Keynote address: Wiring a child’s brain for lifelong success - Laura Justice

I was fortunate enough to attend the Child Well-being Research Symposium last week.

(Handout with abstracts)

There were many interesting sessions shared and I will work on posting up the most engaging over the next week.

The first session was a keynote from Laura Justice a professor at Ohio State University - I found it really refreshing and it reminded me of a lot of the work I had looked into way back when I was at University 8 years ago! Here is a link to her presentation.

The first part of the session looked at Neuroscience. In particular how the brain forms and develops. Each part of the brain is relative to a function - Rational thinking comes from the frontal lobe, Temporal lobe = speech and language features etc. Pathways between and within these lobes are built over time & experience. This means that society has to do the work to build these pathways and how these pathways are formed is important to think about. The word that is used for this process is Synaptogenesis - 2 base words 'synapsis' the connection between two neurons and 'genesis' to bring life/beginning.

An experience causes the pathway between neurons. Meaning that experience-expectant plasticity = synaptogenesis. Research shows that the peak period of plasticity is 7/13years ish. Here is a picture of the process:

Justice mentioned that the most important message she hoped we left the lesson was to always remember that a young child’s brain is much more robust and open to change than ours and therefore you should never underestimate them or what they are capable of.

Another strong message from this keynote was that:

"The environment matters more for certain skills than genes - especially ‘kindergarten readiness skills’."

High quality experiences (nurture) are crucial for buffering the effects of early adversity on the child’s brain.

Meaning that quality early care and education promotes resilience in children, offers a positive offset to challenges.

The second aspect of the keynote was looking at the acquisition of vocabulary, known as Linguistics.

Vocabulary is the basis of a number of things - reading, pro-social behaviours, math, world knowledge and computational thinking just to name a few. It is a key readiness skill and is the foundation for the majority of the curriculum.

Vocabulary is an ‘emergent structure’ it depends on the experiences that you have and the language that you know. The visual representation she shared for this was the creation of an ant hill - something that evolves over time, no two people's vocabulary is the same.

The sensitive period for vocabulary development is age 0-5. Having a good vocabulary is crucial for meeting your needs and wants.

‘Achievement gaps’ (or better-worded opportunity gaps) in vocab are largely a product of experience: the hardware is there, the input needs experiences.

We should be looking further into what it means to know a word.
A word in the lexicon means that the student knows - what it means, how it sounds, how it is spelled, how to use it grammatically, and whether affixes be added to it.

What does it take to know a word deeply? Repeated exposures that are highly informative

The message given was that classrooms should be noisy because the hardware is in place (experience-expectant plasticity) what is needed is input.

Finally, Justice spoke on her ideas around Education.

Language acquisition in the early years is dependent on interactions with others.

Expressions, gestures, intonation, pauses, and loudness provide important cues for learning.

Joint attention - adult and child sharing the same experience is crucial to language development.

In her keynote Justice defined this like a game of ping-pong which involves a serve and return - back and forth = one turn. The completion of a turn develops the brain circuitry/pathways.

The serve is known as a communicative bid (an effort to start the game). Here are some examples:

The adults serve starts and the adults serve is always contingent on the child’s return.

Meaning that the adult is following the child’s focus.

The message from researchers is that IT MUST LAST 5 TURNS.

Interestingly classrooms conversations (cabell, justice et al., 2015). Looking at conversations in small group settings and found that the average length of a conversation is 4 turns. With 50% under 4 turns, 50% over 4 turns and 1:10 conversations was 10+ turns.

Justice put a warning in play - be careful about play based conversations - these need to be supporting long conversations and the evidence from this study show it is not happening currently.

Another reason being that from a very early age children prefer to play with children who have the same language skills as them. And what we need to do is disrupt this.

One solution could be "Bug in the ear" coaching - providing cues to the teacher - to guide conversations.

For ESOL students we should be providing the same opportunities as other students. The serve and return might look a little different, it could be gestural or physical. These students can benefit from exposure to sophisticated language. Instead of us simplifying what we are saying the students will strip down the language to where they are at the moment.

In our settings, we should be designing strategies for implementing to monitor each child’s experiences on these 5 serves.

Exposure to extended conversations are really important.

Overall, I found this session was one of my favourites from the two days. I enjoyed the messages around not underestimating children and also around the importance of developing vocabulary early. I found that this session linked nicely to the learning I have done and the work we do with Manaiakalani.

I would like to read more around the "5 turns" and what evidence supports this - so if you have any links please feel free to leave them in a comment!