Professor Dorothy Bishop’s
recent blog post on the (often
overlooked and/or overly forgiven) limitations of neuroscience in education
will resonate strongly with many in the developmental psychology,
speech-language pathology, education, and related cognitive science fields.
All experience (or
lack there-of) influences the brain and its neural networks, but our recent ability
to “view” the brain at work seems to have blinded us to the fact that from the
moment of birth, sensory and motor experiences “sculpt” neural pathways - and
this occurs irrespective of whether we can view the process. The advent of fMRI seems to have shifted our language from discussion about what neuropsychology contributes to our knowledge of learning, to what sounds, on the face of it like a more sophisticated paradigm - talk of neuroscience. In practice, fMRI-based neuroscience may just turn out to be the "fun sister" - interesting to be around, with some fancy (albeit interesting and diverting) accessories, but still to deliver on independent transformation of classroom practice.
Developmental (neuro)trauma and classroom learning
However there is a field
of neuroscience (for want of a better term!) which is of immediate translational relevance in the everyday classroom
and that is the field of developmental
trauma, as exemplified in the work of Professor
Bruce Perry, Professor Allan Shore,
Professor Besel
van der Kolk, to name a few. “Developmental trauma” refers to a collection
of adverse early experiences of neglect and/or abuse (collectively referred to
as maltreatment) which conspire to work against optimal development of the
human brain in the critical developmental period between birth and age 5. In Australia, in 2011-12, there were more than 250,000 notifications to child protection authorities, not all of whom will be victims of substantiated maltreatment, but by the same token, many cases go undetected and are not included in child protection databases. The bottom line though, is that classrooms in towns and cities across the country include children who are living in stressful, suboptimal environments with respect to their developmental needs.
Maltreatment
comes in a number of guises, compromising many aspects of the relational space in which language, cognition,
empathy, memory, and social skills need to be acquired, refined and rehearsed
over many years. Ideally, such learning occurs in the context of warm, trusting,
and reliable relationships with caring adults who provide a secure base from
which children can explore their world, and develop adaptive "working models" of how to interact and learn.
As the Russian psychologist
Lev Vygotsky taught us,
when adults (parents and later, teachers) can carefully scaffold the child’s early attempts at a particular task or skill, they
maximise success and gradually consolidate mastery. One only needs to think of
how an infant learns to walk, to see this scaffolding in action – parents provide
the necessary but minimal support needed for success and incrementally scale
this down until those first few tottery but independent steps are taken. Under
optimal circumstances, parents seem to have an infinite capacity for
scaffolding across a wide variety of developmental domains. Think for example, of
how parents co-construct narratives (often in as minimally intrusive a way as
they can) with a 5 year old who wants to tell Grandpa about her trip to the
park.
Image source: http://www.freedigitalphotos.net/
Sadly, though, children
who are victims of maltreatment too often miss out on this scaffolding, and
instead learn that adults are unreliable, unpredictable, and sometimes unsafe
to be around. Such learning has negative implications for self-soothing,
forming trusting relationships, and virtually all aspects of cognitive, linguistic,
and social-emotional development that promote success in the early years
classroom. Children who have experienced maltreatment and/or vicarious trauma (e.g.
exposure to domestic violence) are often chronically stressed and hypervigilant to threat;
they may also be tired and hungry – hardly optimal conditions for cognitive and
linguistic engagement in classroom learning. Such children may appear to the
casual observer to be restless, fidgety, inattentive, reticent, disinterested,
and/or poorly motivated. The diagnoses that follow are many and varied.
So here we have a problem….
Unlike doctors, allied
health professionals, and psychologists, teachers are not typically taught the basics of neuropsychology during their training. In fact (and this is not a
criticism of teachers themselves of course) they are probably more likely to be
exposed to pseudo-science such as unhelpful and simplistic
models of “left brain-right brain” learning and so-called “learning styles”, than to scientifically derived models of how the brain is organised and develops during childhood. Maybe this is changing with time, but my experience in working with
classroom teachers in postgraduate training over the last 8 years has been that they are not
well-equipped with basic neuroscience knowledge.
…and the beginnings of a workable solution
It’s encouraging then, that
in recent years developmental trauma frameworks have been advanced for use by teachers
and others in contact with young children experiencing the corrosive
developmental effects of maltreatment. One such framework is that described by
Professor Bruce Perry, who explains the hierarchical organisation and
development of the central nervous system under optimal conditions, and the ways
in which maltreatment can disrupt healthy development and interfere with learning.
Put simply, this framework is built
around the way the brain manages its “house-keeping” (homeostatic or brainstem)
functions, takes in and relays information from the senses to higher centres, forms memories and
emotional associations, and finally organises, stores, and retrieves information
in order to respond adaptively to the surrounding world.
Employed in the context of appropriate professional development modules, this neurodevelopmental framework helps teachers and other school personnel understand
- the role of different “levels” of the central nervous system and their typical development;
- the effects of maltreatment on the immature brain as an integrated system;
- the maladaptive ways in which experiences of trauma can manifest in classroom environments, e.g. restlessness and hypervigilance to threat, and
- ways in which classroom practices can be readily modified to promote optimal learning outcomes for all children.
Two user-friendly teacher resources that can be downloaded free of
charge are:
- The Creating Calmer Classrooms booklet, compiled by the Commission for Children and Young People, Victoria, and
- Making Space for Learning, prepared by the Australian Childhood Foundation.
Another
helpful resource for teachers and school personnel is this paper by Professor Bruce Perry:
© Pamela Snow 2014
