Thanks Jack, for the valued information.
I work with infants and toddlers at my family child care and PITC trainings of continuity of care, routines and nurturance (in-tune with young ones) has helped me a lot in to go at their level and be with them.
Would love to read the articles that you have suggested.
Original Message:
Sent: 08-16-2017 12:49 PM
From: Jack Wright
Subject: BIOLOGY AND EARLY CHILDHOOD EDUCATION
Some more thoughts on this topic:
The developments in neural-biology over the last 20 years are demanding that we take a new look at early childhood education. Education isn't just words anymore, it's environment affecting genes-epigenetics. We knew that relationship was important if education with words was to be effective; we may not have known that relationship was an environment affecting genes, and thereby itself early childhood education.
Early childhood education is different from all other education. I'll compare education in mathematics. A person can start learning mathematics before they are three-years-old. They can keep learning it the rest of their lives. That's where the comparison ends. If mathematicians don't learn something before they are five it isn't much of an impediment to their further learning; it just slows the process a little. If they learned something wrong, it soon shows up as a problem and can be easily corrected: two plus two just doesn't equal five when you count the sticks.
By contrast, if you didn't learn social skills by the time you were five-years-old, you are easily in trouble the rest of your life. It even requires social skills to notice even dramatic errors, and to make corrections. If you didn't learn about and develop feelings of empathy before you were five-years-old, you're in bad shape for learning about relationships, including that with yourself, and may have trouble with the law when you are older.
I can't think of any other subject of education that has the complexity and dramatic impact on human life that early childhood education has. With most educational subjects there are clear rules to follow. They can be complex-consider learning grammar-and take a long time to clearly understand, but they hardly compare to the life-skills that a child needs to learn if their adult life is to go well. My life is going well, but I'm still learning from mistakes and aware that there is more to learn.
Notice that it doesn't matter if your mathematics instructor is a gentle person. They can even be mean. It is of course more difficult, but you can still learn mathematics from them. You're unlikely to learn effective living skills from a caretaker with limited personal skills-a low emotional quotient (EQ in contrast to IQ). You're far more likely to learn personal skills from them that don't work well over time.
Everything that we experience is being learned. If we don't pay attention to the new learning it fades away, sometimes in seconds, but young children are eager to pay attention to anything novel. They are making quadrillions of connections in their brain. One thought may be at least thousands of neural connections. If it is thought many times more, it is a thought that would even be difficult to get rid of.
We even have thoughts about thoughts. We question the effectiveness and consequences of thoughts. How well we do that task depends on what we have learned to think. For example, we can learn a great deal about paying attention in our first months of life if our interests are effectively supported. That includes the ability to pay attention to consequences-think-which is crucial to learning.
Understanding more about neural-biology needs to affect our thinking about early childhood education. Our brains are not digital recorders. Experiences aren't just recorded in our brains, they are thought about as they are recorded by cell division and neural developments. The thinking is recorded with the memory. It happens instantaneously. The thinking includes decisions about how engaged we are in a subject, whether it is positive or negative, safe or dangerous.
Nutrition, sleep, and exercise are crucial to brain development, but we also need to think of early childhood education as brain development. We've been using psychological personality assessments to describe the needs for and effects of early childhood education, but that has proven to be a problem, and is no longer an effective approach to education.
For example, knowing that a child may become aggressive in a classroom is important awareness, but it is not a descriptor of the child. An effective description of the child who easily becomes aggressive is that the child has learned that aggression works in their life. Calling the child aggressive is not only misleading, but also limits a caretaker's understanding regarding what education to bring to bear.
It would be effective when dealing with a child who tends to use aggression for his needs in the classroom for a caregiver to think about what neural connections would counteract his brain connections regarding emotion driving ineffective impulses of aggression. The child's frustration, or even anger, is likely to be appropriate, depending on how much the young child knows about things like rules and sharing; it's the impulsivity that needs attention. The child needs to think more about consequences, both negative and positive.
Now the caregiver will focus on the normal training regarding developing regulation of emotion and impulsivity. That's normal early childhood education if the child is still a toddler, but needs to be returned to if the earlier training was missed or ineffective. Now the caregiver will soothe the aggressive child understanding that being aggressive leads to anxiety.
This well-trained caregiver will not even consider punishment, and will try not even to be disappointed in the aggressive child's return to negative behavior, seeing that, too, as punishment. Reducing anxiety will be scaffolding for clearer thinking. Now some open-ended questions may find what the child is ready to learn about being impulsive with his anger. Possibly even learning some element of the causes of his anger.
We see impulsive aggression in adults regularly in the news, sometimes with ugly and tragic consequences. That can add to our motivation to explore how to make early childhood education more effective. Taking a new look at early childhood education will not change our approach to children quickly. We may need to deal with our own anxiety about mistakes, and our beliefs in what we have been doing for years.
