In a nutshell, this fascinating video (text written by psychiatrist Iain McGilchrist) gives an overview of the two hemisphere’s in the brain, debunking the myth that the roles are clearly divided. We can’t have creativity without a left brain; there’s no ability to pick out important pieces and plan out the steps. Without the right brain, we can’t visualize or contextualize mathematical patterns. The right brain gives broad, sustained alertness, and the left brain gives narrow, sharply focused attention to detail. So many cognitive constructs important to learning are divided here – seeing things in context (right brain), emotional literacy (right brain), saliency determination and labeling (left brain).

He goes into a social critique at the end which I think ties in nicely with some implications about the use of higher order thinking skills – vision, critique, and a nod to the importance of intuition in today’s complicated and overwhelming world.

Which one are you more prone to? Do you think this relates to ADHD and similar tendencies or behaviors? What about aspergers? I don’t have the research handy here, but I can look at the people I’ve known with one condition or the other, and make some connections here to this broad and general overview.

Diagnosis is important, but not so much as the overall experience a young person has in a learning environment – if a bright child or adolescent is trying and failing, clearly they are in need of qualified support and intervention.  We need to consider the labels, but focus on the child.

Article not available online, but summary can be found here.

Here’s a link to 26 things that good readers, of all ages, do.  Naturally, the intervention for reading is a subtle process, and I’ll get to that another time. 

What’s on your reading list?  

What’s important to understand here is that Jason is trying very, very hard, but lacks the tools to do well.  This could be attributed to a number of variables – it may be a learning disability, such as dyscalculia or an auditory processing disorder. Or, it could be that as a young child, various factors prevented Jason from being able to understand the fundamental concepts in mathematics, and he’s never caught up.  Whatever the reason for his failure to succeed in mathematics, it’s no longer strictly academic.  Jason has come to believe, through experience, that math isn’t a subject in which he can succeed.

People who have learning differences are often profoundly bright, and willing to work hard.  However, without the appropriate forms of support, they are not able to achieve the same results as their peers. The impact that years of trying, and failing to achieve, has on an individual is profound. Learned helplessness can impact any area of life or academics, and overcoming years of negative messages is a complex process which requires nurturing and emotional support as well as academic intervention.

The accumulated result of this learned helplessness can become dire if left unaddressed.  Being penalized for failure to meet impossible expectations results in a sense of alienation and disconnect.  Being subject daily to material that isn’t accessible is boring, and causes students to become disengaged.  Additionally, young people cease to see themselves as having control over their own success, and they feel their efforts are not a determiner in outcome.

Learned helplessness is the belief that habits, effort, and behavior do not impact performance.  It’s worth paying some attention to this concept and working with kids on overcoming it.  Once kids become convinced that they don’t have any control over the outcome, the process of successfully teaching them becomes much nuanced and difficult.  They experience anxiousness and are understandably resistant to confronting the content that has been such a tremendous source of stress.   Often, these children are understandably resistant to trying.

So what makes the difference?  What makes it possible for a young person to grow past this very challenging roadblock?  It comes down to a number of points, including Effort should be recognized, and improvements should be noted but not emphasized.  Intervention isn’t just about teaching content, it’s also about finding a way in, and expanding the individual’s ability to feel safe and exert effort. It’s also important that the specialist or tutor assesses the student to determine their level of competence – sometimes it is necessary to go back to the fundamental rules and ideas, and build incrementally from the basics.  It’s also critical that the student experience success, and has some input in the process.

There are many tools and techniques which are effective for the remediation of learned helplessness on a child.  It takes a great deal of patience, and collaboration between parents and specialists, but it’s very possible to help them grow past their state of feeling threatened and powerless, to a point of thriving curiosity, a sense of empowerment, confidence, and clearer direction.

Relevant external links:

1.  A solid overview of learned helplessness, the resulting “Matthew effect” and eight characteristics of learned helplessness.

2. Book recommendation: The Myth of Laziness, by Mel Levine.  Mel Levine has an excellent, humanistic approach to this work, and does an excellent job teasing out the factors behind motivation and gives a good overview on how to support struggling kids.

3.  How to give effective praise: applaud the effort, not the outcome.  ‘Nuff said.

4. The Raising Resilient Children Foundation.  Worth a perusal – Robert Brooks and Sam Goldstein are two of the thought leaders around resilience, its determiners, and how to cultivate resilience in your child.

In The Washington Post, an Op/Ed entitled “We’re not paying enough attention to ADHD” caught my eye.  Diagnosis has risen by 66% since 2000, and still today, many people feel they or their child are misunderstood by doctors, therapists, teachers, and other specialists. 

Autism has been receiving a great deal of press lately, with diagnosis on the rise, currently at the rate of 1 in every 88 children. 

It’s interesting to note that the autism spectrum diagnosis and ADHD both impact frontal lobe functioning.   There’s no real way to know whether the increase in diagnosis is a result of better detection and awareness, or an increase in the conditions themselves.  

 Now, more than ever, we need best practices, multi-modal support for these students and their families, and a solid understanding of these learning profiles.

The ability to sustain effort through boredom is a fundamental life skill.  It’s essential for long term relationships and career goals, for learning a musical instrument or becoming adept in a sport.  It’s no less stressful an experience for adults - even enormously successful adults have to develop coping mechanisms.

Today’s young people are accustomed to the kind of agency and instant gratification offered by technology; as digital natives, many of them relate to the world through the speed of the internet.   On the one hand, kids are savyer today, more able to recognize patterns and communicate ; on the other, they have less patience for slow processes.  For better or for worse, a study by the Pew Research Center shows that this expectation of instant gratification has impacted students’ academic experiences and the kinds of effort they are consequently able (or willing) to exert.

