Reflections on Learning and the Brain 2022 - Kids Who Can't Start

My raw notes are posted earlier on this blog, but they don't do much for me unless I mush it all together in my head to summarize and synthesize.  With that in mind, the next few posts will be my own reflections of some sessions.  This one is from a session with Dr. Jessica Minahan.  Warning:  This is a long post.

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Do you have a student who just can't seem to get started working?  A student with emotional regulation issues?  One who reacts weirdly when you ask them to do something you think is minor and reasonable?  If that student is dealing with high anxiety, acute depression, or trauma, there may be a reason for all of this.  Those things are interfering with their working memory, which is needed, not only for the acquisition of information but also for remembering the strategies they would normally use for coping with small stressors.  And it will also interfere with their ability to initiate any kind of work.  

Let me start by telling a story about a mistake I made.  In my class, we do a fair amount of retrieval practice using something I call the BBQ (big basket of questions).  I do it a number of different ways, but on this particular morning, I was calling on students by calling their names from a pile of popsicle sticks.  When I do this, a student cannot just say, "I don't know" and expect me to move on.  If allowed that, I would get seven "I don't knows" in a row.  We talk about the purpose of retrieval and why it is beneficial even if you are wrong.  I've done all the setup to create a culture of trying, so this isn't just a mean rule.  On this day, I called on a young lady whose first language is not English (although she has lived here for several years and speaks very good English).  She said, "I don't know" to which I replied with a smile, "You know you have to guess."  She completely froze up and couldn't give me any answer.  Her mother contacted me later to tell me that, at that moment, she was so stressed, she couldn't figure out how to say anything in English.  I now have better strategies for a moment like this (thanks to the Craig Barton Tips for Teachers podcast).  I can ask someone else and return to the original student to say, "Can you summarize what he said?" or "Do you agree with that?" or ask them another question to avoid the presumption that you are off the hook if you say you don't know.  At that time, I did not yet have those strategies, so I unnecessarily stressed this girl.  (Fortunately, I had a good relationship with both her and her mom, so we moved forward without difficulty.) This is an example of how stress causing a decrease in working memory can prevent a student from even starting to answer.

Dr. Jessica Minahan is a behavior analyst who conducts interventions in schools.  She is also a wealth of ideas that would work with any student, and I will look forward to reading her book, The Behavior Code.  She used an interesting metaphor to exemplify why some students react differently than others to the same stimulus - soda bottles.  If you came into a room where there were two soda bottles, and you opened one without incident but opened the other with an eruption, you would know that something had happened to the second bottle.  You didn't do anything different by opening them, but one reacted differently because of its past.    Sometimes, a minor comment or instruction might be fine for one student but cause another to erupt.  It's a "soda bottle" moment, triggered by your requestion combined with whatever has happened to them.  

This session was, specifically, about how to get them over the inertia of starting an activity.  Many teachers were trained in the use of incentives, punishments, rewards, moving a clip down a chart, or a million other motivational techniques.  Those may increase motivation, but they do not teach a skill.  If I can't do something (or believe I can't do it), it doesn't matter what the incentive is.  If you offer me ten thousand dollars to only speak French for a week, I'll be highly motivated, but I won't know how to speak French.  Adding another zero won't even help.  Punishing me for not doing it won't teach me French either.  You just can't start with a skill you don't have.

Perhaps you have the skill, but there is something preventing you from believing you have it.  Kids who struggle with anxiety and depression sometimes have distorted perceptions of reality.  They get rattled by the stressor and their amygdala says, "Don't even worry about passing this into your prefrontal cortex; just get out of here."  If you have one of these students, it is worth your time to learn about their perceptions of pretty normal requests.  

• If you tell them to do something while standing across the room, they perceive you as trying to embarrass them in public.
• If you walk straight at them while repeating a request, they sense danger.
• If you stand in front of their desk looking down at them while making a request, they find you threatening.
• Public praise makes them super uncomfortable, and they will do the opposite of what you ask to avoid it.

If you can figure out how to make your requests to these students non-verbal, you will get much better results.  Mime taking off the hat.  Squat down next to their desk, so you can talk quietly to them while not making direct eye contact.  When you want to praise them, write it on a post-it, drop it on their desk, and walk away.  Use gentler words, like "pause" rather than "stop."    

Whenever possible, give the rationale before your request BEFORE the request.  For example, modify a request from, "Move your backpack.  I'm going to trip over it." to "I don't want to trip, could you move your backpack?"  Some limited choice is also a powerful way to bring down their amygdala activity, so you could say, "Hey, I don't want to trip.  Would you rather move your backpack to this spot or that spot?"  All of these are the same request, but you will get better results from the less demanding ones.

