Nutrition and Children’s Brain Development
Brain research has indicated that the foods children eat or do not eat affect their brain development, functioning, and behavior. Chemicals released in response to stress and from foods can prevent higher-order thinking. Chronic stress causes the body to deplete nutrients, inhibits the growth of dendrites and limits interconnections among neurons. The results are no nutrients available for learning; thinking is slowed; learning is depressed. When protein foods, often lacking in diets of poor children, are digested, tyrosine is released into the bloodstream. Tyrosine becomes L-dopa in the brain and is then converted into dopamine. Dopamine produces a feeling of alertness, attentiveness, quick thinking, motivation, and mental energy. Fear of failure, isolation, and trauma, usually present in poor children, cause dopamine to be converted into norepinephrine. This causes alertness to be converted into aggression and agitation. When nutrition is poor, children have difficulty tolerating frustration and stress, become apathetic, and are non-responsive, inactive, and irritable. How can they even attempt to learn?
Carbohydrate foods cause the production of serotonin. Low levels of serotonin are associated with depression and low self-esteem. The body manufactures its own serotonin when an individual experiences positive self-esteem, success in problem-solving, and other accomplishments. Teachers should find ways for students to be successful, thereby increasing levels of serotonin. In terms of nutrition, students should have access to breakfast and lunch programs, as well as nutritious snacks.
In The End
Children of poverty do not choose to behave differently in school, but they are faced daily with overwhelming challenges that affluent children never have to confront. Their brains have adapted to suboptimal conditions affecting the prefrontal cortex, hippocampus, and amygdala in ways that undermine good emotional and social behavior and academic performance. We believe that school systems should meet the needs of these students. Happily there are schools such as Timbuktu Academy that are implementing strategies like the Brain Education System to address improvements in attention, memory, readiness for learning, focus, concentration, self-confidence, and self-esteem.
Successful Strategies
Living in poverty and experiencing chronic stressors present students with an extraordinary challenge to academic and social success. This reality does not mean that success in school or life is impossible. On the contrary, a better understanding of these challenges points to actions educators and administrators can take to help these students succeed.
Brain-development issues caused by chronic stressors can be reversed through intensive interventions. Some of these interventions can take place at home and within the day-to-day school environment. For example, at Timbuktu Academy, reflection time (meditation) was added every morning for all junior high and 9th graders. The school also has Family Groups. Each faculty member has about 10 students assigned to them, and they meet with them each day as a family. The teachers personally bond with them. Both of these strategies affect positive neurotransmitters and help the brain get ready for learning. The children are more open to listening and paying attention.
Brain Education Curriculum
At Timbuktu Academy, the Brain Education organization conducted highly experiential professional-development training to introduce the Brain Education curriculum to the staff. The experiential brain-focused curriculum involved brain-related activities to help students to increase attention, memory, focus, concentration, and relaxation, and how to reduce unhealthy stress, as well as teaching exercises and movements to improve readiness to learn.
The brain-related activities aimed to increase self-confidence, self-esteem, and ways to control social and emotional behavior. Current brain research supports this type of instruction for students struggling in reading, writing, and spelling. This training was followed up with Timbuktu Academy faculty training sessions with Dr. Kenneth Wesson, a leader in assisting faculty with understanding children’s brain functioning and learning.
Whole Brain Teaching
Faculty trained in Whole Brain Teaching focused on how the brain learns best — especially for students in high-poverty schools. It is a method that integrates an effective classroom management system with learning approaches that tap the way the brain learns best. It is a multisensory approach to instruction, which helps students learn through more than one of the senses at the same time. Students are taught using all pathways of learning simultaneously, in order to enhance memory and learning.
Whole Brain Teaching classroom environments are encouraging and student-centered. At Timbuktu, we believe that teaching methods must be aligned with what cognitive science tells us about the brain and how learning happens. For example, educators need to make allowances for the limitations of working memory and the fact that we all need extensive practice to gain mastery in just about anything we are learning. In addition, we encourage faculty to use multimodality strategies along with multisensory approaches.
Phonics First
Timbuktu Academy faculty was also trained in Phonics First. It is RLAC’s (Reading and Language Arts Center) accredited methodology to teaching literacy, which our students need. It is prescriptive, structured, sequential, cumulative, cognitive, and flexible. Based on how the brain learns best.
Zoophonics
In addition, faculty was trained in Zoophonics, which is also a multisensory language-arts program based on phonemic awareness and phonics, taught kinesthetically and mnemonically. It is a kinesthetic, multimodal approach to learning all aspects of language arts.
Math Corps
Timbuktu faculty has been trained in Math Corps, a system out of Wayne State University that recognizes how the brain learns best and the cognitive mechanisms for learning mathematics and ways to differentiate mathematics instruction through a multisensory approach.
For these methods to succeed in schools like Timbuktu Academy, teachers must be highly effective, hard-working, committed, and able. There must be high expectations for student success, success for themselves, parents, and the community. There are no excuses; there is no blame for students’ low achievement. What is needed always is more time on-task, instructional time, extended day, extended school year, Saturdays, and summer. Also there must be relentless use of data, ongoing, diagnostic assessment of student progress and multiple opportunities for improvement.
Warrington S. Parker Jr., Ph.D., is the president of Magnum Educational Management Company. Brenda A. Parker is the principal of Timbuktu Academy of Science and Technology in Detroit, Michigan. The academy enrolls over 450 students and is considered a high-poverty school.
This article was first published in Brain World Magazine’s Spring 2012 issue.
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