The Mindfulness Obsession: Is Relationship-Based Education its Latest Canadian Mutation?

Taking time to really get to know students sounds like good common sense for teachers.  The best teachers, in every school, have always done so while challenging students with high expectations, engaging learning activities, and an intellectually stimulating curriculum. The philosophy, espoused in Dr. David Tanter‘s 2018 Nelson Educators textbook, The Third Path, prescribes something completely different for today’s individualistic and anxiety-filled generation. It also appears to have turned the heads of the educational thinkers mobilizing under the banner of Ontario ASCD, a northern frontier branch of the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development, based in Alexandria, Virginia.

The central tenets of the The Third Path have also given rise to the “Third Path” movement to promote Relationship-Based Education (RBE).  That movement elevates “teaching through relationships” to a “core value” and proposes a third way forward – what amounts to a 21st century fusion of academics, well-being, and mindfulness.   The “Relationship-based Approach to  Well-Being and Achievement” teacher education program, funded by Nelson Education, features conventional workshops, You Tube videos, podcasts, and weekend conference retreats.

The Third Path pedagogical catechism envisions an imagined educational universe with three distinct paths: Path 1 (academics); Path 2 (well-being); and Path 3 (relationships). Prospective teacher-supporters are exhorted to “Do different, not more. Go deeper, not wider.” The Third Path integrates everything by “shifting the classroom focus from tasks to relationships, from check-lists to check-ins.” Then, the hook: “It views education as a journey of human development, not just for the student, but for the educator too. The Third Path focuses on the how of education.” All of this sounds, feels and looks strange and familiar at the same time.  Strange in its aspirational almost spiritual tone; yet with the familiar ring of romantic progressivism.

The Relationship-Based Approach

Focusing on the student-educator relationship is the first step in “following the Third Path.”  “Caring, intentional and responsive relationships are at the heart of learning and growth.” The focus is almost exclusively on the individual student, and “understanding each student, and truly knowing their strengths, struggles, and needs.”

The Eight Conditions

Third Path educational theory rests upon eight hierarchical conditions that are said to support student well-being and academic achievement. Together these conditions are supposed to “create an environment for students to flourish”:

1. Safety: Students need to feel emotionally safe in order to explore and learn

2. Regulation: Students need regulating relationships and supportive environments.

3. Belonging: Belonging comes from all the moments of connection with others.

4. Positivity: Every student has unseen potential. Positive feelings lead to optimal functioning.

5. Engagement: Engagement is about being fully open to learning, connected to others, able to take on complex challenges, and reach accurate conclusions.

6. Identity: School is important for students’ exposure to a variety of ways of being, and for them to develop a stronger sense of who they truly are.

7. Mastery: A feeling of accomplishment is essential to help motivate students to continue to learn.

8. Meaning: Meaning is a powerful force for ongoing motivation and personal fulfillment.

Surveying this rather dogmatic theoretical framework, encumbered with the label “The Third Path,” informed and engaged educators are bound to wonder if they and their students are being “led along a garden path” to the promised land. The fact that the theory is backed by teachers’ testimonials in the George Lukas Foundation’s education e-magazine Edutopia does little to assuage your natural skepticism about “magic beans” in education.

The principal author of The Third Path, Dr. David Tranter, Professor of Social Work, Lakehead University, is touted as the Third Path movement’s guru and guarantor of the authenticity of its research basis. It all originated, it turns out, in 2014 when the Ontario Ministry of Education released Achieving Excellence: A Renewed Vision for Education in Ontario, and identified “well-being” as one of the envisioned new pillars of the system.  That was a tribute to the influence of Dr. Stuart Shanker, a York University professor championing “mindfuness” and “self-regulation” as the latest classroom management panaceas.

Tranter’s claim to being a leading researcher rests principally upon a February 2016 Ontario Ministry of Education research note focusing on “self-regulation” and why “stressed students struggle to learn’ in our classrooms. The short, 4-pager, summarizes the academic literature in favour of mindfulness theory and its educational step-child “self-regulation.” “For students who experience ongoing stress,” Tranter concludes, ” learning self-regulation can be a difficult challenge; teachers have an opportunity to make a tremendous difference in these students’ lives.” Virtually all of his references are to the work of leaders in mindfulness research, including Stuart Shanker and John Ratey, author of Spark: The revolutionary new science of exercise and the brain (2008).

Critical education analysts quickly spot that Third Path theory carries an implicit bias against teaching knowledge and focusing on student achievement. On the cover of the book and between the covers, Path 2 (Well-Being) precedes Path 1 (Academics/Achievement) in order of precedence. Upon closer scrutiny, Path 3 (Relationships) is actually code for student-centered individualized teaching drawing heavily upon mindfulness and self-regulation practices.

All educators today should be skeptical of such simple formulas for success in connecting with, and effectively teaching,  students. Something like “The Third Path” with a strong whiff of mindfulness should raise cautions.  Mindfulfulness has not only gone mainstream, it has emerged as the magic elixir of our present age.

Presented as a peculiar hybrid of science and meditative discipline, its real founder, Jon Kabat-Zinn, inventor of Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR), claims that mindfulness has “the potential to ignite a universal or global renaissance.” He has bigger ambitions than just conquering stress. Mindfulness, he claims, “may actually be the only promise the species and the planet have for making it through the next two hundred years.”

Mindfulness is a recognized therapeutic strategy for individuals properly diagnosed with severe anxieties or debilitating stress. While the leading researchers know its limitations,it has now become a cure-all being introduced and spread to the broader mass of adults through self-help magazines and workshops and to students through the schools. Although derived from Buddhism, it has mass appeal to people seeking spiritual answers outside the church.  Some of the simplified versions. in the hands of amateur enthusiasts, amounts to little more than “concentration training” for hefty professional service fees.

The Third Path movement in Canadian education did not emerge fully formed, out of nowhere.  It’s a small piece of a booming global wellness industry worth over $4-billion. More than 600,000 books for sale on Amazon have a variation of “mindfulness’in their titles, such as Mindful Teaching, Mindful Schools, Mindful Parenting, Mindful Finance, and, believe it or not, Mindful Dog Owners. There is, of course, a Mindfuness Coloring Book, for kids as well as smartphone apps, bells, bracelets, and beauty products. Millions of dollars are being raked-in by educational celebrities on the speaking circuit and by facilitators at adult workshops. Mindfulness based programs have now proliferated in schools, district-after-district, particularly in Ontario, British Columbia, and the Maritimes.

A team of respected British psychiatrists registered major concerns in December of 2016 in a widely-read scientific research paper published in the journal of the Royal College of Psychiatrists. The proliferation of academic literature on mindfulness was, in their view, sustained by incomplete or inconclusive evidence-based research and “pervaded by a a lack of conceptual and methodological self-criticism.” Their two primary concerns were:

(1) the uneven benefits of mindfulness meditation: While “some people may benefit” from the meditation, “others will not be affected in a substantive way, and a number of individuals may suffer moderate to serious negative effects.”

(2) the insufficient of inconclusive evidence for its benefits, particularly when mindfulness-based interventions are compared with other activities or interventions.”

