PROFESSOR JOHN SPENCER:
Okay. Thanks very much for the kind introduction. It's an absolute pleasure to be here today to discuss early development. A topic I'm really passionate about. My hope is that you'll find today's talk not only interesting, but empowering, as my goal is to give you tools to positively shape children's brains and early development. The plan is to empower you across three steps. First, I'll communicate what we know about how brains work, how brains learn, and how brains develop. Next, I'll drill down into one key skill children need to learn in early development how to self-regulate. Here we'll focus on how brains change as children learn this critical skill. Finally, I'll translate the key insights from the first two sections of the talk to empower you to positively shape children's self-regulation and brain development trajectories. Here we'll focus on six ways you can boost up regulation and enhance early brain development in your classrooms. So, without further ado, let's dive into the first question.
How do brains work, learn, and develop? Now to set the stage for part one. I'm going to assert that at a fundamental level, the brain is a linking device forming links or associations between diverse experiences. This is done by densely packing brain cells together in between the child's ears. 86 billion of them. These brain cells are neurons do a range of things, including regulating actions. Like this motor neuron on the left that helps with running and jumping. Regulating the timing of events like the green Purkinje cell, which helps children clap along to music, keeping the brain energised. Like this astrocyte, which gives children the stamina to dance and making brain signals more efficient. A key job of this oligodendrocyte, which helps form a tissue called myelin. Something I'll come back to in a bit because it's critical to child development. These neurons all talk to one another by sending electrical and chemical signals back and forth via connections called synapses. And get this there are 100 trillion connections with this many cells. And this density of connections. That means you can randomly pick any neuron in the brain and arrive at any other neuron in 5 to 8 steps. Does anyone know the game Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon? I guess first off, do you know who Kevin Bacon is? Okay, I asked this question to a roomful of 100 undergraduates recently, and they just stared at me. Alright, so Kevin Bacon is known Down Under? Yes. Fabulous. Alright. In the game, Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon. You pick any actor or director, and then you try to find connections back to Kevin Bacon. And you can usually do this in a maximum of six steps. So the brain is a lot like this game. This feature sets the brain up to be fantastic at linking diverse experiences together. What does this mean concretely?
Let's consider the example of children engaged in music and movement activities and singing songs and clapping and dancing. When they engage in these activities, they're literally building connections in their brains between the motor cortex that regulates movement the somatosensory or touch cortex processing, the feel of their body moving through space and time. The cerebellum that's timing their claps to the beat. The auditory or sound cortex that's processing the music. Language centers in the brain as they process the words and emotion regulation systems that are experiencing the joy of dance. This is all made possible by those 86 billion neurons connected by 100 trillion connections. This is what I mean when I say the brain is a linking device. Now, a key contributor to what the brain links together is time. As the brain forms links, timing matters. As one example, the brain is synchronised to the world step by step through time. This synchronisation is so precise, you can literally measure the brain through time and know what someone thinking. Let's walk through a simple case that shows brain activity synchronised to a moving pattern. Here you can see a movie of the visual brain in action as a person watches this moving checkerboard. To orient you, we're looking at the back of the brain at something called the occipital lobe. It's a bit funny that vision’s in the back of the brain while the eyes are in the front, but that's the way it is. It's also a bit funny because the signals cross over. So the left eye passes activation to the right visual brain, while the right eye passes activation to the left visual brain. Thus, as you watch the video, you'll see that when the checkerboards on the left side of the display brain activity, which is captured by that hot spot moving around is on the opposite side of the brain. Now, the key bit is that the hotspot moves so systematically on the surface of the brain that we can actually look at just brain activity without knowing what the person is seeing, and predict what the person is seeing at that moment in time. This is what's happening in the next video, I'll show you on the right side of the display what's going on in this second movie is that a computer is looking at just the brain activity and predicting what the person is seeing. The prediction by the computer is on the right side. The actual orientation of the checkerboard is on the left side, and you can see they match up pretty well through time. So you can literally know what a person is looking at just by watching activity in the brain. Play out through time.
Here's an even more complex case for timing matters. Here I'm going to show you two brains interacting or otherwise known as two people interacting. So in this video, we're recording brain activity as they play music together. And I want you to notice the synchronised activity across the two brains.
(Video description: Two people sit next to each other playing violins).
