 Welcome everyone to Webcast on Early Learning brought to you by the Ministry of Education Early Learning Branch. Today's webcast is entitled Self-Regulation What is it and why is it important for learning? We have with us today Stuart Schenker and Jane Bertrand. Stuart is from York University and Jane is from George Brown College. Stuart and Jane have much in common. Both are researchers, teachers, authors, consultants in the area of early childhood development and both place the learner at the center of all the work they do. Both Jane and Stuart have presented to us in BC. Stuart is recently as November when he presented at the superintendent's conference and Jane has been a presenter at our interactive conversations so those webcasts have gone right through the province too. Jane is also currently advising the Coquitlam Mission Early Learning Working Group. The overwhelming response from you, the audience both in our studio today and around the province indicates to us the importance that BC places on the wisdom of Jane and Stuart and their work. Stuart and Jane we thank you for joining us today and we look forward to our conversation with you. Thank you Kathy. Good afternoon everyone. We are living in the midst of the most extraordinary revolution in educational theory. The papers are coming out at such a furious pace that it's almost difficult for us to keep up with the most recent discoveries. In fact just this week alone there have been three papers, major papers published on the material that Jane and I will be talking about this afternoon. And the good news is they all substantiate everything that Jane and I are going to say. Thanks Stuart and we are very happy about that. Today we're really going to be looking at three broad overarching themes that guide our presentation. We're going to talk about the long reach of self-regulation in early childhood into adolescence and adulthood. We're also going to talk about the relationship of self-regulation and self-control. And finally we are going to try to illustrate how self-regulation in early childhood sets the foundation for learning behavior and health across the life cycle. We thought we would begin by briefly discussing this paper that was published in the year 2005 by Angela Duckworth and Martin Seligman. This paper had an extraordinary impact on scientists working on educational trajectories. What I mean by that is what we're very interested in are those children that we find it very difficult to enhance the direction in which they're moving in school. And what Duckworth and Seligman showed was that self-discipline is actually a more important factor than IQ and other social variables in predicting how well a child is going to do in school. Now perhaps the most important aspect of this paper was that the average age of the children involved in the study was 13.4. What they found was that the kids at this age were not only doing better in school but a lot of their school related behaviors were significantly better than the children who demonstrated poor self-discipline. This raised a very important question for scientists like myself. And that is how did these kids get to that point? How did these kids develop such robust, such strong self-discipline by the time they were young adolescents? With that in mind, the very first thing we began to look at was temperament. Temperament is obviously enormously important in why some children go on to develop strong self-discipline. The thing you need to understand about temperament is, yes, it's something that we believe a child is born with but we now look at temperament in very biological, in very physiological terms. In other words, we look at things like how a child reacts to stimuli or whether or not a child seeks out, craves certain kinds of stimulus. So for us, what's important isn't the temperament per se. It's how we respond to these different temperamental variables in order to develop or help the child develop their self-control. And that's really very much a key, as Jane mentioned at the outset, that's very much a key theme for today's presentation because we now know that first, self-control is something that a child develops and second, it's an enormously important predictor of how much self-discipline that child will have by the time they become an adolescent. With that in mind, we thought we'd tell you about a study that was done in the late 1970s that's been replicated many times by Walter Mischel. It's called a delay of gratification task. It's a very simple task. You take a little child and you present them with two plates of marshmallows. One has a single marshmallow on it and the other has several marshmallows on it. And you say to the child, you can have the one marshmallow right away or if you wait until I return in 15 minutes, you can have the plate with several marshmallows. What Mischel discovered was that about 30% of all four-year-olds can wait. Well, that's pretty interesting in itself and if you're a parent, I know you're right now thinking my child couldn't possibly wait. I must just tell you briefly, my son recently found a video of me on YouTube where I was talking about this and I was mentioning on the video how I have two children, a six-year-old daughter and a nine-year-old boy. My six-year-old daughter would wait for several hours. In fact, you'd have to be careful to come back and remind her that she can now eat her marshmallows. My son, on the other hand, would grab both plates. So my son was watching this and he was laughing and he said, that's me, that's definitely me. And then he said to me, you know what, I really feel like some marshmallows now. In fact, my son's behavior is a good predictor that he will develop good self-discipline by the time he's a young adolescent simply being able to look at this little vignette about himself with a sense of humor and good reflective skills. So when we talk about self-discipline or even when we talk about self-control, we don't want to think about this as being some sort of harsh regime. We want our kids to adopt or embrace. In fact, it should always be fun, something that Jane will be speaking to quite a bit at the end of this presentation. Now, when we examine the long-term predictive effects of Michel's tests on four-year-olds, the most extraordinary finding was made. The 30% of four-year-olds who did well on the task scored on average 210 points higher in their college entrance exams. This is a very, very striking discovery. And it wasn't only that, what Michel also discovered was that these same children were much less vulnerable to risky behaviors, much less vulnerable to engaging and addictive behaviors. They had much lower incidence of social aggression or conduct disorder. They were functioning at a much higher rate of social acceptability. So it was clear that something very important was going on with these little kids, and what was extraordinary was that they were differentiating already by the age of four. That's a very striking discovery. Now, for us, for scientists, it raises a huge question. Really, too. The first one is, how did these four-year-olds who did so well on the task, why did they do so well? How did they get to that point? And then the bigger question, what about the other 70%? The 70% of kids that really were having trouble with self-control, what can we do as educators and as parents to enhance their self-control? And when I talked at the very outset about the revolution that's occurring in educational thinking, this is the key that we now believe that if we get to these kids early and if we continue to reinforce these kinds of lessons that we're learning, we can have a dramatic impact on each and every child's ability to self-control, and as a result, a dramatic impact on their long-term physical and mental well-being. Put you to work to do some thinking about the kids that you are working with or have worked with in the past. Think about those kids that you interact with on a daily basis. Describe the really exuberant kids in your classrooms, full of life and energy, and sometimes that energy can be disruptive. Sometimes it can take a lot of your energy to cope with that in your classroom. So think about those kids. What are their characteristics? What is the impact of those kids on the rest of the classroom environment? Next we want you to think about what of their behaviors really push your buttons. And how do you respond? What is your gut reactions and how do you manage that? Then finally, we want you to think about those kids that fly beneath the radar screen of your attention. Those kids who, at the end of the day, you'd be a bit hard pressed to think about what activities they engaged in or who they interacted with. And now I think we're going to, Kathy's going to send us into small groups to discuss that. I'm going to. We're going to take a few minutes to let you have some discussion both at where you are and in our studio audience. We're going to keep the cameras going to show you our studio audience. And if you have a group and you'd like to not hear our discussions, just turn your volume down and tune us out and you can tune us back in in two minutes. We'd like to remind you too that the questions that you are going to be discussing, you should find in your participants handout that you have downloaded. And don't forget to keep those questions coming into us. We'll see you again in two minutes. One of the questions we have today from our live audience is from Andrea in Coquitlam. And she's asked, where's the balance between routines, creating safety, adult regulated, and a child's self-regulation? I think Stuart's going to have a go at that one. Well, it's a question that I love because it really gets to the heart of all the work that we do at my institute. Essentially, the starting point for our institute is that a child is born with a very, very small brain. And we study things like what's in this little tiny brain when the child is born and what's not in that brain. At birth, the child's brain is really only between a quarter and a fifth the size of its adult brain. So what we look at is we look at what are the driving mechanisms, and they are largely reflexes in the newborn's brain. They are things like ordinary physical reflexes or motion circuits. A child has four of these, four primitive emotion circuits, anger, love, curiosity, and fear. What the child doesn't have are those mechanisms for regulating its fear