Engaging Children in the World with Words

As we all know, the rudimentary elements of language are established at the earliest ages. From a baby’s first months, they instinctively begin listening and forming the neurological groundwork for what will become their abilities to understand language, as well as speak and read. While there are numerous studies around the topic, I’d like to take you through a simple series of imaginary scenarios to demonstrate the importance of this point—for children as well as for those of us in charge of their learning.

First, imagine the world from the baby’s point of view. They observe, see the shapes and colors around them, and as they do, they hear the voices of their parents, and they begin associating certain sounds with the surrounding world. Now, imagine how the understanding of that process—as a teaching tool in the hands of a conscientious parent—can shape that child’s abilities from the earliest of ages.

Scenario 1: A parent—let’s call her Jane—is walking down the street, slowly because she is holding her young toddler’s hand. Suddenly, a loud siren screams and around the corner comes a gleaming fire engine. Jane quickly points to it, looks into her child’s concerned eyes, smiles and says, "Loud!" As the fire engine goes by, it splashes through a great puddle in the road, spraying the two with water. Jane says, smiling and laughing, "Ohhh, no! Wet! We got wet!" Jane’s child begins to smile and laugh, too.

Scenario 2: Another parent, Carol, has her child in a stroller and is walking at a brisk clip. She is conducting business with the cell phone in one hand and is pushing the stroller with the other. They are enjoying the sunshine, and the child is calmly, quietly watching the world go by. Suddenly, a loud siren screams and around the corner comes a gleaming fire engine. Carol says, "Oh, darn it. Can you hold on a sec?" into her phone. Her child, startled by the loud noise, begins to sob, but Carol doesn’t know it because she’s watching the fire engine pass and can’t hear her child because of the siren. As the fire engine goes by, it splashes through a great puddle in the road, spraying the two with water. Carol, with fury and frustration in her voice, says, "DARN IT! Can I call you back later? I just got soaked." By this time, Carol is genuinely angry and her child is wholeheartedly crying.

In these brief images, with so much playing out in terms of outward attitudes and reactions to circumstances, and we can even look ahead to possible bonding issues. But let’s think specifically about language. What has the child—as well as the parent—in scenario one gained and the child in scenario two lost?

While Carol’s child has witnessed frustration and fear in the face of incoming stimulus, Jane’s child has experienced the world through a comforting, loving, happy interpretive filter. In short, we cannot underestimate the importance of simply being engaged with the children in our lives. As teachers, encouraging the parents we encounter to be as connected and involved in their children’s lives as early as possible.

Inspiring Students to Dream, Learn and Grow

We educators talk a lot about student engagement. We understand that engagement is the magic key that drives the student and creates the moment when they become self-motivated. Engagement must be at the core of our goals as educators, for an engaged student finds wonder in their learning, and they not only find meaning in their studies, but they grow personally, for a lifetime, as a result of that learning.

But what do we really mean when we talk about the engaged student? What does it look like in the brain when a student is truly inspired? In the 2008 article, Engaging Students with Brain-Based Learning , the authors cite research from LeDoux, Eden and Schacter whose studies found connections between learning and
1) connections with emotions and memories,
2) relationships to real-life experiences,
3) “activation of both the auditory and visual areas of the brain to create meaning.”

In short, they are talking about what has become known as “brain-based learning,” which consists of teaching strategies that encourage the brain to make associations and “create synaptic connections and anchor learning through contextual experience.”

In many ways, the research has confirmed what humanity’s greatest thinkers discovered long ago. How many years has it been since you slowed down and went back to meditate for a moment on some of the great axioms about learning and education? They hold wonderful hints and secrets that not only still apply, but have been proven by even the most modern research.

• “ Education's purpose is to replace an empty mind with an open one.” (Malcolm Forbes, 1919-1990) To engage our students, we need to teach them not only to develop answers, but also learn to ask questions. We need to engage their judgment, creativity and reason, not just their memories.
• “ Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire.” (William Butler Yeats, 1865-1939) Clearly for students to be inspired to not just succeed but also to exceed, we educators must engage their passions and, as stated above, their emotions. Our challenge is to seek out those things that are of direct personal interest to our students, and then show them how to find the connections to these passions and what we’re focusing on in the classroom.
• “ There is nothing training cannot do. Nothing is above its reach. It can turn bad morals to good; it can destroy bad principles and recreate good ones; it can lift men to angel ship.” (Mark Twain, 1835-1910) These words are beautiful at so many levels, but at the purely practical one, Twain reminds us of something that we need to bring to our students attention every day. We can help them develop an awareness that they are learning so much more than facts and processes; they are learning the skills that will allow them to contribute to solving the problems of humanity. In short, we need to show them how they are developing the power to change the world.