Okay. Now, importantly, this brain synchronisation actually matters. Recent evidence suggests that children learn more when their brains are in sync with a caregiver. How does this work? Synchronisation in brain activity actually emerges as children and caregivers engage in the stuff you engage in all the time in your classrooms. When you use mutual gaze to coordinate actions, looking at the same object at the same time, when you use positive affect to stay in tune with one another, when you use affectionate touch to maintain connection to the task, like a tap on the shoulder or a tap on the hand. And when you use turn taking to work toward a shared goal. In summary, when these mutual actions and reactions are precisely timed, brains synchronise together and that positively impacts learning.
But it's not just timing that matters. Predictability matters too. You might be familiar with this when you think about daily routines in your classroom. When transitions from storytime to play time to lunchtime are predictable and routine. Children often know what to do when transitions are smooth. But the minute a guest shows up to the class for special activity, everything goes out the window. It can be much harder to transition from one activity to the next. This type of predictability is fundamental to how the brain changes over learning. This is shown in this cartoon. See if I can get my pointer up there. There we go. So in this slide, what you see are a simple case of a couple neurons talking to one another. So we've got the purple neuron and the blue neuron talking to the black neuron. In the second panel you can see how they talk to each other through time. You can see there's a quiet period and then a spike from the or a signal from the purple neuron followed immediately by a signal from the black neuron. A little gap. Then the purple neuron fires again, followed immediately by the black neuron. These are the conditions under which learning occurs. That's captured in the third panel, by the change in shading. So you can see the purple neurons a little bit darker, indicating that the connection between the purple neuron in the black neuron has been strengthened. We can contrast that with the middle case here where we have unrelated firing through time. So as you can see in the middle panel, the purple neuron fires. Then a bit later the black fires. Then a bit later the black fires, then a bit later the purple fires. Under these conditions we get no learning captured by the lack of change in the shading in that third column. We can also contrast this with the opposite firing pattern. In the bottom case you can see that the black neuron fires and then the purple black, then purple. Under these conditions we actually weaken the connections between the purple and the black neuron captured by the lighter shading of that purple neuron in the third column. So what happens over learning is that neurons that fire together in predictable ways, wire together, meaning their synaptic connections are strengthened. Now, this simple rule gets you pretty far in wiring up a brain.
To get even farther in learning and development. you need repetition over many examples. Now, a great example where predictability and repetition come together is the case of language development. Research shows that one way children learn what words mean is by tracking predictable and repeatable relationships over time. For instance, let's do a quick experiment. I'm going to show you some objects. I'm going to say some words, and I want you to figure out what the words refer to. Okay, everybody ready? Alright. Bosa kaki. Bosa kaki. Regli. Bosa. Regli. Boza. What's the name of this? Fabulous. Okay. You just did what 12 to 14 month old infants can do pretty well. So 12 to 14 month old infants can learn up to four new word object mappings in a four minute study set up like this. So a bit more training than I gave you. But you did perfectly. Now how are you doing this? How are the infants doing this? The basic idea is that you're tracking which words go with which objects and sorting out the repetitions over time. So on the first slide, you couldn't know if bosa meant the green or the orange object. So you probably just linked both words and both objects together. Then it's like two. You heard Bosa again. Since the orange object wasn't there. Bosa must map to the green object. Over more and more predictable repetitions like this. Kids sort out what words mean. And this process literally builds vocabulary. Here's a graph showing the growth of the productive vocabulary. How many words children could produce from 16 to 30 months of age. So along this axis here on the left, you can see how many words children are producing. And on the bottom axis you can see age. And what you can see is that children get pretty good at this word learning game. You can't see the dots, but at the top right corner you've got children who have learned up to 600 words in their productive vocabulary. By the age of 30 months. But it turns out differences in how good they are matter. The lines show percentiles for different groups of children. And many children in these lower percentiles will go on to have difficulties with language later in development. Now, one factor that seems to matter here is simple language exposure. How much language children hear.
For instance, in a recent study, my lab group used a simple language recorder to count up how much ambient language 30 month old children were exposed to. So you can see the little recorder in the bottom right hand corner of the screen there. We slipped that into a pouch sewn into the shirt, and kids basically just wear this recorder around for a couple of days, and it's going to record all the ambient language that the child was exposed to. Then this recorder comes with some really cool software that counts up the total number of words the kid heard from all the adults nearby. What we found is that more highly educated mothers tend to talk more to their children. And in fact, that's been replicated across many samples. So in the figure there along the y axis or the vertical axis, you can see the number of words the kids heard. And along the bottom axis you can see the two groups of children. And as you can see in the figure, children with more highly educated mothers heard more words. In fact, if we project the difference in those two groups out over time, children from families from more highly educated mothers are hearing about 150,000 more words per year, 150,000. It's a lot of repetitions. Does this have consequences? The answer is yes. This difference may literally be shaping how the brain processes language.
