Teach42

Time to boogie on down the road. Next stop is Wellness. She started off saying that this section was just put in to remind us that as much as we need to take care of our students, we also need to take care of ourselves. A bit of talking about diet, food allergies and intolerances and such.

That was a really quick session and to be honest, it was just a typical health presentation. The usual. Nothing really new, nothing really significant. I just don’t get the feeling like it has too much to do with the SMART program, short of keeping in mind that if a child isn’t well nourished, then it may contribute to problems they’re having in school. It isn’t really apparent how this fits into the rest of the program. Almost seems like filler. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying this because I don’t think this stuff is valuable. There’s no question that it’s valuable. But learning about looking both ways before crossing the street is also valuable and we aren’t talking about that. Positive reinforcement vs. negative reinforcement is valuable to discuss, but it doesn’t have a place here either. I guess my point is, if it doesn’t directly tie in to the rest of the program, then why are we spending 45 minutes on it?

Am I just overly critical or a complainer? Sometimes I think I am. I do tend to criticize things quite often. The first thing I do upon leaving a movie is point out every part of it that I had an issue with. I suppose I just have very high expectations for how things should be and if something doesn’t meet my expectations I tend to share that observation.

Onwards yet again. This time we’re getting into NeuroTechnology! I’ve been waiting for this one. Just sounds like a good topic to me. Yes, I’m judging the book by its cover. Not a good start though. She’s started off by saying that some students don’t get ‘fixed’ by SMART and this is a way to address them. Once again, I’m going to jump to a conclusion and say that offhand it sounds like filler. I hope not.

“NeuroTechnology may improve the symptoms associated with an unregulated brain such as : behavior challenges, inattention, hyperactivity, depression, sleep problems, impulsivity, headaches, etc…”

NT basically gets the brain in shape. It’s brain exercise. Can relax the state of mind, improve academics and possibly even athletic performance.

All brain waves are always available, but certain ones are more predominant depending on activity. Children often have high theta brain waves, sleepy drowsy ones. It causes kids to seek stimulation because they’re trying to wake up that part of the brain.

There’s good stress and bad stress. Good stress occurs during sports, complex mental tasks, performances and public speaking. Harmful stress occurs with over stimulation, anxiety, fear, inadequate diets, allergies and overwhelming concerns.

Side note, this presenter is reading her notes most of the time. A few times, she’s gone off her notes and just talked. When she does, she’s actually quite a good presenter. She has a great personality and it shows through, very dynamic. However, when she’s reading her notes she becomes dry and almost boring. Right now there’s a full paragraph on the screen. If that wasn’t bad enough, she’s actually reading the entire paragraph. What’s even worse than that is that I’ve seen it before in an email that friends have forwarded to me on a few occasions. Do a search for “email cow dolphin stress” and you’ll find it I’m sure. I’d provide a link but I have no wifi.

Back to the presentation, there are two tools used in NeuroTechnology primarily. The first is EEG Neurofeedback. A person wears two sensors on their head and two on their ears. They’re like microphones for listening to raw electrical activity in the brain. The person seems an image or a game, where the person is rewarded when they reduce theta waves. In other words, when the person is zoning out, the game stops. When they’re active and in the optimal thinking zone, the game moves forward.

The other tool is AVE, Audio Visual Entrainment. It’s portable, basically a set of glasses and headphones. The audio is relaxing music and variable heartbeats. The visual is pulsing lights inside glasses. Entrainment sounds like it’s basically a zone that you get into, like when you stare into a fire for quite a while, or someone is so into a TV show that they block out external stimuli. So we have a device that flickers lights and plays music, and a person is supposed to veg out and just absorb this for twenty minutes. Hmm… Sounds suspiciously like the way I spent the better part of my undergrad years! Pink Floyd and a lava lamp just might be an AVE! But seriously folks…

Sounds like the audio is not just music, but may have academic content as well. Test answers, Spanish words, vocabulary and so on. Sounds like hypnotic learning of sorts. She’s saying that you can use this to alleviate test anxiety. Put the device on, and imagine yourself getting ready to take a test. Then imagine how you want to feel while you’re doing it. Run that through your head again and again. Then when you go to actually take a test, you’ll put yourself in that same frame of mind. This really does sound a lot like self-hypnosis. I wonder if there have been any studies that compare this device to actual hypnotherapy. I’d also be REALLY curious to see how it would compare to Pink Floyd and a lava lamp. Totally serious, I wonder if it would have a similar effect.

