Posted on by Dr James Shea · 3 Comments

Understanding the effect of the Autonomous Nervous System on children’s behaviour

behaviour management

One model of explanation often applied in determining the learning and behaviour of any  child is the state their Autonomous Nervous System (ANS) is in. It is worth knowing a bit about this as the ANS gene expression is changed by poor early attachment experiences, excessive stress and trauma.

In any situation, a child’s brain is neuroceptively (fast and unconsciously) assessing environmental safety.  Many children find school a reasonably safe place and respond accordingly; some will find school and learning unsafe. This blog does apply to all children, but focuses by illustration on children who have experienced adverse childhood experiences. If a child’s  life  means that their experience of things is fraught with danger signals, then the child’s ANS will be sending danger signals to the rest of the brain and to the body. The child will then excessively look for danger in the EXTERNAL environment and excessively experience danger INTERNALLY – even from the most unfathomable of stimuli; when we experience an internal feeling of danger we tend to look externally for the source. This chart by Ruby Jo Walker highlights it well.

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According to Stephen Porges, who has pioneered work on the role of the vagal nerve, the ANS operates on a continuum of response from complete safety to extreme danger. It is helpful to divide this up into three zones of SAFETY, DANGER and LIFETHREAT. When the ANS judges both internal and external environment to be safe then this represents a child’s optimal arousal level. In this state, the child is most ready to learn. This is not about an element of challenge or stress but the assessed absence of danger. It is this state, that most children are in when in school, that is elusive for the child who has experienced significant adverse life experiences.

A child with the above issues exists far more with the ANS in a state of readiness for danger or even life threat – even if no such threat exists in the environment. A danger state is represented by hyperarousal and readiness for fight, flight, rage or panic. A life threat state is represented by hypoarousal, freeze, dissociation and collapse. When someone has an extreme phobic response to a relatively innocent stimulus then this is what is happening.

This understanding sheds some light on the issues surrounding these often very difficult to manage children. We tend to look at our external environmental strategies to see if they will work and often cannot see why they don’t work. However, these strategies simply will not work if the ANS is experiencing the external or internal child environment as dangerous. Where does this leave us then? Our focus needs to be on getting the ANS in the right place rather than on the poor behaviour resulting from the ANS response. Quite simply we also would behave in inappropriate ways if our ANS was misfiring in this way. When working with these children it is helpful for us to acknowledge poor behaviour and response to learning as adaptive rather than maladaptive. That leads us to the question, ‘Why might this behaviour be adaptive?’. Once we have asked ourselves that question it can lead us forward in our search for good solutions.

We can take three routes to modifying the ANS response and in ‘learning the child’, we can try to find the right combination of routes. The first route works primarily on the body and physiological response generated by the ANS. The second route works primarily on the emotional state itself to create a sense of safety. The third route works on the cognitive (executive function) ability to apply a brake to the ANS. This whole brain way of working represents a powerful model for working with these children.

 As teachers we need to ‘stand still in order to move on’. This means finding the time to stand back and ask the question ‘ Could this behaviour be signalling something more than is immediately obvious? By being prepared to view behaviour as a signal of adaptation gives us the space to become thoughtful and reflective rather than reactive. It enables us to be better teachers and children to learn better.

Having run a workshop on this a number of times it has become clear educators need solutions. The main solution is re-labelling the behaviour you see as fight or flight. Imagine someone with a propensity for car rage next to you in a car, raging at the traffic – how do you talk to them? What makes them worse? Tell them to stop swearing and they’ll swear directly at you in response! What about if there was a child on a climbing centre rock wall, frozen mid climb? How would you talk to them? What would you say? You certainly wouldn’t threaten them with a sanction if they didn’t move forward! You tell them about how the rope is making them safe. That everyone does this every day and is always safe. To take their time and then when they are ready take tentative steps. Relabel the behaviour and then approach the situation with the right tools. Once you have a relationship, they’ll respond quicker to you when you use the tools. It’s hard having a heightened ANS system, be sympathetic to them. Recognise how hard it must be to live life on the edge of fight or flight constantly and how that gets in the way of learning.

Posted on by Dr James Shea

The Limits of Educational Research – Part 1: John Sweller

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Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,

Prevent the dog from barking with the juicy bone.

Silence the pianos and, with muffled drum,

Bring out the school bell. Let the learners come.