To explain this, I'm going to return to one of the cell types I showed you a few minutes ago. This is an Oligodendrocyte. It's responsible for helping to make the transmission of signals in the brain more efficient. It does this by insulating the parts of neurons that send signals back and forth to one another. What it does is it literally wraps an insulating material around these wires in the brain, making the signals more efficient from neuron A to neuron. B. It's a bit like going from low speed 3G or 4G internet to a high speed connection. Now it turns out that this Oligodendrocyte notices predictability and repetition, and it chooses to insulate the connections of the brain that get used a lot. Because of this, that 150,000 word difference from our study has consequences for the brain.
Here I'm showing you the relationship between the adult word count and myelin formation in the brain. From our study. So along the bottom axis here you can see the word count from the previous slide. Children with more words are over here on the right side. And on the vertical axis. You can see the amount of myelin in language processing areas in the brain. And if you focus in on the left side, you can see that children who heard more words had more myelin in that those language processing areas in the brain. Now, what I'm really excited about with this study is you can literally see this difference with the naked eye. So I'd like to call your attention to the the images on the right side there. The bottom right image is an individual child's brain, who heard lots of adult word input. The top edge image is an individual child's brain who heard less words or fewer words. The wider the image, the more myelin in the brain. And what you're looking at is a slice from the left hemisphere, where language tends to be processed. In particular, if you look at that little green arc that you can see that's a key language processing, fiber tract, a bunch of wires that connect a frontal part of the brain that’s sensitive to language with a part in the temporal cortex or the side of the brain near where the auditory cortex lives. And what you can clearly see with your naked eye is that that lower brain has much more myelin in it. It has more myelin generally, but in particular in that green fiber tract I'm highlighting in the slide. So let me summarise. Kids learn what words mean through predictability and repetition. The more input they hear, the more opportunities for learning. And as they sought these meanings out over hundreds of thousands of examples, the brain becomes more and more efficient at learning language.
Before I conclude this first part of my talk, I want to add one final ingredient to how the brain works, learns, and develops. And that ingredient is flexibility. Flexibility is key to understanding development, and I think it shapes how we think about development in important ways. For instance, consider the children from this slide at the lowest percentile. We might look at these data and have some concerns. Will these children ever catch up? This is absolutely possible because even though a child may be behind the curve, there's every chance new positive experiences can change the course of early development. How do I know this? The most striking case I can think of comes from studies looking at kids with the worst possible starting point for language you could imagine. This is an MRI scan of a child who had a stroke at birth. The white tissue you see there in the left of the image is all dead tissue. While the gray bits are healthy tissue, as you can see, the stroke damaged most of the left hemisphere. In fact, the stroke has literally killed all the brain cells in that green language pathway from my previous slide. So what happens if you're missing most of your left hemisphere? Classic use of language learning suggests that children should show major problems with language development. What do you think? Well, this child learned language. Well, data from studies of kids like this have revealed a major surprise. We often see normative language abilities in childhood by nine years of age. So we can literally take these kids, give them a standardised language assessment at nine years, and we can't tell them apart from a normative, a normative group. How does this happen? It turns out that the right brain takes over such that language lives in the right hemisphere instead of the left. So the brain completely rewires language, but only if the stroke happens during infancy. This highlights the amazing potential for change in the human brain and early development. The brain is flexible.
Alright. With that optimistic message in mind. Let's do a quick recap of how brains work, learn, and develop. I started by telling you how the brain is a linking device. There we go. That brings together diverse experiences that are close together in time and predictable. Next, I extended these ideas, emphasising that as children accumulate experiences over many repetitions, they learn and pathways in the brain become more efficient. Finally, I highlighted the massive potential for change and early development, noting that flexibility is the rule, not the exception. Putting this all together, the take home message is that experience matters. And this means you have the power to shape the developing brain.
