Dr Bettina Hohnen – How the latest research in neuroscience will improve your teaching

Transcript

Alis Rocca [00:00:02]

In these short podcast clips, we offer nuggets of information from our longer podcasts that give advice and quick tips to help you as teachers, recognise children’s needs and respond more efficiently, empowering you to adapt teaching effectively. This clip is from my podcast with Doctor Bettina Hohnen. Bettina is a clinical psychologist, author and speaker, working in the field of child mental health and neurodiversity. Here we discuss how teachers step into a child’s life as an attachment figure. She explains the importance of building relationships to understand individual needs and as teachers, how we can properly label behaviour, rather than the child. Bettina explains the important developments in the field of neuroscience and the research that teachers need to know.

Dr Bettina Hohnen [00:00:52]

I think teachers take over as being like a step-in attachment figure for kids, particularly in the early years. And I think we need to understand that for some young people, they arrive at school having a model of relationships that they’re going to try and repeat.

Alis Rocca [00:01:12]

Okay.

Dr Bettina Hohnen [00:01:14]

So, for example, there are some young people who learn at home that the way in which they get attention is to be difficult or to cause a problem, and they will carry that into school because that’s what they’ve learned from home. So again, I think for teachers properly labelling behaviour, seeing behaviour, always trusting kids are being the best they can be, is like the crucial first step. Absolutely crucial.

Alis Rocca [00:01:45]

It’s a baseline. Always believing that they’re wanting an effective relationship with you. Their behaviour is not targetted at you as a teacher, but actually start from that positive point.

Dr Bettina Hohnen [00:01:58]

Yeah, exactly. And you know, similar things about understanding individual differences. I think what we don’t have as a model at the moment in education, is a model of having self-reflection for teachers. And actually, just like kids will trigger us in certain ways, there are certain kids who will trigger certain teachers. And I think that’s such a helpful kind of thing to bring to a teacher. There’s a reason that this little kid, whenever they do that thing, is making you react in a way that maybe you don’t want to react. So that insightfulness as an adult, I think is important in all areas. But I would talk in the same way particularly about brain development, we haven’t talked much about neuroscience. I think neuroscience and brain development and brain functioning is a really helpful thing for teachers to know.

Alis Rocca [00:02:54]

What would you want teachers to know if you could add a little bit of a summary of a module you’d put on teacher training, what would that be with regards to neuroscience.

Dr Bettina Hohnen [00:03:05]

So one thing is about how the brain functions and this idea that we can divide the brain into two different sections, depending on what it does. So the lower bit of the brain is really where we house big emotions. Motivation and reward is also in that lower bit of the brain and then the bit over the top of the brain is called the cortex, which is where we do the thinking. Now for all of us, when emotions are in charge, when we feel particularly angry, when we feel particularly anxious or sad, the lower brain takes over, and then we are not in our thinking brain, we’re not making good, rational decisions. I think that is so, so important because first of all, you’ve got to get kids in their thinking brain if they’re going to learn anything. So having safety in the classroom and making sure that kids are emotionally safe and stable is important if you want to get them to learn anything. And then also remembering that when a kid is in their emotional brain, like for example, when you’ve just given them a detention or when something’s happened and they’re upset about something, there is no point in talking to them. Their rational brain is not available. It’s the same for all of us, they don’t really hear, and that’s what we do sometimes when a child is upset or they’ve done something badly, we talk to them about it and we do it over and over and over again, it becomes a lecture. They’re not listening to anything that you’re saying. So even when behaviour is, as we call naughty or bad, I would say you just sit with them. You might say to a child, ‘it’s really not okay for you to do that, it’s not okay for you to speak to me like that, I can see you’re really angry’. You label the emotion so the kid begins to understand what’s going on, and then later you have to come back and talk to them when everybody is calm and you say to the child, ‘let’s have a think about what happened earlier, because I know that you don’t want to be the difficult child in class. I know that you’re trying hard and yet I want to understand what happened this morning because you got really angry or you did whatever you did’. So that two model of you, do one thing when the child is emotional and you have a very different conversation when everybody is in their calm space. That is the best way to get the best out of the child. It’s much better for your relationship and you will teach them because we are the kids’ teachers. If we just come in with a detention or a telling off or whatever it is, even timeouts, and you say to them, ‘you sit there and you think about what you’ve done’. They’re not thinking about what they’ve done. They need us to help them work out what went on.

Alis Rocca [00:05:44]

And do you as an adult, as a parent, as a teacher, how do you support them getting from that point of dysregulation, where they’re highly emotional, to the point where they can use that second part of the brain and they can sit and listen and rationalise. How do we help as adults with that journey?