or its anger once that reflex is triggered. We call these systems the regulating systems, the executive function systems. And these are the things that develop postnatally, and they develop at an extraordinary pace. The child forms around 700 new synapses every single second in the first year of its life. Now what's fascinating about this scientifically is that what has to happen, what is the fundamental unit for the development of the child's brain, for the development of the child's capacity to regulate its own emotional reactions, are its interactions with its primary caregivers. We talk about the dyad as now being the fundamental unit of early brain development. So what does this mean in terms of this question? Well it means something very simple. It is only by being regulated that a child develops the capacity to self-regulate. It is only by being in these very intimate, endless interactions with his or her primary caregivers that the necessary information is delivered to those parts of the brain that are exploding postnatally so that those systems can begin to take on that function itself. We mentioned before the break that we do see a considerable number of kids coming into school with problems in self-regulation. In fact we have data coming out of the U.S. suggesting that as much as half of all children are having challenges in self-regulating. What does this mean for teachers? Well it means that as Jane hinted right before the break, you have to be performing this function for a large part of your day. You are exercising, you continue to exercise this regulating function so that they on top of everything else are learning how to self-regulate. And it's difficult to self-regulate in a classroom environment. It's difficult for them and it's also difficult for you. It's a very, as every mother will tell you, it's very demanding. It's very tiring to help regulate a little baby. It's demanding to be a teacher who has to do this with a classroom of 20 or 25 kids. Want to add something up? I think that's a really good answer. I'll just summarize it. It's about thinking about being a flexible spine, being able to give some structure and some support but being able to be responsive and give some room for the child. So it's a developmental dance. It's a dance back and forth and trying to find the fit to put in the routines and the safety conditions absolutely essential but to give children room that they can cope with in their environment. And there is no one answer. There is no ten tips on how to do a balance between the child's self-regulation and the guidance you must give but it's trying to find your way of introducing that flexible spine into the classroom. Thank you, Andrea. That certainly was a powerful question. Really nice answers. Thank you. We'd now like to continue with Jane and Stuart in the conversation about our role and some of the things we can do when we're working with early learners. Thank you. Let's talk about that relationship between self-regulation and self-control. For a long, long time in our history and in particular, we have thought about this and misunderstood it. Really, the development of self-control sits on emotional, attentional and behavioral regulating skills. We don't develop self-regulation by developing self-control. It's the other way around. And I think that's one of the first things we need to address and think about in our practice as we go forward. We have to recognize that it is much more difficult for some kids to acquire these skills than others. It takes a lot more energy. Stuart's going to talk about that in a moment. I think it's a bit like learning some motor skills. Some things come easier to some kids than others. It took me at seven years, two and a half months, to learn to ride a two-wheel bike. And my sister did it in two days. We were clearly at different levels of readiness and it took me a lot more energy and a lot more effort to coordinate the various body parts one must coordinate to ride a two-wheeler. And I think we need to translate that on into our thinking about self-regulating skills. I have to be very careful now because Jane just said some really great things and I'd love to spend an hour just talking about what she said. She made a hugely important point for this presentation and that is that self-regulation and self-control are not the same thing. Jane and I have been working together in Ontario trying to get this message through because Ontario has adopted an early learning program which has highlighted the importance of self-regulation and there is a bit of a tendency to confuse self-regulation with compliance or to confuse it with self-control. In fact, as Jane just said, self-regulation is vital for the child's mastery of the various skills and her bicycle example is actually a really, really good one because it highlights that these skills are not just cognitive, not just emotional and not just social, but also they are motor skills as well. They are all a part of this. And self-regulation is the sort of energy reserve, the reservoir that makes it possible for a kid to confront these challenges. So what exactly is self-regulation? It's a very important question and there have been various attempts to define it, not entirely satisfactory. I think we pulled up one which, it sounds nice when you first look at it until you realize it's actually not saying very much. It's circular. What we want to know is can we break this down in such a way that we can then begin to look at those experiences? As Jane just said, they're going to be very variable for each and every child that will help improve, enhance their ability to self-regulate. So what we do at our institute at York, at Mary, is we have broken self-regulation down into five distinct levels. This schema is a very useful way to conceptualize the relationship between the various levels. It works in both a bottom-up and a top-down manner. So let me just give one quick example to explain what that means. We know that the better a child can self-regulate at that first biological level, the better they'll be able to regulate their emotions. But conversely, the better the child can regulate their emotions, the better they'll be able to regulate at the first level, which is the level of arousal. So each of these levels builds on the earlier ones, but likewise they have this sort of reverse downstream effect on enhancing the child. We don't have time to do each of these levels. We would need a separate webcast for each level. So we decided that what we're going to do today is concentrate on the first. And the reason for that is because the first is really the most important, especially when we're looking at little kids. What we want to know is how well can the child regulate its arousal states, whatever that actually means. When we look at arousal regulation, scientists define it in terms of two systems, two competing systems, the sympathetic nervous system and the parasympathetic nervous system, which together act as a sort of a fuel pump and a brake. What the child has to do is every time the child confronts a challenge, they need to expend energy. They need to draw on their energy reserves in order to meet that challenge. And then what they need to do is they need to recover. That's the point of these two systems working together. And we have to remember that for a small child, everything is a challenge. So in fact, just looking in a mother's eyes is a challenge for a little baby. And for some babies, it's a much greater challenge than for others. What does that mean? It means that for some babies, the arousal is so great because they're very sensitive to visual stimulus. The arousal is so great when they look in their mummy's eyes that they need a lot of rest to recover from this. They have to have these experiences. They have to have these face-to-face, these eye-to-eye interactions in order to begin to learn about the world, to begin to learn the meaning of a facial expression or of a sound. But if a child is expending so much energy just interacting with mummy, they need to rest, they need to recover. So that's what we mean when we talk about these two systems operating together so that the child can meet the challenges of learning how to sit up, learning how to walk, learning how to talk, learning how to gesture. And the last point that Jane wanted me to make was that this is not a binary thing. It's a continuum. In other words, what's happening throughout the day is that the challenges that the child is dealing with are constantly either greater or lesser. It's a constant movement that's going on here of spending more energy, of spending more time, of spending more time recovering from that. Now we'll explain carefully after the next break how this really bears on the development of self-control. The key point here is that not all kids have to make the same effort. Some have to make a lot more effort. Not all kids find it as easy to recover from their effort. Some kids find it much more difficult. And this gets to the heart, as we'll explain next, of why there is this very tight connection between self-regulation and self-control. Oh, Jane just reminded me. This is actually the most important part. So thanks, Jane. Welcome. Jane's used to me. We co-regulate. That's level four. We're not doing that today. So we use this model. This is a model that goes back to Barry Brazelton in the early 70s where our child goes through six stages of arousal. And we really wanted to draw attention to a very important point about this. What the stages of arousal tell us is that the ideal stage for learning to occur is level four. In fact, neuropsychobiologists have shown that at level four, the modulation between the two systems I was talking about, the sympathetic and the parasympathetic, is most finely regulated. What that means in English is that it's at stage four where the child has the most resources to pay attention. The longer the child pays attention, the more the child learns. The more the child learns, the better the child self-regulates. The better the child's self-control. Now, what this graphic is telling us is that self-regulation is a story that goes in two directions. Suppose I've got a child that's at level three in this model. Level three is when the child is a little bit hypoaroused. And he's hypoaroused, as we'll explain afterwards, because perhaps the stressors are a little too great in this kid's life. So he shuts