“Something has gone wrong with the science of mindfulness,” the British psychiatrists maintained.  “Orange robed gurus” had been replaced by “white-collared academics” who speak of the benefits of “being in the moment.” It was, they contended, “a social phenomenon” most likely “rooted in our culture’s desire for quick fixes and its attraction to spiritual ideas divested of supernatural elements.”

Mass application of mindfulness worried the British psychiatrists. While the psychiatrists stopped short of condemning the practice, they urged “caution” about “its widespread use as a therapeutic technique”  (i.e., McMindfulness)  and warned against the”assembly -line’ approach based on “a reductive understanding of the human mind.”

Much of this mindfulness obsession might turn out to be another passing phase and possibly a harmless one providing comfort and meaning to some.  What’s worrisome is the scientific evidence mounting of its potential to do harm if mass applied to larger populations, including students and teachers.

What’s driving the Third Path movement surfacing in Canadian schools?  Does “Relationship-Based Education” simply mean “get to know your students” or is it code for “Mindfulness” practice?  How much of the Third Path is inspired by Mindfulness and Self-regulation?  Are leading psychiatrists on the right track– has the science of mindfulness lost its mind? 

Read Full Post »

Resilience and Schools: Do Miracle ‘Self-Help’ Cures Improve At-Risk Children’s Lives or Have Negligible Effect?

Today’s world is awash in miracle self-help cures for our lack of “resilience” and it has now welled-up in our schools. Mindfulness, neuroplasticity, trauma-informed cognitive behavioural therapy, psychoanalysis, career coaching, and yoga are all being adopted by well-meaning educators.  Children and teens who are identified as anxious, hyper-active, overweight or downhearted are far too often pathologized as having “mental health issues.” Hordes of gurus and experts are ready with the latest inspirational programs and quick fixes for all their problems.

Pursuing individual social well-being is not the answer, particularly for troubled, at-risk, and struggling children and youth. That is one of the most fundamental lessons conveyed in Michael Ungar’s latest book, Change Your World (2019), a masterful synthesis of 20 years of research in the field of resilience.  It will be an eye-opener to all who were, up until now, unacquainted with his ground-breaking work assessing the effectiveness of at-risk services for children and youth.

The first wave of New Age self-help came through the medium of TED Talks peaking in the late 2000s. Educational gurus mimicking Sir Ken Robinson were full of magic solutions to cure every conceivable ill besetting students, teachers, and school communities. Dr. Ungar has little use for such solutions because they seldom work. “Self-help fixes are like empty calories,” he writes. “The effects are fleeting and often detrimental in the long term. Worse, they promote victim blaming. The notion that your resilience is your problem alone is ideology, not science.”

Ungar is clear about what went wrong. “We have been giving people the wrong message. Resilience is not a DIY endeavour. Self-help fails because the stresses that put our lives in jeopardy in the first place remain in the world around us even after we’ve taken the “cures.” The fact is that people who can find the resources they require for success in their environments are far more likely to succeed than individuals with positive thoughts and the latest power poses.”

Studying resilience around the world through his Resilience Research Centre at Dalhousie University  produced some profound lessons. Some young people and adults “beat the odds” better than expected, especially those in war-torn societies and disaster zones. The reason has more to do with their social and physical environments than with personal traits such as “grit,” “growth mindset.” or “self-regulation.”  Changing the environments has more of an impact than changing outlooks and mindsets or even offering formal programs.

Services provided by health, social welfare and educational systems, Ungar and his research team discovered, are rarely assessed for their effectiveness in helping children, youth or adults “bounce back” from adversity or escape the bonds of dependence. For a professional social worker, Ungar is not afraid to pose the tough questions. What actually works in nurturing well-being and building resilience? Most importantly, does resilience depend on the services we receive?

Ungar’s Resilience Research Centre focuses on adolescents and young adults who are using multiple services. Many of his subjects are young people needing special educational supports at the same time that they are under the supervision of a child-welfare worker because of exposure to family violence.  Some are youth with severe mental-health problems such as attention-deficit disorder and conduct disorder serving probation orders for drug offenses or violent acts.  Other participants have learning challenges,including anxiety disorders. The balance are homeless because they had run away from abusive parents.

His initial study of Canadian youth examined the relationship between risk exposure, resilience and behavioural outcomes for almost 500 young people, all of them facing serious challenges. It was later expanded to include more than 7,000 young people around the world. The overall conclusion was that “resilience depends more on what we receive than what we have within us.” Providing supportive environments and needs-based resources, more than individual talent or positive attitude, accounted for the difference between youths who did well and those who slid into drug addiction, truancy and high-risk sexual activity.

School systems do not always fare well in Ungar’s resilience research findings. Education district offices and schools can be resistant to tailoring their programs and services to meet student an d family needs. One common example –  school guidance counsellors who insisted that parents take time off from minimum-wage jobs to attend case conferences because guidance counsellors and psychometricians do not work evenings. The results were predictable:  “the most vulnerable families did not show up because they could not afford the lost time at work. It was their children, doubly disadvantaged by learning difficulties and poverty, who wound up untreated and who eventually dropped out of school.”

“Student well-being” was sanctified in the Ontario school system from 2010 to 2018 and is now being mimicked in other Canadian provincial school systems. Yet Canadian resilience research demonstrates that social, economic and communitarian contexts and supports are far more important to student health, fitness, and financial security than our individual thoughts, feelings or behaviours.  “When it comes to maintaining well-being and finding success,” Ungar claims, “environments matter.”  A positive attitude helps students and adults capitalize on opportunities, but “positive thinking” on its own does not help in surviving childhood abuse, crime-ridden neighbourhoods, or natural disasters.

Why do today’s pop culture gurus, child psychologists, and behavioural therapists put so much faith in miracle cures and self-help strategies?  How and why have educators embraced those approaches?  What can be learned from Michael Ungar’s ground-breaking research? To what extent is what’s surrounding us more important that what’s within us when it comes to developing resilience in school and in life? 

Read Full Post »

Well-Being and Student Achievement: Do Opposites Attract or Nullify One Another?

Two of North America’s better known school change theorists, Andy Hargreaves and Dennis Shirley, have just published a fascinating article in Education Canada (December 2018) entitled “Well-being and success: Opposites that need to attract.” Looking back over Ontario’s implementation of the ‘Student Well-Being Agenda’ since 2014, the two Boston College consultants hired to both guide and review that agenda sound wistful but they do identify a few of the potential pitfalls. The article’s sub-title even hints at the now visible contradictions.

From 2014 to 2018, Hargreaves, Shirley and their Boston College research team were hired by the Ontario Directors of Education (CODE) to work with ten of Ontario’s 72 school boards to “understand the work they were doing on the ground” to implement the Ontario Ministry of Education’s educational change agenda.

The mandated provincial reform agenda embraced “four pillars”: achieving broadly defined excellence; securing equity for all students; promoting well-being (and positive feelings about learning); and establishing public confidence in the system.  Their mandate was to assess how the four pillars were being implemented and not whether they represented the right direction for the province. 

Hargreaves and Shirley are very skillful promoters of Ontario’s public school system. They are leading education change theorists and Ontario under the Kathleen Wynne Government might be described as “their baby.” “Canada is a global leader” in educational change, they confidently state, and that is why Ontario and Alberta are Exhibits A and B at education summits around the world. The latest iteration of Ontario educational boosterism even comes with a newly-minted slogan – “Leading from the Middle” (LfM)  It is, we are informed, spreading worldwide to Singapore, New Zealand, and Scotland.

