Neuroeducation will play a key role in the future of education, with curricula based not just on teaching subjects but on preparing brains for learning.

The Brain Power conference on May 3-4 in Toronto began a valuable discussion seeking to revolutionize the way we think about child development and consequently, education.

The first annual conference brings together researchers, parents and educators to bring light to issues and recent developments in brain research and child development. It was an invaluable experience to be part of this initiative; I learned a great deal about current trends in research and issues that are important to parents of young children. Main topics at the conference included music, bilingualism and technology. After reflecting on the discussions of each during the conference, I decided to bring to light three lessons to be learned for private schools and parents.

It became clear from many discussions that I overheard in the presentations and workshops that many people are frustrated, and even angered, by the Ontario government’s decisions to cut funding to music and other arts programs. The question was raised many times: If music is so important to the development of a child (especially to their language development), why are schools not doing more? To answer this, I began to think of what we can do as private schools to ensure we are meeting all the needs of the children we educate and the way in which we can provide a valuable alternative to mainstream classrooms. Private schools have an inherent advantage over publicly funded schools in that their programming is not set by government bodies, but developed and implemented by individual school administrators. As a result of this unique opportunity that private schools have to educate children, they can embrace both time-honoured and research-proven programs that can only lead to positive development for the whole child.

Lesson 1: Music and Language

The links between language and music within the brain are very clear. Dr. Sylvain Moreno of the Center for Brain Fitness at the Baycrest Rotman Research Institute shared data showing how music instruction can directly improve a child’s ability to learn. Dr. Moreno explained how learning music through intensive and repeated exercises can actually prepare a child’s brain for learning by increasing higher cognitive functions such as attention, focus, memory and problem solving. A child’s ability to learn and process language is also greatly improved by preparing the brain to learn through learning music. Dr. Moreno and his colleagues have tested and developed a program designed to “train” children’s brain to learn. By using an engaging video game interface, they have developed a program called “Smarter Kids” which they hope to make available in the next year. This is a huge leap from the once-popular Baby Einstein videos, which were thought to passively affect a child’s brain development though exposure to classical music.

Schools can benefit from this recent research too; instead of playing classical music and hoping that it will improve a child’s cognitive functioning, teachers could be teaching mini-lessons on music before or during language classes. Music can also be incorporated into many curriculum areas. By actively engaging and including students in the creative process of writing songs, for example, or choreographing dances to describe scientific concepts or turning points in history, teachers can positively improve the cognitive functioning of their students, and thus, their ability to learn.

Lesson 2: Bilingualism

Similarly, John Godfrey of TFS, explained how learning a second language, such as French, can lead to a stronger usage of a child’s native language. When considering the large roles that both language and sound play in our lives, it is easier to understand how closely they are linked in the brain. Children’s brains are not hard-wired to learn one particular language. As they grow and develop and are exposed to the sounds of the language of adults in their life, babies’ brains begin to learn the sounds that they will need to communicate and they filter out the sounds that they don’t need. Reason follows that if a baby is exposed to adults in their life speaking different languages, they will develop the ability to determine which sounds work to communicate with each adult. This complicated and advanced form of cognitive reasoning is lost out to other skills as children grow older. What research is showing, though, is that by exposing children to more than one language when they are young, we are helping to develop and cultivate this higher cognitive function to learn language. As a result, bilingual children are more equipped to be proficient at language-based skills.

Of special note here is that it was widely acknowledged that not all children are capable of learning more than one language as a child. Children with learning difficulties, such as dyslexia, will have a very difficult time processing a new language, and would not benefit from bilingualism in the same way. It is important for schools to offer native language strengthening classes for these children at the same time as offering French to other students. All children have individual strengths and weaknesses, and this fact can be acknowledged by unique programming options. Many early childhood centres and daycares offer bilingual education options, and most private schools offer French as a second language for their students. When considering the intensity of a bilingual program, consider the student population as well as the options for learning available to all students.