Alright. Let's turn our focus to one key developmental skill now and see how the brain changes as children learn to self-regulate. First off, what is self-regulation? To be successful learners who show creativity, flexibility, and discipline, children must acquire a complex set of self-regulatory skills known as executive functions. Executive functions are a set of higher level cognitive skills that determine what the child should focus on in any given context. These skills enable children to give a considered, rather than an impulsive response, and to stay focused. This is an important part of being an active contributor to a good classroom environment. So executive functions are like the conductor of an orchestra. When everything works, you get music. When it doesn't, you get cacophony.
A key aspect of executive function in the real world is something called autonomy. The idea that children have to generate their own self control from within. We all know this is really challenging for kids, but have you ever stepped back to ask yourself why? If you think about the brain, I think it sheds important light on understanding this question n of why. Earlier in the talk, I showed you how the brain is good at linking diverse experiences. Pulling together music. Clapping. Dancing. Laughing. Well, if the brain is good at linking diverse experiences together, it can be hard to focus on one aspect of a situation over others. For instance, if I link everything together, how do I know that I should focus on listening to the teacher during storytime versus running around with my mates during playtime, versus using my knife and fork during lunchtime? Each of these activities requires selectively attending to some aspects of experience over others, and the bits I'm supposed to attend to shift in complex ways as the situation changes. Now, as you all know, probably much better than I do. Focusing on specific aspects of experiences is quite challenging for 3 to 5 year olds. This is nicely revealed in the laboratory when we play games with children, where we ask them to follow one set of rules and then switch to follow a new set of rules. Let me show you an example.
VIDEO BEGINS
(Video Description: An adult sits at a table with a child with two different coloured shapes).
ADULT:
Red ones go here, blue ones go here. Here is a blue one, where does it go in the colour game? Good job! Remember, we’re playing the colour game. In the colour game, red ones go here, blue ones go here. Here is a red one. Now where does it go the colour game? Good job! Okay, now we're going to switch to a new game. We're not gonna play the colour game anymore. No way. We’re gonna play the shape game. Okay. In the shape game, hold on and stay sitting in the chair. We’re gonna keep sitting. In the shape game, trucks go here and flowers go here. Here's a truck. Where does it go in the shape game?
CHILD:
Right here
ADULT:
Can you put it in?
CHILD:
Yes!
ADULT:
Okay remember we’re playing the shape game, in the shape game trucks go here and flowers go here. Here is a flower. Where does it go in the shape game?
CHILD:
Right there.
ADULT:
Okay Max in the shape game where do the trucks go?
CHILD:
Right here?
ADULT:
Okay. Where does the flower go?
CHILD:
Right there.
ADULT:
Okay, let's play the shape game. Here's a truck. Where does it go in the shape game?
CHILD:
Right there.
ADULT:
Okay. Max in the shape game where do the blue trucks go?
CHILD:
Right there.
ADULT:
Okay, where do the red flowers go?
CHILD:
Right there.
ADULT:
Okay, let's play the shape game. Here's a blue truck. Where does it go in the shape game? Okay.
VIDEO ENDS
PROFESSOR JOHN SPENCER:
Alright. Great. So you can see Max is trying really hard, and he's really good at some things. He's generally sitting in his chair. He's attending to the experimenter. He knows his colours. He knows his shapes. He's getting good at putting the cards in the trays with the right orientation. He knows something about the words colour and the word shape. But once the rules of the game change from the colour game and what we call the pre switch phase to the shape game and what we call the post switch phase, he can't quite wrap his head around the key rules of the game. When you play the shape game only shape matters and you're supposed to ignore colour. And of course, the problem is he's got himself stuck on colours.
I think this task maps pretty nicely on to daily experience. How many times a day do kids have to keep one set of rules in mind? The rules of storytime. And then switch gears to recall a new set of rules for playtime, and then switch gears again to follow a new set of rules for snack time. As you've all undoubtedly experienced, three and four year olds have a hard time pulling all of this together. And this is reflected in data from this card sorting task. Along the bottom axis here, you can see age from three years of age up to 15 years of age. And the vertical axis is performance in this card sorting task. All you need to know is that bigger numbers are better performance. As you can see, three and four year olds find this type of task really hard. And there's rapid development by five years of age with pretty gradual change thereafter. Now, importantly, individual differences between kids and this early window matter. Kids who have better executive functions in this window tend to do better in school, in both maths and reading competence. Later in life. Indeed, having good executive functions in this early window can give you a boost that can last up to three decades later. Predicting career and marriage satisfaction and positive mental and physical health. Reversely kids who are behind the curve in this early window with poor executive functions have worse health, earn less and commit more crimes up to 30 years later.