Dr Bettina Hohnen [00:06:06]

You know, just this idea of being with kids or anybody in their emotions is unbelievably powerful. And we have to wait until the emotions calm, so emotions will die down quite quickly. We can bring them up again with a thought. We think about ‘oh that person upset me’, we feel angry again and then it dies down. So it’s time. A lot of it is time and just waiting. And also there’s a lot of incredible neuroscience that shows that our brains do better when we’re next to somebody. So there’s this amazing study, they put people in an MRI scanner, so they’re scanning your brain, and they had an electrode on these people’s toes, it was adults, not children, that this was done with, and basically when the person got a signal that they were about to get an electric shock, the amygdala, which is the fear centre in the brain, starts to light up in the MRI scanner, as you would expect. But when they got somebody’s significant other to come and hold their hand when they were doing the experiment, the amygdala lit up significantly less. So it’s this idea that when we are with our attachment figure, significant other people in our lives, our brain perceives the world to be less stressful. It helps us to calm our emotions. It helps us to refind our thinking brain. So even when a kid is being really bad, even when they’re trying to hit you and punch you, you don’t let them hit you and punch you. But try to stay with them if you can and just say, ‘you are so angry right now, no, no, no, you can’t hit me, no no no. But I see how strongly you feel about this.’ And you might need to, you know, get away from them if they’re hurting you. But knowing that just your presence and staying with them in that moment is helping their brain to calm down. Sometimes it can be a day later you talk to them about it, it might need a little bit of a distance. And one of the things that happens actually, is kids don’t want to talk about the times when they behave badly. So you come back and you say, ‘we need to have a little think about what happened this morning when you hit your sister’. And they’ll go,’ I don’t want to talk about it’, or ‘it’s fine, I won’t do it again’. They’ll try and bat you off, of course they will. It’s hard to talk about things that you’re not proud of, but you just stick with it and you just say, ‘we going to have to talk about it, we’ve got to find a way to talk about it, come on’. And you put your arm around them and you say, ‘it’s okay, I know you don’t want to hurt your sister, but we’ve got to talk about what happened and help you to find a different way to manage things when you feel cross with her.’

Alis Rocca [00:08:42]

And that again, everything you just explained there comes back to that notion of the importance of relationships. And I know as a teacher and previously being a teacher, having 30 children to be that attachment figure for, can be really challenging. But I think what I’m taking from what you just said there, is the importance of giving it time and reflection. And the school day is a busy day and there’s more and more that teachers are being expected to do. But I think you’re absolutely right and you pick on something really key there, is just to have those moments of reflection as a teacher so that you can go back and rebuild any relationships that you need to and to be working on.

Dr Bettina Hohnen [00:09:28]

Yeah. And I think one of the things when I talk about the being with emotions for teachers, I think teachers can say, I’ve got 30 kids, I haven’t got time to sit with them and I really understand that. And I think the thing to know is that it can just take a moment to do that validation. Actually, they’re struggling with maths, rather than saying ‘you need to get on with it’ or ‘just get going’, put your hand on their shoulder and just say, ‘I can see you’re really struggling, take some breaths and get going when you’re ready’. It’s a totally different experience as a person. So you may not have a long time and even, you know, parents will say, but I have to get to school, what am I going to do? And it’s just about rather than saying, ‘will you get your shoes on’, you just say, ‘oh, getting shoes on is just so hard for you this morning. Come on’. I think, you know, shall I count to five without help trying to make it into a game? Something that joins them rather than, tells them off?

Alis Rocca [00:10:28]

Yeah. And going back to that, the example you gave there of the teacher, it’s not all 30 of them all the time.  It’s throughout your day with them and it might just be putting your hand on their shoulder and saying, ‘I’m here for you’. And in whatever way that looks, at whatever age group they are, is enough.

Dr Bettina Hohnen [00:10:49]

And something that also, I think is important for teachers, I noticed, you know, with my son, you know, his behaviour was sometimes a bit off. He wasn’t very engaged in school when he was younger and I remember they put him on report, you know, they have these report cards that they give. And when they put him on report, which basically means that at the end of the lesson, the teacher kind of makes a little mark on your card or something. His behaviour or his engagement actually increased significantly. So they took him off report. And I’m like, well, first of all, it shouldn’t be a punishment, some kids need that, it’s actually a form of connection. And secondly, don’t take him off because you take him off, you know, he’s going to lose that connection. So I feel like it’s something about that connection, about the child being seen, that is important. That’s why report cards work. It’s not because the child is being told off, it’s them saying, ‘oh, the teacher is really seeing me, is really looking at me’. And some kids really need that.

Alis Rocca [00:11:51]

All kids, probably.

Dr Bettina Hohnen [00:11:52]

Yeah, right.

Alis Rocca [00:11:53]

Just so that some kids need it and show that they need it and some are more introverted with the way that they show their feelings.

Alis Rocca [00:12:02]

I hope you enjoyed that Nip in the Bud nugget. If you want more, why not go back and listen to the whole episode with my guest? If you enjoyed this episode, please share it with others and visit our website for more information, advice and resources.