down a little bit. He avoids interactions. He daydreams a lot. But we need that kid in level four in order for that kid to learn. If I've got that kid in class, I don't want him staring out the window. I want him engaged, fully paying attention to me. I have to up-regulate that kid. That child needs a little bit more energy to engage and keep his attention. Suppose I've got a kid who's in level five on that model. This is the kid that's a bit hyperaroused. The kid that this is James... What did you call it? A really exuberant child. That child needs to be down-regulated. What we need to do with that child is figure out how can we bring him down a little bit so that he's in level four too and keep him in level four so that he can begin to learn. And the more he's in level four, the more he will begin to take this over for himself. That's what we need to do. That child needs to be in level four. So the last point I'll make about this is just to come back to what Jane was saying. In the last two questions that she asked, she drew attention to the really exuberant kid or the kid who's flying beneath the radar. The really exuberant kid is the kid who's at level five or hopefully not level six, but sometimes it's going to happen. The kid who's flying below the radar is the kid that's at level three. So the point that she wanted you to take home was that when we talk about the importance of self-regulation that you are every bit as aware of the kid who is chronically in stage three as the kid who is chronically in stage five. In fact, at my clinic, we are absolutely every bit as much concerned about the kids that are chronically hyperalert as the kids that are chronically hyperalert. Okay? Thank you. I want to go back to you in some discussion. We want you to take this idea of the five levels and the hypoalert, the hyperalert and calmly focused and alert children. Think about those really exuberant kids again and describe their stages of arousal. Do they sometimes go over the top and flood as in completely can't cope and crying and pantomime and that sort of things? And what is your stages of arousal when that happens? Do you withdraw? Do you get more hyper? And is it different? Is your classroom different? And are your stages of arousal different when those children or that child is away? We also want you to think about what strategies you use and are they effective? As well as thinking about the exuberant kids, think about yourself the same questions about kids flying beneath the radar. Perfect. So, thank you for those questions. We're going to now spend some time in our studio audience discussing these questions. You're welcome to stay with us and listen to us as we discuss them. Or you're welcome to tune us down for a few minutes and discuss on your own. Keep those questions coming in. We have some incredible questions coming in through question manager. Please. And we'll see you, well, you'll see us. So we'll come back to you with sound from our presentation again in about two or three minutes. Thank you. Welcome back. We've got two questions from the field. We're not quite sure whose questions they are because we don't have names on them, but they're still good questions. So here we go. Jane's going to look at classroom management in a very active classroom for negotiation skills and self-regulation behaviors for many children all at the same time. You just be truly magic. Simple. Well, this is the art of being an educator and an educator with young children. And that is, and it can be informed by the science, but there is an art and it's what skilled teachers acquire. The whole idea there's another question about can children truly learn when they're being active? And I want to tie these two questions together. I think it's really not possible to support kids' self-regulation and learning if you don't have an active classroom. A quiet classroom does not equate with either learning or self-regulation. It equates with compliance. And for it, so I think we need to pack that, accept the challenges involved, but really understand that everybody sitting still and doing the same thing at the same time means that many kids are not in that level 4. They dozed out. And there are still going to be the nudgers, the pokers, and who can't contain themselves. Neither group are learning. So I want to think about how you manage a classroom, how you organize a classroom, and how you interact to really and truly try to maintain an environment that is a learning environment and not drive yourself, start raving mad. I think there's three things to think about. First of all, the emotional climate of the classroom is so important. Your responsiveness as an educator to individual children, the respect you give them sets an emotional tone and emotional climate that is essential across the spectrum of children. And I think that's job number one. Job number two is really organizational. Some people call it classroom management, but it's the organizational stuff you do to have things at the ready, to have planning, to be seeing forward, to be thinking about how to organize things so that they're efficient. The tools for learning are readily available for young children. And how you organize the routine schedule so it makes sense. And third of all, I think there are the kinds of pedagogical strategies or instructional strategies that you put in place to be able to relate and interact with a range of learners and that you're able to do the dance. You're able to reach and connect with a whole variety of learners and whether they're jumping up and down or sitting still. And that you're able to bring in pedagogical strategies that require children, that encourage children to be interested, to ask questions, to want to solve problems. And I think those are the three aspects when you put those together really can support a very active classroom, good self-regulation and lots of learning. Thanks, Jane. Stuart, was there something you'd like to say? No, that was really good. Just keeping me regulated. So Stuart, a question has come in that you're going to tackle for us and it's a two-part question about a child perhaps not eating a balanced diet and perhaps children who don't get enough sleep and how this can kind of come into play with the conversation we're having today. And the person has also asked where in the stages you discussed would you think that these kids might be? I was fascinated by this question because whoever asked it has gotten to the hurt of what we're trying to convey today. And one of the things that Jane and I decided not to talk about, but we might have, is that this is really not a story about willpower. In fact, one of the worst things that we can do is send a child home with a report card saying you know Johnny has all this potential, but he needs to apply himself more. It's not that the kid is somehow deficient. It's not that the kid is somehow to blame for his poor behavior. And this is something we'll explain. This question gets at the heart of the fact that this is a story about what kind of energy reserves the child's going to have during the day. And the question is absolutely right. My wife right now is begging me to stop eating fatty foods and salt. Those are things I have to eliminate. And they had this fantastic buffet at the hotel this morning. And I saw this beautiful bacon and sausages. And I knew it was full of nitrates and fats. But I slept well last night. And because I slept well, I really had no temptation. It wasn't that I was afraid that my wife would be afraid. And that's the key. And if you're interested in this, there's a fabulous book written by Robert Thayer, T-H-A-Y-E-R, called Calm Energy. And anyone who's ever struggled with a diet in their life will never feel guilty again. In fact, as Jane hinted a second ago, a negative emotion like guilt makes everything a lot more difficult because guilt or anger makes the situation burn energy. Whereas, the other emotions that Jane talked about interest, curiosity, happiness, actually fuel energy. It's the irony, the paradox of negative versus positive emotions. So I love the first part of the question, now the second. This is a serious issue. We know that our children are chronically underslept. We know that chronic under sleeping dramatically exacerbates problems in self-regulation. It's not realistic. Go back in your mind to that model you had, the stages of arousal. Suppose I've got a kid who for one reason or another is hyperalert. Really, Spencer is chronically hyperalert and I've got to get that kid to sleep. If I do it in an aversive manner, if I put the kid in his room and shout at him, go to sleep, A, it's not going to happen and B, it's likely going to end up in him going to level 6. He's going to flood. He has to be down-regulated step-by-step. And we have to be very sensitive to the fact knowing as we do as educators knowing that we have a tremendous number of kids that are underslept we have to be sensitive to the fact that there are so many stimuli in our society today that are leaving these kids hyperaroused at that time. What we don't want to do is say to them, you know what? You've got to get him to sleep. You've got to do whatever it takes. You've got to down-regulate him. You've got to rub his back but they do have to do it. So what we have to do is we have to be gently encouraging to parents to help them want to do it. We have to get them to see that this is a special experience that they'll have with their child to down-regulate what it's bedtime. And believe it or not it doesn't matter how serious the kids' problems are. We know this from clinical experience. Every kid can learn this. Every kid's going to see if you do it over and over it feels good to down-regulate. It feels good to slowly relax and go to sleep. What we have to do is we have to make this a really pleasurable experience for everyone, for parents as well as child. But whoever the questioner was is completely right. It's a serious issue and it's one that the Canadian Pediatric Society is taking very seriously now. Our kids are chronically understepped. Well thank you. Keep those questions coming. Great questions coming into us. Now let's go a little bit deeper and learn some more about self-regulation. What we thought we'd do is this is not the easiest concept to come to terms with and so we have a very nice analogy about these two systems. The activation system that was involved in up-regulating