is a world-renowned curriculum, the NZC in primary schools is very good. But the secondary curriculum is considered poor internationally. Interestingly enough it seems that our culture says that high school is more important and therefore politicians stayed out of the development of this doc...look at the result.
Many think that if we start teaching a child the skills they will need at aged 7 when they are 3,4 or 5, they will be “really good” when they turn 7...wrong. When children are 3,4,5 and 6 we must meet the needs of a 3,4,5 and 6-year-old, socially and emotionally. NOT THE NEEDS OF A7-YEAR-OLD. At aged 45, do we start practising with a Zimmer frame?
China has just made it a law to run Play-based learning until a child is 7 as they found they were nailing tests but lost their creativity, their leaders, etc.. Leadership is developed through Play.
A formal structure under the age of 7 only increases the likelihood of teen anxiety and depression. Between the ages of 2 and 7, we should be focusing on how clever the child “feels” not how much they know.
It is a complete myth and a cultural assumption that a child who at 5 can count, knows the alphabet, etc.. will be more successful and is more clever than a child who doesn’t know this but has been in a child-led environment and feels like they are clever. Even once a child reaches 7 years old, the teacher should only be in charge for 2-3 hours a day...not all 6! Research says that learning under 7 should be completely child-led.
This made me wonder about the data we are collecting. It would be interesting to know what place in the family each child is? Are we giving enough student-led time, especially in the senior school? Can we ignite Passion projects?
Sir Peter Gluckman - NZ's Einstein
Sir John Key asked Sir Peter to look into the NZ suicide rates and two of his key findings were that a punitive approach is not working and that more needs to be done in the early childhood years to develop the brain.
We would be far better off spending our money on paying for youth offenders to spend quality time with a foster caregiver than putting them in prison. Build a dyadic relationship!
When we reach the adolescent period, the brain basically shuts for renovation. Just like a 2-year-old can not work out that a broken biscuit is still the same as an unbroken one and throws a massive wobbly, the adolescent reacts the same way when thinking they might be fat etc… especially when not. The emotional brain takes over and the logical reduces.
Predictability is key for kids, the number 1 way to calm the brain stem is to be involved in a positive 1-1 dyadic relationship. This is also what activates intelligence. One broken dyad can be recovered from, several have a serious impact on overall well being.
In our classes do we “band-aid” kids for a year as we know we are passing them on? How can we set the system up so that teachers develop strong relationships and maintain them for 2-3 years? There is NO academic reason to change them every year, this is a convenience. Content knowledge is not the measure, quality of the relationship is.
Brain 1- needs a dyadic relationship, Brain 2- Rhythmic patterning, Brain 3, a positive disposition about self.
Traumatised kids need to develop these. Waiata, dancing, swings, even a hammock.
NZ has such a long tail because we often go straight to brain 4 and try and teach new knowledge or fix things but we must come back to brain one and work through the system to brain 4. No one gets to skip this!
The best thing teachers can do to keep people out of prison is to ensure each child has a three-year relationship with a teacher. Think of children’s entire time at primary school, not just each year. Could our home bases be multi-leveled?
You have to feel good about being a learner, you have to feel good about your culture-
Maori icons v Kiwi icons, How can we make the Maori icons positive?
Pronunciation, you need to get wrong 90 times before you get some words correct.
Brain four refers to executive functioning. You can change your intelligence and IQ by increasing executive functioning. It is like a muscle and if you increase it then progress is made.
The functions :
Working memory
Metacognition - Thinking about thinking, knowing yourself as a learner, can be better support for trauma victims then counseling. Immediately after counseling can help but between 2 days and a year, metacognition can be a more effective intervention.
Cognitive flexibility, the corpus callosum is large in females, boys under 7 can improve this function by learning a musical instrument before 7.
#1 executive function - Self control. Making yourself do things that you don’t want to do. The more students and adults can practise this, the better the frontal cortex develops.
There is nothing that sparks off more neurons than a face to face interaction. Children often have many neurons but they are not connected, creating a neural pathway via a synaptic connection, the wow moment. Ohhh that's right. The brain has a way of working out what info we need to keep and what we don’t. Typically repetition is what allows the brain to hold the information, the technical term is myelin.
Link fractions to prior knowledge and you speed up learning, linking to the pre-existing neurons.
If someone likes motorbikes but can’t read, we can use a motorbike book as he has prior knowledge of motorbikes and this will speed up the learning.
Behaviour change programmes take about 90 days. If you always get in the car and have a smoke and have done for 20 years, you have a lot of myelin on that pathway. If you decide to have a lolly instead you begin a new pathway, but it takes up to 90 times before it has as much myelin as the other.
The same applies to our students if they have had a negative experience at another school or learning experience. It is a marathon, not a sprint!
Endorphins are released when you are happy. Associated with the learning brain. Cortisol is the stress hormone. Classes should be endorphin factories. Myelin is sped up with endorphins.
With babies, we need to keep this low. Passing a baby away from the primary caregiver increases this slightly, we want to keep as low as possible. There is a lot more research about cortisol than endorphins. Cortisol strips away the most recent neural pathway in the frontal cortex. We need to be careful how much cortisol we release as in classes we can often do this to 30 kids at once. It is a type of weedkiller, another reason why relationships are crucial. Frame things positively in order to reduce the amount released.
Metaphorically if growing a tree in your head, endorphins are fertiliser but cortisol/stress is weedkiller.
3 most effective way to release endorphins
Physical exercise, letterbox effect, can see a difference by walking to the letterbox and back when students stay still, they use brain space to do so means they aren’t fully able to learn as effectively as they possibly could.
Laughter floods your brain with endorphins
#1 endorphin release is singing! It is a clear message that the survival instinct is not needed.
You will not help a child by punishing them. Teach them the behaviour you want to see!!! PB4L 101.
Calm the brain stem in a way that works for that person, exercise doesn’t work for everyone, just like hugging doesn’t. Don’t impose what works for you, on them.
Validate emotions from the limbic system. Children live 90% of their life in their emotional brain.
If you skip their world view, they will skip yours. Children do as you do not as you say.
Break up example- When a daughter breaks up with a boyfriend, even if you didn’t like him and know she will fall in love again. You listen and validate, Oh sorry to hear that Mary, I know you cared a lot about him. Then she is much more likely to listen down the track. Advice giving must come later. It seems simple but children and teenagers need to know you care and for toddlers and adolescents, this happens through emotions.
On reflection, I think we have some great things in place in our environment, music for the bell, lots of physical breaks, Play-based learning etc...
I’d love to look further at how we structure the classes so that deeper relationships can develop, perhaps we are also along the journey here via all of our collaborative work.
We need to stocktake all cultures and see where there knowledge and capacity is at. Perhaps we can help them learn about their culture when things have skipped generations. Passion project on their own culture to kick the year off?
Lots to think about, please post your comments, questions and Clay and Chloe take note! As a father, I am certainly going to set myself some goals around how I interact with my children. I am glad that I have not tried to get Nate “ ready for school” At home, we focus on play, fun, singing, some reasonably out of control dancing but after listening to Nathan, perhaps we aren’t as crazy as I thought! Oh and thanks to Dad for getting those keyboard lessons back in the day :-)