What? Who has time to instill passion, emotion and caring? Many teachers are doing this every day, but we need more! Quite often, educators are pressed more to ensure that students are able to do their multiplication tables, find the capital of North Carolina on a map of the United States and recite the chemical formula for water. 

And yet, our greatest challenge remains inextricably linked to our greatest hope for the future. We must do all we can to light those fires of inspiration and help our students find those deep personal connections to their learning. If we can do that, not only will they learn more successfully, but it will be our students who grab the reins, take charge of their learning, and maybe—just maybe—find their way toward Twain’s angel ship.

The Mirror Neuron System

What is a parent to do to get a child’s brain started out on the right path – to be able to concentrate on one task for extended periods, be able to handle rapidly changing information, and be flexible enough to switch tasks easily?

Well, it turns out the human brain seems to have a strategy: by developing two core capacities during the first few years of life, interactive play and language, the brain seems to become uniquely equipped to build a range of cognitive capacities.  Recent research suggests that a specific area in the frontal lobe – ‘the doing part of the brain’ - begins to wire itself very early in development through imitation of the movements and sounds made by others. This area, the so-called mirror neuron region, allows an infant to watch or listen to other people and respond with imitative or complementary movements or sounds.  

Because this area is the same region, in the left hemisphere, that is responsible for fluent, easy articulated, speech, researchers have speculated that it might have been an evolutionary starting point for development of human language. But, because it is also active in the right hemisphere, it seems to play an important role in social, and perhaps athletic, interaction. In fact, Miella Dapretto and her colleagues at UCLA recently reported research showing that children with autism spectrum disorders, which include a range of disturbances that impact, among other things, social skill development, have observable deficiencies in the mirror neuron system.

There is reason to speculate, based on the research now available, that exercising the mirror system in general, can build a brain that is better equipped for socialization, school, music and athletics. At this time existing research has demonstrated that exercising Broca’s area of the brain (and other areas that are connected to this area through complex cognitive networks), either through natural parental stimulation in infants or through intense specific practice in school-aged children or adults, one can systematically build a brain that is better equipped for many cognitive tasks including language, reading, writing, and math as well as remediate a brain that seems to have deficits or learning disabilities in one or more of these areas.

Every time a parent plays a game like “Patty-cake, Patty-cake” where the child and parent duplicate a routine with actions and a poem or song, the parent is helping the child to exercise the mirror neuron system. Parents have been doing these action/nursery sequences for years, and there are many similar routines in many cultures. Examples of “mirror neuron” routines that have been around and passed on for generations in Western cultures include – “So Big!” where a parent ask the child something like, “How big are you?” and the child and parent respond together holding up their arms in like fashion, “SO BIG!” or, with older children, “Eensie Weensie Spider” where parent and child imitate each other by alternately touching the thumb of one hand to the forefinger of the other hand to emulate the spider climbing up a water spout.

The wonderful thing about these types of routines is that they illustrate how intuitive parents have been for centuries, at identifying and exploiting the natural directions and priorities of brain development. What worries many of us in neuroscience is when parents abandon these time-tested and intuitive interactions with our young children, swayed by technological advances that enhance productivity and drive positive cognitive changes in a mature brain but by abandoning natural parental interactive routines may actually jeopardize the delicate balance of stimulation in the developing brain.

We must exercise caution when adults develop products that appeal to parents with names that inspire confidence like, “Baby Einstein”, if the products have not been subjected to reasonable controlled studies that will help us understand the impact of these activities on young brains. Most companies that develop products for young children do not conduct this type of research because the assumption is that toys and play activities that engage infants and keep them entertained are not harmful. But, unfortunately, that assumption is not warranted. Many of us who put our children in “walkers” or “swings” in the latter part of the twentieth century learned that these “toys” had unintended consequences (i.e., negative effects, on early motor development).