a child and the inhibition system that's involved in down-regulating a child. So the way we originally thought of this was I live fairly far from the university and I drive along the 401 and I put my car on cruise control. If I set the car at I never do this but let's say I follow the speed rule and set my car at 100 kilometers per hour. I can then look at my instantaneous fuel readout and I can see how much fuel I'm expanding at any moment. So when I go up an incline I use up around 40 liters per 100 liters, 40 liters per 100 kilometers. But when I'm on a decline it can go down to 3 or 4 liters per 100 kilometers. In other words you're constantly fluctuating. On top of that what we want to think back to is when we were learning how to drive. So remember that very first time that you had to get on to the freeway. But it was like joining these cars that were zooming by. In fact that's what social interaction feels like to a lot of kids. Things are moving very fast. For some kids this is incredibly difficult. They have to burn so much not just because they may be processing a little slower but also because they become very anxious. And as I just mentioned anxiety burns fuel so it's a sort of exacerbating condition. Now think about when you were learning how to drive in rush hour. Think of how hard it was to constantly sort of finally modulate putting your foot on the gas pedal or putting your foot on the brake. And if you were like me you were probably constantly jerking back and forth and begging my father to stay in the car and I won't do it anymore. But it was hard. It's hard to get that smooth fluctuation. Now you do it without thinking. That's what social interaction that's what engaging with his social world is like for a child. And what's fascinating about this is that for some children this capacity to make the smooth transitions between gas and brake is much more difficult than others. So scientists call this optimal regulation James put it up. Optimal regulation essentially refers to how smoothly the child can produce enough gas for learning something which is challenging and then enough brake to feel when he needs to recover from the expenditure. When people talk about self-regulation kids who self-regulate well this is really what they mean. They mean optimal regulation. Who makes these very smooth transitions from gas pedal to brake. For us the concern is the kid and this is a very large number of kids a very large number of children that have trouble with optimal regulation. Whose transitions are too abrupt or inappropriate for I need James help here. Bruce McEwen about 20 years Bruce McEwen about 20 years so for about 20 years we've understood that kids who have problems with these smooth transitions can be in what's called an allostatic load condition and I want to just briefly explain what this means. Essentially this is a story about stress and what it means is that a child has too much stress in their life and we're talking about little children here a child who has too much stress can have a lot of difficulty making these smooth transitions. It could be that what happens is their transitions are too abrupt or inappropriate. They respond in a stress in a fight or flight manner to something that need to provoke that response like answering a question in class or it could be that once stressed so the child let's say who does have trouble reading out loud even though he could do it becomes so anxious and so stressed out by the experience that they have a lot of trouble returning back to baseline. So for us when we look at these children, when we talk about these kids being under too much stress it's very important that we understand that we define what we mean by stress. Stress is a complex concept stress refers for us when we talk about I had a stressful day we really mean my boss asked me to do too much but for children the stressors, which is what we're talking about the stressors can be biological they can be social they can be environmental. What does that mean? Well, right now I told Jane part of this presentation that she and I and you Kathy we're going to be very tired at the end of it because they have bright lights on us we have to work very hard to concentrate on what we're saying and on inhibiting this visual stimulation we're working twice as hard as you so if you think your head hurts it's nothing compared to what Jane and I are going to do. So but when we talk about stressors for a child we really to begin with we're worried about their nervous system how they respond to sounds or sights or smells for some children just to smell can be incredibly taxing for their system then we have to look at family stressors this doesn't need explanation it's a very important point and finally we have to look at environmental stressors and the data is now emerging which is a serious concern for our child in modern society this we believe is the reason why we see higher incidence rates of children in an allostatic load condition who live in a low income neighborhood it's because there has now been there have been a number of studies showing us that the stress levels pollution noise is higher in these neighborhoods so what it means is if you come back to where we started if it's vital for the child to be in level 4 in order for them to learn for the child to be calmly focused and alert and if it's the case that a child in an allostatic load condition is going to find it difficult to stay in level 4 it means these children for whatever reason whatever is causing the load condition is at a tremendous disadvantage right from the start that doesn't mean there aren't things that we can do in fact that's the whole point of this exercise the whole point of this science is that we are now learning what we can do for a child that's in an allostatic load condition trying to change the environment is a very tall order but in the meantime with these kids there are things that we can do on a day to day basis to strain on them and the last thing I'll say is the one thing we don't want to do is yell at the kid the one thing we don't want to do is shame the child in any way because as I've mentioned these negative emotions anger frustration shame are a tremendous strain on the child's nervous system we were just working with the child two weeks ago that was sent to us because he had been diagnosed with contact disorder and the most dominant emotion we saw in this kid was not anger it was shame okay so we'll come back to that after I know Jane has a couple more points to make we'll come back to this but I just wanted to introduce her next slide her next point because for Jane and me this is the heart of why we're doing this presentation today good lead and thank you Stuart there is a tendency and I talked about this earlier and Stuart has certainly led us back to it that dates back a long time in our history to ancient Greeks actually to somehow see kids as being responsible that they're to blame for poor self control somehow you can snap out of it and take control and we actually tend as a society to put that blame on kids rather early in life long before they hit the formal school system we we talk about fervorizing or allowing babies to cry it out at seven months to learn self control to sleep and we certainly see it coming in at the school system often in our attitudes about blaming kids we fail to realize and take into account that we need a different understanding that is very difficult for kids to inhibit their impulses and it's different for different impulses Stuart talked about the lights and being very tired at the end I'm a little bugged by the lights but not a lot and I'm going to be pumped at the end of this because I always am when I do presentations actually I go into hyper-related or beyond but we'll see but we're different we're all different and we react to stress differently and to have the same expectations for all kids around their self control is a bad starting point for educators you're never going to get there they're never all going to be at the same point and we recognize individuality on a whole lot of other areas of development and early learning but somehow we think we often think we can have a set of rules and it's the kids self control problems if they can't all meet those rules in the same way and it really does take a fundamental shift in attitudes for and not just for educators but for parents and others working with young children we need to understand some kids and all of the reasons that Stuart has laid out have so much more trouble learning the skills that support self control and we have to think about what we can do to help those children master those skills sometimes it's our one-on-one interactions a lot of it may be in our expectations in the environment sometimes we have rules where we insist everybody stop what they're doing at the same time and come to one place and sit down and talk to us in the same way and that may not be a reasonable expectation and is it absolutely necessary so we need to think about that and then put a lens on our practice on our schedules and routines we talked about we need to remember to do two things at the same time and change the slides why is it so difficult for some children to develop self control that I've mentioned and one of the reasons is that is this difference in the demand the fuel demand what we're doing, how it demands fuel and the size of the cost will vary according to child I don't think the lights are making as much of a demand on me as they are perhaps on Stuart on the other hand remembering what I'm supposed to do and keeping this going is putting a lot of demand on me so and this is this very much has to do with our own individual skill levels the environment that we're in and what our own arousal state is we all have different situations that put us over the edge that push our buttons that raise our state of anxiety and kids are the same way we can't expect the whole class to move forward at the same time kids need different environments for us to accommodate the environment to accommodate them in various ways do all kids need the same number of calories at lunchtime to field them to the next meal no we have variations in our metabolism we require our calorie input and output and what kids need and it's the same way with what they need to around the arousal the energy that they do in managing the stimuli that are coming in and keeping their trying to