The ASCD posted a great 6-part series where Eric Jensen gives an overview on the challenges of teaching children in poverty, and how schools can help children overcome the challenges that poverty presents.

To view the series on what being poor does to kids’ brains  – and how we can help them to succeed.

photo: Lisa Krantz/Express-News

Eric Jensen led a workshop on brain-based learning for Harlendale Independent School District teachers and administrators at the Boggess Center in July. Jensen spoke about techniques aimed at children from impoverished backgrounds, including helping them cope with stress, learn appropriate emotional responses and increase cognitive stimulation.

Creating brainiacs

During the summer, about 200 educators in the Harlandale Independent School District experienced brain-based learning firsthand as they joined in a fast-paced scavenger hunt all while becoming acquainted with neuroscience research and teaching techniques from expert Eric Jensen.

Between activities meant to engage workshop participants, Jensen spoke about using brain-based techniques with students from impoverished backgrounds. Research has shown that socioeconomic status is associated with childhood achievement. He emphasized helping students cope with stress, learn appropriate emotional responses and increase cognitive stimulation.

What these teachers may not have realized was the basis for these strategies stretches back to experiments half a century ago.

Leslie Owen Wilson, professor emerita at the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point School of Education, said brain-based learning can trace its origins to the Split Brain Experiments of the 1960s, in which scientists discovered that the two brain hemispheres had different functions. But, neuroscience research has been slow to diffuse into classroom settings, said Wilson, who is based in Austin and is teaching an online course on the topic this fall.

“Generally, teachers teach the way that they were taught,” said Wilson, who added that an administrator who adopts brain-friendly policies can ease the transition.

For students to retain learning, they must practice, talk about and act upon the information, Wilson said.

“A lot of kids physically have to do something in order to ingrain the learning at a permanent level,” Wilson said. “That takes a great deal of time and teaching artistry and, you know, it’s not on the test.”

Using new techniques

Melva Matkin said that when she became principal of Esparza Accelerated Elementary School in the Northside Independent School District more than 20 years ago, most students were functioning below grade level on standardized tests.

“We knew something had to change,” she said.

Matkin’s formula for creating an “enriched” learning environment included asking teachers to stay current on cognitive research and to use students’ emotional states to optimize learning and behavior management.

For instance, students might hear classical music playing during lunch. Matkin has observed that classical music calms students. The few times someone has slipped the wrong CD into the player, she’s seen the kids get really revved up.

She has also advised teachers to cater to students’ multiple intelligences. This translates to students building a diorama of the Alamo for history class — an activity that would appeal to their spatial intelligence — rather than just reading about the Alamo.

In North East Independent School District, the push toward brain-based learning is coming, in part, from the physical education and health department. There Rachel Naylor, assistant director for physical education, health and athletics, said teachers began incorporating brain breaks into classes last year.

“It could be anything from standing up, stretching, breathing and sitting back down, to going outside for a walk,” Naylor said.

Strategies that work movement into the school day boost blood flow to the brain and can create a domino effect that affects learning, quality of life and, potentially, test scores, Naylor said. A preliminary NEISD analysis from the 2008-09 school year found that obese middle school students had lower passing rates on both the reading and math portions of the Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills tests than students with a healthy weight.

Overcoming challenges

Rather than lecturing to quiet lackluster learners, teachers may have to adapt to a classroom cacophony — a potential side effect of having engaged students — according to local educators who have made the switch.

But aside from managing energized students, there are other impediments to using brain-based learning techniques.

For instance, educators must first understand the scientific research to translate it into classroom practices, Wilson said.

Another downside is the amount of time it takes to teach using these tactics.

“If I zip through a textbook or indulge in round-robin reading, I can say I covered that material, but I can’t with any certainty say a child learned it,” Wilson said.

Alvarez said he found time management to be an issue when he took students outside to practice graphing, an activity that took twice as long as expected.

“There’s no other way, sometimes, to get through a lesson besides notes and lecture because there are time constraints,” Alvarez said.

Matkin acknowledges that brain-based learning is not a quick fix.