These data lead to two important questions. First, what is changing in the brain during this critical window of development? And second, how can we facilitate these brain changes to boost executive functions? After all, if we could boost executive functions in this early window, data suggest that might have a three decades long consequence. At the level of the brain, the frontal cortex plays a special role in self-regulating, directing selective attention to some features of the world over others, preventing distractions and maintaining task or content relevant goals.
The image on the right there, gives you the picture we settled on in the neuroscience field. It looks like the frontal cortex captured by that blue circle in the front part of the brain, directs attention, calls attention to certain features of the world by sending signals to other parts of the brain. So, for example, the frontal cortex, that blue circle might send signals to the purple circle in the parietal cortex to highlight specific locations in the world that are important for the task. Or the frontal cortex, again, that blue circle might send signals to the green and yellow circles on the side of the brain to highlight particular features. Like you might have to do in that colour and shape game. The role of the frontal cortex is nicely demonstrated by brain imaging data, as children play the card sorting game, as shown in the next slide.
This is a study by Moriguchi and Hiraki from 2009. They brought in a bunch of 3 to 5 year old children and had them play that card sorting game you saw Max play, while they measured the frontal cortex. You can see the child's wearing a little brain cap on the forehead. Some children spontaneously did well on the task. Others got stuck on the first rule. They perseverated, meaning they continued to sort by colour. Even when we switched to the shape game. Now, what was interesting was the brain activity. Here I'm showing you the brain activity for three groups of kids. Okay, to orient you need my pointer on this one. There we go. This is the x axis here. The horizontal axis is the time axis. The vertical bar is the start of that post switch phase. When we switch the rules. The dash line is when they started sorting cards and the the solid line at the end is the end of the task. Now, what you need to know to interpret the results is that on the vertical axis, bigger numbers mean more intense brain activity and negative numbers mean basically a suppression or absence of brain activity.
Now you're seeing data from three groups in this slide. The first group is the blue line. These are five year olds who we would expect to succeed in the task. So when we switch to the shape game those kids should successfully sort by shape. And they did. And what you can see is a nice robust response from the frontal cortex for these five year olds. The really interesting thing is with the three year olds data, some of the kids successfully switched when they were playing the shape game. They actually successfully sorted by shape. That's the red line. And those three year olds showed a mature frontal cortex response. That contrast with the green line, which are the three year olds who perseverated. They continue to sort by colour, and you can see the absence of frontal activation for these kids. So children who can switch rules show activation of the frontal cortex and young children who were perseverated did not. So in response to our question, what is changing in the brain as executive functions change? We know that frontal cortex activation is a key piece of the puzzle.
Now let's turn to that second question. How might we facilitate frontal cortex activation to boost executive functions? Unfortunately, the prior study didn't explain how to do this. For that, we're going to turn to a study from my lab group which looked at one possible answer to this question. We know that children are sensitive to scaffolding or supports from the world that help them attend to the right aspects of the situation at the right time. I suspect you're all really familiar with the concept of scaffolding, as you probably use this all the time in your classrooms. For instance, you might know that several children in the class are having trouble listening to stories during story time, and they keep talking to one another. So you might you might use a picture of an ear that they should hold for these children as a visual reminder that they need to listen. Given there are lots of real world examples of how scaffolding helps kids self-regulate, we asked a simple question in my lab is the brain sensitive to scaffolding too?
To examine this question, we created a way to help scaffold children's performance in that card sorting task. Here's the standard version of the task. You've got at the top there the trays that indicate what they're supposed to sort to which location. Then you've got the cards that they're sorting during that, that pre switch or colour game. And then at the bottom you've got the cards that they're sorting in the post switch or shape game. And what makes this task so hard is that the dimensions conflict. So that means when they're playing the colour game the blue star goes to the left. When they're playing the shape game, the blue star is supposed to go to the right. Okay, so that conflict makes the task really challenging. So what we did to set up an easy version is we modified the cards during the colour or that pre switch game. Now what makes this particular task easy. At least we thought is that shape and colour cooperate during that pre switch phase. So you can see if you look at the top set of cards right here both dimensions cooperate. If the child's playing the colour game blue goes to the left. But circle also goes to the left. And if they're playing the colour game red goes to the right. But star also goes to the right. And then in the post switch phase, you can see we're using the exact same cards as we do in the standard version of the task.