regulate their arousal to that magic stage for calmly alert and focused let's take an example now about sitting in class and suppose we're dealing with a child who finds it difficult to sit in class for many different reasons perhaps the visual and auditory stimuli are very difficult and are distracting that child in a way that it's hard for them to filter out and pay attention and maybe he finds the seat uncomfortable and it's taxing to sit for a long time I find it personally extremely difficult to sit still for a long time and the seat is too high because I have short legs and if I can't tuck my feet up underneath me or find some alleged to put my feet on I become a real fidgeter and it distracts with my ability to pay attention to absorb what's going on it's just a very simple biological reality that I need to accommodate and if the environment doesn't let me I want to stand up to be able to or I want to get down on the floor if I'm in an environment that requires me to sit in a chair that's high and my feet are dangling I have a very hard time with my self control and I think that's not so different from kids who have various needs some kids actually need to be physically moving they need to be standing kind of fussing around a bit in order to take in the stimulation auditory and visual and other stimulation and process it so yes they do need to move while they are involved in a learning activity or while they're listening to us and I think this is a real shift in attitude and it really challenges us to how we can accommodate when there are only three kids and part of that accommodation is in our attitude I think in understanding and recognizing this isn't a kid out to get us this isn't a kid misbehaving and being defiant this isn't our children doing what they need to do to put themselves in the position where they can come to that calmly alert and focus state Jane wanted me to apply all this into what we do in developmental neuroscience so we study something very carefully called cascading effects and basically what it means is take what Jane has just explained so I can go into a typical classroom and I've got two kids sitting beside each other and I've got one that's really paying wrapped attention and the other one who's whatever Jane's feet are touching the ground by the way so now we worked with a child we worked with a child recently that was having a considerable amount of trouble just inhibiting the amount of noise around her and it was resulting in very poor attention but that makes sense we've explained that I think fairly well but now you start to get a cascading effect because it's natural for us as educators to pace the lesson that we're teaching at the kids that are fully engaged with us those are the ones we notice those are the ones who nod their head or who come up with put up their hand and this kid who's really doing two jobs at the same time this kid who is working twice as hard as the other child right beside her is going to start to fall further and further behind and now we get the kick in effect of these negative emotions because she's going to be frustrated she's going to be possibly ashamed and all this is going to make it harder and harder it's not simply a case of saying that she's not mastering the material at the same speed she doesn't have the same resources available to master those materials and so to explain this we wanted to tell you about some fascinating experiments that were done by Roy Baumeister and tied into everything we said at the outset about Walter Michel's tasks these are called depletion studies everything that Jane just described to you is an example of a depletion effect so her having to do two things at the same time to attend to the clicker is depleting the resources that she has available to pay attention to what she's saying think through her answers Baumeister did something very interesting so you take these kids that did really well on the Michel tasks the 30% that go on to get these great results now you begin to see where we're heading with all this these are the kids that for one reason or another are not burning as much energy in the classroom they don't have the same biological or social stressors as the other kids that's why they've done better that's why they are differentiating at the age of 4 so what Baumeister did was he took those kids so it's 30% and he tired them he used just a little math test and then 15 minutes later you retest them on the Michel test and guess what they can't do it okay this is a fascinating result so it tells us that what the Michel test is really predicting what it's really revealing are those children who are burning too much energy those children who don't have enough resources left to pay attention and the last thing I wanted to say about that is is this the last thing I say now before the break paying attention is incredibly expensive for a child's physiology just paying attention burns a tremendous amount of energy in fact one of the most surprising results from the depletion studies is that having a child concentrate for 15 or 20 minutes will seriously deplete not only their concentration in a subsequent task involving concentration it will seriously deplete their ability to self control and that's why Jane said it's so important for us to have this change in attitude because now what we want to do is we want to look at these kids with an entirely new lens we want to stop blaming the kid we want to stop introducing any kind of negative attitudes towards the child and we want to recognize that there really is no such thing as a bad kid and there's no such thing as a stupid kid and there's no such thing as a lazy kid these are children but if we do the wrong things if we introduce all these negative emotions then we can turn him into a stupid kid and that's the point of today that's what we're getting at here why this change of attitude this scientific knowledge is so vital for transforming educational practice okay? thank you I think that point is really worth stressing and the title of what I'm going to talk about now is understanding a child there is no such thing we know there's no such thing as a stupid child I think we accept that understand that that's part of our value system as educators but there is also no such thing as a lazy child there is no such thing as a child whose primary purpose is out to get us they feel that way some days but we need to think about it in a different way self-regulation is absolutely critical we need to engage in this kinds of social experiences that enable that child to learn cognitive and regulating skills that underpin self-control they're absolutely essential we're not going to be able to move forward to support early learning to support the child getting along with the world if we don't pay attention to that at least not in any lasting way only in super behaviorist approaches may give you some short-term little blips and wins but in the long term you're not going to get very far a child who has difficulty in engaging in critical social experiences because of this significant dream on the nervous system can indeed be helped but only if we recognize and acknowledge those needs now if you're asking yourself but how do I do that with one of them or how many ever you have and you have all kinds of other you have parents who expect things you would be surprised I think by how far you get by just recognizing that and accepting that you take a load off of your own back when you accept that children have different needs and it's not reasonable they're all going to be at the same place at the same time that you're not trying to drill down drill in poor in self control that you're going to have to accept kids have different energy levels it's not the whole ball game but it does take educators a fair distance and it makes a difference on your presence in the room if we acknowledge that the parent of a young infant is critically important in the way that Stuart has talked to us about then we also must recognize our role as educators in the classroom and what we bring into the classroom our own states of arousal our own anxieties our own ways of self-regulating has a whole lot to do with how the kids are doing and those kids who are struggling the most are the most sensitive to your state in your arousal and what you do this is a bit simplistic but just as an example when things are getting a little rangy in a room with many children and the noise level is high and kids are flitting around and things are, you know bridging towards that flooding state across the board we often raise our voices we often speak faster we often get anxiety in our voice and all we're doing is upping the ante if we sit back take two breaths and bring our voice down if we actually bring it down to a lower tone and speak a little more slowly and speak a little quieter it has a big effect to get through and think through other ways in which we can help co-regulate the group when that's what they need they need our support in doing it just by our presence how we use our voices how we use our bodies that understanding can go a long way by knowing the child who while you're talking to the group could really use your hand on their shoulder makes a big difference it comes from understanding the child and thinking about this whole concept of self-regulation which brings me to a favorite topic of mine and that is why play the play of children is so important to self-regulation now my background I am an early childhood educator and play is our mantra and it's core to how we work with children but I'm here today to say it doesn't end in it doesn't end in kindergarten it doesn't end in grade one the play may change and should change and how we work with that play may change but change remains incredibly important to self-regulation from early childhood through middle childhood through adolescence through adulthood in fact some of us self-regulate a whole lot better when we have play in our lives some of us do our most creative thinking and planning when we're giving ourselves some unstructured playtime somewhere somehow so I think we need to come back to this that doesn't mean we're throwing out learning expectations that doesn't mean children learning to read and write to be critical thinkers doesn't matter it does mean that recognizing that children who thrive in primary school are those who have strong self-regulation skills they're calmly focused