Though the success of these initiatives can be difficult to measure comparatively, Matkin pointed out that Esparza, a school of about 750 students, received an exemplary rating in the 2010 Texas accountability ratings.

Brain-based learning is “a philosophy and approach to education that’s kid-friendly and it’s, frankly, teacher-friendly,” the principal said. “It is not an easy way to teach, but it is a fun way to teach.”

Read the full article at San Antonio Express-News:

Favorite quote from the video below: “It’s not basics then enrichment… the basics can be addressed move covertly, authentically, and effective when those skills are developed in a meaningful and motivational context”.

From TED: Brian Crosby, a teacher for 29 years in Sparks, Nevada, guides the learning in a model technology classroom. Coming from a background in outdoor education and educational technology, Brian fuses his “at risk” students’ use of technology with field trips, art, hands-on activities and a problem-based approach, to build their schema of the world while at once connecting them to it.

Brian Crosby, a fifth grade teacher at Agnes Risley Elementary School in Sparks, NV, has a blog called Learning Is Messy.

You can also see his student’s blog here.

The brain is run by three things. First, behavioral geneticists estimate that about 30-40% of how we turn out is genetics. But that leaves 60-70% up to either the environment or environment and genetics combined (gene expression). Those who grow up in poverty experience a very different upbringing from middle or upper class kids.

Students who grow up amid economic insecurity often face many obstacles: parents without education, lack of healthy attachments, lag of cognitive stimulation, lack of enrichment activities, violent neighborhoods and lack of access to medical resources. The latest neuroscience science is showing how these emotions have effects on the brain and how they can directly impede learning. Some scientists and educators are suggesting ways in which kids and college students can combat the long-lasting effects of poverty-related stress.

How Chronic Stress Derails the Brain

Out of all the issues, one of the greatest is acute or chronic stress.

Occasional stress is good for us. Cortisol is actually a molecule of energy. But in response to fear or stress, the brain quickly releases adrenaline and cortisol, activating the heart, blood vessels and brain for life-saving action — fighting, flight or freeze. At school most kids don’t fight or flight, they just freeze up in class and do nothing.

The most severe stressor is a threat. The brain gives the threat priority over anything else — including schoolwork — and it creates powerful memories to help prevent future threats.Fear also interferes with learning. A study published in the February online journal of Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience shows that students raised in low-income homes have stronger fear reactions — with potential consequences for concentration.”All families experience stress, but poor families experience a lot of it,” says Martha Farah, psychology professor at the University of Pennsylvania.

Dr. David Diamond, a professor at the University of South Florida, has studied the effects of stress-related hormones in rats for decades and spoken at Jensen conferences. He found that high cortisol levels affect the hippocampus — a key learning center in the brain — in three ways. They suppress electrical activity, decrease efficiency and reduce new cell growth. In fact, chronic stress actually shrinks the hippocampus. That impairs learning, memory and mood.

These effects, thought likely to occur in humans as well, might be one reason it’s hard for impoverished students to concentrate and learn — especially if there is extra stress, violence or abuse in the child’s environment, Diamond says.

Has anyone actually compared the brains of middle class kids with those from poverty?

One researcher reported that growing up in poverty affects thinking processes associated with several brain systems. Sixty healthy middle-school students matched for age, gender and ethnicity but of different socioeconomic status took tests that challenged brain areas responsible for specific cognitive abilities. Researchers found that children from low-income homes had significantly lower scores in areas of language, long-term and short-term memory, and attention.

The research, Farah says, suggests that the effect of stress on the brain may be the reason for these detected differences and disadvantages. “Growing up in a socially disadvantaged environment often exposes people to threats to their health and well-being,” says Peter Gianaros, an assistant professor of psychiatry and psychology at the University of Pittsburgh, who headed the research.

Can Teachers Change the Brain

There are science-supported ways to mitigate these accentuated fear and stress responses and nurture the brain, researchers and educators say.

