Stuart Shanker  0:00  

The biggest lesson that I've learned so I've seen 10s of 1000s of children. And you know what I've never seen bad kid ever. I've seen kids that need some help. And what we're doing with the science, the science is really interesting. Not just a case of understanding, but Okay, now I understand what's going on, what can I do about it? And that's the key.

Simon Currigan  0:19  

This is the school behaviour secrets podcast. Welcome to Episode Two of the school behaviour secrets podcast. And today we have an interview with Dr. Stuart Shanker. He was going to talk to us about what drives challenging student behaviour and the difference between self regulation and self control as ever. I'm here with my co host, Emma Shackleton. Hi, Emma.

Emma Shackleton  1:16  

Hi there. I also want to remind you that you've still got time to enter our prize competition where you could win over 100 pounds worth of behaviour related resources will tell you how you can enter a little later in the show.

Simon Currigan  1:29  

So Emma, I'd like to start with a question. When was the last time you felt stressed and why

Emma Shackleton  1:35  

I think the biggest stressors for me are usually time related. So if I feel like I'm running out of time on something that makes me feel stressed, don't get me wrong, I do benefit from a bit of deadline pressure to spermy into action. But if I feel like everything's not going to get done, I tend to go into overdrive and get a bit money can feel overwhelmed

Simon Currigan  1:57  

that yesterday, Stuart Shanker is an expert in psychology and he would say that when we experience pressure, it affects the stress chemicals in our body, which go on to affect our behaviour, so we might become more snappy. So let's get straight to that interview now, and find out how stress could be impacting on the behaviour of the pupils in your classroom. I'd like to introduce you to our guest today. Stuart Shanker has served as an advisor on child development to government organisations across the world, including Canada and the United States. He's a research professor of philosophy and psychology is the CEO of the merit centre and the scientific director of self reg global Incorporated. And in particular, his work has focused on the impact of excessive stress on child development and behaviour. And before we get started, I'd also like to say that his work has had a huge impact on me personally and professionally, it's changed the way I approach supporting kids with behaviour in the classroom. And that's not just because his work is based on neuroscience and biology. But he actually gives you practical advice that builds on the science is joining the dots. And I'm sure there's going to be plenty of practical takeaways from this show for our listeners, Stuart, welcome to the show. I'm excited to have you here.

Stuart Shanker  3:13  

Thank you very much, Simon.

Simon Currigan  3:14  

In your work, you say self regulation starts when we reframe a child's behaviour moving from seeing that behaviour as difficult or as misbehaviour to viewing it as a stress response. Can you tell us what do you mean by this and explain how stress drives children's behaviour?

Stuart Shanker  3:31  

You know, it's really the perfect way to start today, I am very much a product of UK education. When I was there, I was in the midst of a revolution that was occurring in the two fields you mentioned in neuroscience and biology, we developed technologies that enabled us to see deep inside a kid's brain. And when I started at Oxford, we can only see what was going on on the outside in the circumference. But now we could see these processes deep inside what's called the limbic system. And it's transformed everything that we believed, up until that point, because we began to see how these deep internal neural processes were really driving kids behave, what we talk about this reframing, seeing the difference between misbehaviour and stress behaviour, what we're talking about is the difference between the behaviours that are really governed by the outer parts of the brain, the prefrontal cortex, and the behaviours that are coming from deep inside the brain, the limbic system,

Simon Currigan  4:29  

say, could you just explain to our listeners for a moment the difference between the prefrontal cortex and the limbic system so they have an understanding of what those different parts do?