So what’s at the root of boredom for most kids?   And – perhaps more importantly – how can we support them in overcoming it? I’m not talking about external factors – everyone’s had at least one ineffective teacher, or a class that was particularly frustrating.  As much as I love the gamification approach, fun isn’t going to solve all learning problems – steady, self initiated effort is still very much required.

As an educational therapist, I’m concerned with the student’s ability to engage and see a process through when it doesn’t excite them or cater to their natural interests.  This list, I believe, encapsulates the elements which support or detract from this ability:

1. Academics  /  life balance

2. Degree of challenge

3. Content

4. Resilience and emotional overlays

5. Metacognition

In a future post, I’ll explore these in further detail.

Did I miss any?  I’m curious to hear thoughts from others.

Individuals who struggle with executive functioning need to be explicitly taught taught metacognitive strategies and self assessment. I spend a great deal of time talking with parents and students about this concept and how to engage the frontal lobe in daily tasks and learning – here’s a wonderful brief introduction to what metacognition is, and use of metacognitive strategies, from setting a goal, being aware of your understanding and ability to proceed, making a plan, and monitoring and reflecting. Lovely primer on this critical aspect of learning, attention and achievement.

I’ve talked a little about reading comprehension in previous posts, and the degree to which it requires executive functioning, self regulation, and the ability to make connections to prior knowledge.

Social skills, and the ability to foster meaningful connections, or even casual sustained relationships, relies on similar skills.  Finding a way to connect with someone, to empathize with them and managing impulses in order to appropriately engage are fundamental to making friends and collaborating with peers.

Indeed, research has shown that students who struggle in reading often have a difficult time in the social arena, for many reasons.

From Stanford University: “Children’s social behavior can promote or undermine their learning, and their academic performance may have implications for their social behavior.”

Scientific American : Fiction Hones Social Skills, helps build empathy.

More of them can be found on her website.

I’d love to know what other resources like this are out there.  What amazing work this woman does!

Think about what happens when you try at something and fail, and are penalized for it.  Maybe you had that experience with dancing, or art.  Perhaps it was math, or fitting in with a group, or it could have been a host of other activities where you felt incapable of success.

How do you feel about those now? If you were a clumsy dancer, and got called out, how willing are you to try again?  Doing so takes resilience and curiosity in order to override the brain’s visceral fear response – we have to have some way to access the frontal lobe in order to effectively learn.  When our first response to a stimulus is fear, we’re unable to think clearly.  Our sympathetic nervous system takes over – its job is to keep us alive and safe from threats.  When faced with a threat, and survival is key, stimuli don’t get processed by the frontal lobe, and higher order thinking isn’t accessible.

Students with learning differences are likely to receive negative feedback than their peers, and are more likely to fear failure.

So how, given years of learned helplessness and negative messages in the context of learning, can smart kids with challenges overcome their fear and sense of helplessness? How can we get past the triggers?

Of late there’s been a lot of consideration given to the persistence of gamers.  With an 80% failure rate, and an eye on personal best, gamers demonstrate the kind of curiosity and resilience that we long to see in our students.   Researchers have been spending a lot of time looking at what makes gamers keep going even after they keep losing.  Take Tetris – the most popular game in history.  There is no possible way to win at Tetris – it’s designed to become more challenging the longer you play until you lose.

So what it is that keeps gamers engaged?  Why do they keep on playing?  Much of it has to do with self-generated positive emotions, which are necessary for engagement.   I recently attended a lecture given by Jane McGonagal, who’s well-known as a proponent of games as a solution to many of the ills we face as a society.  McGonagal holds that the core aspect of gaming which is so powerful is that it allows people to accomplish something which feels extraordinary for them.  Through video games, players are able to measure their progress, and unlock accomplishments, achieving new personal bests without comparing themselves socially.  Games that are networked, like World of Warcraft, rely upon collaboration and interaction, and there’s a great deal to be learned there.

McGonagal lists ten positive emotions which collaborative gamers experience under the best of circumstances, and which draw them back in spite of high failure rates:

-       Curiosity: the desire to find out and experience what happens at the next level.

-       Creativity: learning to approach problems in new ways.

-       Surprise: Seeing what comes next, after succeeding at a task.

-       Excitement: eagerly anticipating the next set of challenges.

-       Contentment: immersion in an activity that yields pleasure, satisfaction, and growth.

-       Awe and Wonder: participation in something bigger than yourself.

-       Pride: measured growth and progress in an accomplishment.

-       Love:  you like and respect someone more after playing together even if you’ve lost

-       Joy: positive connection and feedback through positive experiences.

There’s a charter school in Manhattan called Quest to Learn that has received a great deal of attention for its approach to teaching, on several points.  First, it allows students to gravitate towards their strengths.  Using project based learning, students collaborate to work on goals, and each one is given a role which aligns with their area of expertise. Second, it’s integrated gaming into its classroom experience, and takes the lessons learned by students around strategy and collaboration from the gaming experience, and applies them to the classroom.

It’s not a perfect model for learning for a number of reasons. First of all, achievements in gaming have more to do with the ability to respond, and so many of the problems faced by students in the academic realm have to do with task approach.  Second, it’s important that students learn how to work through boredom – a mindful practice is part of this, and this is, in some ways, a polar opposite to the gamification model.  We want to encourage intrinsic motivation — in the workplace, participants are not rewarded so obviously.    However, I think that the culture of this is inevitable, and that there are a number of principles that this is a good step forward for education, which is notoriously behind in embracing the potential of technological offerings. And truth be told, we need to harness the power of all tools we have available to us, but we must do so wisely, and mindfully.

Links:

NYT article on Quest to Learn

Blogpost: 3 Reasons Not to Gamify Education

Article: What Games Have to Teach Us about Teaching and Learning