“Change the experience, and you change the brain,” says San Diego-based educator Eric Jensen, author of the book “Enriching the Brain: How to Maximize Every Learner’s Potential,” who has developed a teachers’ training program, “Teaching with Poverty in Mind.”

“Many good schools have shown they can create experiences that change the brain for the better.”

Among those experiences:

* Targeted preparation. To help children succeed in school, Jensen teaches educators to build students’ brain capacity in areas shown by science to be lagging: attention, long-term effort, memory, processing skills and sequencing skills. He recommends a slate of activities for each — for example, compelling stories, theater arts and fine-motor tasks all build attention skills, he says.

* Foster a mind-set of hope, determination, change and optimism — and security. There are many ways to foster hope, Jensen says, including asking about and affirming a student’s dreams, bringing successful students back to talk to new ones, giving useful feedback on schoolwork and teaching students how to set and monitor their own goals.

Studies by Dr. Helen Mayberg of Emory University have reported lower activity in the thinking parts of the brain in people with depression, and research has uncovered brain changes as people get better, either with medical treatments or psychotherapy.

Dr. Eric Kandel, a Nobel laureate and neuroscience professor at Columbia University, found that positive emotions — safety and security — affect learning capabilities of mice.

“Behaviors and thoughts that relate to hope, love and happiness can change the brain — just as fear, stress and anxiety can change it,” Kandel says. “It’s completely symmetrical.”

• Meditation. This has been proven in studies to lower stress.
• Social connectedness. According to Diamond’s work at the Veterans Hospital in Tampa, Fla., “When people are experiencing strong stress, they recover much better when they have social support than when they are socially isolated,” he says. Jensen recommends mentoring programs for children and student groups.
• Take control. “Feeling helpless increases stress hormones,” Diamond says. To offset learned helplessness and develop a sense of control, Jensen advised students to learn time-management skills and goal setting — and reward small accomplishments.
• Exercise. “Exercise stimulates and energizes the brain to more efficiently process information. Exercise actually makes more brain cells,” Diamond says. Sports, aerobic exercise, yoga, dance, walking and even exercising the smaller muscles used for playing a musical instrument can change the brain. Music is calming, Diamond says. “If you feel better, you learn better.”
• Eat well. Marian Diamond, a neuroscientist and professor at UC Berkeley, has been using dietary changes to improve the learning capabilities of orphans and impoverished children in Cambodia. For students living in poverty in the U.S., she said, “Be sure you’re getting good sources of protein and calcium. Each day, eat an egg — or egg whites — a glass of milk, and take a multivitamin.” Other researchers recommend cutting back on sugar and smoking because they raise cortisol levels.
• Specific skill-building. There are several specific skills that can and should be fostered. Without these skill sets, students will struggle and fall further behind every year. Some schools do things that boost these skills, many of them do it accidentally.

If you’d like to learn more about how to successfully teach and reach kids from poverty, you may want to attend Jensen Learning’s “Teaching with Poverty in Mind. Early bird or group discounts may apply.

Go to: http://www.jensenlearning.com/workshop-teaching-with-poverty-in-mind.php

Original article by Rosemary Clandos, Special to The Times

photo credit: Learning Leaders NYC

Host a staff development workshop on your own, using Jensen Learning’s workshop to go. It’s a program that you can deliver school-wide with positive, practical, research-based methods that can skyrocket student achievement scores.

Click here to find out how your school can overcome the challenges of teaching kids in poverty.

A huge base of literature shows the inverse relationships between poverty or low socioeconomic status and health, but very few understand the connections with poverty. You can get help teaching kids in poverty. How? Start by learning about poverty and its effect on learning and behavior.

Multiple studies have examined longitudinal relations between duration of poverty exposure since birth, cumulative risk exposure, and cognitive performance. One measure of cumulative risk exposure is basal blood pressure and overnight cortisol levels. Typically cortisol is lowest in the early morning and levels pick up during the day. In kids from poverty, the levels are elevated 24/7.

