May 11, 2008

Leave Their Brains at the School Room Door

We live in the age of unlocking the most basic mysteries of our bodies and brains. With the explosion of baby boomers now hitting their 50s, new products abound for them to “exercise their brains.” Marketing research is studying brain responses of customers to the packaging of products and where they are placed in the shopping aisle in order to increase sales. Nintendo’s Brain Age 2 is a video game of simple math and memory exercises. MindFit is a software-based program combining evaluation of more than a dozen different skills with a personalized training program developed on that data. The estimated market for “neurosoftware” in 2007 was $225 million. How much of a stretch is it to suggest that if the brain can be rehabilitated in an older person, that the same efforts would not yield even better results in children in the way we teach them?

Study of the brain and learning has been a passion of mine since the 60s. Dear God, if only I could live another 100 years to see what happens. But there is no question, whatsoever, that the more we know about how the human brain works and how that manifests itself in behavior (learning is a behavior), the more precise the teaching will be for the individual student. So when No Child Left behind first started, with its emphasis on “scientifically based approaches”, I was eager to see how it would play out. Well, it didn’t and pseudo science won out as it nearly always does.

When I do inservice programs for teachers in connecting neuroscience and learning, we discuss the information they are sending out to their students (physical appearance, smell, voice sound/pitch, language content, language output rate, eye contact, affect, movement, facial expression), combined with the physical status of the room (temperature, light, levels of sound, textures, movement patterns, etc.). Their responses are often blank in the beginning. Teachers discuss how their students “feel”, how they “feel”, and often substitute psychological concepts (He has a thing about his mother…She’s just jealous.)
We do teacher/student role-play in these inservice sessions. I bounce a ball, representing a neuron, to the participants, and have them all watch each other as they either catch it or miss it, and how they throw it back to me. The neuron-ball represents the act of learning and the reciprocity of giving information out and receiving a response from the student. Teachers are asked to describe what they see as they wait for the ball. Sometimes it’s an orderly approach, one after the other in the order of their chairs. Sometimes, it’s a surprise throw at someone behind me who never expected it. They react differently when they know it’s coming versus the surprise of bombardment. Why is that, I ask? In the beginning they talk about not wanting to be there, or worried about looking foolish if they don’t catch it. It’s the surprise of not knowing the ball is coming that upsets them most because they can’t prepare. They never talk about their body or what they must be able to do physically and mentally to catch the ball under either circumstance. It takes a few sessions to have them change their thinking from a curbstone shrink to an observer of physical things you can see. When they begin to observe analytically and take away their own spin on what they think they see, it is often remarkable how their teaching and interaction with students change.

Certain brain myths are popular with school administrators and I’m glad. At least when they talk about right brain and left brain activities they are at the starting gate. But it is the oversimplicity of that notion, now outdated by two decades, that can be dangerous. There is no cookbook recipe for human behavior. Consider DNA, unique to each individual. Everybody is different biologically as confirmed by the good guy from prison who is released because his DNA didn’t match that at the crime scene. And when teachers try to apply the archaic Right-brain/Left-brain methods of instruction, without knowing more about it and without individualizing it, and it doesn’t work, they chalk it up to another fad put upon the classroom teacher to learn. Then everything reverts back to the age-old “classroom management” discussion. What do you do with 30 students in a classroom who all have different learning needs? What do you do when you have to teach to the test? What do you do when you must implement your state’s core curriculum standards? Teachers are trained to think about groups of children sharing an age and grade, rather than what they actually see certain children do each day. They do not know how to interpret what they see. Nothing in our system of education is designed to teach them to observe diagnostically so that they know how to help themselves and the children in their classes who are outside the norm academically, socially or emotionally. Tragically, the brains and biology of the children are left at the classroom door, most teachers never connecting learning with how the brain receives, processes and gives back information and experience.

Last year I was asked to observe a day a week in a public school Kindergarten classroom that was attempting to implement an RTI (Response To Intervention) program. From the first day one specific child markedly stood out. She did not speak and had no social interaction. She constantly chewed her long hair that hung over her drooped head, her chin often touching her chest. She had high top shoes and her gait was off. It looked as though she was trying to find the ground by the way her feet hit the floor. She had great difficulty navigating the spaces of the classroom, bumping into things, never having eye contact. She loved music and completely changed when it came on. She moved to the rhythms and seemed to mouth the lyrics. She wanted to be held and constantly crawled into peoples’ laps, wrapping their arms around her. She preferred to sit on the floor than in a chair. Over time I saw her say the alphabet and heard her read 1st grade books in less than a whisper in a dark corner of the room. She could count to 100. Certain little girls were assigned to her as a buddy but she ignored them. The teacher, sweet, energetic, and highly experienced, considered this child a behavior problem. The child study team would not accept a referral because the teacher was “managing” the child in a regular classroom. I urged her to get the school OT involved and to learn about sensory integration. I also insisted that this child be evaluated by the child study team.

One day I went in and most of the child’s hair was cut, an elf with a punk hairstyle. I asked what happened. The teacher told me that it was because of one of my comments. They told the parent that their consultant had discussed the child’s obsession with her hair so that to get rid of the problem the hair should be cut as short as possible so that she would behave better. I thought I was going to be sick on the spot. I walked out of the building and have never gone back. And nobody has called me in a year to ask why I stopped coming. This child’s brain and body needs were left at the door to her classroom. The teacher tried to grasp what I suggested but had an entire class to deal with. I had explained the problem in depth to the building principal. She seemed receptive but did nothing. As you can see, this child haunts me to this day. It was the last time I took a job for a public school.