Stuart Shanker  4:37  

I use a model that was developed by an American neuroscientist called Paul MacLean. And it's called the triune model. And what he argued was that we really have three brains in one we have an ancient brain, a reptilian brain, this is the brain it's about 300 million years old, and it's the brain that governs things like fight or flight and aggression, what we're seeing happening in the US Today, superimposed on that is a newer brain, which he called the Paleo mammalian. This is about 200 million years old. This was a brain for social creatures for for mammals. And so it begins to do all kinds of things like nurturing a baby. And then let's say 3 million years ago, we start to get modern human brain. And it's this third brain that we really have looked at for the last couple of 100 years. It's the part of the brain, the neocortex, which subserves things like thinking and problem solving and understanding what other people are feeling. All of those are sort of higher human traits. But the big discovery that we've made over the last 30 years, is that the stuff that's going on in that middle brain, that limbic system, the part of the brain underneath the neocortex, it's as important if not more important than the things that are going on in the thinking part of the brain. And in fact, what we find with the kinds of kids, they really have heightened stress low generally, because of biological reasons. And unfortunately, because we didn't understand this, because we didn't understand the difference between a stress behaviour something coming from the limbic system, in an intentional behaviour, we actually made things worse, you know, we punish the child to shame the child. In the work that we've done in Canada, what we find is that once you make this distinction, once you recognise the stress behaviour for what it is, and deal with it accordingly, you get a totally different kids, that child's whole trajectory, their developmental trajectory is transformed as a result of us seeing their behaviour through a different lens.

Simon Currigan  6:39  

So when you say stress mean, stress has got kind of an everyday meaning in terms of being under pressure. What do we mean in this sense? What What do we mean by stress?

Stuart Shanker  6:48  

One of the problems that we have when we teach all this stuff is people have this sort of pop understanding of stress, you know, the stress of time or money for neuroscientists and physiologist, stress is anything that requires the brain to burn energy in order to keep functioning. And in fact, the original example that was used to explain stress was cold weather, how when it's cold outside, this triggers a response deep inside the limbic system to generate heat so that our body stays at 37 degrees roughly. So when we look at stress you need the essence of life is to deal with stress. We look at stress across five different domains. And you said something right in your intro that I thought was the key. What we're interested in, in self reg is stress overload, excessive stress, a child has to deal with stress, they have to deal with the stress of school or the stress of getting along with other kids. Stress wakes us up stress is what motivates us problems that we have are when the child has too much stress that requires a very different kind of response. If our goal is for them to, you know, thrive by no means are we trying to eliminate stress from a child's life. What we're trying to do is figure out when we're seeing signs of stress overload, and what do we do about it?

Simon Currigan  8:08  

How do our brains How do our bodies normally regulate the stress that's coming towards it? What's the kind of normal process

Stuart Shanker  8:14  

one of the key elements of this whole theory so in my last book, which is called reframed, talks about the two big discoveries, the foundation of self right theory, one is the one I just mentioned, this triune brain, but the other one, which is as important is called the inter brain. So let me give you one second explanation of what the inner brain is for various evolutionary reasons. Our species give birth to our babies prematurely. All babies, all human babies are born premature, we're not sure how much but maybe four to six months. But there are various reasons why this happened. The newborn is completely helpless. In fact, we even talk about the newborn as a foetus outside the womb. But if it's still very much like a foetus, then it raises an interesting question, what takes the place of the umbilical cord? And the answer is the theory is the entire brain and this was actually developed by a British psychologist called Digby tantum. And the idea here is the inner brain is a sort of wireless connection between a higher order brain and a lower order. And the reason it's so important is because here we've got this little foetus outside the womb, assaulted by all kinds of stresses that it didn't experience inside. So you know, noise and light temperature and it now it has to breathe through itself, all these things going on. And this foetus like newborn lacks that knowledge and experience necessary to deal with all these stresses. And so the role of the inner brain is really to serve as that higher order self regulating mechanism she or he reads the signs of when the baby is becoming overstressed and adjusts accordingly.

Simon Currigan  9:59  

So we're talking here about the higher order brain being the parent, usually the mother. 

Stuart Shanker  10:03  

So the answer is yes, usually, but not necessarily. Now, here's the problem, certain babies are born with a heightened stress response. And this is biological, maybe they're more sensitive, let's just take one example. So they're more sensitive to sound, just having a caregiver that speaks a little too quickly or a little too loudly causes the baby aversive response and the baby shuts down to protect themselves from the stress, I was reading through a lot of your literature on your website, and the kids that you're working with our by and large kids who, for biological reasons, have this kind of heightened stress response, a little bit more sensitive to different kinds of stresses, or maybe their internal system, their proprioception, it's called is a little bit underdeveloped. Now, we tie that in with the intergrain. Suppose now I'm looking at a child, two or three years old, who gets overstressed. And when they're overstressed, they have all kinds of impulses, like let's say, a tantrum, if I respond as a self or a parent to or suffering educator to this behaviour. So I see the difference, I see that this is a stress behaviour, then I begin to ask myself, why is this child overstressed? Now, what's causing this to happen, and I'm going to reduce those stresses. And at a very young age, we can begin to teach the child how to do this for themselves. But let's say I'm a self controlling parent, let's say that I get angry when the child has this heightened impulse. And I respond by punishing or yelling. Now the problem what this does is the child may stop the behaviour, but their internal system, there's it's called their sympathetic arousal remains very high, we haven't actually addressed the source of the problem. In fact, we've made it worse, because that child is going to become even more sensitive to the stresses that created the problem in the first place.