This is pretty easy to understand, since many from poverty are exposed to poor housing conditions, crowded conditions, unsafe conditions, etc. Typical risk exposure is measured by multiple physical (e.g., substandard housing) and social (e.g., family turmoil) factors. The greater the number of years spent living in poverty, the more elevated was overnight cortisol and the more dysregulated was the cardiovascular response (i.e., muted reactivity).

As a teacher working with kids from poverty, why should you care about this?

There are two reasons, both with enormous consequences. First, cumulative stress is HIGHLY correlated with behavior issues at school. In our in-depth workshop on Teaching with Poverty in Mind, we’ll give you 7 priceless solutions for this challenge. Never, ever, give up on these students. You can learn exactly HOW to deal with behavior issues in simple, strategic ways.

Second, cumulative stress is associated with worse academic performance. Why? Chronic levels of stress inhibit working memory, process speed, sequencing capacity and attentional skills. Every one of those factors is a major determinant of underachievement. You’ll get specific, practical, easy-to-implement strategies that can mitigate the effects of stress. Eric Jensen’s new book, “Teaching with Poverty in Mind” offers specific strategies you can use, too.

Join us each year for our in-depth workshop on Teaching with Poverty in Mind, we’ll give you the exact research-based solution for this challenge. Remember, you don’t usually get to select the kids you teach, but you can choose HOW you teach. Brains are designed the adapt to experience. If the experiences you are giving them in school are strong, focused, and “on point,” they will change the brain for the better.

photo credit: break.things

For those that didn’t make the ASCD Conference on March 7th, the recorded session on how to overcome the challenges of poverty in the classroom is now available.

The presentation is 1:57, so grab a coffee and enjoy the presentation (TIP: Start the video first, then pause it, so it buffers…)

If you are faced with the challenges that poverty creates in the classroom, you’ll pick up a few great ideas.

If you’d like to have Eric Jensen work with your school on creating a comprehensive poverty program to boost your student’s achievement, please contact us for more information: diane@jlcbrain.com or call us at (808) 552-0110.

We also have the following resources for educators wanting to address student achievement goals:

PowerPoint for staff development training:

Overcoming Poverty Challenges: Teaching with Poverty in Mind

Learn the newest research on what poverty does to kids brains. Find out what are the four biggest factors that impact the brains of poverty.

Discover the real potential for change in every student’s brain. This updated presentation that helps teachers connect the research with the classroom-practical strategies. You get the brain scans, the key principles and most importantly, the teacher-tested ideas you can use immediately.

This 143-slide session has color, passion, science and still answers the question, “What do I do on Monday?” This shows links to differentiation, enrichment, learning and memory strategies. It is long enough for either a 2 hour, half-day or full day session. Staff will be talking about this presentation for weeks! The support book recommended for this presentation is Teaching with Poverty in Mind by Eric Jensen.

Do-It-Yourself Workshop

Enriching the Brains of Students In Poverty – An Eric Jensen Workshop to Go!

Last week Andre Bauer, the lieutenant governor of South Carolina and a candidate to become the state’s next governor, compared providing government assistance to those in need – including school kids eligible for free or reduced price lunches – to feeding stray animals. He claimed that providing such services only encourage breeding and facilitate the problem.

Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but not their version of the facts. Bauer has it completely wrong.

We need to put to rest the idea that the only way those in need will enjoy improved outcomes in life is for them to pull themselves up by the bootstraps and do it all on their own – especially when it comes to kids. Our brains don’t grow up and flourish inside a test tube. Given the integrated way in which our brains work, it’s simply wrong to expect hungry kids or kids who aren’t exposed to healthy environments to show up at school ready to learn.

Research is compelling; the brains runs on oxygen, glucose and nutrients. Unless kids get this at home, schools must provide it. Research shows that good nutrition not only keeps kids healthy – it also contributes to better learning. Take a look at just some of the evidence:

• In a large-scale analysis of approximately 1 million students enrolled in New York City schools, researchers examined IQ scores before and after preservatives, dyes, colorings, and artificial flavors were removed from lunch offerings. Prior to the dietary changes, 120,000 of the students were performing two or more grade levels below average. Afterward, the figure dropped to 50,000. Ceci, S. J. (2001).

