Systems supporting learning | Integrated Learning Therapy

At Integrated Learning Therapy, you might often hear us comparing children to a house. Strange, but true! Let me explain.

So often we lose sight of the way a child’s brain develops and how that development may impact on learning. We tend to see a child’s difficulties in school and try to analyse the symptoms the child is showing to better understand the nature of his or her problems. The trouble with this approach is that it keeps our focus on the symptoms of the problem, rather than the underlying cause.

Integrated Learning Therapy (ILT) tries to avoid this by teaching how a child’s brain develops and what needs to be in place for learning to be efficient and effective. This is where the example of a house comes in. Children, like a house, need strong foundations. It is useless trying to build walls and complete a house on poorly laid or non-existent foundations. Once the foundations are in place, walls will stand firm; no cracks will open up around doors and windows, and the roof will not leak. When foundations are poor, we spend a lot of time trying fruitlessly to patch cracks and leaking roofs; as soon as we have finished patching an area, the foundations shift and we have to start again.

This is the reason why so often, remedial work done shows no real, quick gains. After all, if teacher A has not managed to help a child learn to read, why should teacher B succeed? Efforts may bring results, but these often take long and require considerable work on the parts of both adult and child. On the other hand, when the root cause of a learning difficulty is identified and corrected, gaps in learning become more quickly and easily filled.

So the very first step to take when considering a child who is not able to function in school, is to look at his or her foundation systems, to identify which did not develop as they should have. Remembering that movement (and experiences from the environment) is responsible for many of the most basic foundational systems, it becomes possible to use specific, controlled and slow movements to give the brain a second chance to lay down strong foundations. Once this is done, the house becomes a haven and learning can take place with far greater efficiency.

Here’s a short video clip for you to watch which explains this further:

https://youtu.be/OC_UIi26tNE

Do visit our website www.ilt.co.za to find out more about ILT and also contact us if you are interested in taking one of our courses to help you better understand the children in your care. You’ll see that our courses are accredited for CPTD points with SACE and also earn you credits towards further qualifications with ETDP-SETA. Earn while you learn J

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Martin Doherty, writing for The Conversation, says that at the age of about four, children reach important milestones in brain development.

One of these is a huge improvement in understanding others’ thoughts and feelings. This is the start of empathy. Another is in spatial thinking—understanding how objects are positioned and related. This is the beginning of the ability to read maps.

Martin and his colleague, Catherine Sayer, conducted a study with 175 two to five-year-olds to explore how children are able to use scale models to figure out where something is in the real world. At about four, children are able to use a scale model of a room to work out where something is. We thought that this might result from children’s understanding of how one thing can represent something else. But we actually found that four-year-olds’ ability to use scale models came from their spatial abilities.

At the same age, children start to understand that someone’s behaviour is due to what that person believes, not necessarily what is really the case. This has interesting consequences.

If you’ve played hide-and-seek with young children, you may have noticed that they aren’t always very good at it. They love the ritual of looking in all the wrong places first, but beforehand they may tell you where they are going to hide, hide in the same place every time, or not be especially hidden.

After their fourth birthday, they get much better at hide and seek. They understand that the seeker looks in the wrong places because they don’t know where the hider is.

At about three to four children also start to tell lies. They realize they can make someone believe something that isn’t true.

Understanding symbols

Martin’s earlier research with fellow psychologist Josef Perner suggests that four-year-olds don’t just start to understand how others’ minds work. Figuring this out is part of the development of an understanding of “representation”—that symbols, like thoughts, words, or pictures, can be used to stand for something else.

Children start to think about how words relate to objects. This means, for instance, knowing that “animal” can refer to something you already have a name for, such as “rabbit”. This might help children learn the new word.

Their ability to use a understand the components of pictures also improves around this age. Very young children use a lot of trial and error to complete a jigsaw, picking up random pieces to see if they fit. By the time they are about four years old, they start to use the picture as a guide, trying to connect lines and match bits of colour, while checking the guide picture on the box lid.

Developmental experiments

Another ability children develop at around four is using scale models. A classic set of developmental experiments involved a model of a regular household room. The real room had typical furniture—sofa, table, cupboard and so on—and the model had miniature versions laid out in the same way.

Children were shown where something was hidden in the model and told to find an object hidden in “the same place” in the room. Children of around four can find the object using the identical layouts. If shown a sticker under a particular chair in the model room, for example, they can go straight to the “same” chair in the other room. This is the fundamental understanding required to read maps.

Adults see scale models and maps as representations. Maps represent a town or a country. A scale model of, say, the Eiffel Tower represents the real thing. At first, Martin suspected children’s ability to use scale models is more evidence of understanding representation at this age.

He was wrong. Instead, the researchers found that this ability is based on a development in children’s spatial abilities that also occurs at about four. This is the ability to think about spaces and where objects are within them. Spatial abilities help with maths skills, and good spatial ability is linked to an interest in science, technology, engineering and mathematics.

Their experiment was simple. They compared the model room task with a test of understanding how representation works. The two abilities develop around the same age, but they found they were not related. Children who could do one task couldn’t necessarily do the other.

They also had a test of purely spatial ability. Children who passed the model room task also passed the spatial task. So it looks like the model room task relied on children‘s spatial thinking.

They don’t yet know why two important but apparently unrelated abilities arise at the same time. Perhaps it’s related to changes in the growing brain at this interesting age.

Provided by The Conversation.

Image supplied by Freepik.