Time For Revision

Welcome back to our Newsletters for 2022.  It has been a long journey from our first offering in March of 2017 up until the end of last year, December 2021.  In that time we have published 186 free editions.  A lot has changed over these years, some dramatic and sequential such as the impact of COVID and others gradual and progressive like the emergence of the punitive demand for accountability.  The first exacerbation, the pandemic is a problem shared across the community including the unfair increase in teachers’ workload that is a burden placed on a single part of our community; the teachers.  So, we go into a new year with teachers being subjected to even more pressure without any significant increase in assistance.

 

One major demand on teachers that was there before the pandemic and has been there since the beginning of organised education is the management of classroom behaviour.  Helping teachers address this issue has underpinned all of our work and it will continue to be that way.  I believe it is time we reflected on the work we have done, revisit crucial issues and create, if you like a second edition of many of the significant subjects integrating new material.  In this essay we will examine the benefits of having a calm and safe classroom.

 

The brain is at the heart of all behaviour, if not the brain than what?  Our approach accepts the thesis proposed by Richard Dawkins in his seminal work the Selfish Gene and that is our fundamental drive in life is to survive and reproduce. To survive requires an optimal set of environmental conditions that support life.  These conditions allow us to maintain our body in a steady state of internal biological, physical, social and intellectual equilibrium a condition referred to as homeostasis.  When the perceived conditions of the external environment will not satisfy our needs we are in a state of disequilibrium.  When we are in this state our cognitive energy focuses on behaving in a way to return to equilibrium. 

 

We have what is referred to as a triune brain, that is three levels that have developed sequentially over time.  The first is the brain stem and mid brain, often referred to as the reptilian brain.  This is the area that deals with our biological and physical demands.  Things like heart-beat, blood pressure, balance and other body motions (see illustration below).

 

 

The next level to emerge is the limbic system; that area of the brain that attends to our social needs and consequentially our emotional status.  The development of this area of our brain occurred when, as a species we appreciated the advantage working in groups provided for each individual.  Much of our work will focus on this social brain but for this particular paper we will explain the impediment for learning outcomes that result from the limbic system being in a state of disequilibrium or homeostatic disequilibrium.

 

The last stage of our cognitive development occurred when we realised the advantage that could be experienced when we used tools.  This was the start of the development of our intellectual brain or our cerebral cortex including the important prefrontal lobes.  How far we have come as a species is reflected in the types of tools we use today.  We have come from using early stone tools to things like the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) which is the world's largest energy particle collider that measures minute sun-atomic particles.  The fact we have evolved to this level is a tribute to the advances in our thinking and we owe all of this to our ability to educate the next generation. 

 

The development of this area of the brain has been so significant the additional neural material required increased the volume of the brain to such an extent it no longer fitted in our skull.  This accounts for the cerebral cortex being folded, providing a greater surface area in the confined volume of our head.

 

It is this part of the brain we are interested in as teachers however, we can only optimise our access to this if the other areas are in homeostasis.  We use all our brain all the time, for instance we require oxygen to breathe and about every 30 seconds or so we need to refresh the supply of air to our lungs.  This requires cognitive energy albeit at the unconscious level.  The thing is that if we want to maximise our access to the student’s intellectual brain we need to minimise the demands from our physical/biological and social brain.  The sum total of all our cognitive energy can be described as a percentage, the more of that percentage is accessible to our cerebral cortex the more efficient our learning will be.  The illustration below explains this circumstance.

 

 

It can be seen that only when the physical, biological and social needs are not too demanding then we have a greater access to that part of the brain needed for academic learning.  We have evolved to pay attention to intellectual problems when we feel safe.

 

There is plenty of evidence that dysfunctional behaviours in the classroom is the greatest impediment to learning.  John Hattie identifies their presence and the environment in the classroom as two of the top three impediments to learning.  There is an obvious close relationship between classroom environment and the presence of these students and combined they would constitute the leading cause of student failure in our system.  This is a condition where the social demands rob the intellectual potential.  We all understand how that disruptive student commands the attention of the teacher and the other students.

 

In any case, collectively or alone these factors have been identified as more significant than the quality of the teacher yet the focus on learning improvement is completely focused on the latter element.  If you take the Australian Professional Standards for Teachers as an indicator of how the Department accepts these findings, a superficial look at these might suggest that there is a recognition that the child’s physical, social and intellectual development and characteristics of students are considered.  For example, in Professional Knowledge the Requirements - the following guiding principles are given beginning with the basic level:

• Standard 1.1 ‘Know Students and How They Learn’ you get:

• Physical, social and intellectual development and characteristics of students
• Demonstrate knowledge and understanding of physical, social and intellectual development and characteristics of students and how these may affect learning.

But if you examine the Professional Engagement, the top level of knowledge required you get:

• 6.1 Identify and plan professional learning needs:
  • Demonstrate an understanding of the role of the Australian Professional Standards for Teachers in identifying professional learning needs
  • Demonstrate an understanding of the role of the Australian Professional Standards for Teachers in identifying professional learning needs

 

• 7.1 Meet professional ethics and responsibilities:
  • Understand and apply the key principles described in codes of ethics and conduct for the teaching profession.

No where is the issue of managing severely disrupted students even acknowledged as a ‘professional requirement’.  Any beginning teacher and most of their experienced colleagues will cite the issue of behaviour management as one of the major impediments to the maximisation of their teaching and their student’s learning. 

I hope this Newsletter sets the scene for upcoming papers that focus on approaches that will allow students to learn in a calm and secure environment.

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