Important new information is happening quickly in sciences related to child development. Five years is old information these days. This information about the environment influencing our genes-epigenetics-has been significantly growing among scientists for 20 years, but only recently reached our ears. When I write on early education sites, I'm often shown that I've misspelled epigenetics and need to add it to their dictionary. That's how new this information is.
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Jack Wright
Success With Children
St. Ignatius MT
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Jack Wright
Success With Children
St. Ignatius MT
Original Message:
Sent: 08-16-2017 12:08 PM
From: Jack Wright
Subject: BIOLOGY AND EARLY CHILDHOOD EDUCATION
Benjamin: thanks for the links to the YC Journal. It has some good information on this subject.
Jean: there is quite a bit of research suggesting that it is the passiveness of watching that limits brain development in young children. One-hour has been suggested as a limit for those under three-years-old. Research also suggests that screens limit interaction with others for both children and adults. Loneliness is up, and may be a result of too much screen time.
Fran: I haven't done a literature review, but the references in some sources I'll mention may be helpful. I attend conferences on brain development, have a college text for biology, read a good deal of literature that I don't copy or save references for, but the following may be helpful.
For background: From Neurons to Neighborhoods, National Research Council and Institute of Medicine, 2000. Old, but still relevant.
"From Best Practices to Breakthrough Impacts," Center for the Developing Child, Harvard University, 2016.
"Executive Control of Actions Across Time and Space," Current Directions in Psychological Science, APS, 2016.
"Bridging Psychological and Biological Science: The Good, Bad, and Ugly," Perspectives on Psychological Science, APS, 2010.
"Maternal Behavior Predicts Infant Neurophysiological and Behavioral Attention Processes in the First Year," Developmental Psychology, APA, 2017.
"Developmental Origins of Infant Emotion Regulation: Mediation by Temperamental Negativity and Moderation by Maternal Sensitivity," Development Psychology, APA, 2017.
"The Development of Self-Regulation Across Early Childhood," Developmental Psychology, APA, 2016.
Because research can appear to be blaming mothers, I want to note that understanding epigenetics helps us not blame anyone, adult or child for mistakes. The message is that we can't be a better person in the moment, we can only learn to do better.
I'm going to post a article I've written about the effects of biology on early childhood education. Hope we can discuss that, too. We can go so wrong if we don't have feedback on new thinking.
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Jack Wright
Success With Children
St. Ignatius MT
Original Message:
Sent: 08-15-2017 11:42 AM
From: Fran Simon
Subject: BIOLOGY AND EARLY CHILDHOOD EDUCATION
Hi Jack, can you provide some citations to the reports that influence your thinking? Thanks!
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Fran Simon, M.Ed.
Engagement Strategies, LLC
Early Childhood Investigations Webinars
Early Childhood Investigations Consultants Directory
Washington, DC Metro
Original Message:
Sent: 08-13-2017 04:39 PM
From: Jack Wright
Subject: BIOLOGY AND EARLY CHILDHOOD EDUCATION
The last 20 years in the biological sciences has presented dramatic changes in our understanding of child development. A core change is that the debate over nature versus nurture is over. We now have epigenetic adaptation: nurture influences nature. Together they control our lives. Early childhood educators don't need to become neural-biologists, but we do need to understand how the current information regarding epigenetic adaptation informs our role in the development of children.
We especially need to understand that we are changing the expression of genes, not just behaviors. That suggests that how we change behaviors is crucial to the success of children. Most of us have moved from behavior modification to teaching thinking skills, but we also need to pay close attention to brain development: the ability to think.
It appears that thinking itself is a central piece of the environment that affects genes. Genes control all development of animals and plants. They control the development of cells: the basic element in all living things. Thinking is available because cells divided to produce neural structures that recorded environmental experience and make connections between neurons.
This is a different language than early childhood educators are used to. It is a significant difference. If we think, for example, that a child is being obstinate by way of multiple refusals, we are not as likely to see what the child needs to develop in their brain that will sustain the learning necessary to obey the commands of caregivers. The behavior may appear to be obstinate, but it is a lack of education, of brain development.
Understanding epigenesis could even lead to not giving children many commands, only assisting their education. For example, children do need to obey: sometimes, some ways, but not always. The decision requires cognition. Recognizing the need for cognition could lead to more focus on nutrition, sleep, and sensory-motor activities. Further, the development of cognition requires understanding the procedures of scaffolding: offering mental-assistance when the child is asking, and finding ways to encourage their search for answers.
Early childhood educators have mostly stopped directly punishing children for mistakes, but we still may be thinking that children make mistakes on purpose. We confuse children when we're disappointed in them. We probably have confused ourselves when we expect more of children than they have learned. Understanding the epigenetic adaptation aspect of brain development will help us improve our training of young children.
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Jack Wright
Success With Children
St. Ignatius MT
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