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.