Simon Currigan  12:03  

Could you talk a little bit about how the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems trying to upregulate and down regulate you so you can see the child trying to cope with this increase in stress,

Stuart Shanker  12:13  

we've got this mechanism which operates entirely on its own, we can't control it. It's called the autonomic nervous system. And so autonomic pure meaning automatic, and it's really designed, it has two branches. And so one of the branches is called the sympathetic nervous system. And the other branch is called the parasympathetic nervous system, the role of the sympathetic nervous system is basically to provide us with energy to meet a challenge. So whenever we have, say, a stress, what happens is our heart rate goes up, blood pressure goes up a little bit, our breathing increases, all these reactions are the result of the sympathetic nervous system, and it's really sending messages into the bloodstream. Basically, they are tapping into our glucose so that we can meet the stress, this is not a bad thing. This is life, the problem that you identified is stress overload when that sympathetic nervous system is really being triggered too much. So we have that second branch that you mentioned the parasympathetic, and we refer to that as the source of restoration. The problem with the sympathetic nervous system is that if it's chronic, if it's constantly burning energy, this causes all kinds of wear and tear cells, organs. And so the role of the parasympathetic nervous system is to restore our energy to reduce inflammation, all these are very important. So you've got these two branches. Working together, when a child is thriving, those two systems are really balancing off the parasympathetic restores all of the energy expenditure of the previous day, technical term is homeostasis. And we know when a kid's in homeostasis, because, you know, they wake up, they're happy, they're smiling, they're eager to embrace the challenges of the day. They're curious all these signs of balance, when you get the kinds of problems that you guys that big sport is working with. When we get those behaviours, it tells us the child is out of balance, the technical term is in a state of calculus status, meaning that the parasympathetic system can't keep up with the demands

Simon Currigan  14:27  

would it be fair to say the child gets stuck,

Stuart Shanker  14:29  

it's because they get stuck that they begin to seek out various kinds of stimulation. And really what they're doing here is they're looking for ways to trigger adrenaline or epinephrine in order to keep going so they're not restoring they're actually pushing even harder on this what's called the parasympathetic reflex. I want to tie that to where we started today, this reframing because now when I see this kid that's having problems regulating their emotion or problems, you know, lashing out. Instead of seeing this as a bad kid, what I actually see is I see a kid whose parasympathetic reflex can't keep up. And I begin to ask myself why instead of seeing this as a child who needs to be punished or corrected, I see this as a child who, for biological or neurobiological reasons, is overstressed. And I want to know how I can lower that child stress and teach that child how to do it for himself.

Simon Currigan  15:25  

So that brings us neatly to what is the difference between self regulation and self control?

Stuart Shanker  15:32  

So that's the million dollar question, right. And self control is where we, you know, it's a very Victorian concept. And the idea here is that if you have impulses, you have to inhibit those impulses. So if you want to, you know, if you want to hit another kid, you have to be punished, so that you learn that hitting is not allowed. But what we've learned is that when we try to teach a child to inhibit their impulses, what happens is that they may, they may stop that behaviour because of their fear of punishment, but their sympathetic arousal remains incredibly high, even while they're sleeping. Now, this is literally what I did at Oxford, I was studying self regulation. And the idea here was self regulation refers to how we manage stress. And the reason why that original definition is so critical is because it tells us that we can manage stress in a maladaptive way or in a growth promoting way. And so all the work that we do in self reg is really designed to shift kids from maladaptive to growth mode. And so one of the typical behaviours that we saw with children that have autism is gaze aversion. what it was, was that the young child on the spectrum finds social interaction incredibly stressful, and it could be the proximity, it could be the energy coming off the caregivers, eyes, it can be smell, it can be noise, but whatever the stresses are, and it's usually more than one, the child responds by gaze, averting by breaking that connection, this is a way of managing stress.