and alert they can remember on purpose they communicate effectively they make friends and know how to use their friends to support their own learning they are persistent they stick with things even through the tough parts and they're creative in completing tasks these are all part of children with strong self-regulation skills these children have developed their abilities to imagine to use mental representations to act in deliberate plan manner they're able to integrate their emotions and thinking in ways that allow their learning to become more complex and move forward you all know who some of those kids are and when you think about it they all have strong self-regulation skills well guess what guess what play develops that same list of skills that I just went through and is on the slide those same skills are what our play provides such opportunities it provides opportunities to make connections to make links we can stay with the task we can get through the hard part sometimes in a play situation before we apply it in a more task-focused product-driven situation so socio-dramatic and pretend play that are complemented by constructive play or play where we're creating things making things really strengthens and provides opportunities for building those critical skills of self-regulation so I want to talk for a moment about the power of play and I want to put out something that sometimes I get a lot of criticism for but I'm going to put it out here anyway I maintain that play accelerates learning if you want to motivate children's learning you need to increase their opportunities for rich and deep complex play play where there is a challenge for children and it doesn't end at 4 years old or 5 years old you continue that through it may be different, it may be structured different but I would maintain that you actually accelerate learning and how that works how play is so powerful there's a number of points here I want to go through first of all play that really engages children has to emerge from what really interests children and therefore they are engaged in the focus so if we seek out what engages children we're halfway there to figuring out how we can increase their ability to be focused and alert and attend and there's no better way to do that than to see what happens during play to really be attentive to what children choose to do and what gives them joy play with other children demands perspective taking you have to figure out what others think and work with that and respect that what empathy is empathy is something we hear a lot about being able to put ourselves in someone else's shoes and understand the feelings of others you have to do that in play with other children particularly pretend play that can become very complex as children become more skilled in it play encourages communication about what one wants and what feels and we have to put that forward in a way that's understandable and acceptable to who our co-players are and that's a very important part play demands that we make connections between objects and people and things as the play becomes more and more complex with a bigger script involved in the situation of pretend play we have to be able to make more and more connections we draw more materials into that play we need tools to develop the props for that play developing more and more complexity for making connections play that is extended that's ongoing provides challenges that children can take on physical challenges emotional challenges, cognitive challenges problems to be sorted out and figured out it requires a lot of self-direction to maintain it's not maintained by the teacher's script it's not maintained by a rule book or worksheets to maintain the self-direction has to be internal or the play ends and I think one of the most exciting things about playing classrooms and playing elementary school all the way through is that it identifies for us the questions that can initiate extensive and very interesting inquiry projects I think we'll come back to that point at the very end of this presentation but as we struggle to engage children what would really engage them can often be there right in front of our eyes in play so I'm hoping I'm making a little bit of a case for thinking about play is something that is very valuable it's not just something we do to let off steam with kids at the end it's something that we can gain from so much from and support what we do to support self-regulation skills in the classroom so now I want to ask you another question to talk about with each other or to think about yourself if you're alone and at your computer is play central or is it an afterthought in your classroom and in the environments that you're with with children do you really pay attention to children's play do you pay attention to what's exciting to gravitate to or do you use it as a way to manage the classroom just get those kids over there to go play will you get on with the important learning activities okay can you identify negotiation perspective taking empathy and communication skills that children use in their child directed play either in the classroom or on the playground to get children and identify some of those skills and how is your classroom environment set up to encourage extended rich and deep play that elaborates children's abilities it's been incredible both Stuart and Jane thank you so much for that segment our audience here in the studio has really appreciated it about three minutes now for you to ponder some of these really big issues I know it's not enough time I apologize for that three minutes tune us out if you've got a big group leave the conversation going if you'd like to listen in and keep those questions coming we're going to take some questions when we come back with Stuart and Jane welcome back everyone first of all we'd like to tell you that the book that Jane and Stuart mentioned calm energy by Robert Thayer is a book that we'll post up on the website so you'll be able to get the information it's on my bedside table at home I'm looking forward to reading that Stuart's going to talk with us a little bit about the work that Adele Diamond at UBC is doing it's one of our questions that have come in from you Adele's done research on how play develops executive function in children's brains Stuart? so this is an easy one this is a nice one for me to answer I've learned more from Adele Diamond than any other scientist in the world and it's true and I've learned not just on the brain side but also on the behavioral side Adele's work is on executive functions as the question asked which is if you'll remember level three and the five domain model of self-regulation that we presented and if you'd like there's a wonderful summary of Adele's ideas in a paper that she published in Science November the 30th 2008 and I would suggest you get the online version which has a an addendum and I believe that Jane is going to touch on this in her answer to the next question what's wonderful about the work that Adele has done recently on a model called tools of mind is that she has tested a number of very practical techniques for enhancing self-regulation at this cognitive level the level of executive function she has tested these methods that you operate in preschool and in primary school years and it works they do work and she's shown that they work so we're all very excited about it and actually trying to talk Jane into letting us test this out in Ontario okay so we have a question for Jane too thanks Stuart Jane's question comes from the field also and it says I've recently been very deeply engaged in two university courses on Vygotsky I hear some of his ideas in your comments on play is it a coincidence or perhaps does it influence your thinking well I think as Stuart has hinted at absolutely very much Vygotsky's theories of child development I think is quite certainly a strong part of my foundation and my thinking and I think Stuart as well it's also very complimentary to the concept of self-regulation Vygotsky talks about scaffolding children's learning he very much put the highlight on the sociocultural environment and the zone of proximal development and this is really how we support children's self-regulation is by bridging by finding the zone and doing the dance with the child to help them regulate to help them develop those skills so for Vygotsky the social relationship was the vehicle for learning when we talk about supporting children's self-regulation skills social relationships are the vehicle to do that and certainly if you do look at tools of mind you will see the strong influence of Vygotsky and Adele Diamond's work so as in most things this is really a concept that we're talking about today around self-regulation knit together a number of big ideas that are informing our practice right now I think as we move into the 21st century Thank you so much it's hard to believe but we're actually heading into the summary of our webcast today it's amazing how quickly the time is going here we're heading into the summary and Jane and Stuart are going to wrap this up and we're going to ask you to keep your questions coming in because we're going to do a very nice section at the end with your questions with Jane and Stuart so back to you Thank you very much Kathy I'm going to talk just and we've had some discussion about these so I'm going to be fairly high level and quick as we go through this about specific practical strategies for educators so this is all fine and good Stuart we like the stories we get the breaking in the gas pedal but what do we do when we go back to the classroom and there is no magic tips for teachers there is no quick hits or if you do these 10 behavioral strategies it'll all work but there are some ideas I think that can influence practice and I would argue again start with really thinking about how you understand children and their individual arousal levels and then think about the stimuli that are in your room and which ones seem to calm and agitate you would not want lights like Stuart and I and Kathy are facing right now for instance these may seem like small things but they make a big difference so pay attention and you all know about the crooked picture on your wall that you can walk by 29 times and then your cousin who is highly critical comes over and notices as soon as they walk in we forget we get used to criminal we get used maybe that too we get used to those stimuli