Optimizing Learning Outcomes

Proven Brain-Centric, Trauma-Sensitive Practices

William Steele

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781317191667
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psicología
• Subtopic: Psicoterapia

Optimizing Learning Outcomes provides answers for the most pressing questions that mental health professionals, teachers, and administrators are facing in today's schools. Chapters provide a wide array of evidence-based resources—including links to video segments—that promote understanding, discussion, and successful modeling. Accessible how-to trainings provide readers with multiple sensory-based practices that improve academic success and promote behavioral regulation. Clinicians and educators will come away from this book with a variety of tools for facilitating brain-based, trauma-sensitive learning for all, realizing improved learning outcomes, improving teacher satisfaction, and reducing disciplinary actions and suspensions.

1 Twenty First Century Neuroscience, Learning, and Behavior

Not Doing More; Doing Differently

William Steele

There is nothing ordinary about learning and managing student behaviors in the twenty-first century. The students of today are not the students of yesterday. Consider that anxiety is the number-one diagnosis assigned to children today and that such anxiety does not respond well to verbal efforts to manage that anxiety and its associated behaviors. Also consider that one in four children will be exposed to a traumatic experience by age four. This represents approximately 5 million children every year who come into our classrooms with unique learning and behavioral needs. Also keep in mind that longitudinal research has repeatedly demonstrated that two out of every three children have poor regulation skills (Transforming Education, 2015).

Self-regulation is the ability to manage our emotional and behavioral reactions to what is experienced as stressful, fearful, or worrisome, and also to remain focused and patient when gratification is not immediate. In Chapter Two the authors explain regulation as the ability to “manage one’s energy and attention.” Poor regulation, as science now documents, significantly compromises learning and the management of challenging classroom behaviors. Neuroscience offers us irrefutable documentation that indeed stress, fear, worry, anxiety, trauma, and/or poor regulation compromise learning and trigger challenging student behaviors. Past practices are simply not effective in helping these students realize their learning potential and manage their reactions and behaviors to stressful situations and conditions.

The good news is that neuroscience has also led to new practices that educators are finding successful for optimizing learning outcomes and significantly reducing disciplinary responses and actions to challenging behaviors. This chapter provides an interactive glimpse into these successful practices and strategies. It reviews:

• The function of the brain and nervous system under stress, their negative impact on learning and behavior, and those brain-based, trauma-sensitive practices that are helping teachers more effectively help stressed, anxious, traumatized, and poor regulating students optimize their learning experience while managing their behavior.

• The research related to critical mindsets that motivate students to continue learning while improving outcomes, and those teacher mindsets that are critical for remaining proactive rather than reactive to the disruptive and often misunderstood behaviors of anxious and traumatized students.

• Various examples as to how “the experience” matters in changing cultures of violence into cultures of respect and optimal learning.

• The importance of integrating movement into the learning experience.

• The need to engage regulation practices throughout the day.

• The components of a brain-centered, trauma-sensitive environment.

• And the necessity of brief teacher–student connections to foster the kind of strength-based, resilient-focused relationship associated with optimal learning and behavioral outcomes.

Links to a number of video segments are also provided to address the questions and school scenarios presented in the Introduction. Subsequent chapters then expand on the practices and strategies related to these scenarios.

You are encouraged to visit the cited video segments to hear directly from your peers as to what is helping them, their students, and schools realize significant reductions in disciplinary actions and improved academic outcomes, despite the challenges of today’s students.

Worry, Fear, Anxiety, Trauma: One Commonality

When presenting training on creating brain-based, trauma-sensitive classrooms, I begin by reviewing the data related to the prevalence of anxious, traumatized, poor regulating students. I then ask participants to discuss the differences between worry, fear, anxiety, and trauma. The differences are not always known. They include:

• Worry is about a specific possibility that does not initially induce the intense physiological symptoms of fear or anxiety but can be stressful.

• Fear is a response to a specific threat with immediate neurobiological responses.

• Anxiety is an inexplicable range of reactions, including fear and worry, involving a preoccupation that interferes with ability to enjoy life and complete daily routines and expected tasks (learning).

• Trauma involves all the above.

The critical follow-up question is: “What do each of these have in common, in relation to learning and behavior?” The answer is: “All are stressful and induce reactions that impede learning.” This process helps participants appreciate that the focus of the training is not solely about traumatized students but any student who is experiencing worry, new fears, or stress as a result of family or other challenging issues. At those times learning suffers unless those students are in a brain-based, trauma-sensitive environment. Given that it is not always possible to know the kind of stress a student might be experiencing, it becomes beneficial for all to engage in those practices that neuroscience now documents optimize the learning experience. Keep this in mind as you read through this resource.