Lesson 3: Technology and Child Development

It is no surprise that children’s entertainment options played a significant role in the debates heard around the conference. Many parents and educators are concerned with the amount of screen time their children face. Additionally, changes in children’s programming over the past 20 years have seen television shows become more fast-paced and action-oriented than before. While there remain concerns over television programming, it was interesting to hear how current brain research is helping to influence the way children’s entertainment options are being developed. Television shows are attempting to fuse educational concepts into their plots while video games and apps are reinforcing academic learning.

As educators and schools, it is important to have a clear policy on digital education. There is an infinite number of options for ways to integrate technology into our schools, as the very nature of technology means that the options are increasing daily. Digital citizenship is a HUGE issue, and one that private schools have the power to teach more so than public schools. With more resources, and lower student-teacher ratios, we can use digital learning opportunities to teach our children how to grow up responsibly in the digital world. Similarly, it is important to work together with parents to choose appropriate entertainment options for children that enhance, rather than negatively impact, their academic or social lives.

Neuroeducation will play a key role in the future of education, with curricula based not just on teaching subjects but on preparing brains for learning.

Neuroscience is coming to the classroom. Or more accurately, our understanding of how a brain develops will change the way we teach, parent, and help our kids to grow and develop.

Over the last decade, our ability to study how the brain works has dramatically improved. Now, the research done by neuroscientists is coming out of the lab and into the classroom.

Here are five ways that education will be changed because of what we’ve learned about a child’s brain:

1. We’ll Start to Hear a Lot About “Neuroeducation”
   In the future, we’ll hear a lot about neuroeducation, and we can expect to see curricula based not just on teaching subjects, but on preparing brains for learning.If you think of the brain as a tree with branches, neuroeducation is the process of adding more branches. If the brain has more branches, a child can learn faster, remember more and have improved IQ.Neuroscience has shown us that it’s possible to change the “wiring” of the brain (or to add more branches). This “rewiring” is based on something called neuroplasticity and we’ll hear a lot more about it in the years ahead.
2. Changing the Way Kids Study
   Our understanding of the brain is leading to remarkable insights into how memories are formed and how we access those memories. These insights are leading to new approaches to helping kids to study and learn.We’ll expect to see new insights into helping your kids with their study plans.For example, it turns out that repetition is important but that the brain responds to a “spacing effect.”The spacing effect is the finding that when you space learning episodes farther apart in time, you’ll remember more information later on than if you mass the learning into one study episode, according to Nicholas Cepeda, associate professor of psychology at York University. Understanding how the brain is “wired” and how memories work will give us new hints on how to help our kids study and remember.
3. Music, Language and the Mind
   One of the most pronounced findings of neuroscience is the impact of learning music on cognitive function. The idea became popular when it was called the “Mozart Effect”—but it turns out that listening to music isn’t enough.Neuroscience has shown that learning to play an instrument or learning about notes, rhythm and song can have a dramatic impact on how the brain develops.But the breakthrough is in understanding why this happens: that the brain has a capacity to create new connections through things like music, and the impact of those connections is increased IQ, memory and attention.So expect to hear a lot of support for music programs in schools over the coming years!
4. The Bilingual Advantage
   Similar to music, learning a second language has a direct impact on how the brain develops and grows. And the impact can be unexpected: a child who has learned English and French will perform better than a child who grew up learning English only—in English!
5. The Parenting Advantage
   What a child does in school goes hand-in-hand with what happens in the home. The advantages on the brain of a great school program, for example, are only fully realized when parents play a role in their child’s development.Some of the findings of neuroscience are common sense. Diet and exercise help the brain, for example. But some of them are less obvious: how you reward and encourage a child only works to improve the brain if it’s done a specific way, for example.

But in the past few decades mainstream neuroscience has reversed itself, demonstrating that the brain is “neuroplastic” from cradle to grave. Neuroplasticity is the property of the brain that allows it to change its structure and function through mental experience. This discovery has led to new treatments for learning disabilities and for strokes (so that adults can at times, through brain exercises, develop new circuitry and cure themselves). A host of neurological and psychiatric problems and injuries can now be addressed through mind-based interventions.