that may be agitating us we accommodate them so pay attention fresh eyes schedule for 10 play opportunities it may happen in different ways in the primary grades but bring it in with extended time and treat it as absolutely valuable time for you to figure out where kids are at and where they are play games with rules that challenge and encourage children's abilities to inhibit impulses to take turns and that sort of thing and Adele's book tools of mind has lots of good ideas for that use children's questions and passion what they really matters to them to launch inquiry based projects that can provide rich learning experiences and make follow and discuss plans make plans with the children about what's happening follow those plans and discuss what happened and do the same with their plans and those are some of the strategies that I use in my own practice and encourage students and practicum to use well we thought we end this presentation by returning to the point that we started off with we started off by saying that we are experiencing a profound revolution in education and in educational theory it's a revolution that's grounded in self-regulation for all the reasons we've tried to explain today but this isn't simply a revolution about how we can get children to higher levels of literacy or numeracy this is a much more profound revolution when we talk about the revolution in educational thinking in the 21st century our hope and our belief will that as a society we will come to recognize in teachers the most important profession we have for ensuring the well-being of our society this is a message that Jane and I have actually worked very hard to express in Ontario and I believe with some success and we wanted to show you one last graphic so that you fully understand this point at my institute when we first started to study self-regulation we asked our postdocs to go out and find us all the research they could on self-regulation this was in the year 2000 and they came up with this and this is an absolutely riveting graphic what's fascinating about it is that scientists in all these different areas were working on self-regulation without knowing that everybody else was the last couple of years that we've begun to recognize the close interconnection between all these fields in fact I mentioned at the outset three huge papers that came out this week two of them are specifically about the importance of early education for a child long-term physical health I would strongly recommend read the paper by Terry Moffitt who is a very sophisticated neuroscientist I don't think we have time now to go through the graphic properly agreed so I'll just explain the so I'll explain to you in very simple terms what this is telling you when you started 12 o'clock and work your way down to 5 o'clock these are all areas that we would study in psychology ranging from problems of depression or problems of anxiety or panic disorder to problems of aggression or bullying to even problems as simple as being able to remember what you've just learned or to think in a linear fashion but as you start to go around the wheel you start moving more and more into the physical domain more and more we see that the problems that can arise from problems in self-regulation can affect vital aspects of long term physical health and then finally you come at 11 o'clock to educational outcomes this was really Fraser Mustard's great one of his greatest contributions to Canada Fraser was the one who recognized that there is a very tight connection between educational outcomes and a child's mental and physical health it is not because the child who is smarter and has a lot of different styles Fraser's hypothesis which has been dramatically substantiated over the last 10 years and this week in particular was that there is a single pathway that is going on here there is a single mechanism that is resulting in the child with high educational outcomes also having low problems in mental and physical health it is one in the same thing in education these physical and psychological problems will likely manifest at different points in the lifespan the connection however is something that we can dramatically mitigate when we work with little kids and so that is the final point that I wanted to make today when we talk about the revolution that we believe is occurring in education it is a revolution about helping children become healthy active happy individuals this is about the health of our society and this is why teaching is becoming all of a sudden what we have referred to as the guardians of the future of Canada Jane I was supposed to do that I will do the first part and you can do the second Jane wanted me to talk about one last part here sorry I know it was good I was going to go with that the reason she wanted me to talk about this last point was because Stanley my partner for many many years was Stanley Greenspan and Stanley and I did a study about five years ago using early screening test as an indicator of a child's psychological and in fact physical health when they entered the school system what we discovered was that these screening tools are pretty good they're pretty useful if you see them as a crude kind of tool Stanley and I use the metaphor they're like using a thermometer and triage when someone comes into triage at the hospital into the emergency department and they take your temperature all the thermometer is telling you is there might be a problem here in fact the thermometer might be wrong and it certainly doesn't tell you what the problem is that's the point of these screening tools it's to alert us to when we have to look a little bit more carefully when we have to dig a little deeper so the question that Stanley and I asked ourselves was how long does it really take us to get to know a kid and our feeling is a minimum of two months it takes us that much time to begin to understand the child's strengths and weaknesses all the variabilities and really it takes us a year to get to know this child and then we ask ourselves the following question who is in a position as a professional to have this much time with the child who is in that position where they can really have that understanding which can't possibly be obtained in a 20 minute screening test it's only the teacher so at the end of the day what we really wanted to do in this presentation was introduce you to what your appetite so that the next generation of teachers will have these tools not just to understand the kid not just the desire to understand the kid but as Jane has hinted over and over again today to really understand yourself too because self-regulation at the end of the day is as much about us as it is about them okay? thank you that which leads us to carries on into some things to take away and think about and Stuart and I have had a lot of late night emails going back and forth to identify what are some take away messages of things to think about to reflect on your practice as educators and one of the ones just following what Stuart said is to view standard learning outcomes learning expectations as by-products not drivers of effective curriculum to think about them yes we want to be able to use them to monitor what's happening but they're not the central goal they're the by-product of good curriculum, good pedagogy following on that is avoiding labels and pathologization of childhood I mean one of the real downsides of screens and tests of young children is to find a label and then stick with that label and it is just as crazy as going into the hospital having a temperature and getting the label of swine flu it doesn't make a lot of sense it's not enough to go on so we always have to ask ourselves about that before we use labels and really what I call pathologize the child recognize the limits of standard instruction and isolated standardized assessments and isolated instruction where we try to pull out a skill and teach it in isolation of everything else in a child's life we're working against self-regulation folks we're working against childhood when we do that long-term observation and documentation of children's learning and their strengths which is exactly what Stuart just referenced when he talked about takes time to get to know a child is so much more effective in the long run practice what you preach recognize children as having rights for respect and understanding listen and respect and understand them the way you want to be and we often it's easy to forget that one think about what you're saying to a young child and think about if your principal came in and spoke to you the same way and demanded that you know made note of your behavior in front of your colleagues in the same way how you would feel it's not a bad litmus test to measure what you're saying to children and to really make that part of your practice it goes a long way to raising children's ability to self-regulate and pay attention to yourself as Stuart finished on pay attention to what pushes your buttons and ask why and dig deep and I think thank you very much I'll end there great thank you remarkable, absolutely remarkable my mind is just humming we've got about 15 minutes I think for some good questions and we've got some questions piling up on us you can still continue to send yours in remember if we don't get them on live now we'll definitely get them when we archive the webcast so we have one here I'm not sure who from but says we see a lot of children who are highly active constantly wriggling around they never seem to be in stage 4 can children truly learn optimally when they are so active let me give you something wonderful to see on the web you know the Ted talks on the web Ken Robinson has a talk so go to Ken Robinson's talk on creativity and he talks about Julian Lime and Julian Lime was in England and she was struggling in school and her her teacher said that she needs to be put on medication she needs to be put on on Ritalin or whatever they were using back then and mummy wouldn't have anything of it and mummy thought that she saw that her child was and was just so happy when she was dancing that she took her out of the school and put her in a dance school in the National Ballet School and Julian Lime went on to become not just a primaval arena but one of the most famous choreographers for the National Ballet she was also a fabulous student the key here was and this is a point that Greenspan makes in his book overcoming