Neuroscience and Teaching Very Difficult Kids

John R. Frew

• Publisher: Austin Macauley Publishers
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781787105447
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Educational Psychology

Teaching students whose behaviour is so 'out of control' is a challenge faced by all teachers in modern schools. Contemporary approaches have focused on dealing with the presenting behaviours and attempting to control those. This approach may deal with the problem in the short term but creates no long-term solution.
This work accepts that the majority of extremely dysfunctional behaviour is carried out by children who have suffered early, persistent trauma and/or neglect. Disruptive conduct can be explained by the effect their early childhood environment has had on the neural construction of their brain. These children are not 'born bad' but behave this way because of the 'parenting' they received in their early life. These are the children who have graduated out of these dysfunctional environments.
Recognising this provides the key to understanding how to deal with these kids. Because the social conditions created these problems, if we change those conditions, over time these children will develop different behaviours to get their fundamental needs met. The solution lies in the fact that everyone acts to get their needs met in the environment in which they live, so it makes sense to present an environment that demands different behaviours to satisfy these needs.
The book provides a description about how the early childhood environment creates the neural scaffold that drives dysfunctional behaviour and how developing a well-defined classroom environment will make a positive contribution to changing that behaviour.

Chapter 1
How the Brain Is ‘Constructed’

The purpose of this book is to assist teachers and those who struggle with children whose behaviour is so dysfunctional that they deny themselves any opportunity to participate in life in a meaningful way. Not only do they disadvantage their own lives, they also spoil the opportunities for their peers and classmates. Inevitably, any book about human behaviour must examine the workings of the brain as all our actions are controlled by our nervous system. Therefore, to understand dysfunctional behaviour, you must explore the creation of those neural pathways that dictate that behaviour.

At the fundamental level, the brain is inert; all it can do is initiate the release of chemicals and/or electrical signals that direct our bodies to change its existing conditions in response to incoming stimulus from the environment outside our mind. That is, our brain controls the movement of our body in an attempt to achieve a state of security and comfort for our body.

For humans, this simple stimulus-response coupling has evolved into an extremely involved set of behaviours. This complexity is exclusive to each individual but there is a common purpose for all these ‘behaviours’ and that is the drive to maintain our genetic composition.

The process is to deal with the external world through the following functions:

1. Sense: Our receptors such as sight, sound, feel, etc. provide the brain with information about the state of our environment.
2. Process: Through the various neural pathways, the information provided by our senses is analysed for its potential to impact on our safety or provide opportunities for our development.
3. Store: Through the creation of long-term memories, we can retain information about how the situation current being processed can inform future behaviour.
4. Perceive: This is the task of our working memory where, based on previous experience, we can predict what may happen in these circumstances.
5. Initiate action: All the brain can do is instigate coordinated physical actions that ‘move’ the body into a preferred position.

The following is a brief description of the brain, which will be used when discussing what goes wrong with behaviour in children and adults because of the ways the networks in the brain have been formed in response to stimulus from their environment.

The story of our brain is extraordinary in its complexity and a real understanding of the conditions in which it functions is at least years away, if ever, to be accomplished. But since the 1990s, with the advent of investigative tools such as MRI, the advancement has been accelerating. Unfortunately, or perhaps fortunately, we are far from understanding the true intricacy of the brain. The paradox is that if we could understand the brain, it would be so simplistic we would not be able to even wonder about it. So perhaps it will be left to our artificial intelligence to understand this complexity.

The following is a brief description of the brain, how it changes over time and what goes wrong for a very small number of children.

A child is born with a brain that is well towards being fully stocked with neurons and supporting materials. At age three, the child’s brain is 90% the size of an adult’s brain but the body is only 18%. Although it is only 2% of our body mass, it uses 25% of our energy, about 500 kilocalories per day. The genes that make us human provide the synaptic scaffold of a human brain just as the genes that make an elephant provide a new-born elephant with a different blueprint; the latter can walk soon after birth but us humans certainly can’t, we’re not programmed to do so.

The underpinning drive that triggers activation in the brain is to survive and later to reproduce. All the motivation for learning can be reduced to these two activities. As the genes determine what species we become, the way those specific genes can be preserved is to design a body that is specific to that genetic type. This survival lasts as long as it can in our body. When that wears out, we reproduce a replica body so that our genetic legacy continues in a new host.

This what Richard Dawkins describes as the selfish gene. When our existence is under threat, our body is being attacked, our brain initiates action to protect it. In extreme situations, say if we are in an accident that is so bad all the bodily systems will turn off, all but the most essential parts so that our resources can be concentrated on repairing the threatening damage, we go into a coma. In that coma, the brain is still working but eliminates the demands for any other activity.

