Last week I had the pleasure to attend the 2015 Learning and the Brain Conference in Boston, MA. I met a variety of experts in the fields of education, neuroscience, medicine, and psychology and heard keynote speeches by some of the most well-know researchers and leaders in the fields of neuroscience and character.
I arrived on Thursday morning and was able to meet two of my former students, Charlie and Enzo, at Lesley University. It was great to see these two young men on their campus and to hear about their freshman year at college. We were only able to spend about an hour together but it was fun to hang out for a little while and to see their school.
My Learning and the Brain experience started Thursday afternoon at MIT's Athinoula A. Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging at the McGovern Institute for Brain Research. Small groups of participants were invited to watch someone have an fMRI done on their brain to watch it "light up" while doing a task. I was so lucky to be selected as the test subject (the first two people selected weren't there!). I have never had an fMRI done, but I have had a few MRIs done of my head so I wasn't too nervous to be in the narrow tube. The researchers first did a six minute scan of my brain to gather a baseline image. Next I was shown a screen that flashed eitheir "right hand" or "left hand." I was told to tap my fingers to my thumb of the hand indicated. I followed this procedure for six minutes and had to switch hands about every 30 seconds. At the end of the scan I was able to see my brain images and was given an entire CD of my brain images.
It's pretty amazing how clearly you can see my cerebellum! The green and blue area at the top of my head indicates the part of my brain that was active during the finger tapping task. If I had been wiggling my toes instead of tapping my foot a different part of the brain would have been lit up; this part corresponds to the motor control of my fingers as opposed to the part of the brain that controls the motor function of my toes. Of course we all wondered why that part of the brain lit up since there were all sorts of other thoughts running through my mind during the task and the brain is always active in many ways. How did the fMRI scanner know what to focus on and what to light up? I'm sure it is all much more complicated that my explanation, but basically the scanner takes constant images and it is looking for the part of the brain that is making a consistent change every 30 seconds. I moved one hand for 30 seconds and then the other hand for 30 seconds so it could "see" or find this difference in the scans. It was absolutely fascinating to see my own brain and to learn more about the process of fMRI imaging. My group left with more questions than before we arrived, but we also had many questions answered. We all agreed we would love to see a task and the corresponding images that involved emotion, but that would take much longer. The scientists at MIT couldn't have been kinder or more patient with us and I am very grateful to have had the experience.
Friday morning I participated in the pre-conference session that focused on Teens and Executive Functions. Peg Dawson and Richard Guare, authors of Smart but Scattered and recognized experts on executive function, led the session. I was familiar with most of their strategies for improving executive functions, but I was very interested in their outline of how the executive functions develop. They identified eleven areas of executive function. One of the earliest skills to develop is response inhibition. The ability to stop and wait can emerge as early as seven months. In fact, Sesame Street has a great clip we watched later in the conference about the ability to delay gratification. The video even teaches kids strategies to use when feeling impulsive!
Other executive function skills, like goal directed persistence, don't develop well into the teenage years or beyond. This ability to set a goal, hold it in mind, make a plan, stick with it and not get distracted is very difficult, especially when the goal is far down the road. It requires other earlier developed executive function skills like working memory, task initiation, planning and sustained attention. That's why it's so hard to convince a high school sophomore that he should do his biology homework because colleges will see those grades. We also had the opportunity to do a survey on our own executive skills and I was not surprised to find out that task initiation is my weakest skill. This is the skill needed to get something started. This is why I am always rushing around to the dorms on the day SAT registration is due to make sure I checked in with everyone and have them registered and why I usually wait until the last minute to print out the e-tickets to a show/train/flight (and then find out the printer isn't working and end up scrambling at the last minute). The good news, however, is that even for professional adults it is the weakest executive skill. I'm in good company!
Drs. Dawson and Guarre gave us a variety of classroom, school and home strategies to help students develop the executive skills they will need. More information can be found on their website.
The rest of Friday afternoon was filled with four keynote speakers focused on the science of character (this year's conference theme). Dr. Bauermeister began the afternoon by talking about the history of character education. He explained that in recent years educators and psychologists were focused on raising students' self-esteem with the belief that this would also raise their achievement. Well, now we have a lot of kids that feel really great about themselves (and, in fact, some that have become all too full of themselves) but achievement hasn't risen in connection to higher self-esteem. On the other hand, self-control has show to positively predict outcomes. Self-control is the ability to regulate one's behavior in order to have control over the outcomes. Self-control is made of three ingredients: the commitment to standards, the ability to monitor one's progress towards a goal, and willpower, or the capacity to make changes to yourself. This talk led brilliantly into Dr. Mischel's talk about the Marshmallow Test. Dr. Mischel started using the marshmallow test in his lab almost 40 years ago when he told young children that they could eat one marshmallow immediately or wait until the adult returned and then could eat two marshmallows. This task of self-control and the ability to delay gratification has been studied, cited, and repeated many times. Just like Cookie Monster used different strategies to wait for the cookie, young children presented evidence of using these same strategies: distract themselves, put distance between themselves and the desired object, or give themselves instructions like pretending it is a picture (self-talk). The ability to delay gratification as a young child had some predictive effects into adulthood such as higher SAT scores, lower BMI and differences in fMRI scans at ages 40-45. Mischel argues that the ability to delay gratification does not only predict future skills but also protects students from future negative behaviors. Those that exhibit self-control are able to better resist acting out behaviors, overeating and agressive responses.
I spent much of Saturday listening to Dr. Ken Ginsburg from Philadelphia. He was an engaging speaker that walked all over the stage and room, climbed on chairs, jumped around and involved the audience. He was focused on building resilience in teenagers, a task I face every day. Dr. Ginsburg works with teens that have experienced homelessness, food insecurity, violence, and abuse. While most of my students have luckily not had those experiences, many of my students have suffered from intense bullying, school failure, and academic struggles. They need to build resilience in order to face each school day and to reach their goals. He emphasized the need to have positive adults in their lives in order to build that resilience. Teenagers need help in processing stressful situations and they need adults to help them know when bad things are temporary. Adults have to stop the lecturing and start having conversations with kids where they can learn. Adults also have to learn, when working with kids, what is about them and what is not. Through all of Dr. Ginsburg's talks, all the research and work he has done, his final message was that the only thing that heals kids from trauma is love! It was an amazing message to hear after looking at all this data and interventions and ways to try to "fix" kids that are "broken." Yet here was a medical doctor that said the bottom line is that teenagers need to be loved. At times they can be some of the most unloveable people around, but that is what they most need. We need to stop asking the question "what is wrong with you?" and starting asking "what happened to you?" He ended his talk on Saturday afternoon reminding everyone in the room, the caretakers of these vulnerable young people, that we can do nothing if we don't take care of ourselves first. It was such a refreshing message and came at such an ideal time for me that I was so energized by listening to him and thinking about what he had to say.
By Sunday I was feeling pretty exhausted and overloaded with information it was hard for me to absorb much more. I had seen countless pictures of adolescent brains by then, had my fill of gray matter and white matter of the brain and couldn't fathom listening to another talk on resilience. I decided to step out of my usual comfort zone of teenagers with learning disabilities and went to a talk about the stressors of social media and I'm so glad I did! I had the pleasure of listening to Emily Weinstein's talk on her current research on teenagers' use of social media and was so intrigued. I was able to have some more conversations with her throughout the past week. There is some good stuff that will come out of these talks but that is for another time. Stay tuned and maybe you'll get a peek at what I'll be doing at Marvelwood in December!