My daughter pictured above was a gymnast pretty much since she could walk. She wanted to climb up and jump off everything when she was 4 and still does at 24. To be jumping, swinging, flipping, or climbing delighted her. It is easy for us adults to identify and associate these gross motor behaviors as pleasing to our children.
What about all the rest of our children’s behaviors? What are they and what kind of relationship do our children’s brains have to their behaviors? What could be more important to the well-being of our children than to get the relationship that exists between their brain and their behaviors right? Our children cannot have fulfilling relationships with others or grow up and lead fulfilling lives unless their brain and their behaviors are optimally integrated and functional.
If you ascribe to the same theory of the brain that Jeff Hawkins does, which I do, then you believe behavior is a by-product of prediction because his research shows our brain is an organ of memory and prediction. The human brain builds invariant representations, or models, of everything it learns, then stores these models to be recalled as needed in making predictions for what to do next.
Jeff Hawkins believes if we want to understand what our brain does and what intelligence is, we must understand the nature of our predictions and how the cortex makes them. To understand how our brain makes predictions, we must consider what is happening neuronally, but just as importantly, we must consider the role our human behaviors play in allowing for and supporting the predictions our brain has made, is making, and will make. This essay is focusing on the roles our behaviors play in the memory/prediction matrix that is our brain.
In effect, our behaviors are the expression of our neuronal activity and any action we are capable of is a human behavior. To a large extent, our brain relies upon our behaviors to do its heavy lifting. Our behaviors allow our brain to orient itself in space and time so it can collect the relevant sensory information it needs to make predictions for what is likely to happen in the next moment and what an optimal response should then be in a repeating fashion.
Imagine a child is about to cross the street. His brain must be able to predict when to cross. To do this, his brain must cue his neck muscles to turn left, then right, in order to position his eyes properly so they can see the oncoming traffic. If someone restricts his neck muscles, his brain will cue for an extreme anxiety response because his brain cannot orient his eyes properly to predict whether or not cars are barreling towards him.
Our brain has anxiety, paranoia, and fear whenever any of our behaviors are restricted because our brain relies upon the full array of human behaviors available to us to know it can optimally meet any situation that might arise.Much of our brain’s job is to be ever vigilant for the unexpected. If a teacher tries to manage our behaviors, we become anxious, paranoid, and afraid because, in effect, the teacher is limiting the full range of behaviors we can access should the unexpected occur.
Handcuffing a human makes him exceedingly anxious and vulnerable. Our human brain will cue for an anxiety response when we are handcuffed against our will because the handcuffs restrict the behavioral range our brain relies upon and depends upon. Putting a wristband around one wrist will not cause the brain to cue for an anxiety response because typically a wristband will not inhibit our behavioral range.
Handcuffing is an extreme behavioral limitation and it is easy to understand why it causes people great anxiety. However, nobody I know has yet made the following connection. Our brain has only 7 basic emotional cues it is able to deliver. It is not very differentiated in this regard. Consequently, our brain cues for the same emotional/physiological alarm signals for being handcuffed as it does for any behavioral limitation put on us. This means, if we are handcuffed or simply told we cannot suck our fingers during silent reading, our brain makes us feel equally anxious. All behavioral limitations cause our brain to cue for anxiety. Anxiety cues are the same for slight limitations as they are for extreme limitations because our brain, even though it can think millions of different thoughts, has only 7 emotional cues at its disposal.
If Amy is told she cannot suck her fingers during silent reading, her brain will become confused and disoriented because she will not be able to achieve the calming effects she predicted she could. This arbitrary limit to her behavioral range makes her brain feel threatened and it will cue for an anxiety response pretty equal to the anxiety response her brain would send if she was handcuffed. Our brain has one signal for anxiety and will send it out every time it perceives a limit to its ability to predict optimally. This is not rocket science, but it calls for us to change our current old fashioned and outdated methods of seeking to control and shape the behaviors of our children.
We absolutely must consider what our behavior management practices are doing to the physiological response systems inside of our children’s bodies, because anxiety related disorders are epidemic among our nation’s children. Once anxiety becomes unmanageable, a child’s brain is stuck in a double bind situation. Double binds often lead to full-blown mental illnesses.Is behavioral compliance worth setting our children up for anxiety related disorders, depression, rage, violence, and mental illness?
We teachers are trained to speak about the behaviors of children as if their behaviors exist for us to be able to judge them for how well they are performing in school. We objectify our students’ behaviors and talk about them as if we have some sort of ownership and say in what those behaviors should be.
Our current models for how children should behave are based upon ideals we have fabricated that say behaviors a, b, and c, allow for the important accomplishments, x, y, and z. Therefore, if children exhibit any other behaviors than a, b, or c, they will not accomplish x, y, or z and therefore they should be redirected or reprimanded until their behaviors fall into compliance. Like many of our psychological ideals, this sounds reasonable on paper. In practice, however, it is a recipe for anxiety, depression, rage, violence, and for the least cognitively flexible or our children it is a recipe for mental illness.
When you deeply consider the biological role our human behaviors play in our overall human functioning, you can’t help but question our current ideas and practices. The biological role of our human behaviors is to enable our brain to be our brain and to perform all the jobs it has to perform. Our brain does not take the inhibition or management of its array of behaviors by a third party lightly. As mentioned above, the brain registers extreme anxiety when somebody else wants to limit the behavioral tools in its tool kit of behaviors, regardless of how small or big that limitation is.
Is there a correlation between how cavalier we adults are about managing our children’s behaviors and the epidemic numbers of childhood anxiety related disorders? It seems highly likely.