New-born babies are particularly dependent on the parents who brought them into the world and through the interaction between the baby and the parents, they will develop an internal, coherent structure that allows new behaviours to become available. This occurs when the internal world of the child is under some threat, they might be hungry and so they will project out either to adjust their internal world or seek help from the external world, say from a parent to satisfy that hunger.

During this early stage of development, the volume of synaptic connectivity is at its peak. The experience, the neural development, is a combination of the genetic template and the child’s experiences. This is the formation of a nervous pathway that will initiate a response, a particular body movement that alters our ‘position’ when our safety is under threat. The formation is not instantaneous but through trial and error, the actions that get the best response are repeated and by continual repetition of this connection between stimulus, discomfort, action and consequential relief, a circuit is born.

Remember that this is a crude description of what happens; throughout childhood and into adolescence, there are periods of time when an oversupply of neurological materials will accumulate in an area of the brain to support the learning of a new action. In a broad sense, the brain is divided into sections, areas that host the circuitry to complete separate activities. There are areas that house the neural network for sight, another for language, for music, etc.

There are crucial periods when the presence of the required material to build synaptic connection and retention increases, providing optimum conditions for the construction of these networks. So when a series of synaptic links are wired together to form a ‘connection’, myelin, a fatty material, surrounds that network to make it more efficient and helps transmit the signals quicker. This ‘insulation’ is supported by glial cells, a type of supportive product that does not conduct electric impulses. There is no definitive appreciation for the function of these cells but I suspect they perform some supportive function in the brain. Nature rarely retains useless materials in such abundance.

So it is at these times children have the maximum potential to learn, plenty of synaptic material is present so it is essential that the correct stimulus is available to motivate the child to ‘change’. These attempts to adjust their current physiological state continue until there is some success. Then, through repetition, the strength of these successful connections increases until they become dominant and are myelinated to become fixed in the structure of the brain.

Those neurons that are not used wither through disuse and eventually are discarded, a process called pruning where the unused neuron cells are removed to make the newly formed connection still more efficient.

It is a time of great plasticity, a time when new circuits are easily formed and retained. This plasticity decreases once the circuit is formed and the developmental, neural organisation moves to another learning task. When the focus moves on, the learned behaviour driven by the newly formed neural pathway is ‘locked in’. This is the process of pruning mentioned above. The result is that these behaviours are difficult to change in the future because the excess neural, myelin and glial materials are no longer available.

This lack of plasticity explains why the learning that takes place in early childhood is difficult to modify. This is the fundamental reason cognitive interventions to change the behaviour of children from early learning in abusive and neglectful environments are ineffective.

The effect of this pruning is that in the first three years, a child has over 1,000 trillion potential neural connections, but the time they reach adolescence, this is halved to 500 trillion, a number that remains fairly stable for the rest of their life.

To achieve the optimum outcome, the best result occurs for children who are exposed to high-level, alternative experiences that are repeated, consistent and nurturing. This brings us to the connection between the contributions of nature, the genetic legacy and the environment in which the child is raised.

It was believed that a person’s intelligence was 80% dependent on their genes and 20% on the environment they developed in. Now those numbers are considered to be reversed; now 80% is down to the environment indicating the tremendous influence a child’s nurturing has on the development of a rich neural network that supports further learning. The disagreement regarding the percentages may have some academic interest but for now, any intervention must focus on the environmental influence. There are some who suggest we could alter a child’s DNA to ‘correct’ their behaviour but the validity of this type of intervention is far from settled and if it was possible, the ethical debate would be extremely controversial.

Although the development of different ‘areas’ of the brain is programmed, there is a general, overall pattern to its sculpturing from infancy to adulthood. Our brain grows and organises from the ‘inside-out’ or ‘bottom-up’. It starts with primitive functioning like breathing, sleeping, etc., moving on to the emotional social behaviours and at the top, the cognitive functions; from the brain stem on to the midbrain, then the limbic system and finally the cerebral cortex.

This ‘bottom-up’ enhancement coincides with the development from the back of the brain, the occipital lobe through to the front where the pre-frontal cortex resides. This back to front maturity is not as associated to the development of behaviours but has more to do with the maturity of particular areas of specialisation, starting with sight.

The development of sight provides a great illustration of the need for stimulus at the time the brain is geared for the acquisition of a new skill. If a child is born with cataracts on their eyes and those cataracts are not removed by about ten months, that child will be functionally blind. Even if the cataracts are removed after the critical period and the stimulus is available, the rich neural environment that was there has been removed. This is an example of the ‘use it or lose it’ maxim and a further example of the loss of plasticity in the lower levels of the brain over time.