As developmental neuro scientists and other specialists have begun to understand the implications, both positive and negative, of early stimulation on later brain development, those of us in the sciences need to better inform parents and “toy” makers may need to attempt more accountable to parents. In all fairness, however, it may be unreasonable to expect toy makers to conduct independent controlled research studies that we have not even demanded of drug companies. So, the view held by many scientists is that an educated parent can look beyond the hype of advertising and provide for the young child in their care, a fostering environment that is calmly yet convincingly brain-enhancing.

Still the Write Stuff: Why We Must Continue Teaching Handwriting

When it comes to lost arts, we could argue that none is getting lost faster than handwriting. Since the personal computer and now the telephone have become the primary methods for recording our ideas, we simply do not write – I mean with an actual writing implement like a pen or pencil – as much as we used to.

So, we must ask ourselves, is this really a problem? Sure, one could argue that receiving a handwritten letter is more meaningful than getting one that is typed, but that’s an emotional opinion; it’s not a scientific argument. And aren’t professionals in all fields using more computers, tablets and handhelds to communicate, record and share ideas? So, what is the real value of learning handwriting skills versus being able to type 100 words per minute on a QWERTY keyboard?

At Indiana University, Dr. Karin Harman James, assistant professor in the department of psychological and brain sciences, focuses her research on how motor stimuli can influence our visual recognition, and how the brain changes as we have different experiences. This research provides a basis for a scientific argument for the continued instruction of handwriting.

In a 2008 study published in the Journal of Cognitive Science, adults were shown new characters as well as a mirror image of these characters after reproducing them through writing and keyboarding. When quizzed afterward, subjects were shown to have a “stronger, longer lasting recognition” of the characters’ correct orientation when they had written them by hand versus produced them by matching them to a keyboard button. This suggests that engaging the motor nerves to create the shapes by hand helped solidify the ability to identify such shapes.

In another study, James’ team took this idea to the next level to see what was actually going on inside the brain during these activities. They used a functional MRI to map brain activity in children as they looked at letters before and after letter-learning instruction. Their results showed that those who practiced writing the letters showed more brain activity than those who only looked at the letters. In addition, according to a 2010 report on the research in the Wall Street Journal Online, James said that after four weeks of training, the children who practiced writing skills showed brain activation similar to an adult’s.

Between these two studies, we see excellent examples of brain plasticity at work. James’ work demonstrates a clear connection between how engaging more of the brain in the activity of writing improves how letters are committed to memory. Given that letter recognition is an essential step for early readers, it’s easy to see why practicing writing letters is an essential component of the groundwork for later success.

Certainly, with limited time, schools try to maximize student achievement, and give them a baseline of skills that will allow them to continue to develop to optimize their success throughout life in an increasingly technology-based society. That said, based on James’ research, it’s quite clear that penmanship has an important place in the classroom, and not just as an important traditional skill.  In actually applying pen to paper, we allow our students to engage their brains in ways that typing on a keyboard cannot. And whether such an activity is done with pen and paper, a stylus and a tablet PC or chalk on a blackboard, it is in every student’s best interest to practice the “write” stuff.

Using the Power of Optimal Timing to Improve the Brain’s Ability to Learn

Learning is both a behavioral and biological process that is supported by the neurons in the brain over time.

When we learn, our brain cells physically change in response to stimulation, forming pathways to facilitate the connections we use repeatedly. For example, if you meet a person only once, you might not remember their name or recognize their face if you were to run into them on the street ten years on. On the other hand, if you see that person every day for a year, you will likely be able to recognize their face and remember their name much more readily should you not see that person for a long period of time.

Learning processes like these in the brain take predictable, measured amounts of time. While these rates will vary from person to person and nervous system to nervous system, we can depend upon certain relatively constant time frames for learning and processing an understanding of some of these time frames can allow educators to take maximum advantage of them. That’s why the Fast ForWord® products function on each of these scales by design, using the power of optimal timing to improve the brain’s ability to learn.

