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 :-)
Yes, yes, yes.!! Nathan makes so much sense. I have heard him speak and came away fired up, and with much more understanding of some of our children. As T/As we are lucky to be able to work 1:1 with some of our children. Izyah comes to mind, if we could sing his teaching to him he would learn much better. He knows all the words to the bell songs. We have tried with alphabet and colours and number songs and also some rhymes, and they seem to help him learn.
ReplyDeleteI was also lucky to be born in an era where I could stay home with my children till they were five, and I have always believed that if at all possible this is of
more benefit to a child than any learning in a school type system. I agree completely with your example of if you had $50,000 one care giver could stay at home for at least some of those formative years.
I am passionate about parent/caregiver and child spending lots of time learning together about everyday life and things, and the building of the neural pathways for the children. My heart breaks for some of our little ones and what damage can be done by them not having this time together, for one reason or another.
I think as a school we are doing lots of things like PBL , music etc very well.
We now need deep pockets to find the money so that we could have more teachers/parents involved so teachers aren’t spread so thinly and children do have more adult contact at school.
Unfortunately we can do little about what happens before they are five, the most important years.
There's a lot to think about in this post Andrew. Nathan Wallis has an extensive fan club and with good reason. What he talks about makes so much sense. I read your post with both my mum and teacher hat on and reflected about my parenting, my own children's experiences and our students. Before teaching at Gilberthorpe I always believed that the key to teaching was relationships and this past year has reinforced that belief infinitely. If we work with the research and facts which Nathan has provided the future is going to look a lot brighter for our students.
ReplyDeleteYes I think a lot of our philosophy aligns with the research described. I was particularly interested in the two areas of music and language learning. To me, your reflections also reinforce the massive impact of teaching and learning in the first year of school, and the necessity of having low teacher -pupil ratios at this level. From a literacy perspective, I think there are implications for emphasis on whole language learning that is woven naturally into the school day. Language experience teaching fits nicely in the play environment and is child centered. So much of this seemed like common sense that we have not heeded due to ever-changing educational whims and resource-based approaches.
ReplyDeleteThanks for your post. It is fascinating. I have been wondering why many of our children think less of themselves and don't have confidence. To follow the brain development paths as Nathan describes, and to get our school ready for the child (rather than the child getting ready for school), I think we need to talk about how flexible we can or want to be at our school, e.g. extending PBL hours but not focusing too much on meeting targets for reading, writing and maths. I have always been keen on project-based learning where the children come up with ideas for projects they are interested in and they lead the projects with teacher support. The children take learning the curriculum areas through the project. Schools may change to find the best way to help and support children, but how about parents? Lee-Anne mentioned that Nathan would be spending more time on working with parents. I hope that happens very soon.
ReplyDeleteYou can tell through your enthusiasm how much you enjoyed listening to Nathan Wallis. The brain is really interesting. I found out so much about it when I was looking at Resilience and Well-being earlier in the year and in my reading of 'Distressed or Deliberately defiant?'
ReplyDeleteWe have been on a pathway for a while to try and be ready for our children who come to our school rather than them being ready for us. What you have said and reflected on from the conference makes so much sense. Relationships have to be our foundation so that we can nurture learning in the ways that best meet the needs of our children. Getting more than just educators on board with this idea may be a challenge though.
Hey Andrew, thanks so much for sharing all of this. Having studied Child Development and Neuropsychology at University I have always found what Nathan Wallis says particularly interesting. Even more so now with the fact that I'll be becoming a Mum in 11 weeks! It makes it all so much more meaningful and thought provoking. How can I be putting this all in place to give my child the best start to life?
ReplyDeleteIt all makes sense that the first 1000 days of a baby's life are the most critical. Clay and I are lucky that we are in a position where I can stay at home with the baby, whilst Clay works (unlucky for him). Building that relationship is so so important and I can't wait to start doing this in December. In terms of teaching, I think that the idea of students remaining with the same teacher for 3 years makes sense. For them, they would have someone they feel super safe and comfortable with, and for us, we would know them and their needs so well (physical, emotional, social & learning) which would no doubt benefit them in more ways than one.
I totally agree with the whole PBL model. You can see at our school that there are kids that aren't yet ready to learn in a formal setting. Testing, and teaching scares these children off, lowers their self esteem, and may cause avoidance type behaviour. There are so many perceptions and ideologies of things that need to be taught, or done by certain ages. We need to be teaching to students needs, not to tick boxes and appease parents or whomever else.