This also vaguely reminds me of that headphone device that I blogged about some months back, just without the visual. Basically they’re both trying to use audio stimulation to influence brain waves.

Once again, this seems to have little to do with the SMART program directly. I really hope we come back to this at some point in the workshop. If we don’t, then this afternoon was largely a disappointment. Not that the information wasn’t interesting, but it just doesn’t seem to apply to what we’re here to learn! I hope I’m wrong. If I do, I will issue an apology and retraction, highlighted and bolded!

New session. We’re on Learning Styles now. We’re taking a look at the different preferences that people have when they’re learning, such as learners who prefer sound vs. those who prefer quiet, those who prefer bright lights to dim lighting, warm vs. cold, and so on. Same thing goes for emotional elements. Some students are motivated, persistent and responsible. Those students have different needs than other students without those characteristitcs.

This is going to drive me nuts. There is an obvious problem with the remote control that the presenters are using to go through their power point presentation. After every slide, they either go way too far forward or backwards. They are standing no more than seven feet away from the laptop that they are using the remote control on! However, instead of simply walking up to the computer and hitting the space bar, they keep trying to use the remote again and again and again. End result? After every slide we have a 1 minute frustration break as the presenter goes all the way back to the beginning of the presentation and then tries to find their place again. Another member of the team finally walked up to try to help and I thought she was going to just click on the laptop for him, but instead she’s trying to use the remote control too! Same result! And a USB mouse is about a foot in front of her on the table. Which is more rude, me knowing that they can just use the mouse or arrow keys and not speaking up or interrupting the presentation to show them how to use their own technology? I’m choosing to just let them do what they’re doing and being passive aggressive by writing about it here. Personality flaw? Perhaps. Subject for another day. For the record, my guess is that the battery is going on the remote.

Ok, back to the presentation (I think I missed four or five slides). We’re still talking about different learning styles that students have. He’s saying that some students need to be eating, drinking or chewing while learning. That stimulation does help some students. I chew on pens constantly or shake a leg. Perhaps if I chewed gum, it would help to release some of the energy I have.

More types. Day learners vs. night learners, learners who like to move around vs. those who stay sitting down for hours, global vs. analytic, impulsive vs. reflective, etc.etc. No surprise, I’m very analytic. I like things sequential, step by step. I’m very methodical and a big believer in planning before a project. I’m not very artistic, in some ways I’m not very creative.

Ok, done with Learning Styles. It was chock full of traditional stereotypes. Some people like sitting at a desk, others like lying on a sofa. I would love to see the presentation updated for the 21st century. Some students like going to one web site and reading it through before clicking on a link, others open 15 browser windows and read pieces from each before jumping to the next site. Some prefer reading through the help menu while others like clicking on each function just to see what happens. I think it would be fascinating to update the usual learning styles shtick to take advantage of 21st century skills. I’d be curious to how many variations there really are. Do students have iTunes open? Do they have AIM on? Do they chat with one person or 30 people? Lots to consider along those avenues.

Alright, done with brain basics 101. We’re now moving on to reflexes. These workshops are full day sessions, so I’m going to try to break entries down to specific sessions, but there may be some abrupt switches between entries because of this.

Reflexes control our movements. Obviously we want our students to be in control of their bodies. First the body needs to experience things in order to build a storehouse of knowledge, then the body will be able to apply that learning to situations and use it to perform tasks.

Some skills are automatic (or should be) such as sitting in a chair, handwriting, listening, and so on. But for many students, they aren’t.

Reflexes are god given, “pre-fabricated” movements. Their purpose is to provide a learning experience for the brain. They may not seem like they have an obvious purpose, but they often do. They can be integrated, learned or matured. They become internal, occur automatically.

Most primitive reflexes should be integrated in the first year of life.