• In another study, elementary school children were provided with one of three breakfast options: a good breakfast, a fast-food breakfast, or no breakfast. The results replicated previous findings showing that breakfast intake enhances cognitive performance. But the study also showed differential effects based on breakfast type. Children who ate the healthy breakfast frequently demonstrated enhanced spatial memory, improved short-term memory, and better auditory attention. (Fernald L, Ani CC, Grantham-Mcgregor S., 1997)

• Adequate intake of minerals, phytonutrients, enzymes, and vitamins also makes a difference. School age children who received such nutrients over the course of a year behaved better (meaning they gave teachers more “on task time”) and scored higher on achievement tests than their peers who just received placebos. (Grantham-McGregor S, Baker-Henningham H. (2005).

The real takeaway here is that providing kids with healthy meals and other services and supports really can make a difference.

Assumptions that disadvantaged students underperform in school because their parents aren’t educated, their home environments are substandard, or their parents just don’t care only perpetuate the problem because they excuse schools and other adults in kids’ lives from making a difference.

There’s no question that poverty changes the brain, which can negatively affect behavior and student performance. But the brain can also change for the better when kids are exposed to healthy, safe, engaging, and challenging environments.

In thousands of the top performing schools across the country, only those providing nutrition for kids from poverty are meeting or exceeding the standards. Are the governor’s statements suggesting an ignorance of the facts or is it simply prejudice? Let the voters be the judge.

Eric Jensen, author of the new ASCD book, Teaching with Poverty in Mind. He’s been featured as a guest on ASCD’s Whole Child Podcast, and he’s presenting at ASCD’s Annual Conference in San Antonio, Texas.

photo credit: Let There Be More Light

Kids from poverty do not need a “dumbed down” curriculum.

These are the three “As” that matter” most: arts, AP (advanced placement curriculum) and activity (P.E., recess, sports).

Before these kids even get to school, they have been subjected to years of “doing without.” Poor children are half as likely to be taken to museums, theaters, or to the library and are less likely to go on culturally enriching outings. Low-income children have fewer or smaller designated play areas in the home and spend more time watching television and less time exercising than non-poor children.

Financial limitations of parents also often exclude low-income kids from healthy after-school activities such as music, athletics, dance or drama. In addition, kids from poverty are more prone to depression.

This is critical information for educators because school sports, recess and physical activity all reduce the likelihood of depression in kids via increasing neurogenesis. In fact, part of depression is the inability to recognize novelty, which makes them disinterested in class and harder to teach.

Boosting neurogenesis is the ultimate low-budget anti-depressant…

Arts and Physical Education

Does studying the arts affect the learning? Yes, the arts are an often-neglected area of the curriculum that have a dramatic impact on student performance.

If you take musically naive participants and scan their brains before teaching them to read music and play the piano and then give them fifteen weeks of lessons and scan their brain again and you’ll see physical changes.

In theater, drama and other performance arts, subjects have demonstrated improved emotional intelligence, timing, reflection, respect for diversity, and even higher SAT scores. When compared to those taking no arts courses, the longer they worked at it, the higher the scores of those taking theater and drama scored higher on the widely used college entrance test. Drama teaches emotional intelligences (correlated with better grades), memorization and processing skills (upgrades operating skills) and builds social status and friends.

UCLA professor of education Dr. James Catterall analyzed data on more than 25,000 students from the National Educational Longitudinal Survey to determine the relationship of engagement in the arts to student performance and attitudes, and also investigated the impact of intensive involvement in instrumental music on student achievement. She found that students with high levels of arts participation outperform “arts-poor” students by virtually every measure and that high arts participation makes a more significant difference to students from low-income backgrounds than to high-income students.

In addition, Catterall found clear evidence that sustained involvement in particular art forms — music and theater — is highly correlated with success in mathematics and reading. She documented the difference between students of lower socioeconomic status who took music lessons in grades 8-12 when compared to other low SES students who took no music lessons. The former not only increased their math scores significantly but also improved reading, history, and geography by 40%. The arts are particularly valuable for kids from poverty.