More important is the bottom-up development. A newborn child comes into the world with plenty of pathways already developed. Things like blood pressure, heat regulation, sleep—these fundamental physical survival mechanisms are already in place in the brainstem. Further development of the physical skills takes place in the midbrain, especially in the cerebellum. Things like balance and controlled movement are developed, allowing the child to take some control of the world. Once a skill is learned, say balance, it is locked in through myelination and becomes very powerful.

We can experience the efficiency of the ‘learned behaviour’ every time we trip on something. Without thinking, we adjust the position of our body and limbs to stop ourselves from falling. This is a good thing and an example of the efficiency of the brain. As an aside, this is also a case for not interfering with the brain; say, by intoxicating it with alcohol. One of the first things to go is our sense of balance when we are drunk and many a casualty room’s notes have the condition DAFD—to indicate someone arrived with an injury that was the result of a DAFD—a drunk and fell down cause.

Because the brain is constantly learning, the outcomes of any behaviour will be fed back into the memory system and update the information available to the cerebellum and this will influence future behaviours. That is, we are constantly changing but at any given time, our response to our environment will be instantly controlled by the actions of the cerebellum.

The cerebellum is one of the new frontiers of neuroscience but what is clear is the crucial effect it has on behaviour. In the next chapter, I will discuss the brain damage that occurs from abuse or neglect. One of these is that the cerebellum is reduced in volume under these conditions and that must have an impact on behaviour.

The next part of the brain to mature during this upward growth is the limbic system. This is really just a convenient way of describing a collection of interconnected groups of anatomical cortical structures whose functions really coordinate activity across the whole brain. This is the part that really does focus on the preservation of the individual and the species. It initiates a range of behaviours to maintain the body and ensures the continuation of our genetic survival through sexual expression.

The limbic system is the area of social processing and how this is developed is crucial to the explanation of children with severe behaviours. The system is usually under the control by our ‘thinking brain’; in the sense, we think about what we are doing and how that will change things but the limbic system can, and must, act independently especially in times of emergency. The limbic system regulates the autonomic and endocrine functions based on the level of arousal and at such times, thinking about a response is too slow and so the limbic system initiates the body’s immediate requirements.

The processes in the limbic system are—as with all the brain—very complex and interconnected but the general descriptions will support the argument made in this book and so we can see this part of the brain as being really where stimulus comes in from our receptors, be those external or internal, which is ordered depending on how the message impacts our survival. It is the connection between the ‘thinking brain’, the cerebral cortex and the ‘doing brain’ providing instructions for our physical body.

Although all parts of the limbic system are critical to the functioning of the brain, a brief description of the parts that are involved in the behaviour that is relevant for a discussion about children with dysfunctional behaviour follows.

Amygdala

This almond-shaped part of the limbic system is generally associated with the emotional brain. Its chief function is to initiate changes to stress levels in response to stimulus inputs. When the input changes, the amygdala reacts, combining behavioural changes that support the survival of the individual and the species.

Generally speaking, the amygdala is more closely associated with functions that drive the body’s autonomic system; that is, it initiates activity in the midbrain and the brainstem. However, it does have influence on all parts of the brain, particularly the frontal cortex. This is particularly so during childhood when the conditions for the maturity of the frontal section of the brain are not yet in play.

It is best understood when a stimulus foreshadows a real, immediate threat and the response is immediate with a full reaction to the output of signals and hormones that are described as the general adaptive syndrome. The emotion associated with these events is fear.

This amygdala is involved in memory formation of the episcopal or autobiographical type; that is, the memories of an event are associated with an emotional content. Perhaps the most defining feature of the human brain is its ability to recall memories and then predict what will happen. So if we are exposed to a situation that is extremely threatening, the memory associated with that event will have a strong sense of fear.

Traditionally, discussions about the limbic system place a strong focus on the amygdala and the hippocampus, probably because these are involved with emotional and cognitive memories respectively.

Hippocampus

The hippocampus gets its name because it resembles a sea horse. It is primarily associated with the conversion of short-term memories into more permanent and useful long-term memories. Short-term memories are the immediate recall of the things that occupy our thoughts about the situation in which we find ourselves. If they contain small bits of information that is of little value in directing future actions, they are extinguished. However, if the response to a situation has a survival benefit, it will be converted to long-term memory. This occurs through the hippocampus sending the memory to the various appropriate parts of th...

Table of contents

• Neuroscience and Teaching Very Difficult Kids
• About the Author
• Dedication
• Copyright Information ©
• Introduction
• Chapter 1 How the Brain Is ‘Constructed’
• Chapter 2 The Formation of Behaviours
• Chapter 3 Expression of Dysfunctional Behaviour
• Chapter 4 Interventions
• Chapter 5 Approaches for Behaviour Modification
• Chapter 6 Structure
• Chapter 7 Boundaries
• Chapter 8 Relationships
• Chapter 9 The Child
• Chapter 10 The Teacher
• Epilogue
• Quotes