Simon Currigan  17:08  

And of course, in the classroom, you'll often hear Look at me when I'm talking to you, and that's going to result in more stress.

Stuart Shanker  17:14  

So maladaptive means that maybe it reduces the stress at the moment, but it creates more stress down the road. So a maladaptive response to stress is anything that actually serves to increase the child's stress later, what we're looking at then is, let's suppose that the child deals with this heightened stress load. So we're talking now 12 1314 year old by immersing themselves in a video game. Now, the problem is not the media, per se, it's not the game, when we have problems, it's because the child is using this to avoid dealing with their stress. So what we want to do is we want to shift them, we want to help them transition to a healthier way of dealing with stress. And so what we find is that those kids that are struggling, if they turn to their primary caregivers, and can deal objectively non judge mentally with their stress, this is not only incredibly effective, incredibly growth promoting, but it's true at all stages of life, even at the end of life. And let's tie that in with what you just said about the kid in the classroom, we get those misbehaviors. And that kid needs that inner brain connection more than ever, that inner brain connection at this moment is with that educator,

Simon Currigan  18:33  

I think that brings us on perfectly to the five sort of key domains. And I wonder if you could just give us a quick description of those domains and the kinds of stresses in the classroom or the kind of experiences in the classroom that would cause a child to feel stress.

Stuart Shanker  18:48  

One of the things that we did was we had a team scientists that began to assemble what are called stress inventories. For us, what we wanted was a list of every kind of stress that you can find in the scientific literature. Some of them were very surprising. For example, it turns out that birthday parties are stresses, you know, and begins to all make sense. And you can get those stress inventories for free from our website. And so what we wanted to do was to simplify it, because in the moment dealing with a kid that you see is becoming overstressed. You haven't got time to pull out a stress inventory. And we did what's called factor analysis, we wanted to know what are the basic groups of stresses. And what we found was there are pretty much these five domains. So all of the examples that we have can be fitted in to one of the five domains. So the five domains are physical, biological, emotional, cognitive, social and pro social. Okay, so let's start off with physical. Let's take a typical classroom, all the kids all the students are sitting at the same chair and desk. And you wouldn't normally think of that in terms of, you know, self regulation, but what we found was that for kids that have poor proprioception. proprioception is this internal sense. It's like the five senses, but it's an internal sense where your body is. But what they found was that for kids with poor proprioception, the result of forcing them to sit for a long time in, you know, the typical desk chair arrangement was behavioural issues. What they studied was what happens if I change the seating? What if I give them some kind of seating, which is not as stressful on their property receptive system? And the answer was, there was a dramatic drop in their behavioural problems. So that's what we're doing in our five domains. Okay, so in the emotion domain, suppose you've got a kid that has been conditioned, never to get angry, and the child starts to get angry. And so they're punished for it or shamed for it by their parent, because in our family, we don't get angry. And what we really want to know is, you know, what were the stresses that led to this angry outbursts, what's a constructive way of dealing with it. But now suppose that instead, what we've done is we shut it down, you do not behave that way. So now what happens is, the child may well inhibit their anger. But inside, if you could peer inside what's going on, you'll find that their heart rate is speeding like crazy, their sympathetic arousal is off the charts. So what we've done is we've created a problem for down the road. So what we want children to do is we want them to understand why certain emotions are running away on them. So it's not a case of controlling their emotion. It's a case of understanding how the connection between stresses and the emotions that they're feeling, and then giving them tools that will help them reduce the stress so that they can manage more effectively, the stress is now an interesting question is at what age can you begin to teach this to a child? And what we found is you can begin to teach at around the age of three.

Simon Currigan  22:01  

Wow, that's remarkable.

Stuart Shanker  22:03  

It's very remarkable, okay. Cognitive stress is the hardest one for people to understand math is a cognitive stress, it's a cognitive stress, because it makes great demands on working memory. And and what we found is that kids, there's two chapters on this and reframed in the last book, what we found was that for kids that have that say, they're born with a slight deficit in numerical cognition, and what happens in math class is that they can't keep up with the rest of the class. And so they're getting now the social stress, they don't want to look stupid, or whatever, or being yelled at by the teacher, it's not a hard thing to work on. Once we understand what it is, we have lots of wonderful tools now exercises and things that can transform math into something fun, provided, we recognise the child's overstressed by this, and what kinds of things we can do to reduce the stress load of math.