The question thus inevitably arises: What ambitious kinds of learning might we, as adults, undertake? Is the brain plastic enough, say, for a 39-year-old adult without any apparent musical skill to learn an instrument and become a musician? In “Guitar Zero,” the cognitive psychologist Gary Marcus sets out to answer this question by using himself as a guinea pig.

Mr. Marcus tells us that, since childhood, he had yearned to be musical and play the electric guitar but had concluded that he lacked the talent (hence, “Guitar Zero”). His friend Daniel Levitin, an accomplished musician, neuroscientist and the author of “This Is Your Brain on Music,” tried to give Mr. Marcus a few guitar lessons and joked that he suffered from “congenital arrhythmia.” But one day, fiddling with the videogame Guitar Hero, which gives a player the illusion of playing guitar licks by pressing the right button at the right moment, Mr. Marcus was so enthralled that he decided to spend his coming sabbatical trying to learn to play guitar—in effect, testing whether his brain was plastic enough to do so. This book recounts the 18-month experience, practicing up to six hours a day. “Guitar Zero” is a refreshing alternation between the nitty-gritty details of learning rock-guitar licks and Mr. Marcus’s survey of the relevant scientific literature on learning and the brain.

Mr. Marcus discovers that “the evidence for critical periods is surprisingly weak.” It is not that critical periods (when the brain is especially plastic) do not exist. They do, but they vary. The science shows that, at least for learning a language, we don’t suddenly lose our plasticity and ability to learn at the end of the critical period. The falloff is often gradual. Relatedly, complex activities such as language and music involve many brain areas, not all affected equally. Studies of language development show that critical periods apply more to learning accent formation than to learning grammar. In music, a study shows that perfect pitch must be learned early; other skills, such as music theory, it appears, need not be.

The conditions for plastic change are altered after the critical period. Babies in a critical period for language development can learn words effortlessly, for example: As I like to put it, babies don’t furrow their brows to pick up new words as adults do when cramming for a vocabulary test. After the critical period, deliberate mental effort and focus alter the brain’s circuitry and grow new connections.

Brain scans show that musicians’ new neuronal connections vary according to the instrument they play. Violinists have their signature brain changes, brass players theirs. Loving what we do helps to form these new connections, because the same dopamine chemistry that gives us the pleasurable rush of reward consolidates new brain connections.

Immersion fosters learning after the critical period, not only because it enforces more practice time. Adults have more difficulty learning than children in part because they have built up so many language habits that they have to overcome. This too is a product of brain plasticity: The circuits we use the most get stronger and “outcompete” others. Immersion prevents us from reinforcing those habits.

I knew an intelligence officer who had failed to learn languages repeatedly until he was appointed head of the CIA’s Latin American desk. Now his problem was serious. He moved abroad, lived with a Spanish family that couldn’t speak any English, and became fluent in months. Mr. Marcus’s immersion included not just playing but learning music theory and conducting interviews with musicians. Guitarist Tom Morello (Rage Against the Machine), we learn, didn’t start playing until he was 17, but he practiced six hours a day for four years while a doing an undergraduate degree at Harvard. He missed only three days, for a total of 8,760 hours.

“Guitar Zero” makes some delightful counterintuitive fine points. Kids are not quicker learners; but they are more persistent. Kids will practice riffs over and over, just as they will play a new videogame ad nauseam. In the end, Mr. Marcus does not become the next Jimi Hendrix, but he can play guitar, perform in a band and write songs, and he has overcome his supposedly hard-wired “congenital” arrhythmia.

Most important, his life has been significantly changed; it is more balanced, its joy enhanced by his becoming musical. Few people can imagine taking off 18 months to change themselves in such a way, but then few know it is possible. For those who look forward, in “retirement,” to honoring the lifelong yearnings they have neglected, “Guitar Zero” is good news. Neuroplastic discoveries about adult development are a good reason for the word “retirement” to itself be retired. We may be happiest if we work our brains as hard as ever—doing something we love.

Dr. Doidge is the author of “The Brain That Changes Itself.”

17 percent of the world population; superior I.Q.; appropriate average for individuals in professional occupations.