The notion that Canada’s education leaders, including Education Deputy Ministers and Regional Superintendents, “lead from the middle” is quite a stretch.  So is the claim that “LfM” was “invented in Ontario” because the two leading promoters were professors at Boston’s Lynch School of Education.

“Leading from the Middle” is hard to pull-off when you are the CEO of a school system.  You can talk that way and spout the right words. Schools and school districts embracing “LfM,” we are told, do not just ” join up the dots” between policies at the top and practice at the bottom.” Instead, they lead “from the middle” with “shared, professional judgement, collective responsibility for initiating and implementing change” with “systemic impact that benefits all students.”

Ontario, Hargreaves and Shirley would have us believe, is moving from an “Age of Achievement and Effort” to an “Age of Learning, Well-being and Identity.”  That conclusion was reached after interviewing some 222 educators and Ministry officials implementing that agenda.  There was no hint in the CODE report (issued early in 2018)  of a coming storm (the Doug Ford hurricane)  let alone an upheaval that would stall this movement in its tracks.

Hargreaves and Shirley, based upon their Ministry-approved research, offer a number of conclusions, presented as incontestable truths: 1) Improved well-being increases achievement; 2) Academic achievement is crucial for well-being; and  3) Well-being has its own value and complements academic achievement. In sum, their research confirms the wisdom of Ontario Ministry directives from 2014 to 2018.

Most of the research actually cited in the Education Canada article is that conducted by advocates for, or contributors to, the Student-Well Being agenda. No one will be surprised to see the approving citations to work of Carol Campbell and others in Empowered Educators in Canada (2017), Carol Dweck’s Mindset: The new psychology of success (2007); and Leah M. Kuypers, Zones of Regulation (2011).  All conform nicely with the prevailing policy trends from 2014 to 2018.

Dark clouds are spotted on the otherwise sunny horizon. The two CODE consultants sense that marrying student well-being with academic achievement may appear, to some, as contradictory. Then comes a warning : “In testing times, be wary of cheap shots that are easily made against well-being or achievement. On one hand, we don’t want a school system that is obsessed with well-being to the point where young people live in a superficial and self-indulgent world of undemanding happiness. That path leads to a nation of narcissistic adults who feel that success and earned expertise are unimportant., and all that matters is the needs and opinions of themselves and others who happen to agree with them.”

That passage concludes with a telling comment: “True well-being doesn’t come without sacrifice and struggle, perseverance, and empathy for others.” That’s quite an admission from two of the chief proponents of the Ontario “Student Well-Being agenda.’

The warning is counterbalanced by an obligatory reference to the wisdom of pursuing student achievement and well-being together. Unless I’m wrong, there’s also a grudging acknowledgement that student achievement still comes first and when it doesn’t educators default to more comfortable habitats – whether it’s worshiping the “god of self esteem” (1968 to 1992) or the new secular religion of “mindfulness” and “self-regulation” (2009-2018).

The prophecy that ends the Hargreaves-Shirley research summary is already coming to pass in Ontario education. The Well-Being policy agenda is now imperiled.  “Back to fundamentals” education and heavy investments in student well-being initiatives do not mix. “When budget cuts loom,” they note, “initiatives in yoga or meditation, or support roles in counselling and similar areas” are seen as dispensable, compared to literacy and math.

What are Andy Hargreaves and Dennis Shirley really saying in their retrospective on Ontario’s recent obsession with “Student Well-Being” and “Success for All”? Did Ontario really “invent” Leading from the Middle? How plausible is it for Regional Superintendents to “lead from the middle’?   If student achievement is paramount, then why not cite the academic literature that demonstrates its primacy? How much of the Dalton McGuinty-Kathleen Wynne education policy agenda will actually survive the Ford Revolution in Ontario politics? 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Read Full Post »

Promoting Student Well Being: Is the Mass Application of Mindfulness Harmful to Schoolchildren?

Mindfulness has enjoyed a tremendous boom in the past decade and has recently begun to spring up in Canadian school systems. Two provinces, Ontario and British Columbia, are hotbeds for promoting “student well being” through broad application of ‘mindfulness training’ and its step-child ‘self-regulation ‘ beginning in the earliest grades. Under the former Liberal Government of Kathleen Wynne, the heavily promoted “Student Well Being Strategy’ attempted to integrate ‘mindfulness’ through what is known as the MINDUP curriculum.  The recent change in government presents a rare opportunity to critically examine the whole initiative, its assumptions, research base, and actual impact upon schoolchildren.

“Student Well Being” has acquired something of an exalted status in Ontario schools ever since the appearance of a fascinating November 2016 policy paper,’ entitled “Well Being in Our Schools, Strength in Our Society.’ The whole concept of  Student Well Being was rationalized using a popular narrative promoted by its leading Ontario advocates, Dr. Jean Clinton, a McMaster University clinical psychiatrist, and Dr Stuart Shanker, a York University psychologist who doubles as the CEO of the MEHRIT Centre, a Peterborough-based organization holding a patent on the term “Self-Reg” and marketing “self-regulation’ in schools.  While labelled an “engagement paper,” the educators and the public were invited to “provide your insights and considerations on how best to promote and support student well-being throughout Ontario’s education system.”

Promoting “Student Well Being” sounds like the educational equivalent of motherhood, so it has, to date, attracted little close scrutiny. That may explain why the whole provincial strategy sailed through the normal process of review and was immediately embraced by educators, particularly in elementary schools. Few Ontario educators, it seemed, were troubled by the initiative and parents were, as usual with curriculum initiatives, presented with a fait accompli.

Growing concerns among leading researchers in the United States, the U.K., and the Netherlands about the widespread adoption of positive psychology, the implementation of the Goldie Hawn Foundation’s MINDUP program, and the mindfulness and happiness movement. failed to register.  Judging from Ontario Ministry of Education and school board conferences held in 2016-17 and 2017-18, the provincial school system was totally enamoured with an approach that promised salvation and relief from stress, anxiety, depression, bullying, and today’s frenetic school life.

What could possibly be wrong with making Student Well Being a system-wide priority? It sounded harmless enough until you bore down into what it actually entails and begin to examine the promotional videos and classroom resources generated by the initiative. An early warning was issued by British Columbia teacher Tina Olesen  in November of 2012 on the Scientific American Blog. Her concerns about the potentially harmful effects of Hawn’s MINDUP program were prophetic. Early studies in British Columbia (K.A. Schonert-Reichel 2008 and 2010) extolling the virtues of MINDUP curriculum have now come in for heavy criticism, challenging the validity of the findings.

Mindfulness and meditation recently took a big hit in “Mind the Hype,” a January 2018 peer-reviewed article in Perspectives on Psychological Science. An interdisciplinary team of scholars, led by N.T. Van Dam, found that the benefits of “mindfulness and meditation” have been over-hyped and that the research evidence to support its widespread use is mostly shoddy. They are very critical of the “misinformation and propagation of poor research methodology” that pervade much of the evidence behind the benefits of mindfulness. They focus in particular on the problem of defining the word mindfulness and on how the effects of the practice are studied.