The more intense and consistent our worry, fear, anxiety, or trauma symptoms, the more learning and behavior are compromised. The more inadequate our regulation skills, the more our cognitive and behavioral functions are also compromised. The lives of those around us also become complicated from the challenging behaviors associated with these reactions. In a moment we will take a more detailed look at how the brain functions under stress, and how that stress, whatever its form, impedes learning and triggers challenging behaviors. First, though, allow me, a college-educated professional, to present a personal example of how stress can alter our cognitive processes and lead to behavior that brings about negative consequences.

I was in my mid-thirties, single and living in a first-floor apartment with a door that led to an outdoor patio. It was only a few steps from the kitchen. One day the pot I was using somehow caught fire. The flames rose quite high and I had no fire extinguisher to hand. My first response was to the voice that said, “Remain calm.” My next thought was: “I’m cool. I’ll just take the pot outside, to the patio.” I grabbed the pot and walked the five or six steps to the patio door, which was closed. I sat the pot on the linoleum floor to open the door. I then grabbed the pot and took it outside. When I came back in I saw the outline of the pot on the burnt linoleum. I thought I had been thinking clearly under the stress of dealing with that burning pot, so I could not believe what I had done. Although I lost my security deposit, I learned a valuable lesson.

Stress alters the way we think and process information and subsequently how we behave. This has critical implications for helping today’s students optimize their learning experience, maximize their performance, and regulate their classroom behaviors.

Learning and Behavior Under Stress: Our Brain, Our Nervous System

The video How Is Your Brain Wired? (Olding, 2009) offers a seven-minute, fairly detailed description of how stress impacts the three regions of the brain. These are: the reptilian brain (sometimes referred to as our survival brain); the limbic brain (referred to as the mid-brain or emotional brain); and the cerebral cortex region (referred to as the upper brain or thinking brain). The video also discusses the right and left hemispheres of the brain and how these are connected by a bundle of nerves called the corpus collosum. It is this connection that allows for a balanced integration and processing of information to support optimal cognitive and emotional functioning, including self-regulation. It is worth watching before going into more detailed explanations related to learning and behavior under stress.

How Is Your Brain Wired?
www.youtube.com/watch?v=uOIWVo-4-lc

A Different Explanation

Another way to appreciate the function of the brain as it relates to learning and behavior is an adaptation of Daniel Siegel’s Hand Model of the Brain (2012). I want you to make a fist, but put your thumb inside your hand. Now, as you look at your fist, also look at your forearm. Your forearm represents your reptilian brain, the first part of our brain to develop. The reptilian brain had three primary functions when it faced a potential or real threat—flight, flight, or freeze; the very same reactions we have when facing stress that is overwhelming or consistent. Now, open your hand and wiggle your thumb. Your thumb represents the next part of our brain to develop—the limbic region, the mid-brain, also known as the emotional brain. There is no language, reason, or logic in this part of the brain. We simply respond to what the brain senses needs to happen in order to survive.

Now, close your fist again. Your fingers represent the last part of the brain to develop—the cortex region—and your fingertips represent the frontal cortex. The cortex and the frontal cortex are those regions of the brain where language, reason, and logic reside and where the functions needed to learn as well as help regulate our primal survival responses take place. Now, open your fist and wiggle your thumb again. As you wiggle your thumb, picture all those students presenting with challenging behaviors and struggling with learning. Realize that many of them are functioning from this part of the brain, as opposed to the fingertip area (the cortex region). They are in a survival mode.

Basically, as you wiggle your thumb, you are depicting a dysregulated survival response to stress, where verbal information or talk is limited in its ability to calm down this part of the brain. This is critical because, when this limbic region of the brain remains active, it is very difficult to access the cognitive part of the brain, that thinking part that is needed to problem solve, process information, and regulate otherwise dysregulated, emotionally dominant reactions. When the body and brain are functioning in survival mode, children often display problematic behaviors, irritability, poor self-control, and hyperactivity symptoms. Learning and concentration are compromised (Maddox, 2006).

These processes are now documented by brain imaging technology that previously did not exist, but this is not new information. Interestingly, the Yerkes–Dodson Law of 1908 (Wikipedia, 2013) concluded that the quality of our performance on any task, whether physical or mental, is related to our level of stress (emotional arousal). If we are feeling either very low or very high levels of emotion arousal, then our performance is likely to be impaired. We have all experienced this at some point in our lives; now we have the learning science to better regulate our stress and help students regulate theirs.

Daniel Siegel’s Hand Model of the Brain
www.youtube.com/watch?v=gm9CIJ74Oxw

Cognitive Limitations under Stress

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