Shanker – supporting self-regulation

How do we take the lessons that we were learning by working in this intense, therapeutic environment, and transform it into a model that could benefit every single kid, and here we had a brain wave and I think we’ll share credit for this 50/50, and the brain wave was ‘you know what? There’s no reason why Early Child Educators can’t do this, there’s no reason why they can’t have these skills, and in fact we’ll go a step further: maybe, if you were to, if you were to teach this stuff to Early Educators and teachers, maybe you would see the same effects in them that we see in our parents. In other words, would it be the case that the better a Teacher, and an Early Educator, begins to understand what self-regulation is, the less stress they will feel in what is an extremely demanding job.  

So we began to test that model too and we’ve done this in a study that’s been going on in New Zealand for three years in Christchurch, and is now resulting in a university course, and we’ve made some very interesting discoveries in this, the first one is ‘yeah, they can do it’. The first one is that it turns out that the more a teacher understands this, the more a teacher can begin to create an environment that enhances self-regulation for all children. So it might be the physical environment, she might want to look carefully at her, at the colors of her classroom, what she’s putting on her walls, what kinds of desks, it might relate to the kinds of simple techniques she can introduce into a classroom to help a child really start to become a little bit dis-regulated, so these might be things like: little exercise thera-bands which a child can stretch or being able to get up from their desk and go onto a little swiss ball, the simple things that are very effective. And so what we’re seeing as we do this study is, let me say three really, really interesting results, the first one is the kids do better, so yeah, the teachers get this, and in fact we can’t keep up with their demand, they’re constantly pestering me now, they want to read more and learn more, once they see it, they are as eager to learn as my therapists are, so that’s good.  

The second thing is that the teacher; that the whole environment in the classroom changes, it becomes a self-regulated classroom, and now we have some tools where we can measure this, and it turns out that the criteria for a self-regulated classroom, a group of children, are not what you might expect. It’s not that the classroom is quiet, that everybody’s doing the same task, the criteria for a self-regulated classroom is that the kids are in level four for long periods of time. And so a self-regulated classroom might have an awful lot going on in it, but when you look at it you’ll see that every kid is happy and every kid’s on task. And the third thing that we learned which is absolutely fascinating is the teacher’s starting telling us that they wanted to do self-reports, and they all said the same thing that their own self-regulation was enhanced dramatically.