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TRANSCRIPT
The Development of
Self-Regulation
Stuart G. Shanker
Distinguished Research Professor
Director, Milton & Ethel Harris Research Initiative
Coquitlam Summer Institute, July 5, 2010
2
Changing School Trajectories
• There is considerable research showing how
difficult it is to change a child‟s trajectory from the
moment that they enter kindergarten or grade 1
• On the basis of we can predict educational
attainment and occupational status
• Why is it so difficult to change trajectories?
3
Jensen
•The standard explanation, made famous by Arthur
Jensen, is that IQ determines educational potential
•Fluid IQ (e.g., processing speed) is determined by
our genes and limits educational potential in the
same way that hp limits how fast a car can drive
•Intensive preschool programs can‟t increase a
child‟s potential; they just squeeze out the last few
drops of that potential
Problems with the IQ Argument
•We have seen successful interventions at the level
of the child (Stacey, 2004), the school (Meier,
1995), the community (Tough, 2009), and a nation
(Carnoy, 2007)
•Methodological/ conceptual flaws in twin IQ studies
•Jensen saw IQ as the determining cause of
“scholastic achievement”; these are very different
phenomena
4
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The Need for a Developmental
Explanation
•To move beyond IQ, we need a developmental
explanation for why it so difficult to change
children’s educational trajectories
•Need to understand whether successes amount to
more than maximizing genetic potential
•Until we can explain what it is that we are doing
wrong, and what it is that we are doing right,
biological determinism will lurk in the background
as the default hypothesis
6
From Neurons to
Neighbourhoods
•In 2000, Shonkoff & Phillips set off a seismic shift
in how developmental scientists, and especially
neuroscientists, look at the reasons why it is so
difficult to change a child‟s learning trajectory from
kindergarten or grade 1
•The shift they instituted was from looking at IQ to
seeing self-regulation as the key to a child‟s
“scholastic achievement”
Auto-immune
disorders
Psycho-
pathologies
Development
Disorders
Coronary
Heart
Disease
Obesity
Externalizing
problems
Internalizing
problems
Self-
regulation
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Five Levels of
Self-Regulation
1. Biology (Temperament)
2. Emotion-regulation
3. Cognitive: Executive Functions
– Sustained attention
– Attention switching
– Inhibit impulses
– Deal with frustration, delay, distractions
4. Social : Co-regulation
5. Self-reflectiveness
9
The Teacher-Child Relationship
•Poor self-regulation not only impedes a child‟s
ability to attend to her lessons but may also
undermine the teacher-student relationship
•Not surprisingly, teachers respond much more
positively to children who are able to stay calmly
focused while those who have more difficulty in this
regard receive less attention or are treated less
sympathetically
10
Self-regulation and Educational
Trajectories
•The obduracy of trajectories may be largely due to
poor self-regulation
•A recent study has shown that children from lower
SES have poorer development of the systems in
the PFC that support self-regulation
•So this suggests a deeper reason why we haven‟t
been able to close the achievement gap, and even,
that it has relatively little to do with IQ
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A New Vision of a Child‟s
Educational Potential
•The ability to learn is in large part determined by:
–child‟s ability to attend to a lesson
–process auditory or visual information
–recognize visual, auditory or social patterns
–respond to challenges with curiosity and interest
–grasp the norms of classroom behavior
•If a child enters school without mastering these core
capacities this will significantly impair his ability to
rise to the challenges he will be exposed to in school
12
Secondary Altriciality
• Early plasticity enables the child‟s brain to be highly
attuned to the environment in which she is born
• Synaptic growth in the first 2 years is massive
• There is huge over-production of synapses that, at
8 months, will start to be „pruned‟ back
• Synaptic pruning is regulated by baby‟s emotional
interactions with her caregivers
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Neal Halfon
04-212
Sound
Vision
Smell
Touch
Proprioception
Taste
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The Role of the Primary
Caregiver in Early Brain Growth
•The primary caregiver serves as an „external brain‟,
up-regulating and down-regulating the baby
•Dyadic experiences are vital for:
–Sensory integration
–Sensory/motor coordination
–Emotion-regulation
–Effortful control
–Sustained attention
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The Brain-to-Brain Interactive
System
•Nature provided us with an exquisitely sensitive
interactive system, in which specific types of
experiences result in the delivery of specific types of
stimuli to systems that come „online‟ hierarchically
•There are three key stages in this process:
–Proximal
–Distal
–Verbal
•In each of these stages, early brain development is
fundamentally dyadic
Stages of Arousal
Inhibition
1. Asleep
2. Drowsy
3. Hypoalert
4. Calmly focused and Alert
5. Hyperalert
6. Flooded
Activation16
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Individual Differences
•The baby has to find interacting with her caregiver
pleasurable; for that to happen the caregiver has to
understand and respond to her unique physiology
•An over-reactive baby who is highly sensitive to
various types of stimuli needs to be enticed by more
soothing touch and sounds
•An under-reactive baby is enticed using more
energy and bigger gestures or vocalizations
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A Baby‟s Starting-Point
•Newborn starts life with basic capacities: hears
fairly well, sees somewhat indistinctly, can move in
response to stimuli but can‟t control her movements
•By 2 or 3 months she can respond to parents by
looking up, or to the right and left
•How does the baby reach this point of integrating
the information coming in from her different senses
and responding in a purposeful manner?
