Engage
Engaging your child with learning
As a parent/guardian you are already an expert with unique insight into your child’s thinking and behaviour. Draw on that expert knowledge when considering how the scientific concepts presented here can help support your child’s learning.
You will have noticed how very different children are, one from another. It is also true that their brains are all unique too, and children differ in how well they can keep their attention and what engages them to be interested in something. So, there can be no “one-fits-all” expert solution that guarantees learning for all children.
Pause for thought
Think about what things already engage your child. What are they interested in, what activities do they enjoy? Why that might be and how it could be included in a learning activity.
Although all children are different, the basic processes by which their brains learn are the same. Let’s take a look at what’s going on in there. This is a brain, and the wrinkly part outside we call the cortex:
Hidden underneath the wrinkly cortex there are also some ‘centres’ in the brain that are involved with our emotions.
Engagement has a lot to do with connections between these emotional centres and the front of our brain. This front part of the brain is important for our conscious reasoning and our learning. As indicated by the arrows, these connections are two-way. Our reasoning and learning can impact on our emotional response, and emotion can also impact on our reasoning and learning, both positively and negatively.
Rewards and recognition
A positive example of the role of these emotional centres in learning is how the brain responds to reward, in all its many different forms. This response can encourage us to approach something and get engaged (and stay engaged) with learning. The 'approach response' in the brain happens when we anticipate praise and/or tokens for our achievement, but also when we experience novelty, choice or sharing attention to an activity with another person.
We all respond better in an environment where the things we do get noticed and our achievements are praised. Younger children are particularly responsive to sticker charts, but all of us appreciate being told “well done”. These are types of ‘social reward’. They stimulate the brain as if we were being offered money or chocolate cake and focus our attention towards the activity involved with the reward.
Whether young or old, the response of the brain to reward has a lot to do with expectations, and that means predictability can become a problem. Receiving the same reward for the same task again and again can reduce its impact. So, offering a rich range of social rewards that are constantly refreshed with new ideas, such as different forms of praise and tokens acknowledging achievement, can help generate engagement and learning.
Pause for thought
We're not suggesting you use money or chocolate cake to reward for learning! Rewards also need to be 'deserved' so have a think about what activities you reward your children for.
Novelty and learning games
Novelty also impacts on the brain in much the same way as reward. The unusual and the unexplored can drive curiosity and learning very effectively. If you notice your child showing curiosity then feed that curiosity, you may find a way of turning it into a learning experience.
There are lots of learning games available online, but understanding how they work means you can turn anything into a game. The constant scoring of points in games stimulates the reward system and helps make the game highly engaging.
Some games include elements of chance. This further increases reward system activation, and some games get around the issue of predictability by constantly increasing the stakes (think about ‘Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?’). For example, a knowledge quiz can be made much more exciting and unpredictable by gaming the points won for a correct answer on a wheel of fortune.
Research has also established that simply providing some element of choice can stimulate the reward system, even if we don’t know exactly what we’re choosing. So, for example, being asked to choose your own question, even if you can’t see the options available, is more interesting than just being asked a question.
Learning together and learning positively
Learning is often a social activity. Sharing attention with another is also known to increase activation in the reward system, at least if you can make your own contribution to the activity. This helps explain why working with others can be so engaging and helpful for learning. That said, unless brothers and sisters are at hand, doing activities face-to-face can be difficult or impossible during the pandemic. However, encouraging children to go online, collaborate and share what they produce with friends can help here.
As a parent or guardian, being part of the learning and having a positive approach to it is also down to other ways the brain works and impacts on our ability to learn. Scientists now believe we have a part in our brain which helps us to communicate unconsciously what we are thinking. This ‘mirror neuron system’ has been shown to activate not just when someone moves part of their body, but also in another person watching them do it. This is true for big movements, but also small movements like the micro-expressions on our faces we often don’t know we’re making, that often convey our feelings. This brain system helps us ‘get inside’ the mind of another person and have a better idea of what they’re thinking. It’s like a type of unconscious mind reading.
When supporting your child with their learning, they will unconsciously pick up on how you are feeling and thinking about the subject and the work they’ve been set. It can help to think and feel about the learning as you’d want your child to think and feel about it. So, if you want your child to think creatively, it may help to be creative in front of them and/or with them. If you want your child to feel confident about maths, it can be important to do some preparation and feel confident about the maths yourself before helping them.
Pause for thought
Think about how you currently talk about learning and specific subjects. Are there any subjects you don’t feel confident with? Why might that be?
As a parent or guardian, you cannot be an expert in all the subjects your child is studying, and that’s fine. But if you can’t feel confident, what other emotions might you show about the topic that are helpful for learning? How might you present a subject you don’t know about in a positive way?
In contrast to how the brain responds to reward, negative emotions such as fear can have a negative effect on attention. Anxiety reduces the brain’s ability to think and learn. This is true whether the anxiety is related to the learning activity and subject (for example, maths anxiety), or with something happening in our lives, such as the current pandemic. We have evolved a primitive fear response that helps us avoid a threat to keep us safe, but it’s not always helpful in other ways.
Once again this is about our emotional centres in the brain impacting on the frontal parts of our brain involved with reasoning and learning, including our ability to temporarily hold information in our mind’s eye, our so-called 'working memory'. This means negative emotions like fear and anxiety can reduce our ability to learn, or even to use and apply the learning that we already have.
But, as you might remember from earlier, the connections between the front of our brain and our emotional centres are two-way. Reasoning can impact on our emotional response. Talking about our anxieties can help us objectify and reason about them. This can reduce the impact of anxiety on our frontal working memory networks, which is good news for learning, because working memory ability is essential when children are building new knowledge.