Because stress reduces working memory, some of them may have trouble interpreting your instructions, making it difficult to initiate action.  It may be helpful to write instructions on the board or project them on a slide.  Even better, use a photograph to show what you mean.  Instead of repeating, "take out your calculator and pencil and math journal" over and over as kids enter the room, you can project a photograph of a calculator, a pencil, and a notebook with the words "time for math journals."  This won't just help those with anxiety; it will also help English language learners, students with processing disorders, kids with ADHD, and pretty much everyone because words are more powerful in memory when paired with pictures (dual coding), so eventually you could fade out the explanation and just have the cue "Math journals" because the picture will be in their mind.

Sometimes students say, "I don't understand" when all they really want is reassurance.  This is a type of inaccurate thought that should be a yellow flag for you.  Your natural instinct to rescue them will not help them learn to recognize it for themselves.  Don't become their pre-frontal cortex.  Ask a few questions to find out if they do understand, and if you have deemed that they probably do, ask them, "Do you need help or do you just want to check in?"  Often, that's all it takes for them to realize that is what they are doing, and you can say, "From now on, you can just say you want to check in."  They may need to repeat directions to you just to reassure themselves that they heard you correctly.  I had a student many years ago who routinely stopped me about halfway through lessons to say, "I don't understand" and then proceed to summarize my lesson perfectly.  One day, I said, "It seems to me you do understand and you just need to hear yourself say it."  She agreed that was probably true, so I said, "You're welcome to keep doing it (everyone was getting taught twice!), but just leave off the part about not understanding it."  I hope it taught her that she was more skilled than she thought.

Another form of inaccurate thought is "all or nothing" thinking.  Watch this sequence from Patricia Heaton on Who Wants to Be A Millionaire.  Aside from Regis being more patient than I have ever seen a game show host with anyone, notice that it takes her less than half a second to decide she cannot answer this question.  She could have eliminated 90 pennies without doing any math, but her brain was telling her she couldn't do anything with numbers.  Regis does exactly what every teacher should do - start with the easiest thing and show them that they can do it.  Again, our job is not to become their surrogate prefrontal cortex, it is to calm their amygdala down enough to allow the thoughts to get to their prefrontal cortex.  Getting them to recognize that they can do any part of the task will help break them from the idea that it is all or nothing.

Writers sometimes talk about "blank page syndrome," and I've seen it in yearbook students as well.  It can be hard to start something completely out of nothing.  You can have trouble overcoming the inertia, and it can feel vaguely threatening.  The idea of continuing is much less intimidating than starting, so one thing that may be helpful when doing a list of problems or sentences is to do the first problem together as a class and then begin the second problem and say to the class, "continue."  

It is also important to give students strategies for what to do when they get stuck.  We, as teachers, have been bad in the past about using vague instructions, like "Try your best" or "concentrate" rather than teaching them skills or jumping in to rescue them ourselves.  You can try other things that they can use in all classes, not just yours.

• When a student needs help, pretend you aren't as smart as you are.  Say something like, "Why do you think you're stuck?"  If they say they don't understand a word, slowly repeat, "Hmm.  You don't understand the word." They will likely come to the conclusion on their own, "I guess I can look it up."
• Teach them to chunk a big thing into parts.  Often, we do that FOR them, but if we take the time to do it WITH them, we give them the tools to apply it elsewhere.
• Pair a negative with a positive.  The example she gave was a class in which the students didn't like writing because they thought it was hard.  The teacher had students sit on pillows while they wrote and would introduce it with, "Let's get comfy. It's time to write."  One day, a student came to the teacher and said, "Can write today?  My back hurts."
• Chunk time, not just process.  You can say, "We will work on this for three minutes."  At the end of three minutes, ask them to pause their work and then say, "Continue."
• Allow students to practice on whiteboards.  I've been confused about why kids prefer them until very recently, when someone on Twitter quoted one of their students saying, "Mistakes don't feel permanent with these."  At the conference, Dr. Minahan asked us to recall a time when we saw a student erase a mistake until they erased a hole in their paper.  You have to really have some hatred for a mistake to want to obliterate it that way.  With a whiteboard, you can easily wipe the mistake away.
• I love crossing things off of lists.  Part of that is the sense of satisfaction and completion, but for the kid who has trouble with perseverance, it also shows them a diminishing amount of things left to do.  Consider including a way for students to check off what they've completed.  This could be a list for them to cross off, boxes for checkmarks next to their problems, or a rectangle divided into the number of boxes you have problems (students can fill in a box after completing each problem, and it will remind them of an internet downloading bar - she said she started hearing kids use language like "well, we only have three left" when she implemented this strategy.
• Make a poster of a variety of strategies for your classroom with ways to get around getting stuck.  You can refer to it or tell kids to refer to it when they get stuck.

Overcoming inertia is hard for everyone, so it is easy to empathize with students when they have it.  Share that with them, tell them ways in which you address it, and teach them strategies to overcome it.  It will help them in more than just your class.