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Comforting a Newborn
•This process begins at the moment of birth
•The descent down the birth canal and into the world
is one fraught with physical and sensory assault
•As she cradles her newborn in her arms, the
caregiver is instinctively using her body warmth and
the beatings of her heart to bring comfort to her child
•every infant is different in the kinds of sensations or
movements that she finds comforting
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Learning about a Baby‟s
Reaction to Touch
•Caregiver begins exploring every part of her baby‟s
body, promoting baby‟s physical growth and
providing mother with subliminal information about
baby‟s response to touch
•Through trial and error, repeated over and over, the
caregiver discovers what kind of touches, or which
position or motion, enhance her baby‟s ability to
focus calmly, and which seem to distress her baby
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Helping the Baby Respond
Positively To Touch
•If baby‟s body stiffens when she hears motherese,
caregiver might lower her pitch and slow down the
rhythm, searching for a calming effect
•With a baby who is under-reactive to sound, she
might do opposite to get her baby‟s attention
•By gradually modulating her vocalizations the
caregiver can maintain her baby‟s interest and help
him to cope with sounds that initially overloaded
him, or attend to sounds that he seemed at first not
to notice
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Hearing
•Caregivers can only learn how their baby reacts to sounds in their endless interactions
•Caregiver needs to experiment with different cadences, pitches, tempo, etc., in order to ascertain which vocal patterns sustain her baby‟s interest and which elicit no response, or even, are aversive
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Developing the Visual System
•The same subtly nuanced interactive process is
key in the development of the baby‟s visual system
•caregiver learns if baby is drawn to or overwhelmed
by animated facial expressions, or if he is energized
or drained by bright lighting
•By modulating the child‟s visual experiences she
learns how to maintain the child‟s interest and
slowly enhance his capacity to process visual stimuli
The Learning Tree
• Far too often, our interventions with children in
school are targeted at higher-level skills – the
branches of the tree – rather than the roots
• The most effective interventions, especially with
children in primary school, but really at all levels,
target the roots of the child‟s difficulties
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The Root System:
Self-Regulation
• Fundamentally important is how the child orients to
and processes auditory, visual, tactile, gustatory
and olfactory information, and how she modulates
her sensory responses – her overall reactivity or
excitability, responsivity, and arousability to these
various kinds of sensory stimuli
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Child‟s Response to Stress
• Another critical biological factor is the child‟s
soothability: how easily or intensely she becomes
fearful, anxious, angry, excited
• how she responds to new situations (e.g., approach
versus withdrawal, adaptability)
• whether she actively seeks out new stimulation
• distractibility and attention-span persistence
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Motor Planning
• Of utmost importance for the development of self-
regulation is the child‟s motor planning and
sequencing abilities and the child‟s sense of her
body in space
• Many self-regulatory problems – chronically hypo-
or hyper-reactive – can be traced back to early
deficits in motor control and sensory-motor
integration27
The Tree Trunk
• The better the child can stay calmly focused and
alert, the better her development of :
•Effortful Control
•Emotion-Regulation
•Executive Functioning
•Pattern Recognition
•Symbolic and Language skills
•Logical and Reflective thinking
•Empathy and Theory of Mind 28
Working on the Trunk
• Children having trouble staying calmly focused and
alert typically have a problem in one of these
domains
• The child‟s ability to self-regulate in all these
domains grows throughout schooling
• For that to happen, the child must continue to
undergo experiences designed to nurture her ability
to self-regulate in all these domains
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The Overarching Importance of
Emotional Development
• The neural systems involved in emotion-regulation
grow throughout the school years, as will the
emotional challenges that child has to deal with
• Her learning experiences must be such that they
are not only directed at the material covered in the