Our question was if we direct attention to the correct features at the correct locations in that pre switch phase, will this help children correctly sort cards when we switch the rules of the game?
And will we see this scaffolding reflected in brain activity. So we brought kids into the lab and used the brain cap to monitor the frontal cortex, which is what I'm going to highlight today. Now, as expected, kids who did well in the task, these are kids who are we call switchers because they switch in that post switch phase. They showed robust frontal brain activity in both the easy which is the dash red line, and the hard, which is the solid red line task. So these kids are like the five year olds from the previous study. They're rock stars when it comes to executive function. They show robust frontal engagement in both versions of the task. Kids who had trouble with the task, which we call perseverators, showed a different pattern. Just like in the previous study. They didn't show frontal activity in the hard task. That's that solid red line at the bottom, which is hovering around zero activation. But in the easy task, it looks like these kids have a mature frontal cortex. The scaffolding not only help them behave in a smart way. It actually changed brain activity. So it looks like they're smart under the hood as well. I think this enhances the way we think about scaffolding. It's not just about changing how kids behave on the surface. It can literally be a driver of changes in the brain. Now, what do these data suggest about this question of how do we support mastery of self-regulation in early development? Here we can roll back to some of the ideas from part one of my talk and think about how the brain works, learns, and develops. I think a key driver of mastery is repetition over many, many experiences that are predictable and repeatable. And to do this in your classrooms requires intentional teaching. You have to think about it in advance.
For instance, ask yourselves what are the rules of behaviour in each context in my classroom? And are you communicating these rules clearly to children? What supports are available to children to attend to these rules? Do those supports direct attention to the right features, in the right context? Are you using these supports reliably and repeatedly? Are you challenging children to self-regulate from within by changing the supports as children improve? And are you doing this consistently across contexts? I can tell you this last bit is a real challenge in the self-regulation literature, because we've been trying to figure out for the last decade or so how children generalise self-regulation across contexts. After all, we want them to learn how to self-regulate in general, not just in one specific situation. And I'm going to return to this challenge in the final section of my talk.
Before turning to the final section, let me just summarise the key points from part two. I've just discussed how self-regulation requires that children selectively attend to specific aspects of the situation. This ability is driven by the frontal cortex, which directs other parts of the brain to attend to specific locations or features in the world. I suggested that scaffolding and easy executive function tasks can support mastery. After many, many experiences that are predictable and repeatable. Children internalise how to direct attention to the right aspects of the world at the right time autonomously or from within. Finally, I highlighted that a key challenge here is generalisation. How to encourage mastery across different contexts.
Alright.
Let's move on to part three. What can early childhood teachers and educators do to positively shape self-regulation and brain development trajectories? When I was thinking about this question, I was looking at studies at brain development, thinking about the research literature on executive function. I also looked at intervention studies that try to boost executive function in practice. From this work, I extracted six ways to boost executive function skills and support brain development that I'd like to share with you today. Now, before I put up the list, I want to acknowledge that this list likely contains things you already do in your classrooms. My hope is that I can place these tools in a richer context, highlighting why you should engage in these activities based on principles of brain development.
The first tool focuses on how to start an interaction with a child by engaging in joint attention. This involves noticing the child serves and returning at the right time. Once you've established joint attention elaborate through language which can help build richer links. Next, use scaffolding and something called autonomy support to help with mastery. I'll talk about this more in a few slides, but this involves attending to the child's pace, offering choices, and letting the child make mistakes.
The next three tools focus on self-regulation mastery across contexts. This involves setting up predictable contexts things like routines that can promote learning and also reduce stress in the classroom. Using repetition with variation to promote flexible learning. And bringing parents into the conversation to support generalisation across contexts. So let's dig into these tools in more detail. The first way to boost self-regulation and support brain development is to engage in joint attention. Simply put, this involves entering into interactions with the child through the child's focus of attention. So when you walk up to a child building a tower with blocks, notice what the child's up to. Is she trying to build a tall tower? A house for the dog? Just exploring. And then join that interactions through their focus. Oh, I see you're building a house for the dog. How fun, can I join? As you interact, if they are interested and you follow in, in this way that can help them sustain attention. Try to engage in well timed returns within that context. Pointing. Gesturing, touching objects. All of these things direct attention and help keep them engaged. For instance, picking up the dog or commenting on the lovely colour of the doghouse helps keep sustained attention focused on the activity and through repetition. This deepens learning and leads to better and better sustained attention, which is, after all, an important skill on its own.