Besides building volition, caring, and effort, which can make a big difference in achievement, integration of music in the curriculum can contribute to both better academic scores and enhanced neurobiological development by enhancing the student’s brain.

Arts are particularly valuable because they build lifelong, transferable skills such as reading. In fact, the implicit learning that arts provide transfers better than the explicit “textbook” learning of other subjects. To put it bluntly, arts build your student’s operating system as well as anything you have in your school. If you do not have a strong arts program, what are replacing it with?

Arts training influences cognition because children who do art become motivated to practice their particular art (music, dance, drawing, etc.) with intentional, focused determination. This motivation typically leads to sustained attention, which in turn leads to greater efficiency of the brain network involved in attention. That leads to cognitive improvement in many areas, including math and science, according to the results of a three-year collaboration with over a dozen neuroscientists from five universities and the Dana Consortium on Arts and Cognition. For the first time, we are seeing that transferable skills can be taught which my raise the practical or “fluid” intelligence.

In short, arts have a cascading array of benefits that go far beyond increased participation, attendance, and love of learning.

Compared to such vital concern as safety, how important is a school-wide enrichment mindset a challenging curriculum, and physical exercise? It’s critical! For some kids, school arts enrichment is all the enrichment they’ll get.

Like many National Blue Ribbon Schools, Lincoln Elementary School is fully immersed in arts. Why? In addition to building the student’s brain for academics, arts serves as an engagement and motivation strategy.

At Lincoln, in Mount Vernon, New York, the curriculum hooks kids in with arts at every chance. “Capture them in the arts and the academics will follow,” declares Lincoln’s principal George Albano. This principal is a classy instructional leader comfortable discussing content areas with teachers, a mentor to faculty, and an administrator familiar with all the children and their accomplishments and struggles. The school has created a great place to be: it’s a rich, interdisciplinary curriculum that somehow finds a way to blend literacy and jazz, physics and physical education. Much of credit goes to formative assessments and the arts.

Activities Advance Academics

Physical education and athletics are another aspect of school not commonly associated with improved cognition. We all know that exercise can make you healthier but can exercises make you smarter as well? Can exercising make your brain more fit? Surprisingly, athletic programs have been found to increase rates of academic performance and graduation and to reduce behavioral problems in schools. In addition to improving the health of students and improving reaction times, cardiovascular capacity, muscle strength, body coordination, speed, and stress responses, athletics also enhances cognition and academic outcomes.

As a matter of fact, exercise helps increase the release of brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF), which supports learning and memory function and the repair and maintenance of neural circuits. Fernando Gomez-Pinilla and her team at UCLA found that voluntary exercise increased levels of BDNF in the hippocampus, a brain area involved with learning and memory. Some studies have found strong evidence that in mammals, exercise increase the production of new brain cells and that they become functional. In addition, exercise leads to increased calcium levels in the blood, and that calcium is transported to the brain—where it enhances dopamine synthesis, making the brain sharper for both cognitive problem solving and working memory.

For example, one study found that joggers consistently performed better than non-joggers on learning and memory tests that required the use of the prefrontal cortex. Scott Small’s work shows that exercise increases the birth of new brains cells, which are highly correlated with learning, mood and memory.

This brain stuff may sound hopeful, but how does it translate? What happens to student achievement when schools engage kids in quality physical education? First, it improves self-concept and reduces stress and reduces aggression Second, it improves academic performance. A preliminary analysis conducted by the California Department of Education shows a significant relationship between academic achievement and the physical fitness of public school students. In the study, reading and mathematics scores were matched with fitness scores of 353,000 fifth graders, 322,000 seventh graders, and 279,000 ninth graders. Higher achievement was associated with higher levels of fitness at each of the three grade levels measured. Exercise is protective against the negative factors of stress and other disabilities and diseases and studies show it enhances memory, focus, and brain function, leading to better cognition and achievement

Click here to find out more on how to have Eric Jensen come to your school or event.

photo credit: bethany8183