The Importance of Brain Development in Learning

As educators our role is to teach children a range of skills and values; literacy, numeracy, to read, socialise, problem solve, collaborate, be compassionate to others and resilient when learning gets hard to name but a few. We value and understand that relationships are incredibly important, and that all behaviour is communication.

On our recent student free day all staff participated in very valuable professional learning on ‘trauma informed practises’ with a focus on brain development, how this links to understanding children’s behaviour and strategies to support children. This was led by the wonderful Nicola from an organisation providing professional development in this space, Connect Ed.

Children need to be regulated, to be engaged and ready to learn. When children are feeling wobbly or dysregulated, they ‘flip their lid’, meaning they are unable to think and communicate clearly. They can become overwhelmed with big emotions and this can lead to big behaviours.

Our first strategy is to seek to understand, connect with and respond in ways that will bring them to a point where they are calm, can communicate and then talk to them to help fix the problem. As the iceberg model shows us, although we may observe behaviours such as hitting, bitting and kicking, beneath the surface are the things we don’t see driving the behaviour (e.g. children feeling scared or overwhelmed). It’s important we are curious about what the behaviour is trying to tell us, what children are feeling and needing, then we have an opportunity to meet those needs.

Our ultimate goal is to grow learners who feel safe, regulated, happy and connected , creating a space that teachers can teach and all children can learn.

We were all interested to learn that the Pre-frontal Cortex (responsible for empathy, judgement and reasoning) is the last part of the brain to develop and this typically is not fully developed until mid to late 20’s! It made us re-think some of our expectations around the level of development of our children’s brains and what we ask children to do.

As a staff we explored a range of strategies we use to support children to practise regulation and build a safe connected learning space. These include:-

Safe spaces in the classrooms for children to go and have some calm/thinking time
Regulation breaks – this could be a movement break, Interoception break, Crash and Bash, doing a calming activity near the classroom.
All classes do Interoception exercises daily eg. Breathing, whole body movements, mindfulness activities, stretching to focus on knowing our body and responses in our bodies to these exercises and activities to help us learn self-regulation strategies.
Our Interoception space in the library – children can access this to do an exercise, a calming activity and then chat with one of the adults and then return to class.
Role modelling and co-regulating eg. Breathing to bring our heart rate down.
Creating predictability, clear routines and expectations that makes students feel safe.
Practising regulations strategies when children are calm, so they have the tools to use when they need.

This is not a ‘one size fits all ‘approach and we use a range of different strategies with different children in order to support them to build self-awareness and self-regulation skills.

After this insightful and thought-provoking training, we all left the session thinking about what each and everyone of us could do better for our students as we are still learners and continue to grow in our knowledge, understanding and what we do!

Kind regards,

Ms Sally

Principal

Graduation