Once you've established joint attention, the next step is to elaborate through language. This is a great idea, a great way to link ideas together. For instance, you could talk about what the dog might eat or where the dog might sleep, or how you have a dog named Daisy at home. There's my dog, Daisy, at home. Using descriptive language and rich serve and return interactions. Helps develop strong language skills and strengthen those language pathways. I showed you earlier in the talk. After all, language input matters. It literally shapes the brain. But it's not just quantity that matters. Quality also matters. Research shows that conversational turns are great for language development, using language returns and asking WH questions. What funny sounds does a dog make? Why do you think dogs like to chase balls? These back and forth exchanges can extend children's language skills, but also link ideas together. Interestingly, a diversity of language input also seems to matter. Here's some recent data from my colleague Lynn Perry at the University of Miami. They tracked the sound complexity of all the language teachers use in a preschool classroom, and the sound complexity of all the language children produced across an entire year. So the teacher's sound diversity is on the bottom axis. The children's sound diversity is on the vertical axis. And as you can see, the more diverse the language of the teachers, the more diverse the sound the more sound diverse the child's language. And interestingly, this relationship held even for the light green dots which track hearing loss, children with hearing loss, and cochlear implants in this classroom. My colleague noted that at the start of the study, many teachers thought they should simplify language for children with hearing loss. But these data show that exposing kids to rich and diverse input is good for all children. And this challenges some intuitive expectations we might have about teaching special needs children. Alright. So now you've entered into an episode with a child through their focus of attention. You're playing you're using language routines and elaborating.
The next tool is to think about how to use scaffolding and something called autonomy support. These are behaviours that support the child's independent problem solving and encourage participation in decisions. Things like taking the child's perspective, respecting the child's pace, giving the child a role in the task, and providing the child with task relevant choices. To illustrate, I'm going to show you a couple of videos. In each video, you're going to see an adult in a child solving a puzzle together. We're going to start with a rich autonomy, supportive interaction.
VIDEO BEGINS
(Video Description: Caregiver sits at a table with a child playing with shapes).
ADULT:
So I think you might be right. It might fit, it might fit better. So if we switch it with the yellow and we just put on. So we have that green. And there's another piece that goes with the green.
CHILD:
These blue ones that’s not the diamond, it’s a square thingy.
ADULT:
It is. It looks like. It looks like the blue. One side is touching the green side and seems to turn it a little bit. What happens if you try that? You touch one blue side to one green side.
CHILD:
We have too many of these.
ADULT:
Yeah...too... How many is this? 1,2,3. *counting* Oh, man. We have one, two on our tray puzzle here. That means we need a lot more. Should we go digging for some squares? lt's only the tricky part. Okay, so we got that space, and it looks like a red piece, but I'm wondering if because all these seem to go the same direction. Maybe we got to change the other red direction. Let’s pull one out and see. And try to put it on there this time and see. Because that way it looks like it's longer on top and shorter What if you flipped it another direction? Maybe that pushed it here and there. It gives us a little more space. Now.
CHILD:
It doesn't look like you're supposed to push outward.
ADULT:
It's not too much, but it looks like this line, these go in line this way, and then these go on like this way. I can notice right now, this one slid off the line why don’t you scoot it over just a little bit more. Now wait a minute. Come over here. Stay on this side.
VIDEO ENDS
PROFESSOR JOHN SPENCER:
Alright, so one of the things that stands out to me most in this video is I think the pace, you know, it's a very easy pace trying to work together to solve this puzzle. In addition, the caregiver is acknowledging that the task is hard, but staying positive is providing hints, directing attention to key features of the puzzle game, and using WH questions like what happens if you try that? Alright, let's look at another interaction that's a bit less supportive as you watch this, I don't want you to judge the parent. She's actually doing quite a good job. You'll see lots of positive tone. The child's on task and so on. Instead, try to pick up on subtle ways in which you could be a little bit more supportive of the child's autonomy. In this video.
VIDEO BEGINS
(Video Description: Caregiver sits at a table with a child playing with shapes).