“Mindfulness has become an extremely influential practice for a sizable subset of the general public, constituting part of Google’s business practices, available as a standard psychotherapy via the National Health Service in the United Kingdom and, most recently, part of standard education for approximately 6,000 school children in London,” the authors wrote. They also pinpointed a number of flaws in the supporting research, including  using various definitions for mindfulness, not comparing results to a control group of people who did not meditate and not using good measurements for mindfulness.

“I’ll admit to have drank the Kool-Aid a bit myself. I’m a practicing meditator, and I have been for over 20 years,” David Vago told Newsweek. A research director at the Osher Center for Integrative Medicine at Vanderbilt University, he is one of the study’s authors. “A lot of the data that’s out there is still premature,” he said. Educators are not the only ones overstating the benefits of mindfulness.  “You go into Whole Foods today, and there will be three magazines with some beautiful blonde meditating on the cover,” Vago said. “And they’re labeled ‘Mindfulness, the New Science and Benefits’ in some shape or form.”

Mindfulness has spawned a completely new “mental health and happiness” industry. Mindfulness and meditation are a popular practice that brings in around $1 billion US annually, according to Fortune. The booming industry includes apps, classes and medical treatments.  That’s what concerns Canadian mental health researchers such as Dr. Stan Kutcher, the Sun Life Chair of Teen Mental Health, at Dalhousie University. “Being happy all the time without feeling any stress,” he reminds teachers, is not normal.  Contrary to the claims of Mindfulness promoters, Kutcher points out that  “Anxiety Disorder is not the same as being stressed before an exam.  Handling such normal stress is, in fact, essential to being in good mental health.”

Where’s the research to support mass application of Student Well Being training based upon mindfulness?  Two leading University of Wisconsin  researchers , Richard J. Davidson and Alfred W. Kaszniak, addressed the problem squarely in their October 2015 American Psychologist research review.  Mindfulness meditation and mindfulness-based interventions, they found, lack a proper research base. “There are still very few methodologically rigorous studies, ” they concluded,  that demonstrate the efficacy of mindfulness-based interventions in either the treatment of specific diseases or in the promotion of well-being.”

Studying the effectiveness of Canadian social and emotional learning (SEL) school programs is still in its infancy. One of the first such studies, conducted by Dr. John LeBlanc of Dalhousie Medical School and a team of researchers, systematically assessed over a dozen school-based SEL programs, including both “evidence-based” and “non-evidence based” programs. Five evidence-based programs (PATHS, Second Step, Caring School Community, Roots of Empathy, The Fourth R), and 6 non-evidence-based programs (DARE, Lion’s Quests: Skills for Adolescence, Options to Anger, Room 14: A Social Language Program, Stop Now and Plan (SNAP), Tribes) were identified.

A systematic literature search was conducted for all evidence-based programs, and each program underwent qualitative analysis using the Grading of Recommendations, Assessment, Development, and Evaluation (GRADE) approach. Implementation recommendations were then developed for all 13 programs. PATHS and Second Step received the strongest recommendations for school-based implementation, due to high quality empirical evaluations of the positive outcomes of these programs. Caring School Community, Roots of Empathy, and The Fourth R showed promise and received provisional recommendations for implementation. Those five programs were recommended for use in Nova Scotia public schools. Eight other noteworthy programs were discussed. but deemed to require empirical evaluation before evidence-based recommendations can be made. Based upon the evidence gathered in subsequent Dalhousie Medical School studies, MINDUP would also fall into that category – not yet suitable for school implementation. The research study or toolkit for educators underlined the critical need for proper program evaluation to ensure that such SEL programs are “cost effective and yield maximal benefits for students’ behaviour.”

Why did the Ontario Ministry of Education adopt Social Well-Being in January 2017 as a system-wide priority?  Where is the evidence to support the implementation of a mindfulness-based initiative in schools across Ontario? Were Ontario parents ever properly consulted on this provincial curriculum initiative?  Given the recent research findings, is it time to halt the Student Well Being Strategy and to seriously look at the wisdom of proceeding on the current set of assumptions? 

Read Full Post »

Teen Mental Health Programs: What Works — and Why — in Schools?

Seeing some 400 teachers and school service providers flooding into the Halifax West High School auditorium on July 20, 2017 was an eye-opening experience. In the middle of the summer, they committed time to a two-day conference focusing on child and teen mental health. Led by Dr. Stan Kutcher, the Mental Health Academy was filling a real need in the school system.

With the news full of stories warning of a “mental health crisis,” teachers in the K-12 system are feeling anxious and more conscious than ever of their role in the front lines of education.  What Dr. Kutcher’s Academy offered was something of a tranquilizer because he not only rejects the “crisis” narrative, but urges classroom practitioners to develop “mental health literacy” so they can “talk smart” with students and their parents.

The fifth edition of the Mental Health Academy, initiated in 2006 by Dr. Kutcher, studiously avoided adding further to the noise and sought to advance teacher education in mental health using evidence-based research and programs.  Stress can be good and bad, Kutcher reminded us, and we need to be able to distinguish among the three types of stress responses identified by the Harvard Center for the Developing Child: positive (daily), tolerable (regularly) and toxic (extremely rare).  Instead of pathologizing “stress” as “anxiety,” what children and youth need most is “inoculation” to help build a more robust stress immune system.

While the incidence of teen mental health problems is not appreciably different than it was fifty years ago, we are far better equipped to respond to the challenges in and around schools. The MH Academy amply demonstrated how much more we know today about adolescent brain development, school staff self-care, anxiety, depression, eating disorders, substance addictions, and teen suicide.  Educating teachers about that research is the real purpose of the Academy.

Mental health disorders are serious and teachers are well-positioned to assist in early identification. About 1 in 5 people may experience a mental disorder during adolescence. If left unrecognized and untreated, they can lead to substantial negative outcomes in physical and mental health, academic and vocational achievement, interpersonal relationships, and other important life experiences. Despite this tremendous burden of mental health disability, youth requiring proper care still do not receive it from childhood through to adulthood.  Lack of knowledge, presence of stigma, and limited access to care all serve as barriers to addressing mental disorders and alleviating the daily challenges.

Promoting Mental Health Literacy (MHL) is Dr. Kutcher’s mission because it is an essential component of improving individual and population health and mental health outcomes. As most mental disorders can be identified by age 25, schools provide the ideal location in which to implement interventions that can be demonstrated to improve mental health and life outcomes.  Good MHL programs tend to exhibit four components: : understanding how to obtain and maintain good mental health; understanding mental disorders and their treatments; decreasing stigma; and enhancing help seeking efficacy (knowing when, where, and how to obtain proper care.

A recent Canadian study of some 10,000 educators, cited by  IWK Health researcher Dr. Yifeng Wei at the Academy, found that over 90 per cent of teachers lacked adequate preparation for responding to mental health issues.  That is startling when one considers the fact that the survey uncovered some 200 different mental health programs being implemented in over 1,000 Canadian schools.

Systematic evidence-based reviews of the most popular mental health programs are not that encouraging.  Four such programs, including two based upon “mindfulness, “Learning to Breathe,” and “Mind Up,” analyzed using the GRADE System, were found to be mostly ineffective and judged not ready for widespread implementation in schools. “Good intentions,” Dr. Wei stated,” do not translate into beneficial outcomes for children and teens.”