First is the ATNR reflex, Asymmetrical Tonic Neck Reflex. Basically, it’s when the child’s head is turned to one side, the muscle receptors in the neck have the same arm straighten and the opposite arm flex or bend. It helps babies roll from stomach to the back. Typically occurs from 4-6 months.

Here’s one thing that wasn’t immediately apparent to me (and a few others). We want these reflexes to be completely internalized in our students. For example, when on their knees with their arms straight out (so they are almost in a crawling position), they should be able to turn their head all the way towards their shoulder and hold it without having any bend in their elbows. If there’s a bend in their elbows, it could be that they haven’t internalized the ATNR reflex and need to do some exercises to properly internalize it.

Just finished a lunch break and soon we’ll be continuing on reflexes. It has been a pretty productive morning and I’m starting to get a good feel for what the program is about. It seems to take the same principals that I’m always harping about with respects to the importance of social and emotional development occurring in students’ early school years, and applying it to brain development. In other words, if the students’ brains haven’t developed properly between ages 1 and 6, then they already have a strike against them in future years. A student who hasn’t properly developed the pathway that transmits data between the eye and the brain may have issues skipping words and/or letters when they’re reading. It definitely seems to make sense. I’m starting to buy in to the idea at least.

Onwards with reflexes! They have a ton of activities to address ways to exercise these reflexes in a variety of situations. Maybe I’ll try to take some video, or photos of these exercises so I can provide a visual for you.

Next reflex is the STNR: Symmetrical Tonic Neck Reflex. Position of the head and neck affect the position of the trunk and limbs. When the neck is extended, the arms go into extension and the knees are contracted. When the head goes down (chin to chest), the arms naturally bend and the legs extend.

TLR: Tonic Labyrinthine Reflex. Stimulates the labyrinthine of the inner ear by the position of the head in space and the position of the body. Basically, it looks like the entire body is bent. Arms, legs, feet, neck and so on. Babies start off like this and quickly learn to extend different areas. Exercise to test this involves laying on the belly and trying to get their arms, legs and head fully extended and off the floor.

Quick tangent. We just saw a video of a student who has trouble with retained reflexes. He was supposed to be drawing a counter clockwise circle between two pieces of tape. He was doing it clockwise instead of counter and seemed to be having a problem. The presenter told us to watch carefully what he did at the end of the activity. When he finished, he looked up to see what his neighbor had done or whether the teacher had seen what he had done. She claimed that he looked up like this because he was so used to have problems due to retained reflexes that he was used to doing things wrong and being criticized. Right there is where she lost me. Retained reflexes may cause some problems, but that doesn’t mean that every problem will be solved by fixing the reflex issue! Could it simply be that he has a self-confidence issue brought on by overbearing parenting or teaching? Or perhaps he wants to go to the playground and is checking to see if he has done the task well enough to be released. Who knows? This may very well be a tremendous boon to the educational environment. It could help students to be better prepared to learn. But please don’t try to fool me into thinking that this is going to solve all of our educational problems, or that every problem can be solved through these exercises.

After a short break, we’re now talking about the brain. We’re talking about neurons, multitasking and the lobes. The frontal lobe controls personality, planning, voluntary motion, intelligence, memory and writing. Parietal lobe (just behind the frontal) controls sensations such as touch, pain, pressure, and temperature. The occipital lobe is in the back of the brain and controls vision. The temporal lobes are on the sides and control speech and hearing and such. The central nervous system is comprised of the brain and spinal cord. The peripheral nervous system is the nerves that come off the spinal cord. The somatic nervous system obtains sensory information, provides motor output to voluntary muscles that allow us to move. The autonomic nervous system receives input from and sends input to internal organs. Handles involuntary functions like blood flow and breathing. The autonomic nervous system has two subdivisions, sympathetic and parasympathetic. The sympathetic prepares the body for ‘fight or flight’, the parasympathetic returns body functions to normal after they have been altered by sympathetic stimulation. In other words, if a child has been revved up due to something that occurred at the playground (such as a fight), the parasympathetic nervous system is what will allow the body to return to normal.

He’s having us look at a graph right now that charts the growth of the brain over the first six years of life and what is developing when in various areas like vision, tactile, auditory, mobility, language and manual.