Simon Currigan  23:02  

I think what you've illustrated there really clearly as well is that these domains aren't kind of self contained. One can spill into the next and spill into the next and they have a domino effect with each other.

Stuart Shanker  23:12  

That's huge. And so one of the things that we're trying to teach here is exactly what you just said. It's never just one stress. And so we could build in in the math example, we can go to the pro social, the child's image of themself, it's always all five. Suppose I've got that kid now he's uncomfortable on the chair, which can itself make math a little harder, or really what we're looking at is all five domains, we always assume it's all five domains. The reason why we studied this is so that we make sure that we reduce all five domains in the previous book in the book called self re, I used some great examples.

Simon Currigan  23:53  

To this point, I just want to take a moment to tell you about act competition where you could get your hands on over 130 pounds worth of school behaviour goodies. We've got a stack of books by authors like Paul Dix, Tom Bennett, Stuart Shanker, Lee concept and Carol Dweck up for grabs. pull us three months subscription to our exclusive inner circle online programme packed with hours and hours of video training about all aspects of managing behaviour in school. To win these prizes. All you have to do is leave an honest review and rating for our show. on Apple podcasts, grab a screenshot on your phone, and email it to me at Simon at beacon school support code on UK entries are limited to one per person, and no purchase is necessary. It's completely free to enter. But I must have received your email before February the 28th 2021. Remember, we can only accept screenshots from Apple podcasts will draw the winner at random at the start of March 2021. You can find them More details at beacon score support.co.uk slash podcast competition dot php. So whatever you got to lose rate review us and send me your screenshot today. And you'll be in with a chance of winning that fantastic prize pot. And now it's back to the podcast. So let's have a look at that self reg process that you described in the book, he talked about five key steps, what are those steps? And how can we start using them to support kids in our own classrooms.

Stuart Shanker  25:29  

So the five steps are reframe, that's the first recognise meaning recognise what the stresses are reduces stresses reflect, we want the child to really understand when they're becoming overstressed what it feels like to be calm. And then the fifth step is the one that you and I were talking at the beginning restore, which is really kicking in a different part of the brain. And it's called the ventral medial prefrontal cortex, which is the part of the brain that really revitalises the whole thing. We made a very interesting discovery. So we do these Institute's cross Canada, teachers, so they come from across the country, they come from around the world now said, you know, we really want to start off the first day about our own self right needs. So and the discovery is, of course, that educators are under the most extraordinary stress, it's not recognised as such, in my experience, teachers are quite extraordinary, I'm absolutely convinced that they are the guardians of society's future. If those educators are overstressed, what happens is they get irritated or annoyed by the child's impulses that you said something else, you let drop a term that is hugely important. And you said that their annoyance or irritation or leaks out, and that's huge, because that annoyance or irritation, it comes from the limbic system, no matter how much you try to control what you say or do, you cannot control these limbic messages, they come out through your voice, I gaze through your posture, etc. What we were finding was that how do you turn off this kind of limbic leakage? And the answer is not by conscious effort. So reframing is more than just some sort of cognitive exercise, we have our teachers stop and say why now why am I seeing this behaviour, our own anxiety, our own amygdala arousal drops, this calmness that we're feeling now as we look at the kid is actually conveyed to the child, if your limbic system is calm, this has an immediately calming effect on the kid, what teachers were discovering was, they felt better. If I can reduce my own stress load, not only am I more effective, but I'm coming home and I'm not wasted.

Simon Currigan  27:53  

I guess if you're a teacher, and you're reframing something from a confrontation, which is going to get you kind of keyed up emotionally, biologically to a puzzle to solve, it would sort of naturally change the way you stand and the way you think about it. And it will change the way you reflected on your experiences at the end of the day, and it's going to be positive for the kids. So we've got reframing the behaviour, looking at the causes of the stress and the sort of five domains, what can we then do you talk about reducing the stress and developing self awareness to identify the problem? What's the next step to get at the solution?