All such fascinating stuff and a lot of work that still needs to be done. I wish I was going to be at Gilby to see the changes, especially if students are going to be with the same teacher- I'm sure this will give some interesting results! I'll just be at home creating that dyadic relationship between our child and myself (singing, dancing, playing, talking, creating & laughing)- and hope that by the time they go to school things might be seen and done a little bit differently!
11 weeks? That is so soon Chloe. Go Dyad!!
DeleteI enjoy reading or hearing about the reflections from different conferences, as when the person that attended is enthusiastic in how they reflect, you feel that you have actually been to the conference as well, and this is what I have taken both from reading this and my conversations with you and Lee-Anne.
ReplyDeleteI have enjoyed seeing the different approaches and outcomes since starting PB4L & PBL at Gilberthorpe, in both the students and the staff. There is many more positive interactions happening across the school, and this does flow on into the families as well.
I have always been a "Go with the flow" type parent, and wanted to never say to my Kids "You can't do that", (this happened to me and I actually still hold some negativity about what I was not allowed to do when I was younger). I always wanted my children to have every opportunity they could, and I am very proud of how far my kids have come and have taken the opportunities of life so far. As a parent of teens, the life pressures or influences around them scares the c**p outta me, but learning that I have to 'Respond, not React' has helped me, help them get through difficult situations, and I see this in the PBL model we are doing at school.
I do hope that Nathan does the parent conferences, as I think this will be beneficial to everyone, and I would love to hear him in person.
Prior to going to this conference I was a little ho hum about it until I heard it was all going to be Nathan. I can't actually think of the last time I was sitting, listening to someone speak and I was transfixed and engaged the entire time. There was not one moment when I thought hurry up mate.
ReplyDeleteYears ago, I received the Brainwaves publications and through reading these, I decided to take the first three years of Josiah's life to stay at home with him. I knew that there were connections that happened through these years that were vital for development but it was through listening to Nathan that connections in my own brain happened.
This has certainly made an impact on me as a mum and teacher and I am looking forward to exploring things more and implementing different strategies to support our kids.
We need to sing more...and laugh. That's not only good for the brain but good for the soul too.
There is definitely a lot to think about and take in from this post, Nathan certainly sounds like an amazing person to listen to. Nathan has a lot of great messages to think about for our students. It is interesting that ECE’s are trying to become more like schools because part of the reason that schools are developing play based learning is to make them more similar to ECE’s in order to ease transitions and make it easier for students to become comfortable in their new school environment.
ReplyDeleteI work really hard to form strong relationships with my students and I think that collaborative learning creates an even better environment to do this as there are lots of different adults for students to talk with as well as their homeroom teacher. Talking, playing and interacting with children is so important! The best thing anyone can do for their child is to talk with them!
It can be confusing to get conflicting messages about when to start formal learning. From doing our literacy project at the moment I have been able to see that this was much easier for the students that are newer to school to grasp the concepts, as they didn’t have to relearn information. Whereas my students have taken a bit longer to catch on as they had already been exposed to other literacy learning previously. The project is also done through lots of fun activities and games so it is fun for them to do. At the end of the day I guess it’s all about the students in front of us nothing is going to fit all the students you always have to adapt for the students in front of you. Some students come to school really hungry and ready to start learning, whereas others really need to play and build their oral language and social and emotional understanding.
I love music so it is great that this makes a positive difference. Glad to have chosen flute and French as two of my passions in life! I love singing with the kids and this gives me an excuse to do more in the future!
I have heard Nathan a couple of times now and I totally agree he is inspiring and engaging for the entire time of his presentations.
ReplyDeleteI had actually been to two of his conferences the weekend before you guys attended the two day workshops.
Relationships are key and this is not new. Especially that deep level relationship. I feel the way the collaborative hubs are set up works well to maintain these and allow children to develop strong relationships with a few adults.
Talking is so important!! I found this from the research project that I was involved in that looked at the communication and wellbeing success of children as they transitioned to school.
I have enjoyed seeing the children grow through Play Based this year however there is conflicting messages around this especially from the university where Nathan lectures and from the Better Start project that we are currently involved with. We need to explore this further and ask people questions.
I love the three keys: Singing, Laughter and Movement and this is something I do with my classes and children all the time.