One curriculum resource, the Mental Health and High School Curriculum Guide, researched and developed by Kutcher and his research team at Dalhousie’s Medical School, shows more promising results. It’s not a “packaged program,” but rather a full curriculum taught by the usual classroom teachers in Canadian secondary schools. Survey data collected before, immediately after, and 2 months after implementation of The Guide showed that students’ knowledge improved significantly when the program was delivered by their regular teachers.  Embedding a classroom resource, delivered by usual classroom teachers in usual school settings is proving to be far better than utilizing any number of the commercially-marketed mental health programs.

What’s contributing to the widespread public perception that we are experiencing a “mental health crisis” in and around our schools?  Why are classroom teachers so motivated and committed to responding to mental health issues?  Why are education authorities and school districts so quick to snap up the latest program in mental health, student behaviour modification, and suicide prevention?  What’s the secret of the recent success of the the Canadian Teen Mental Health Curriculum Guide? 

Read Full Post »

The Fidget Spinner Craze: Why Are Schools Banning the Latest Gadget?

Principal Daniel Villeneuve of Saints-Anges Catholic Elementary School in North Bay, Ontario, is among the first wave of Canadian school leaders to take a stand against fidget spinners, the latest craze among children and teens world-wide. On May 23, 2017, he visited class after class to advise his students that the hand-held gadgets were being banned from school grounds. Marketed as a “stress reliever” for anxious or hyperactive kids, the spinners had become a “major distraction” interfering with teaching and learning affecting everyone in the classroom.

The North Bay principal’s letter to parents, issued May 24, 2017, directly challenged the claim of the commercial product’s marketers that a fidget spinner “helps people focus and concentrate.”  He was crystal-clear about the real “issues with this toy”: 1) it makes noise; 2) it attracts attention; 3) most kids require two hands to make it spin; and 4) it distracts the user and others. For this reason, it was “banned from the school and the day care” and “must remain in the student’s school bag at school.”  What he didn’t say was perhaps obvious – it was driving teachers crazy and making teaching almost intolerable.

Most Canadian school authorities and far too many principals were simply asleep at the switch, compared to their counterparts in the United Kingdom, New York State, Southern California, and New Zealand.  By May 10, 2017, 32 per cent of America’s 200 top rated high schools had banned the spinners from their premises. With the exception of a few Western Canadian school boards, provincial educational leaders seemed to be taken-in by the latest student pacifier and the pseudoscience offered in support of such panaceas. How and why did it get so advanced, and take so long, before a few courageous school principals saw fit to weigh in to put a stop to the classroom disruption?

Fidget spinners, since their invention in the 1990s, have been used with some success to assist in teaching students severely challenged with autism. “We call them fidget tools because they really are tools,” Edmonton autism specialist Terri Duncan told CBC News. “Sometimes it helps to tune out other sensory information. Sometimes it helps them calm and focus. Sometimes it helps them with their breathing and relaxing. It’s a little bit different for every child.” They are one of a series of such tools, including fidget cubes, squishy balls, fuzzy rings, tangle puzzles, putty and even chews — colourful, tactile objects to meet the special needs of ASD children.  Fidget spinners, she adds, “can prevent kids from chewing on their fingers, from picking at their hands, picking at their clothes” and actually help them to concentrate more in class.

Serious problems arise when the fidget spinners are employed to simply relieve everyday stress and anxiety. One leading clinical psychologist, Dr. Jennifer Crosbie of Toronto’s Sick Children’s Hospital, sees value in the gadgets for treating autistic children, but is not a fan of their widespread use in classrooms.  In her words, “it’s too distracting” and “draws attention” to the user, disrupting the class. She and many other clinicians now recommend that schools limit their use to special education classes or interventions.

School authorities in Maritime Canada appear to have initially accepted the claims of the marketers and been swayed by their special education program consultants.  Self-regulation, championed by Dr. Shanker, has made inroads in elementary schools, many of which embrace “mindfulness” and employ “stress-reduction” strategies.  In the region’s largest school district, Halifax Regional School Board, the policy decision was left up to individual schools and frustrated teachers took to social media to complain about the constant distraction and ordeal of confiscating spinners to restore order. New Brunswick’s Anglophone school districts seeking to accommodate learning challenged students in inclusive classrooms accepted spinners as just another pacifying tool to complement their wiggle stools. In rural school communities such as Nova Scotia’s Shelburne and Pictou counties and towns such as Summerside, PEI, the craze popped up in schools totally unprepared with policies to deal with students fixated with the gadgets.

Prominent education critics and teacher researchers are now having a field day exposing the pseudoscience supporting the introduction of fidget spinners into today’s regular classrooms.  A Winnipeg psychologist, Kristen Wirth, finds little evidence testifying to their positive results and claims that it is a “placebo effect” where “we feel something is helping, but it may or may not be helping.”  Canada’s leading teen mental health expert, Dr. Stan Kutcher, sees “no substantive evidence on spinners” and warns parents and teachers to be wary of the out-sized claims made by marketers of the toys.

British teacher Tom Bennett, founder of researchED, is more adamant about the “latest menace” to effective teaching and learning in our schools.  The latest fad – fidget spinners – he sees as symptomatic of “education’s crypto-pathologies.”  Teachers today have to contend with students purportedly exhibiting “every trouble and symptom” of anxiety and stress.  Misdiagnoses, he claims, can lead to children feeling they have some insurmountable difficulty in reading, when what it requires is tutorial help and ongoing support.

“Many children do suffer from very real and very grave difficulties,” Bennett points out, and they need intensive support. When it comes to “fidget spinners,” he adds, “we need to develop a finer, collective nose for the bullshit, for the deliberately mysterious, for the (purely invented) halitosis of the classroom.”  In spite of the inflated claims of the marketers, “magic bullets and magic beans” won’t provide the solutions.

Why are today’s schools so susceptible to the inflated claims of marketers promoting the latest educational gadget?  Do popular inventions like the fidget spinner answer some inner need in today’s fast-paced, high anxiety, unsettled popular culture?  To what extent have Dr. Stuart Shanker and his student behaviour theorists made us more receptive to tools which are said to relieve stress and promote “self-regulation” in children?  Why do so many education leaders and school principals go along with the latest trend without looking deeper at its research-basis and broader impact? 

 

Read Full Post »

The Year of Self-Regulation 2016: What – and Who – Requires the “Treatment”?

A model Grade 6 classroom in Sherwood Park, Alberta, now comes fully equipped with every imaginable solution to coping with fidgety kids, including spin bikes, exercise balls, rotating stools and stand-up desks. The latest classroom pacifiers, ‘Wiggle stools,’ are being hailed as a godsend by a harried Grade 2 classroom teacher in a Sackville, NB.

Schools across Canada went to great lengths to re-engage fidgety students in what will likely always be known as the Year of Self-Regulation. Coping with today’s restless generation of kids now requires every conceivable pacifier, including spin bikes, exercise balls, wiggle stools and stand-up desks.

That is why in any Canadian survey of the top five K-12 education issues in 2016, coping with today’s antsy students would top the list.