121+

10 percent; potentially gifted; average for college graduates

132+

2 percent; borderline genius; average I.Q. of most Ph.D. recipients

143+

1 percent; genius level; about average for Ph.D.’s in physics

158+

1 in 10,000; Nobel Prize winners

164+

1 in 30,000; Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and the chess champion Bobby Fischer.

“Just as hockey players prepare their bodies for the season, we should help to prepare our kids’ brains even before they begin elementary school,” says Dr. Sylvain Moreno of Baycrest’s Rotman Research Institute in Toronto.

Moreno is one of several Canadian scientists doing work in neuro-education, an area that stresses that a child’s capacity to learn can be as critical as what he or she is taught. In his research he has found that training children in one area can affect seemingly unrelated higher order processes such as language, memory and intelligence.

It’s all about strengthening what Moreno calls the brain’s “executive function” — the part of the brain (the pre-frontal lobe) which helps us manage cognitive processes such as working memory, attention, verbal reasoning and multitasking.

“This part of the brain is responsible for everything that we do that’s hard, that requires special effort, says Dr. Ellen Bialystok, a cognitive neuroscientist and research professor of psychology at York University in Toronto. She adds that the brain’s executive function or control system allows us to do “all the things that require effortful attention and concentration. It helps us with mental juggling.”

Emma Climie, an assistant professor at the University of Calgary’s Faculty of Education, uses the analogy of a “boss” to explain executive function. These are “complex cognitive skills,” she says. “It is important for teachers to understand them and how they develop. Executive function plays a significant role in classroom learning.”

In kids whose executive function is underdeveloped or immature, academic progress may be slower: Even having to pay attention to a teacher in front of a class can be daunting.

Both Bialystok and Moreno spoke earlier this week at the inaugural Brain Power conference. It presented the latest neuroscience findings and how they impact and enhance children’s capacity to learn. The Brain Power Initiative (brainpowerinitiative.com), which organized the conference, brings together scientists, teachers, researchers and parents to enhance childhood development by recognizing the role that neuroscience plays in what they call “the neuro-education revolution.”

Bialystok’s work, which explored language and cognitive development, found that when children speak two languages (any two languages, not just our official languages), it benefits them in all sorts of ways; it also protects adults from Alzheimer’s disease. She challenges the argument that children who speak a heritage language at home have problems learning English.

“Overall, the experience is enriching,” she says of speaking two languages. “Bilingual children easily move between any two languages and in our studies they outperformed the monolingual children.”

Her bilingual participants were super at multitasking and task-switching; the bilingual advantage lies in the fact that speaking two languages requires you to use the brain’s executive control system more often than if you speak only one language, she explains. Exercising that function makes it more efficient and adds to your brain’s networks.

Moreno used a fun computer-based music program that featured cartoon characters and games to show that after only 20 days of classroom instruction pre-schoolers were able to boost their verbal IQ scores some five times more than kids who received a program not based on musical concepts.

That program, he explains, stimulated a specific brain processing function which ended up affecting other areas.

“We found improvement in language, in intelligence, in attention — and in reading.” In his view, preparing a child’s brain to learn is almost as important as what they learn.

Boost kids’ brightness

“Encourage a second language in your children,” says Dr. Ellen Bialystok. “Keep your heritage language at home; your children will learn English in the community. No other country in the world facilitates speaking two languages as well as Canada.”

This is your brain on music

Dr. Sylvain Moreno says that kids should sing. “When it comes to music, kids need to be engaged. So singing will have a positive effect — more so than just listening.” Learning an instrument also has a direct impact on memory, attention and intelligence.

Help for pre-schoolers

The executive function part of your child’s brain will mature naturally, but you can help prepare pre-schoolers for elementary school, says University of Calgary educator Emma Climie.

Encourage the development of tasks that require cognitive skills such as putting on shoes, taking off coats, and listening to instructions, she suggests.

Children whose executive function is immature may have trouble meeting school expectations, she adds. “But it is not because the child is being wilfully disrespectful or disobedient, but because their (executive function) development may not be at the stage where they are able to meet these expectations independently.”

What’s neuroscience?