Learning depends upon a specific feedback loop characterized by timing between stimulus, response and reward [i] . Here are some of those timescales, along with how Fast ForWord works within each:

• Milliseconds: Auditory processing happens on the millisecond timescale. Fast ForWord helps improves auditory processing rate to ensure that students are able to “keep up” with auditory input such as spoken directions from their teacher.
• Seconds:Reinforcement learning happens on a scale of seconds and is achieved by interacting with one’s surroundings.  The Fast ForWord program’s reward system is based on this time scale, delivering rewards to students at just the right moment to maximize reinforcement learning, helping students get the most benefit from the program.
• Minutes:Our actions change based on how we perceive our surroundings. This kind of adaptation can take minutes. As students move through Fast ForWord exercises, they can see their performance results changing minute by minute. Being able to see such improvement helps motivate students toward greater learning. In other words, as they perceive the positive results of their actions, students adapt and learn to generate more of those positive results.
• Days or Weeks:Consolidation and maturation of memories can take days or weeks. When a student overcomes an obstacle in Fast ForWord, their confidence is strengthened and they not only learn the material, but they learn about their own capabilities and what success feels like. The memories of such experiences and the associated feelings – gathered and built upon over the days, weeks and months – lay the foundation to spur them on to future success. Such success in the classroom can lead to a greater drive to perform well in other areas, such as doing well on a test, winning on the athletic field, or successfully completing that college application.   We cannot underestimate the power of experiencing success and the sensation that it creates.

In the classroom, having an awareness of how long it takes for a student to assimilate and process certain kinds of information can add an entirely different rhythm to our instruction. In having such an understanding of how the brains of our students work, we can time our teaching to optimize learning and help our students achieve maximum success.

Stress and the Human Brain

Why are there more patients coming to my office with complaints of memory problems? Great question, and the typical answer is stress! In the course of human development, our brain developed the acute stress response that promoted survival when we were being chased and threatened by large animals—and it uses the same stress response to react to stressful events in everyday modern life.

A stressor triggers the amygdala in our brain that sets off the alarm bells for the body to prepare to fight or flee. Norepinephrine floods the brain generating a state of hyper focus, the pituitary sets off the adrenal glands and adrenaline cascades through the body. This causes the lungs to expand for more oxygen, the blood flow to increase to large muscles, digestion and reproduction to halt, and processing speed to increase. We are prepared to fight for our survival.

If this beneficial response to life-threatening stressors does not shut off appropriately, it becomes a chronic response that can damage the structure and function of the brain’s hippocampus. The hippocampus is the neighbor of the amygdala and the critical structure for memory and new learning.

The body generates steroid hormones known as glucocorticoids when under stress, and over time these hormones can do structural and functional damage to the hippocampus. This is the reason why chronic stress can cause memory problems. It is common, for example, to see memory deficit in those with Post-traumatic Stress Disorder.

The good news is we do have some control over our perceptions and our body’s ability to regain a balanced and relaxed state.

In my practice, I spend time working with patients to first explain with pictures the neuroanatomy and neurophysiology of stress and the brain. This provides a visual to the person. We then identify what the stressors are in the person’s life that are setting off the alarm bells in the brain. Using visualization, relaxation, meditation, and self-talk the person can connect with their amygdala and cool the alarm bells by triggering the “rest and digest” system, also known as the parasympathetic nervous system.

Consider the following tips as a means of cooling the amygdala, thereby promoting hippocampal function and enhancing memory:

1. Practice daily breathing exercises with deep inhalation (this will set off the stress response) and equally deep exhalation (this will set off the relaxation system). This should be done for three to five minutes twice daily.
2. Engage in quiet self-talk to help guide your brain to remain calm with emotional equilibrium. You have the power through self-talk to minimize the brain’s tendency to react with panic. By making the process conscious, you will be able to identify your own stress triggers and to work on avoiding the stress response.
3. Learn how to meditate and to gain mindfulness, as this will free you from conscious and subconscious distraction.
4. Engage in daily exercise with moderate exertion. Blood flow to the brain can help emotional stability and information processing.
5. Increase your fish intake to 8 ounces weekly, as the Omega-3s are wonderful for cognition and emotional functions of the brain.
6. Work on being in the moment and enjoying those you love. Life will always be stressful, unless we do not perceive it that way.

Building Better Writers (Without Picking Up a Pen)

When teachers think of teaching writing, they typically begin with the type of writing they want their students to compose—persuasive pieces, personal narratives, academic essays and the like. They think of following the steps of the writing process—prewriting, drafting, revising, editing, and publishing—and conduct mini-lessons during writers’ workshop. Others teachers begin diagraming sentences, discussing subject-verb agreement or distinguishing between nominative and objective case pronouns.

All too often, however, little attention is given to the cognitive skills of writing. And that’s a shame, because cognitive skills are the building blocks upon which writing depends.