curriculum but also geared towards creating a trunk
that will be strong enough to withstand the
emotional buffeting that the child will be exposed to
as an adolescent and young adult
• This critical aspect of self-regulation must not be
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The Boughs and Branches
• The boughs of the tree relate to the child‟s mastery
of the basic skills of reading, oral and written
expression, math and science skills, music and art,
and no less vital, health and hygiene
• Growing out of the boughs are the branches that
represent the different domains of learning spelled
out in detail in the curriculum, subject by subject
• As the child rises through the grades, the branches
become increasingly intricate and articulated31
Using the Model
Typically, a teacher will look at:
•how well the child functions emotionally, socially,
and intellectually
•how well she can focus and attend
•interact emotionally with those around her
•do simple sequencing and problem-solving
•Her creativity
• whether she can answer “why” questions logically32
Look at the root system
• For example, the 10 year-old who is delayed in
reading may have difficulties with sequencing and
comprehending subtleties of sounds and words,
making it hard for her to connect the sounds to the
visual image when she is reading
• This makes her a slow, halting reader, in order to
slow down the information inflow
• Her anxiety trying to read exacerbates the problem
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Building a Strong Foundation
• If we just work on the branches alone, then we‟re
trying to build a house without a strong foundation
• If we can strengthen the roots and the trunk we then
really build foundations for strong branches
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How Many Children Are we
Talking About?
•This argument doesn‟t just apply to the child with
ASD, ADHD, or CD
•What about the child who is withdrawn and retreats
into a fantasy world? Or who is frightened by new
ideas? Or who refuses to mix with other children?
Or who is easily frustrated and inconsolable if he
makes a mistake? Or who gets lost in math
problems, or can‟t string together more than one or
two ideas? Or who doesn‟t appear to have any
interests at all or isn‟t curious about anything?
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The Real Source of Bell Curve
Distributions
•The picture I am trying to paint here is that of a
typical classroom
•It is a picture that every primary teacher will
immediately resonate with, which brings home the
reality of the enormous task we have asked our
primary school teachers to perform
•Each of the traits described here, and many more,
are a downstream consequence of much more
basic processes
37
A Holistic Approach to
Strong S-R
•SR develops throughout childhood, adolescence,
and young adulthood as challenges to which child
is exposed increase
•Programs with greatest long-term physical and
psychological benefit are those that promote SR
•The more developed the child‟s SR, the more
receptive and able they are to adopting healthy
behaviors
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Back to Basics
•We‟re just starting to understand what enhances
and what constricts development of SR
•The most important early experiences are the
child‟s interactions with her caregivers
•The most effective activities for children growing
up are the simplest: e.g., sports, nature, arts, social
interest groups
39
Living in Challenging Times
•See evidence of the possible negative effects of
excessive tv and video games on development of
SR
•These activities also inhibit family and peer
interactions
•Growing number of families with both parents
working, single parent-families with working parent
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The Ongoing Development of
Self-Regulation
•S-R continues to grow throughout the lifespan, as
we adapt to new challenges
•Parents and teachers need to continue to
develop SR to deal with the added stresses of
parenting and teaching
•Just as with the interactions that promote SR in
children, the most successful parenting and
teaching programs and are those that value the
individuals involved
41
Reading
•Diamond, A et. al (2008) Preschool program improves cognitive control
Science November 30th
•Fogel, A, King, B & Shanker, S (2007) Human Development in the 21st
Century (Cambridge UP)
•Greenspan, S & N Greenspan (2010) The Learning Tree (Perseus)
•Greenspan, S & Shanker, S (2004) The First Idea (Perseus)
•McCain, M, JF Mustard & SG Shanker (2007) Early Years Study II:
Putting Science into Action.
•Shanker, S (2010) Self-Regulation: Calm, Alert and Learning,
Education Canada, 50:3
•Shanker, S (2010) Enhancing the potential in children. H. Denise (ed),
Early Child Development and Policy