Mindfulness and Self-Regulation

High anxiety educators have also embraced the latest panacea known as ‘mindfulness’ and are going whole hog into ‘self-regulation’ of their students.  It’s the brainchild of American advocate Jon Kabat-Zinn who transformed ‘Buddhist mindfulness’ into teaching practice and his Canadian apostle York University’s Stuart Shanker. That approach has emerged in 2016 as the latest wave in what has been characterized as a pseudoscience reform movement.

“It helps with their focus, helps with their creativity, helps promote problem-solving, gives them some way to self-regulate as they have a place to burn-off energy or to gain energy as they need it,” Alberta teacher Kurt Davison told Global TV News Edmonton. Eleven-year-old Connor Harrower heartily agreed: “In other classes, I’m sitting at desks and I’m bored.”

Teacher Misconduct and Discipline

A CBC-TV Marketplace investigation into ‘Teacher Discipline’ in Canada’s provincial school systems aired in April 2016 and immediately drew attention to glaring weaknesses in  professional evaluation, regulation, and discipline. It revealed that only two provinces, Ontario and British Columbia, provide public access to teacher discipline records, and most of the others continue to conceal information from parents and the public, including cases of serious misconduct, incompetence and sexual abuse

Fewer than 400 teaching certificates were revoked in Canada (outside Quebec) over a ten year period from 2005 to 2015, which represented one in every 5,780 teacher certificates each year. In the U.S., the revocation rate was about 30 per cent higher. According to the most recent data from the National Association of State Directors of Teacher Education and Certification, the American figure in 2015 was one certificate out of every 4,360.

The Marketplace investigation raised a fundamental question: If your child’s teacher was punished for a serious offence such as sexual, physical or verbal misconduct, would you be able to find out about it? Depending on where you live, the answer was ‘probably not.’

Chronic Student Math Woes

Ontario students, like those in most Canadian provinces, continued to struggle mightily in mathematics. Grade 4 Ontario students lagged behind their counterparts in Kazakhstan, Lithuania and 25 other jurisdictions in mathematics, landing them in the middle of the pack in the 2015 TIMSS assessment, a U.S.-based global study of math and science.

Those startling TIMSS results came on the heels of a dismal showing from Grade 3 and 6 students on the latest provincial test by the Education Quality and Accountability Office (EQAO), with scores dropping to the lowest levels in more than 15 years. Only 63 per cent of Grade 3s met the acceptable standard, dropping to half in Grade 6.

Math standards advocates such as Teresa Murray of @FixONTmath claimed that pumping $60-million more into a math strategy might not make much of a difference without a return to teaching the fundamentals in the early grades.

B.C. ‘Class Composition’ Court Ruling

The British Columbia Teachers’ Federation (BCTF) won a critical Supreme Court of Canada decision in November 2016 that ended a union legal battle that began in 2002. That ruling immediately restored clauses removed from the B.C. teachers’ contract by the Gordon Campbell Liberal Government dealing with class size, the number of special needs students in a class, and the number of specialist teachers required in schools.

The BCTF court victory was forecasted to have far-reaching ramifications for contact negotiations across Canada. Teachers in Nova Scotia embroiled in a contract dispute of their own took heart from the decision prohibiting the ‘stripping’ of ‘working conditions’ and denying teachers the right to bargain on those issues.

PISA 2015 Test Results Fallout

Crowing about the showing of Canadian students in the 2015 Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) report was widespread and the current Chair of the Council of Ministers of Education (CMEC), P.E.I. Education Minister Doug Currie, was first-off-the mark on December 6, 2016 to hail the student results in the three subjects tested: science, reading and math.

The real devil was evident in the details and more clearly portrayed in the OECD’s own “Country Profile” for Canada. Yes, 15-year-olds in three Canadian provinces (Alberta, British Columbia, and Quebec) achieved some excellent results, but overall Mathematics scores were down, especially in Manitoba and Saskatchewan, and students in over half of our provinces trailed-off into mediocrity in terms of performance. Our real success was not in performance, but rather in reducing the achievement gap adversely affecting disadvantaged students.

Final Words of Wisdom

Looking ahead to 2017, we can find some solace in the April 2016 comments of Dr. Stan Kutcher, one of the world’s leading experts on teen mental health. “We are not facing a mental health crisis in schools,” he pointed out, but we do have to learn to distinguish between “the daily slings and arrows of outrageous fortune” and those “more serious conditions requiring treatment.”

Why and how did Canadian elementary schools become so enthralled with “mindfulness” and “self-regulation”?  What critical education issues were either obscured or ignored in pursuit of pseudo-scientific cures for today’s classroom challenges? What will be the legacy of turning the younger grades into therapeutic classroom environments? What does all of this portend for Canadian K-12 education in 2017 and beyond? 

Read Full Post »

‘Self-Regulation’ and Students: Is the Latest ‘Cure-All’ a False God?

Stationary bikes are now appearing in Canadian classrooms in the latest wave of the  North American “self-regulation” movement.  Frustrated , angry and fidgety kids and stressed-out parents are driving many teachers almost crazy and they are grasping for life preservers in today’s classrooms.  That may explain why principals and teachers in the Halifax Regional School Board and far beyond see spin bikes as almost magical in their powers.

Is this becoming the latest ‘cure-all’ and where’s the scientific research to support its widespread use in regular classrooms? Since the publication of British teacher Tom Bennett’s book Teacher Proof, more and more classroom teachers are raising a “skeptical eyebrow” and confronting the succession of teaching fads that have come and gone over the past twenty years. It’s becoming acceptable to ask whether “self-regulation” with or without bikes is destined for the same fate.

The current expectations for Self-Regulation and Spin Bikes are sky high. Discovery of the latest ‘cure-all’ has sparked incredible media interest with recent CBC-TV short documentaries and CBC Radio The Current feature interviews.

The sheer excitement created by spin bike frenzy is captured well in Aly Thomson’s March 9, 2016 Canadian Press story: “Frustrated at her inability to draw a sofa, five-year-old Mylee Lumsden began to cry. She liked her drawing of a TV, but the couch confounded her, and so she grew increasingly upset. Her teacher, Mary Theresa Burt, looked at the brewing storm, and suggested the little girl take a turn on the bright yellow stationary bicycle at the centre of her primary classroom at Ian Forsyth Elementary School.” Within minutes, Mylee was “bright again, cheerful, and smiling widely.”

That tiny yellow bike was simply working miracles — calming rambunctious kids down, quietening the class, getting restless boys to sit still, and making teaching life liveable again. “Now, amid a shift in how educators shift and embrace various styles of learning,” Thomson wrote, “such bikes are helping to boost moods, relieve stress and regulate energy in students of all ages.”

“Learning styles” simply won’t go away long after it has been exposed as fraudulent educational practice.  It’s the best known of the myths recently exposed by Tom Bennett, co-founder of ResearchED and Britain’s 2015 Teacher of the Year.  A year ago, in the Daily Telegraph, he pointed out that many such theories that fill classrooms in Britain have little grounding in scientific research.

“We have all kinds of rubbish thrown at us over the last 10 to 20 years,” he stated. “We’ve been told that kids only learn properly in groups. We’ve had people claiming that children learn using brain gym, people saying kids only learn when you appeal to their learning style. There’s not a scrap of research that substantiates this, and, unfortunately, it’s indicative of the really, really dysfunctional state of social science research that exists today.”