Our current theories of human behavior from psychology, many of them handed down from over a century ago, have zero sensitivity towards the work our brain has to do. Our current theories of behavior pre-date modern brain research, but we rely upon them because we have never updated them.
A child’s brain doesn’t magically press the pause button on the jobs it is biologically required to do unceasingly when it is plunked in a classroom with a teacher who seeks to manage his or her behavioral range.Quite the opposite. The brain is largely an organ of paranoia and threat detection. It doesn’t mess around. It never takes behavioral limitations lightly. It will always be the organ that it is and do what it does, regardless of the limitations we try to place around it. And the more limits placed on it, the more anxious, paranoid, defensive, and hyped up it will become.
For a teacher to have a predetermined list of allowable behaviors in the classroom, again, sounds good on paper, but it is a disaster for the brains in that classroom. Sometimes our brain needs us to be able to jump up and turn around when we hear a loud noise coming from behind us. Sometimes our brain needs us to move as fast as we can to lift our hand off of a hot surface or to remove our body from a painful position.
Our brain itself cannot physically do the behaviors it needs in order to gather all the relevant sensory information it needs in order to make the assessments it needs in order to make the predictive decisions it needs in order to determine what to do next each and every moment, all day, every day. Our brain needs to know it can rely on its entire tool kit of behaviors every waking moment so it knows it can always optimally perform any job it might be called to do.
Our brain cannot simply ‘forget’ or put on hold that the unexpected always has the potential to occur and that it needs to be at the ready at all times to potentially make predictions for how to manage the unexpected. Our brain, to always be at the ready and to be fully operational at all times relies upon the full use of the full range of its behaviors.
Our current theories for how children ‘should’ behave do not take into consideration the work our brain has to do to be our brain, nor do they take into consideration the intense system of alarms our brain sets off every single time its behavioral range is inhibited for any reason. We must let our children exist from the brains they have, not the brains we believe they should have or want them to have.
In school there are 25 kids in a class, all with completely different idiosyncrasies within the structures and functions of their brains, different neuronal connections, different stored associations and memories, different speeds at which they can recall old information, different abilities to retain new information while recalling old information, different backgrounds, to name a few. Due to so many differences among all children, there is no way to predetermine the behaviors a child should exhibit while they are dealing with information they have never dealt with before in the classroom. It is counter productive to hyper focus on student behavior. No two brains are alike. No two sets of behaviors will be alike while new learning is taking place.
If you have spent any time with children, you will observe them become extremely skittish, anxious, defensive, angry, and/or paranoid when you attempt to manage their behaviors. If teachers put all their energy and focus into helping each student master the new learning in the ways that make the most sense to each child, and the teacher refrains from referencing student behaviors while doing so, her job will instantly become much easier. The kids will become much calmer. The learning will unfold organically for each child. And almost like magic, behavior problems will cease and desist.
When I connected the dots between how inseparable a child’s understanding is from his or her behaviors, I stopped referencing my students’ behaviors cold turkey. What happened was this. My students did not feel threatened. They did not feel anxious. If there was a conflict, they were able to pause and listen to me because they weren’t gearing up to defend themselves. More importantly, I was able to pause and listen to them because I stopped having anxiety about behaviors they exhibited that were different from what I was predicting. I stopped predicting what I believed their behaviors should be and instead put all of my focus on what the learning goals and methods should be. Teachers cannot magically turn off their brains when they teach. When things go differently than a teacher expects, she has anxiety. One way to reduce anxiety is to be more selective about the predictions you make. If you don’t predict how your students behave, you are never thrown into anxiety by their behaviors.
When I stopped discussing or referencing student behaviors for one full month, my classroom turned into calm city. I began to accomplish my teaching goals so much more effectively because my students became SO MUCH CALMER. This was a big deal because I taught all the children in my district from K through 12 who were often the least calm and the most behaviorally unpredictable. I realized different thinkers will exhibit different behaviors. There is no way I can predict how somebody who is differently abled than I am in all ways will either think through a situation or behave in that situation. By simply respecting my students’ boundaries instead of expecting them to understand and respect mine, teaching became easier than I ever imagined it could be.
Many people, when I discuss this new paradigm for understanding and interpreting behavior, believe I am proposing a student free-for-all where kids do whatever they want whenever they want. This couldn’t be further from the truth. With these new ideas I created learning environments that were much calmer and far less filled with chaotic and disruptive behaviors than ever before.
Furthermore, when I took the focus off of behavioral goals and put all of the focus on learning goals, I developed a whole new language with which to speak to my students. When student behaviors were no longer part of the learning equation that I had the right to manipulate, my students’ brains literally lit up for me. I could suddenly see into their brains and understand exactly how they assessed information and came to conclusions because I became so much more focus on the cognitive conclusions they were reaching rather than the behaviors they were exhibiting. I feel like I met each and every one of my students for the first time when I learned to interpret them through how they think and understand information instead of through how they behave.
My new rule of thumb is that every single human being’s behaviors are private, personal, and crucial to their sense of stability and safety. To reference another human beings behaviors can cause them to feel irritated, angry, embarrassed, ashamed, and/or violated. I try not to talk about or gossip about anyone’s behaviors any more when I am teaching or having professional or personal conversations. Certainly there are exceptions to every rule, but being considerate of the extremely personal and private nature of other people's behaviors has improved every single one of my personal and professional relationships, more ease, more joy, fewer conflicts. Conflicts that do arise are refreshingly easy to solve when solutions are the focus and not the behaviors of either party involved.
I am bursting at the seems for how exciting and successful I believe this new paradigm for how to understand human behaviors can be. In my opinion, it could be a real game changer. Its application makes teaching and life in general so much easier!
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