(Adapted from, and with apologies to, WH Auden)

Few people who hear the poem adapted above, realise that WH Auden originally wrote it as a piece of satire, mocking the sort of eulogies that are  delivered for public figures who don’t really deserve them.  The fact that the poem is often seen as and used as, a heartfelt tribute at funerals, suggests that it is easy to misrepresent  a poet’s intentions by making use of their work in such a way that its original meaning is lost, and the same might be said of educational research. John Sweller’s work on cognitive load is often promoted by a group of teachers and researchers who have come to be identified as “the neo-trads” or neo-traditionalists.  However, just like when a legion of summative assessors leapt misguidedly upon the Black and Wiliam Black Box and nearly broke the system with their enthusiasm for inefficient assessment of work and learning, so we need to be careful before doing the same with Sweller’s work on Cognitive Load Theory (CLT).

Sweller is working just as hard as Wiliam did in correcting misunderstandings about his work. Like any good researcher, Sweller acknowledges the limitations of his work. And it is these limitations which fail to cross the divide from research to school teaching that we need to pause and reflect upon.

Many people forget that Sweller accepts the constructivist view of learning – namely that we learn because of a set of mental structures (often referred to as schemata) which allow us to construct meanings and information from that which we perceive of the outside world. The difference for Sweller is what this means for teachers. For social constructivists, like Jerome Bruner, this construction is facilitated through the individual’s interaction with others and the world they inhabit. It is a journey of discovery rather than a  guided path. For Sweller, this is the problem. The mental structures with which with he is concerned need to be built in a particular way, and this is where the teacher comes in. They must teach certain things in certain ways which develop the architecture of the schema, allowing them to be stored in the individual’s long term memory. For Sweller, teaching methods which allow students to discover things for themselves do not do this.

But…..Sweller is clear that his ideas do not constitute “ a theory of everything”. Most of the data which supports his theory comes from the subject domains of Maths and Science. He doesn’t feel that Cognitive Load Theory works as a way of informing instructional design unless what is being learnt has a high level of what he calls “element interactivity”, namely, the number of different elements that must be considered simultaneously in the instance of learning – say, something like a complex equation. Interestingly, an Australian academic called Arianne Rourke has tried to apply Sweller’s ideas to the Art classroom , but only in the sense of using worked examples to teach students about the history of design and designers – an area of Art education that we might see as being largely a matter factual information, rather than the affective matter of expression or interpretation.

The real problem with CLT then, would appear to be its adaptability and scalability. Can it, as a basis for instructional design, be adapted to subjects like Drama, Geography or DT? Probably not, though it might be worth thinking about areas of these subjects where CLT might have an application? Could it be scaled properly across schools so that everyone was using it to inform their teaching? Again, probably not, but some teachers might benefit from thinking about cognitive load and where this idea was advantaging or disadvantaging learning.

Posted on by Dr James Shea

The Parnassian Phoenix and the GCSE Language Carpet

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If you recognise words in that headline, there’s a reason. It’s an intertextual reference to Edith Nesbit’s Phoenix and the Carpet combined with an obscure movement in reaction to Romanticism used as an adjective in a pejorative sense. It then takes the GCSE Language and suggests it is on the floor, on the carpet, knocked down by some unknown force which I am about to expound upon. Or perhaps the carpet is the new GCSE Language itself, exciting and new at first, but once the Phoenix makes it a magic carpet it starts to get frayed with the children constantly having adventures with and on it, wearing it out.

I am referring to the nonsensical GCSE Language exam revision that we are seeing in a pseudo norm referenced scramble to meet the criteria in a better way than around 55% of one’s national peers. Children learning ever more complex and obscure language devices to better impress the examiner. I remember studying Parnassianism at university, its weakness and how well that resonated with me as a reader. In a nutshell, the surface of the Parnassian text is so ornate, so layered with technical features, that it obscures the actual meaning the text is trying to convey to the reader due to an opaque and impenetrable layer of verbosity. Hopkins uses it to describe competent but uninspired poetry.

I’m not alone. The Fake Headteacher posted a tweet which provoked a nerve:

Fake Headteacher

This started a debate partly inspired by OFSTED’s conversion to machine learning. Is the future of English Language GCSE marking one where a machine is counting the techniques? Is this what good writing now looks like?

Sophie and Joe

@_MissieBee and @joenutt_author both raise really important points. In a modern world of fake news and bot authors, we are not developing original authors. We are in effect developing bot authors. Writers whose work can be read by bots with no recognition of thought and ideas. How we can get them to appreciate the new A02 phrase from AQA ‘effects of writer’s methods to create meanings’ over in GCSE Literature if we are not doing the same in GCSE Language?