Hey guys, it's Richard here from MacKillop Secondary School in Geelong. Many of you know me as a teacher that teaches them with secondary for a number of years and figured we might try and do something a little bit different and invite our resident educational psychologist, Jessie. Many of you would have worked with as maybe a parent, or one of your students would have worked with him and we just thought of what, I hope up a little bit of a conversation really about. Jessie I kind of want to know from you what you think or from your experience what might be happening at home at the moment with the difficulties around home school and maybe a little bit of refusal around school work and what else and maybe a couple of few tips that we can talk about together for parents
Sure, thanks for the intro. Okay I think a good place to start is by talking about stress and the stress that we apply on different learners. If our students have low learner confidence as we call it – they can't handle too much stress and if we apply too much stress there's actually a bit of a change in brain functioning that happens and the areas of our brain that we're using. Just gonna do a quick screenshare to sort of explain this concept a little more. Yeah so if we have a learner who feels safe and confident and calm and supported, they're using their prefrontal cortex which is that yellow part of the brain there, and although this is you know overly simplistic you know basically it's about 90 percent activated there and only 10% in the more primitive parts of our brain which kind of control the survival response. Now different amounts of kids which I can handle different amounts of stress, you know some kids can handle a lot of learning stress. We know that for our students because they can be low in confidence in learning it doesn't take too much stress to actually become threatening and the idea of learning being threatening. And then we see that when we perceive a threat, the effect happens like this where we've got you know 10% up in our learning brain here and knives and activation our survival response and if that occurs then well you probably know and what sort of things might you see when you have a student who you know is overly stressed in the class look.
Totally and this would happen in the classroom and definitely would happen at home. I mean even for any family really when they probably will level stress is too much you're gonna start seeing some avoidance around the work, negative behaviors whether it be kind of verbal aggression, could be a little bit destructive might into a little bit of physical. You might see some sabotage ripping up work or some envy about maybe somebody that's getting too much attention or actually maybe succeeding and the other side of the house with their home schooling and they're not feeling like they're things.
You're describing, which are you know it's fight or fligh, t freeze isn't it, it's your flight, it's shut down, can't do it, it's freeze you know or it's you know a bit of aggression kind of thing fighting back at that level of work you know and we see that in the classroom all the time and I think parents might not ordinarily think of you know doing schoolwork is something that could you know lead to this stress response happening but we know that it can and especially if our learn is a really low in confidence. So I think that the best sort of tip that I can give is things to get back into this prefrontal cortex, back into that brain that can be creative and abstract and really to be there you need to feel safe, you need to feel calm, you need to feel supported and what we do at the school is really create clear routines and predictability and consistency for the students so they know what's coming and we don't apply too much pressure - we try and get that sweet spot where there's enough challenge but not too much and yeah I think the parents right now they kind of learn anyone that is for their students.
Yeah and keeping the goals small simple realistic, don't expect six hours you know straight in a row with working independently - they're gonna need a little bit of assistance, and then let go a little bit of assistance, let go but seeing it even in 15-20 minute chunks rather than sort of hours at an end and at the end of two o'clock you then you're gonna have your free time. Make sure it works for you keep it small and simple try and find the routine that fits with the safety of the culture of the house. Not all houses are going to operate by regiment so but figure it out have that conversation try and get them on board with the planning about how that day works and if you've got that emotional buy-in and it's more likely that they're going to operate with you.
Yeah I'd sort of say finally as well do the tip for parents would be give students at the benefit of the doubt you know we call it at school unconditional positive regard and we can abide the little motto that students do well if they can . And this is that maybe you know maybe you could misread this situation like a students being lazy but in my experience it's almost always that that student is low in confidence and they're finding the learning highly stressful and that's why you know they're not engaging with it.
Awesome Jesse, hey well that was a good start so maybe we'll do another one later on but could you have a chat with yet and we'll catch up.
Same pleasure let's do it again.