ADHD that Jane and I have talked repeatedly about the importance of being in stage 4 focused and alert in fact the calm part is the term that we don't really even use at my clinic kids don't have to be sitting still to be focused to be in stage 4 and in fact for the reasons that we've tried to explain today for some kids it's going to be aversive it's going to be very draining to be forced to sit still and the last thing I'll suggest you take a look at if you're interested in this line of thought is go on the web and look at the foothills academy in Calgary and you'll think at first that this is Bedlam but it's not the results when I saw it I was amazed kids are moving around, they're on exercise balls there was one corner kids doing somersaults and everybody was on task and they were on task for the entire day so is that an answer you bet that's an answer thanks so much Jane how about this Kim from Coquitlam who's doing her PDP at SFU says why is self-regulation in children more prevalent now question mark has this issue been around four years or are we just noticing it now yeah self-regulation has been around a long time probably since the beginning of our species then before I think we're coming to see different spheres of research different lines of evidence coming together to see a common pathway as Stuart talked about so we're labeling calling itself regulation and seeing things as more interconnected in a way we're moving away from the division of social emotional and cognitive you know I'm getting on I'm a little old here and then when I first studied child development there was cognitive development and Piaget stages of cognitive development and there was social emotional development and that was Eric Erickson with a tad of Freud thrown in and we really kept those as two spheres and we talked about the emotional brain and the cognitive brain as if they were separate entities and what we've learned over the last few decades is that these things are absolutely interconnected it is a totally false dichotomy to talk about emotions as separate from cognition okay they're entirely interrelated and connected and I won't I can do a two hour and it's really good but we'll do that another time so they're totally interconnected and I think that we're seeing it as a construct now of self-regulation also both Stuart and I have mentors who have been talking who we've learned about self-regulation from and worked with in our work for good 20 years mine is Marie Goulet at George Brown College who's got some terrific tools and yours was Stanley Greenspan and they were both deeply into this as an integrated construct 20 years ago I think it is exploding onto a much broader stage now and that's probably what's behind the question great can I add something to that? absolutely there was a study published in the year 2001 by Sarah Rim Kaufman suggesting that there are very high rates of problems in self-regulation in SK and grade 1 and so the person who sent in the question it was really a very astute question and we don't know the answer they talked about 53% of kids having these challenges is it because we're more attuned to this or is there something going on in our society? and we always believe in airing on the side of being overly cautious we're concerned about certain kinds of things that may cause problems in self-regulation and by the same token which are detracting from those experiences that enhance, that promote self-regulation so what do I mean by this? well, we're worried about TV we're particularly worried about video games one of the problems is there have been some studies that were done in France recently on the effects of video games and let me just say because we don't have time it is very worrying for scientists the neural patterns that we're seeing but by the same token you come back to the question we had at the beginning because we now know that these kids are not getting enough sleep nor are they exercising playing sports which is fantastic for enhancing self-regulation nor to come back to Jane's point Jane was talking about the importance of social play for self-regulation we're seeing a lack of these ordinary kinds of social interactions that develop self-regulation at the fourth level so for us we always look at certain things as effects not as causes for us, if a child is watching too much TV ok, we know that this is going to exacerbate it but for us the question is why? why is the kid watching so much TV? why is the kid playing so much video games? and why is the kid drawn to high density caloric foods instead of the foods that will make him feel better? and the answers we believe come back to self-regulation the answers we believe are the more a child is having problems with self-regulation the more drawn that child will be to these kinds of activities that exacerbate these problems and the less they will be inclined to engage with these activities that enhance self-regulation so that's my add-on perfect add-on, thank you so much I think we have time for one last question and it's one that we talked about initially in the middle of the broadcast but we saved for later and it's a large one I think but we've only got a few minutes so let's see what we can do both of you it's specific strategies for hyper-alert children in the classroom we have a lot of breadth here lots of breadth strategies give us some good way to end up with some strategies that's you well I think we'll both take a turn here well the overall classroom environment is a starting point and having I'll go back to my big three the emotional climate the organization and management so that it's organized space and finally the pedagogical strategies that we're putting in place and I think that those three things together help to create the classroom environment that helps kids across that continuum overall and we can't underestimate that specifically for kids who are hypo or not engaged so much finding out what does engage them and we usually have to animate it a bit more we have to put ourselves into it more with a young baby who we're trying to up-regulate as Stuart said we may become more animated to engage them and to excite them now we have to pay attention because we can push them back further in a way to withdraw from us we have to watch our stimulation but trying to get them engaged by our own energy by our own excitement is certainly one way of doing it for kids who are hyper-alert looking at the stimulation in the room and do we need to tone it down and do we have a place for kids is there a quiet place to withdraw we all know that we like to sometimes withdraw from a big noisy crowd and find a quiet space are we providing that in our classroom to help the child who's overstimulated who's moving into from hyper-activity into flooding sorry um well I do this for a living this is what we do in our clinic so we work with kids that are in chronic hypo or hyper-alert states and try to enhance their capacity to be in level 4 Marine let me invite everybody to Coquitlam tomorrow I'm going to show you guys a video that shows that we can actually do this with really really severe cases so it's a difficult question it is something we can do we work on two principles and the two principles are literally what Jane has just described so in essence what we try to do is we know that these kids are under too much stress so that's our first thing what we have to do is we have to identify and reduce whatever the stressors are if we can and the second thing we have to do is we have to build up the positive emotions and that's what she was referring to with ramping it up because the positive emotions are going to fuel their desire there's one thing that is absolutely vital that we have learned from every single kid that we've worked with so my supervisor at Oxford was Jerry Bruner, Jerry Bruner was Bagotskin, I'm a Bagotskin we really believe in scaffolding so what we're doing is we're trying to adjust the challenges that the child can meet so that it's within that child's reach if we make a challenge for the child that's beyond his reach the result will likely be shutting down or frustration or becoming hyper whatever it is but at the end of the day it's the child who has to make that effort you cannot make that effort for that child what you do with scaffolding is you let the child know we all have to fall we become great in education because we learn that we can recover from these setbacks and try and try again this was one of Jane's slides about six slides back the importance of perseverance our firm belief based on our work in our clinic is that we have to have mom and dad on board mom and dad have to be active parents mom and dad have to be self-regulating as well as the child but we can't force them to self-regulate any more than we can force the child at the end of the day what we can do is study, scaffold and try to motivate child family to make that effort and if they make the effort then the resulting feelings of satisfaction the resulting feelings of self-esteem are genuine they are grounded in the child's awareness and the kid gets this something I was afraid of I was ashamed to do this in front of the other kids in the class who don't seem to be having any problems they know that what they've achieved is meaningful I think I'll stop at that that's excellent thank you Stuart and thank you Jane we at the ministry and especially my colleagues in the early learning branch wanted to address self-regulation what is it and why is it important to learning that it was really nicely accomplished in this webcast thank you a lot and I look forward to hearing more about your time in Coquitlam tomorrow so keep your keep your questions coming into us hang on here keep your questions coming into us and we have a webcast coming up on let me just see Audrey do I have this here there we go we have a webcast coming up on February 17th how does it work and where do I begin and the presenter for that webcast is Sue Fraser and Sue is in our audience today hello Sue so we're going to look forward to that on February 17th again thank you so much to Sue and Jane and thank you so much to our colleagues at the early learning branch brought to you on behalf of the early learning branch Caroline Hansen Angie Kelleberg and Melanie Bradford and thank you to Audrey for producing this and to the INSYNC crew New Lions thank you so much and thank you Kevin you're more than welcome thank you again