This whole new area of education looks at how specific areas of the brain connect with other areas.

Hate math?

Kids who have problems with math may have problems with their brain’s executive function, says Dr. Sylvain Moreno. “If we can improve their memory, they will do better in math. With neuro-education you don’t have to teach something specific to get good in it. The strength will transfer.”

This is why we created the Music Performing Arts Camp, a two week, full-day camp from July 2nd to 14th,encompasses both the wonders of visual art and an interactive music program for children age 4 to 8.

Children will get the opportunity to explore different musical instruments, learn about different musical genres and also express themselves by drawing and painting. At the end of the two weeks,  there will be a  recital and art exposition to display the children’s art work and perform the songs they’ve learned during camp.

Whether children already have skills in these areas or never tried them, our 88 Keys music and art specialist  will help them develop, learn and experiment with new experiences and techniques.

Eileen Tan, Director of 88 Keys always says, “It is important to develop our children’s artistic skills and enhance their creativity and imagination”

We are located in Richmond Hill, in an air-conditioned facility and many families drive as far north as Newmarket and North Toronto, Vaughan and Markham.

The cost is $600.00 for the two full day camp and limited space is available so register today!

Recently, I received a great question from one of our Studio3Music mommas. I’m sure she’s not the first person to wonder, so I thought I should share it with you all.

Question: Is it typical for each class to be very similar each week? We’ve noticed that we are singing the same songs each week and I’m hoping that the class changes a bit from week to week. Could you let me know?

Answer:
Your question was both astute and excellent. That tells me that you are paying attention in class! (Which is wonderful, since seriously, I’ve had a few mommas that text the entire class time!)

While we as adults may quickly tire of an activity, it is important that we recognize the importance of repetition to our children’s learning and development. Learning, or the growth of neural connections in the brain, is strengthened through repetition. A one-time experience is not enough for a neural connection to form and stabilize. It is through repetition that possibility becomes ability. That is why Kindermusik activities are repeated over and over. Repetition is a foundation of learning in the Kindermusik program!

Learning how to hold a mallet!

We will, however, do “extensions” of activities. The brain loves to be a little surprised once in a while; a surprise causes the brain to pay extra attention. One week we might sing a song, the next we’ll sing the song and add a manipulative. We might do the same lap bounce for 5 weeks in a row, but change up the words in the 4th or 5th week. This allows children to have mastery of an idea before we add a new one.

Three interesting facts about repetition and child development:

1. Learning requires electrical energy to create neural pathways. The less “automatic” something is, the more electrical energy is required. Think of something you do automatically – like count by 10?s. It takes very little electrical energy for your brain to travel that “counting 10?s” neural pathway, because you’ve done it a lot.

The more well-traveled a pathway, the less energy is required. That’s why you can do two things at once. Watch TV and knit, for example. When you are first learning to knit, it takes all of your effort. Looking, counting stitches, watching your needles. As it becomes automatic, you use less brain energy, so you can layer another activity on top of that without fear of accidentally turning those mittens into a hat instead.

2. Did you ever wonder why children expect a favorite activity to be repeated again and again and again? Repetition is a necessary building block of development. Children’s brains KNOW that they need repetition. They are pretty smart little creatures! Do you remember the show Blue’s Clues? (Never the same for me after Steve left…). The creators did research while developing the show as to what preschoolers wanted to see in the show, and you can probably guess the answer by now – repetition!

3. So what about the fact that we always have a hello and goodbye ritual, a bounce, a steady beat, rocking time, and story time (in the older classes)? As my friend Heather Wiebe says (she a Kindermusik teacher in Alberta who is fascinated about the way the brain works, just like me) “Patterns make children happy. Knowing what to expect and having things happen in that way not only helps children know what to expect and feel at ease, it’s also how they mark time.” When the environment and routine is predictable, then a child feels safe and learning can naturally happen.

We know you’ll be ready to move on to another activity before your children will (believe me, I’ve been there three times with my own kids!) know that you’ll get new music and activities soon enough. And a Kindermusik Education is the most powerful tool you can give them now, for future success in school, work and life.