ADULT:
Now we need the red ones. They go this way. See there’s a space between those two. So we need to make sure we get the space in between. So like that. And then this one goes in the front.
CHILD:
They go on the sides?
ADULT:
Yeah. One more. No, it goes over here. Now the squares.
CHILD:
This is what I we need.
ADULT:
They want to move around a lot, don't they? So there's one, two, three, four, five squares. That's four, that’s five. 1,2.3 over here. And two. Right. And so now we have to put this one in between those two. This one has to go right there in between. So it's kind of over the crack. And this one goes right on top of those two. Right. So that would be on top too. And then this one goes right there. Now you need this cool rough thing. This one goes on top of that one. Oh yeah I bet you recognise, probably - Choo choo. You can add this one to the end of this line. Yeah. Right there. We are So close. Let's see. With the green triangle in between. So this way. And here's your green triangle. There you go. Here I’ll add these and you put at the green triangle...
VIDEO ENDS
PROFESSOR JOHN SPENCER:
Okay. So as you can see in this example the caregiver is a bit more directive, a bit more hands on, less sensitive to the child’s pace. And not always letting the child choose and make their own corrections. But again, there's lots of positives here. But what I want to emphasise is that research shows that the subtle details across these two videos matter. Children who receive less autonomy support tend to have weaker self-regulatory skills later in development.
Now that I've explained a little bit about the concept of autonomy support, I want to highlight that recent research suggests that offering choices to children may be quite important to self-regulation skills, so children who are routinely offered choices in daily tasks develop stronger executive function skills. We could ask why? Choices give children practice with guiding their own behaviour from within. Having choices to make can give children a sense of agency and control, and they can also reflect on the consequences of their choices, helping them hopefully to make better choices in the future.
Alright, so as I mentioned previously, the first three tools on my list focus on the quality of social interactions with children. Let's now turn to the last three tools which focus on how to achieve self-regulation mastery across contexts.
Two and four is to set up predictable contexts. Here I'm referring to what happens within each context. Are the rules of behaviour clear? Are there well structured activities? Is the atmosphere secure and welcoming? This type of predictability within story time, within playtime, within snack time is critical to learning a predictable routine and a secure atmosphere reduce stress on children. And when they feel safe, children's brains can focus on learning new things and forming new links. In addition, it's important to set up predictable consequence as you move from context to context. Does the class have a stable routine? Are transitions from one activity to the next predictable, with good scaffolding to help children self-regulate. Predictable transitions can support key self-regulation skills. As children switch from the rules of one context to the rules of the next.
The fifth tool is to use repetition with variation. While routine is great, repetition with variation can help promote learning and mastery of self-regulation. For instance, think back to my word learning example from earlier in the talk. Seeing the bosa in those two different contexts was what allowed you to figure out that the bosa was the green object. It's the same with kids. When you read a funny book together at storytime and they can laugh together. But then the next day you read a sad story and they could share their emotions. They're learning that stories connect with us in different ways, and that sharing emotions makes us feel connected to one another. But they're also learning that sometimes it's okay to talk during storytime, but you need to take turns. Or sometimes it's okay to laugh during storytime, but you have to settle back down and listen. All of these are great examples of how social interactions and self-regulation involve complex and layered rules that can only be learned through these types of variation. In short variations can help children figure out what to attend to in each situation, especially when the rules of the context are flexible.
The final tool to boost executive functions is to bring parents in to support generalisation across contexts. As I mentioned earlier, a big challenge in trying to boost self regulatory skills in early development has been to promote self-regulation across contexts. Some children are great on the playground, but they still struggle during storytime. Other children have storytime down but struggle during free play. To promote mastery of skills that generalise over contexts it can be useful to involve parents in the journey. Share what you're working on. How are you helping the children flex their self-regulatory muscles? Remember, you only have them for part of the day, so to develop expertise, they need to practice at home too. And this can help children figure out how to self-regulate in many different contexts and support that generalisation.
Alright. That concludes the tour of my six tools, which can help boost executive function and brain development. Again, I suspect many of you are already using these tools in your classrooms, but I hope I helped to clarify why you should engage in these activities based on principles of brain development. And with that, I'm going to conclude my presentation. I'd like to thank the families who contributed to the work I highlighted, my collaborators and the funding agencies listed above. And most importantly, I'd like to thank you for your attention. You've been a wonderful audience and I look forward to hearing your thoughts and any questions you might have.
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