The basic idea is that during the formation of these various areas of the brain, this program is meant to provide extra stimulation so that they develop fully. If the brain is well stimulated as it is being formed during the early years, the students will be better prepared for education and for life.

Recommending a book called “Magic Trees of the Mind” by Marion Diamond. If you take two groups of rats from the same litter and put one half of them in a stimulating environment and one in a dull environment, the rats in the more stimulating environment developed larger brains. This book goes through all the brain research that has occurred since that experiment. The point of her book are that the magic trees are the dendrites in the brain and that if they aren’t stimulated, they shrivel up and ‘die’.

Here’s a decent analogy. In the past, if you wanted to create an interstate highway, you’d start off with a small pathway through the forest, then pave it, then expand it and so on. This is helping students to develop six lane super highways from the very beginning. They’re helping to develop the automatic skills that can make a significant difference in learning.

Sensory pathways: Visual, auditory and tactile. Motor pathways: Mobility, language and manual function.

I really wish this chart were online somewhere. It’s pretty interesting. I’ll have to ask if they’d mind me scanning it in or sending me a digital copy to upload.

“The language of the brain stem is crawling and creeping.” The program doesn’t have kids crawling around to practice crawling skills, it’s to help build connections that may not have been properly formed in the early years.

The brain stem controls the coordination of unconscious motor activity. SMART activities activate the brain stem where learning readiness skills are developed. Function produces structure.

A few principles:
* The brain grows fastest during the early years. That means it’s smart to take advantage of that window of opportunity with proper exposure
* Stimulation produces beneficial electrical activity. Increases connections to other cells.
* The brain’s plasticity is influenced by sensory experience. A great way to grow a better brain is through the senses. SMART activities are designed to improve reading, writing and attention through sensory stimulation.
* If the environment is complex with new and unexpected positive events, the brain remains active and stimulated. If the environment is routine, the brain merely adapts and then operates automatically using the cells which have been wired for adequacy without a need for increasing growth.
* The brain can be stimulated for increased neural growth at any age. Connections can be made throughout lives.
* The brain is stimulated through inputs not outputs. The only thing that stimulates the brain is visual, auditory or kinesthetic input.

Well, I’m here at the workshop. We haven’t started yet, but it looks really exciting. They’ve given us a massive amount of material including a curriculum guide and a notebook of articles, powerpoint presentations, and reference material the likes of which I haven’t seen since my undergrad years!

Well, I just found out that my school has moved! Perhaps moved is the wrong term, but it isn’t going to be in the location that I thought it was. It won’t be too far away, just a few blocks, but that’s still quite a surprise.

Onwards, introductions are over and it’s time to get started. The program is called S.M.A.R.T., Stimulating Maturity through Accelerated Readiness Training. Children aren’t coming to schools ready for education. The program is not a curriculum per se, it is embedded in the regular curriculum and should enhance it.

Right now he’s listing all the different things that will be enhanced by this program. Zooming in on just classroom desk activities, they’re saying it will improve hand-eye coordination, letter sound stimulation, vocab stimulation, pre-math skills and so on. I know it’s just the overview, but it sounds almost like a sales pitch. A bottle of snake oil that will help your migraines, arthritis, and cure that nasty cold. I don’t mean to sound critical, it just has the flavor of a sales pitch. I’m sold, I’m here. I don’t need to be convinced that this program is incredible, I want to see it in action and get into the details.

He’s relating a story about a boy named Alex who was struggling in Kindergarten, horribly cross-eyed and stuck in right field when he played little league. After 240 hours of this program, his eye was straightened out (“Daddy, I only see one of you now!), he was doing much better in school and playing first base. While the story may be true and this may be a fantastic program, the story just has the feeling of a Sunday morning religious program. “The doctors told him that he would never walk again, but the power of faith has healed him!” Like I said, the story may be true, but you aren’t going to get me to buy in to something by describing a success story or two. I want to get to the meat of the program. It’s easy to describe a ‘miracle’, it’s much more of a challenge to teach somebody to produce miracles.

