Train your brain part 2

I began to look deeper into social and emotional learning to follow up on my earlier post.  Traditionally, school was for the 3 Rs: Reading, Rriting, and Rithmetic.  Now, school systems are trying to implement a more well-rounded program for children.  This includes social and emotional learning (SEL).  Social emotional learning’s goal is to give children the tools necessary to control their emotions and use that power to be successful in the educational, social, and emotional environments.

As I mentioned in the last post on this topic, Richard Davidson is well known for doing the ‘science’ of this topic.  He is a neuroscientist that has conducted many studies including the benefits of SEL on the brain.  In his talk given in the last post, he studied children’s brain activity to identify the differences in their response to various situations.

Here is a summary of his 20-minute presentation (He presented it very well so hopefully this does justice to it).

·      Take home message: SEL changes the brain; even down to the gene level

·      Neuroplasticity- our brain is built to change with experiences, it is very dynamic and resilient

·      Children are constantly having their brains molded by experiences; we want to mold them in positive directions; we can do this using SEL

·      Behavioral changes are biological (physically change the brain)

·      Behavioral changes can create more specific changes than medications have been able to achieve (could SEL potentially sure ADD in children??)

·      The reactions of a child to a negative event vary from child to child; neuroscientists study what brings about these differences and how children can learn to recover more quickly to these incidents

·      One example of a study to measure these differences of reactions: show a very sad picture and monitor the brain activity with respect to time (pictures at one period of time are similar to the image shown above).  The individuals that recover quicker from this negative event have a greater ability to regulate their emotions

·      Regulating one’s emotions is good for not only the emotions, but for one’s health.  Cortisol is released in response to stress.  With quicker recovery to negative events, adolescents with greater emotion control have lower cortisol levels in the evening

·      With large amounts of stress and anxiety, the memory and learning ability is greatly impaired

·      Conclusion: we can positively change the brain through SEL

So how is this “Social Emotional Learning” implemented?  Stay tuned for next post