Bennett is far from alone in challenging the research basis for a whole range of initiatives floating on unproven educational theories. According to a research scan by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), trillions of dollars are spent on education policies around the world, but just one in 10 are actually evaluated.

Commenting on the research, Andreas Schleicher, OECD director of education and skills, said: “If we want to improve educational outcomes we need to have a much more systematic and evidence-based approach.” Speaking at the 2014 Education World Forum in London, Schleicher added: “We need to make education a lot more of a science.”

Cutting through the hype surrounding Self-Regulation, it’s difficult to find independent, validated research support. A very perceptive October 2012 feature in The Tyee actually bore down into the British Columbia self-regulation movement looking for the research basis while 3,000 teachers were being taught the strategy.

While much of Dr. Stuart Shanker’s work is compromised by his promotion of his own particular program, Kimberley Schonert-Reichl, of UBC’s Human Development, Learning and Culture research unit, has studied MindUP , an alternative approach to teaching self-regulation as the basis for Social and Emotional Learning (SEL). Over a period of six years, she only found one large-scale independent research study, a CASEL study of 270 programs, that documented its actual benefits.

“So little(in education) has actually been formed by rigorous research, as opposed to the medical field, Schonert-Reichl claimed. ” I heard someone compare where we are with understanding well-designed educational studies to where we were with clinical drug trials in the early 1900s.”

Self-regulation definitely holds promise, but the research basis is quite limited and teachers are wise to be skeptical until there’s more evidence that it actually works and is sustainable in the classroom.  A new study by Shanker and his associates, Child Development (September/October 2015), may add to the puzzle by demonstrating the the meaning of the term ‘self-regulation’ is still unclear and therefore expandable to accommodate an array of some 88 different concepts, including  self-control, self-management, self-observation, learning, social behavior, and the personality constructs related to self-monitoring.

Who is really being served by ‘self-regulation’ is particularly unclear. Much of the rationale has its underpinning in neurocience and that’s what is being debated rather than its efficacy for the majority of students.  Some like former BC Education Minister George Abbott see it as a way of serving severely learning-challenged kids and getting rid of the extensive, expensive Special Education system with all those individual program plans.

Child psychologist and elementary teachers, as The National Post columnist Marni Soupcoff  anticipated three years ago, are latching onto self-regulation believing that you can ‘teach kids to behave properly in schools’ because the job is not being done in today’s family homes. The real reason it’s needed, in other words, is because too many kids aren’t getting the “psychological stability and support” they need from their own families.

Is Self-Regulation — with or without Spin Bikes – another unproven educational initiative that will come and go without a discernable impact on students? Should researchers marketing their own programs be relied upon to provide the supporting research? Will ‘self-regulation’ end up resembling mother’s version of  “sit in the corner,” “go to your room” or “get down and do five push-ups, now” ? Should we intervene if kids riding those bikes ever come to look like hamsters on wheels in the Cage?  

Read Full Post »

Kids and Stress: Are Kids More “Stressed” Today — and If So Why?

Every weekday morning, students across the nation arrive at school and file into their classrooms. Most students are ready and prepared to learn, but increasing numbers are reportedly anxious, “stressed-out” and hyperkinetic. Teachers everywhere find today’s students distracted by mobile devices and texting, wrestling with family issues, bothered by bullying, easily excitable, or simply anxious about academic expectations.  Child psychologists and parenting experts provide plenty of advice on how to help “stressed-out” kids cope in our schools and homes.

More children and teens claim to be “stressed” than ever before, but — strangely enough– the research evidence to support such assumptions is spotty at best. One of Canada’s leading authorities on teen mental health, Dr. Stanley Kutcher, observes that they are under “different kinds of stress” and perhaps less resilient than in the past. Why some kids can “handle the pressure” of competition while others “fall apart” is now attracting more serious study. Close observers of classroom culture are also noting the recent trend toward promoting the philosophy of “mindfulness,” including “Breathe In, Breathe Out” daily yoga exercises.

Stress is a normal part of everyday life and resilience is what allows students to not only survive, but to thrive.  The idea that “all stress is bad,” Dr. Kutcher insists, is a popular myth and “completely untrue.” In a March 2011 interview with CBC-TV health reporter Kelly Crowe, he clearly explained why without resorting to inaccessible medical terminology:

“Stress is useful for us, it helps the body tune itself, it is a method by which we learn how to adapt to our environment either by changing ourselves or by changing our environment.  There is good stress, which is positive, it helps kids learn how to pick themselves up and dust themselves off, and start all over again. That’s part of resilience.  That’s part of learning how to deal with life, but sometimes there’s also stress that is bad for you and part of the deal is understanding which is which.”

When does stress become harmful to children and youth? Here’s Dr. Kutcher’s answer, based upon the best research:

“Stress which is very prolonged or very intense can be harmful to people and the times in life when that stress comes on can also be more harmful than other times.  For example early in life; severe and prolonged stress early in life such as maltreatment or abuse can have impact not only at that point in life but also well into adulthood because of its impact on brain development. Severe and prolonged stress is not good for you.”

Reading recent news articles endorsing “Mindfulness in Class” and “Self-Regulation” made me wonder if advocates of such approaches made any distinction between types of stress, and whether “competition” was, once again, a bad word in elementary classrooms.  One Grade 5 class in Abbotsford, BC, taught by Julie Loland, addressed the problem with a “Mindfulness” initiative. In her “high needs” school, Ms. Loland utilized Dr. Jon Kabat-Zinn’s Buddhism-inspired strategies to calm the children down and get them to focus on learning. “I felt kids came to school and were not ready to learn; they were battling stressful life situations,” she said. “Many students didn’t care about learning” and simply came to school to escape “their poverty.”  Regular yoga exercises were introduced to ensure “kids were open to the learning of the day.”

A Toronto region school, Massey Street Public School in Brampton, is implementing Dr. Stuart Shanker’s prescription from Calm, Alert, and Learning, a variation of “Mindfulness” known as “self-regulation.” In teacher Shivonne Lewis-Young’s Grade 3 and 4 classes, children sit on a blue carpet and padded balls rather than at desks and the day begins with passing a “talking stick” and asking each child “how do you feel today?”  Calming the kids down and teaching them how to control their behaviour with “self-regulation zones” is seen as the panacea. “It appears to be working” anecdotally, according to The Globe and Mail’s Education reporter, Caroline Alphonso.  It definitely makes the kids feel better, but where’s the evidence that it’s building confidence, strengthening resilience, or improving their grades?

More discerning education analysts and researchers, particularly in Britain, consider such “feel-good” strategies as mostly  harmless as school-based elementary-level experiments but possibly detrimental if scaled-up to a system-wide initiative.  Utilizing them in socially-disadvantaged schools might be doing more harm than good by further “degrading” the curriculum and lowering student performance expectations.  On this score, Dr. Kutcher has some further advice:  “We’re not here as a species and still surviving those millennia because we couldn’t adapt to stress. On the contrary, our brains are wired to adapt.  I don’t think we actually do anybody a service and we may actually do young people a disservice by trying to protect them from stress and trying to make everything nice and everything rosy and having a Pollyannish approach to life.  I don’ t think that does anyone any good.”