Just got the presenters name. Bob DeBoer, former high school counselor, co-founder of New Visions school and member of the executive committee of the Minnesota Association of Charter Schools. He’s describing how his organizations were formed and some background. Looks like the program has actually been going on for quite a while, since 1987.

Readiness Skill Deficits: Here we go, the program is designed to address visual efficiency & perceptual problems, auditory processing problems and biochemical imbalances. These issues will be addressed through SMART, Auditory Stimulation and NeuroTechnology. Heh, I don’t know what NeuroTechnology is yet, but the term definitely appeals to the geek in me. If I had WiFi here, I’d be skipping ahead right now and looking the term up in the Wikipedia.

Random thought, I think I learn better with Wifi. I’m very impulsive and get frustrated when there’s something I want to learn a bit more about, but am forced to wait for when the presenter decides to inform me about it. Will it be this morning, afternoon, tomorrow? Who knows? Instead, here I am trying to figure out what that could possibly be about instead of just finding it out and moving forward.

This is interesting. Bob is talking about how most people are “right eared”, meaning they primarily take auditory stimulus in through the right ear which then goes straight to the left hemisphere where language is processed. Many children with issues are found to be “left eared” meaning that language comes in through the left ear, goes to the right hemisphere, and then has to cross over to the left hemisphere. To address this, they have them listening to music that basically stimulates them into becoming ‘right eared’. I’m oversimplifying, but it sounded worth doing more research.

I just had to be a little patient; he’s talking about NeuroTechnology right now. It’s a bit complicated and I’m not quite sure how to put it into words. One thing I found interesting was that he was basically saying that they can ‘cure’ ADD by having the kids play games that are based are controlled by a person exerting control over their brainwaves in specific waves. Ok, that completely fails to describe it, but we’ll be getting into more detail later. To say I’m skeptical is an understatement, but I’m really looking forward to learning more. It sounds sort of like physical therapy for the brain.

Random thought, there have been several studies showing that the content from most workshops tends to have little impact on the classroom. I wonder how our school’s directors are planning to address this and ensure that this content really gets embedded into the school’s culture.

The program started off in Minnesota, and is now being used in 90 schools outside of Minnesota. It’s being used in Delaware, Kentucky, Florida, Massachusetts, Iowa, and so on. It is fairly impressive that so many schools are adopting the program. What I’d love to hear is how many schools started the program vs. how many are still using it.

We finally saw a video of what this program looks like. Wow. It looks nothing like what I expected. I don’t know how to describe it short of a psychedelic sobriety test of sorts. A lot of kinesthetics combined with forced visual stimulation. Just based on what I’ve heard and now seen, it definitely sounds promising. I wish they’d shown the video from the very beginning though. Would have done a lot to frame the introduction.

Yikes. There was no wifi at the workshop so I took notes in word. Eight pages worth of notes. I’m going to split it all up by the specific sessions, but keep in mind that this is all one massive workshop. As with all of my notes, keep in mind that they are often stream of thought musings or ideas that pop into my head. They tend to meander a bit and go off on tangents. Sometimes the grammer is brutal, sometimes the commentary is just as brutal. Above all else though, the notes are honest. Hope you enjoy them!

I’ve never heard of the Americinn hotel chain, but so far I’m impressed. Flew out to Minneapolis earlier, grabbed a quick bite to eat and then headed over to the hotel. I thought it was going to be just some local yahoo hotel but the place has free HBO, breakfast included, a patio or balcony attached to the room, and best of all…. Free wifi!

I know Dave Warlick has written about that before, but it really does make a huge difference having the free Wifi. As soon as I heard that, I was in love with the hotel before I’d even opened up the door to the room!

So tomorrow I get started at the workshop. Rather looking forward to it. I’m joined here by one other teacher from my school. She’s going to be a first year teacher, finished her undergrad last year and is finishing her master’s degree this summer. She’s going to be teaching first grade and is rearing to go. I have to admit, it’s been a little nerve wracking not having met the rest of my team, or any other teachers at all actually. I almost wish I could have gone to this workshop in July with the rest of the faculty, but I can’t complain. It means I get to get out of town one more time.

Well, time to get some rest. next entry will probably be notes from the workshop!