Stuart Shanker  28:26  

So these are very, if you think about it, they're very metacognitive steps, you know, we're thinking about what are the signs of stress overload? What are the stresses involved? How can I help the child internalise all this? Okay, so those are the first four steps. But the fifth step is called restore. And that's what the goal of all this is. Now when I was when I want to explain, I'll do this very, very briefly, but the part of the brain that governs restoration, it's called the ventral medial prefrontal cortex. And for that to operate, we call it flipping the switch. And what that means is we have to turn off the parts of the brain that are overactive so that that ventral medial can automatically unconsciously kick in. And the way we do that is you can't teach a kid you can't force this. Instead, through steps one to four, we reduce the stress load, which has been the cause of why the kid has become hyper Rouse why they are stuck in this anxious mode or ruminative mode. And so we want to do is reduce the stress so that they naturally transition into into this restorative brain state. And what we found is that how the kinds of restorative practices that will help this process are different for every child is a cooking, gardening, listening to music, art, and the other lesson was to what was restored last week may not be this week.

Simon Currigan  30:00  

Sometimes we see as well, kids who are given kind of restorative breaks. And they're given things like very engaging iPad games, computer games. And I suspect that when they come off those, they're even more depleted than when they started. Pure a teacher or a parent now listening to this podcast, what's the first practical step that they can take to start implementing something like self reg? How can they find out more about you? What's the easiest way to start this process?

Stuart Shanker  30:27  

I honestly think the best way is to do our introductory online course. The reason I say that is, this has been carefully developed so that they become part of a community of learners. And it's that community experience, which seems to be more important than anything I might have to say, if you go on the website, self dashboard.ca, you can see all the different courses there are. But that introductory one is a really good one. You know, deep down, I can't help but feel that now more than ever, we have to do this for our own well being, you know, if you're an educator, the demands on you are enormous. What I want you to internalise since they take away anything from this is the biggest lesson that I've learned. And I've done this for my entire career. So I've seen 10s of 1000s of children. And you know what, I've never seen bad kid ever. I'm seeing kids that need some help. And what we're doing with the science, the science is really interesting. But again, something you said right at the outset, I think it's what drives me it's not just a case of understanding, but Okay, now I understand what's going on, what can I do about it. And that's the key.

Simon Currigan  31:37  

You've told us lots of useful theory here, but also lots of practical steps that we can take to start implementing this in the classroom. And really reframing as we said before children's behaviour, not as misbehaviour, but as human struggling to manage stress. And I think our readers are going to find that really useful and powerful. Thank you so much for coming on. I really enjoyed that interview is a fascinating conversation with a very smart guy. And I'm sure there was loads of information that that we can all act on. By the way, if you're interested in supporting students with strong emotions, we've got a download called the SEM handbook that I'm sure you'll find interesting. It will help you link behaviours you see in the classroom with possible underlying causes. Now, this isn't about making a diagnosis because as teachers, we're not qualified to do that. But when we start linking behaviours with possible causes, it means we can get the right help quickly. It's a free download, there's nothing to pay for you just go to our website, beacon school support.co.uk. Click on the free resources option near the top and you will see the SDN handbook. I'll also leave a link to that free download in the description.

Emma Shackleton  32:43  

And don't forget to enter our competition, we've got just under 100 pounds worth of books about behaviour in schools to give away, including Stuart Shanker his book on self regulation, running the room by Tom Bennett. And when the adults change everything changes by Paul Dix. We're also going to throw in a three month subscription of our very own inner circle online programme containing over 20 videos and resources about successful behaviour management in schools. And that's worth almost 40 pounds in itself. So if you want to read all you've got to do is give this podcast an honest rating and review on Apple podcasts, email the screenshot to Simon at beacon school support.co.uk. And we'll pick one lucky winner at random one entry per person, no purchase necessary, so get your entries in before February 28th 2021. Remember, we can only accept screenshots from Apple podcasts.

Simon Currigan  33:40  

In the next episode of school behaviour secrets, we'll be exploring the difference between the four attachment styles and what that means for the children in your school and how you might need to adapt your approach to teach them successfully and build relationships. If you don't want to miss that open the podcast app that you're using right now. And click on the subscribe button and that will make sure your podcast app automatically downloads all future episodes so you don't miss a thing.

Emma Shackleton  34:04  

Thanks for listening to school behaviour secrets. Have a great week and we look forward to talking to you again in the next episode.