Respecting the pupil and challenging them to do their best remains the soundest, proven, and research-based approach, especially for kids who come to school with few social advantages.  School classrooms are populated by “Warriors” and “Worriers” and some of that outlook and attitude, whether high motivation or paralytic anxiety, is definitely parent-driven. American psychiatrist Douglas C. Johnson of UCLA, San Diego, a leader in the OptiBrain Center Consortium, specializes in training pilots and favours “stress inoculation” as a strategy: “You tax them without overwhelming them. And then you allow for sufficient recovery.”  That, Johnson claims, ‘helps diffuse the Worrier’s curse.’

If that sounds a little harsh and perhaps overly competitive, then Dr. Kutcher’s approach might be more palatable. “We have to learn how to deal with stress,” he says. “That doesn’t mean that giving kids techniques… or showing them how to deal with it is a bad thing. I think it’s probably a good thing but doing it over and over again and providing cocoons for kids I don’t think works.”

Are kids more stressed today or are we just more sensitive to it in our schools and homes? Do educational prescriptions such as “Mindfulness” and “Self-Regulation” help or hurt today’s students? Where’s the evidence that calming them down sharpens their intellect and produces improved performance? Is there any danger that mainstream elementary classrooms are becoming “therapeutic” rather than educative in their focus? 

Read Full Post »

Teaching ‘Stressed-Out’ Kids: Why is the Self-Regulation Movement Spreading?

Luke MacDonald, the leading champion of Sparks Fly,  is in the business of helping people to get active and healthy.  Since 1996, he’s been promoting a series of Youth Run projects and volunteering with Phoenix House as a community outreach dimension of of his own Halifax sports equipment shop, Aerobics First.  After 34 years in business, he’s now turned to promoting  stationary “spin bikes” and “self-regulation” as the way of reaching and re-engaging today’s ‘stressed-out,’ distracted school children.

Luke is in the vanguard of the Canadian ‘self-regulation’ movement. Building on the research connecting improved mental concentration with physical exercise, the Run for Life Foundation (www.runforlife.ca) has developed the Sparks Fly program. With the support of private donors, Sparks Fly has placed child-sized spin bicycles into classrooms across Canada, including more than a dozen within the Halifax Regional School Board.

Here’s how it works: Students are encouraged to hop on the bike if they are having difficulty focusing on their lessons. The idea is that children learn to identify when they are having difficulties with attention, and then use physical activity as a stimulant to engage the parts of the brain that help with this cognitive skill. At Dalhousie University, a research team is also conducting a study to determine the optimal dose of exercise to promote improved cognitive functioning, focusing on university-age students.

The Sparks Fly spin bike project  has a practical, utilitarian objective — to help “stressed-out.’ distracted children focus and perform better in school.  “The ideal situation is that the bikes remain in the classroom,” Luke told The Chronicle Herald  during last year’s Fitness Week. “So when a student is feeling anxious, they just have to get on the bike. A little bit of movement can calm them, and they learn that.”

Halifax healthy living activist MacDonald experienced an epiphany, of sports, when he was awakened to its intellectual origins in the ‘self-regulation’ movement. Inspired by a powerful address by York University’s Dr. Stuart Shanker at “The Collision” conference in Waterloo and Dr. John Ratey’s book, The Spark, he was completely hooked on the initiative that attempted to marry physical activity with ‘self-regulation’ principles in elementary schools.

Self-regulation is the latest manifestation of neuroscience and it’s catching on as the latest panacea to grab the attention of today’s stressed children and high speed screenagers.  In an August 2014 Toronto Globe and Mail feature, social trends reporter Erin Anderssen was drawn to neuroscience as “a subversive solution.” “Cut math class,” she wrote, ” to dance–or walk, skip, play catch — the theory being that whatever gets the heart pumping will get the brain humming as well.”

Aerobic fitness is now touted by RunForLife.ca as one of the best ways to develop a child’s ability to self-regulate.  In simplest terms, self-regulation is the ability to stay calmly focused and alert.  Its research-based origins can be traced back to the famous 1989 “Marshmallow Test”  where only 30 per cent of four-year-olds left alone in a room for a few minutes could resist eating the tasty treat.

Self-regulation is now being promoted as an educational alternative to “behaviour management” and is increasingly favoured by so-called progressive, child-centred elementary school educators. “Self-regulation,” in Shanker’s words, “does not involve making an effort to inhibit impulses” but rather “to reduce the stressors affecting the nervous system.”  It’s so widely accepted by Ontario child psychologists that it’s actually enshrined as “a measurement outcome” on the latest provincial school report cards.

Student learning initiatives based upon neuroscience now enjoy a patina of  scientific research respectability. Growing numbers of education observers are beginning to question the legitimacy of “self-regulation” in the context of its actual brain research origins.  A January 2014 Time Magazine feature, written by Kate Pickert, identified the movement as an outgrowth of what is termed “The Mindful Revolution,” the popular science of “finding focus in a stressed-out, multitasking culture.’  She and a number of North American scholars see self-regulation as a recent mutation of “Mindfulness,” a Stress Reduction curriculum (MBSR) developed in 1979by Jon Kabat-Zinn, an MIT-educated scientist heavily influenced by Buddhism.

Much of the rationale for ‘self-regulation’ echoes Kabat-Zinn’s MBSR neuroscience theories and some of its proponents make it sound like a “New Age retread” of previous prescriptions for stress.  Mindfulness is definitely rooted in Eastern philosophy, while it is being presented as “secular” in our schools.  Dr. Catherine Gidney at Fredericton’s St. Thomas University is currently exploring the historical context surrounding the implementation of mindfulness in Canadian classrooms. In doing so she documents some of pedagogical and spiritual concerns and objections that have been raised about this phenomenon.  A few other education scholars have also pointed out the laser-like focus of mindfulness on “the here and now” and its implicit lack of respect for wisdom and learned experience.

American writer and skeptic Dan Hurley, writing in New York Times Magazine (January 14, 2014), has also pointed out a few of its “unwanted side-effects.”  While presented as a virtual cure-all for “split focus’ distractibility, more recent research demonstrates that it sharpens focus , but actually impairs “implict learning,”  making it more difficult to ride a bicycle, speak grammatically, or read people’s facial expressions.  More concerning, it is being shown to inhibit “mind wandering” and the sort of “mind vacations” that often lead to epiphanies and Big Ideas.

Educators are always looking to improve upon current student behaviour management strategies. If Self-Regulation becomes dominant practice,  we may succeed in incorporating more physical activity and securing more attentiveness.  It’s fair to ask whether we will also be producing more placid kids — sacrificing intellectual risk taking, academic learning time, and perhaps a little creativity in our classrooms.

What explains the rise and spread of Self-Regulation as the latest educational panacea for modifying children’s behaviour in the schools?  How is the self-regulation movement connected to Eastern philosophy and should that be a matter of concern in essentially sectarian state schools?  What impact are Sparks Fly and comparable programs having on teaching and learning in elementary schools?  Is there any danger that Self-Regulation may actually curb creativity and historical-mindedness by inculcating “willpower” and stamping out “mind wandering” ?

Read Full Post »