The Cognitive Building Blocks of Writing

Cognitive skills such as memory, attention, sequencing, and processing speed underlie all composition. It is generally presumed that by middle and high school, students have mastered these basic cognitive skills, and, as such, mainstream writing curricula for secondary students rarely explicitly address the cognitive skills of writing. Nonetheless, research evidence is mounting that many middle and high school students who continue to struggle with writing have not mastered the underlying cognitive and linguistic skills on which written language depends (Berninger, Fuller, & Whitaker, 1996)

Memory

To write cohesive, readable, and understandable text, the writer must not only have a firm linguistic foundation in order to select the appropriate vocabulary and grammatical structure to convey the meaning intended, but must also hold the concepts, vocabulary, and grammatical form of sentences and paragraphs in working memory while formulating each new sentence.

The writing process itself places considerable demands on real-time verbal working memory, as writers construct and hold in mind the ideas they wish to express, inhibiting the irrelevant and attending to the relevant details of what they are presently writing. Simultaneously writers must keep in mind what they have already written, and plan for what they are about to write to complete their thoughts (Torrance & Galbraith, 2008).

Attention

Another cognitive skill that has been shown to affect writing is focused and sustainedattention (Ransdell, Levy, & Kellogg, 2002). A writer’s full attention is consumed in thinking about what to say and applying correct spelling, punctuation, and syntactical rules to what is written. Sentence generation involves consciously reflecting on and manipulating knowledge that needs to be retrieved rapidly from long-term memory or actively maintained in short-term working memory.  Writers must toggle their attention between formulating their thoughts to be written and the transcriptional demands of actually recording these thoughts in written form, all the while inhibiting distractions from the environment.

Sequencing and Processing Speed

Writing also places heavy demands on both perceptual and motor sequencing. Writers must process their thoughts sequentially as they compose letters into words, words into sentences, and sentences into paragraphs that conform to the rules of any language. Applying language rules during writing—from recalling the correct sequence of letters within words, to recalling the proper order of words within sentences (such as, in English, nouns precede verbs and adjectives precede nouns), to building multiple paragraphs within a composition—also places particularly heavy demands on the writer’s sequencing abilities.

As the writer translates this mental process into a motor process of composing each word in a sentence, all preceding words in that sentence must be kept in working memory while words and sentences are strung into paragraphs. The writer needs to coordinate these cognitive tasks almost simultaneously, placing heavy demands on processing speed . The significance of processing speed is felt most heavily in the classroom, where students who cannot process rapidly enough are often times left behind.

What the Research Says

Because of the heavy cognitive demands that writing places on attention, sequencing, working memory, and processing speed, Robert T. Kellogg, a professor of psychology at Saint Louis University suggested (Kellogg, 2008) that explicit cognitive skills training programs—especially ones that emphasize deliberate practice—might prove particularly beneficial in improving student’s writing skills.

In two separate studies conducted by the author (Rogowsky, 2010; Rogowsky, Papamichalis, Villa, Heim, & Tallal, 2013) a significant improvement in students’ writing skills occurred after their participation in a computer-based cognitive and literacy skills training. In the first study, a pretest-posttest randomized field trial was conducted in a public middle school (Rogowsky, 2010). The study compared the writing skills of sixth-grade students who either did or did not receive individually adaptive, computer-based cognitive skills instruction ( Fast ForWord) in conjunction with their standards-aligned comprehensive literacy curriculum for one school marking period (45 days). The writing skills of students who received the cognitive training, in addition to the standards-aligned comprehensive literacy curriculum, improved significantly more than those who received the standards-aligned comprehensive literacy curriculum alone, with a large between-group difference.

In a second study, Fast ForWord training was shown to improve college students’ writing (Rogowsky et al., 2013). College students with poor writing skills participated in 11 weeks of computer-based cognitive and literacy skills training, and were compared to a group of college students from the general population of the same university. Results from this study showed the group who received training began with statistically lower writing skills before training, but exceeded the writing skills of the comparison group after training. Although writing was not explicitly trained, the individually adaptive, computer-based training designed to improve foundational cognitive and linguistic skills generalized to improve writing skills in both middle school and college students.

What it Means for Writing Instruction

Based upon these two studies, there is clearly a link between writing and the foundational cognitive skills upon which writing exists. Learning to write is one of the most cognitively demanding academic activities a student must perform. It is not surprising that so many students struggle to perfect and improve their writing abilities throughout their academic years. In addition to the traditional writing methodologies, the future of writing instruction calls for the inclusion of cognitive skills training.