Teachers INSET/Training Day

On Monday the 22nd October, whilst our students were continuing to enjoy their holidays, HeadStart teachers were all in school involved in a training day. Training (INSET) days are a great opportunity for staff to enhance existing skills or to develop knowledge and expertise in new areas of education, that will have a direct impact on the quality and experience students get here at HSIS. Monday’s INSET saw staff involved in a host of different activities led by outside providers and our own in school experts, including:

• Non-native English speakers developing writing skills.
• Fast ForWord
• Thai etiquette
• Foundation language
• Phonics in Primary
• Third Culture Kids
• Middle leadership training
• Collaborative learning
• Play based learning for Foundation staff
• IGCSE P.E. practical moderation
• Positive behaviour management strategies

HeadStart is committed to offering students the best possible education in Phuket and by keeping our teachers well trained and up to date with current educational practices, we ensure our students get the best possible learning experiences on a daily basis.

---

Duke of Edinburgh Update

This announcement is regarding the upcoming Duke of Edinburgh International Award trips that will take place during the course of this term.

The students are to meet at HeadStart at 07:55hrs on Saturday and will be returned to HeadStart at approximately 16:30hrs on Sunday, though the return time is dependent on the time taken to clean and pack things away at the end of the trip. Please be there ready to pick up the students as there will be no teaching staff on site after 16:45hrs.

The kit list and groups have been emailed to all parents separately. Students will also need to bring food as discussed in their cooking groups. All other necessary equipment such as tents, cookers, pans etc. will be provided, as will drinking water. Please note that HeadStart and Topper Sail cannot be held responsible for the loss or damage of valuables.

This itinerary is similar for all 3 trips (Training, Practice and Qualifying).

Here are the dates for the trips:

Group 1

• Training 27/28 October 2018
• Practice 10/11 November 2018
• Qualifying 3/4 December 2018

Group 2

• Training 3/4 November 2018
• Practice 1/2 December 2018
• Qualifying 10/11 January 2019

If you have any questions regarding the weekends, please do not hesitate in contacting me at [email protected]

---

Remember to Sleep, and Sleep to Remember

Last week, I wrote a note about the importance of the affective and its relationship to learning in terms of homework.

This week I’d like to discuss the cognitive; there are lots of things I could talk about but I am going to talk about the one I think is most important one big thing to help your children learn. The biggest thing to help your child learn is to get into a very good sleep pattern.

Of course, I appreciate that all parents have been trying to do this since your child was two months old, but sleep patterns change, develops and becomes more challenging in teenage years. It may come as a surprise, but as children go through teenage years, they become nocturnal. This applies to boys particularly; there is actually an evolutionary reason for this: hunting and gathering. Evolutionary biologists have discovered that teenage boys were usually the demographic sent out hunting at night- hardwired developmental traits are not erased in the blink of an evolutionary eye.

So in teenage boys, sleep patterns can switch. This applies less to girls, they are typically more routine. Like with everything, there are exceptions of course. We’ve always know that something special goes on when we sleep. We may know the old adage- ‘early to bed, early to rise’, but actual chemical reactions in the brain and their relation to how they improve learning when asleep have only been identified as recently as 2008 in the Academy of Neuroscience in Chicago.

I know I am an English teacher, but allow me to dabble with a smidge of neuroscience. Bear with me, it’s interesting. Honestly…(!) The scientists in Chicago identified in the brain a chemical called acetycholine. Acetycholine is involved in a process called synaptic plasticity. Synaptic plasticity is the model which challenges the idea that the brain grows in childhood, develops in teenage years and then you’re left with a final model as an adult. Synaptic plasticity indicates that your brain can continue to develop and grow in different ways as an adult; in short, that you can teach an old dog new tricks. Acetycholine is a chemical which is released into the brain which not only enables the brain to develop and make new connections and new pathways between synapses but it is also connected to something called long-term potentiation.

Effectively, long-term potentiation is an increase in your brain muscles. A muscle analogy for long-term potentiation would be that we could learn to create a better tennis stroke perhaps, by practising day in, day out on the court, and certain muscles would grow and develop to allow that to happen. Yet in addition, you need to develop your body so that you can not only learn one new stroke, but 10 new strokes. So, synaptic plasticity , long term potentiation, triggered by acetycholine allows the brain to do this. However, this acetycholine isn’t around in your brain in great quantities, particularly during the day when it’s actually suppressed. It’s suppressed by serotonin and norepinephine- stress chemicals.

These stress chemicals get in the way of learning- but during sleep they are lowered. During the sleeping state, serotonin and norepinephrine levels go down, and acetycholine kicks in. Part of the reasons for these chemicals to be supressed is that when you’re dreaming, if you’re being, say, chased by a bear and serotonin and norepinephrine are flooding your brain, then you would wake up very…overstimulated- in fact, you won’t stay asleep, you would wake up and start running around. So, it has to be supressed and this is the time learning takes place. This is bad news for us teachers- we thought it takes place in the classroom- it actually takes place when your kids are asleep!

To be more precise, it actually takes place during REM sleep- that stage of sleep where you get the rapid eye movement- the dreaming state. I don’t know if you know, but the dreaming part of sleep only kicks in half way through the night. I am sure some of you may have seen the app or even may have it on your phone which tracks your REM sleep. There’s a problem with this though, this valuable stuff called acetycholine is not actually released into the brain until the last stages of REM sleep. So you go in and out of this dreaming state in the last third of your night’s sleep. But it’s only in the last third of that which acetycholine is released.

So what’s the take home from this? Well, it’s no good getting 6 hours sleep. For children of school age, 8 hours sleep is the absolute minimum. Not just for health, but for learning. And typically 8-10 hours as they become older into their teens.

So, to return to my piece two weeks ago, if homework gets in the way of sleep, it gets in the way of learning. So we must not only remember to sleep, we must sleep to remember. If not, any learning done during the day and during homework time is likely to be lost.

Here is a quote from the presentation to the neuroscience conference in Washington in 2009:

‘The absence of chemicals norepenhrine and serotonin, serves a unique function for memory, giving REM sleep a singular role in learning, it is not replicable by more waking practice.’

What that means is if you don’t get that late surge or REM sleep, you can’t make up for it by just doing more practice of the thing you’re working on next day. In practical terms, children don’t always get 9 hours sleep. There are times when they don’t, sometimes for things beyond anyone’s control- does it matter? Can we make up for it? The answer is yes- to a point. It can be made up for; it’s not permanent. But it takes months to make up for several nights of lost sleep.

Remember though, lack of sleep not only damages immediate learning, it also stops that thing called long term potentiation (LPT) which acetycholine also helps with, so that sleep is not only crucial for the learning from the day before, but if it’s missed, you progressively damage the brain’s ability to learn.

In this last section, I would like to brooch some practical aspects then give you a chance to reflect on these. I believe very strongly the best way for parents to help is to pay attention to the emotional aspects of learning and look at where learning happens- both at school and at other times. Homework is about learning. We can work together to make it more conducive to learning taking place, but it does involve attitude, emotion and sleep being central to successful learning. Learning, emotion and sleep are interconnected.

So what can you do to help at home?

1.) Sleep patterns. Routines. Any of you who have that already, a hearty, ‘Well done – congratulations!’ Children taking a bath, drinking milk, reading a bedtime story- all these things which you may well do already can help with this before bed.

2.) No screens in the bedroom. Studies have shown that the effects of an Ipad or computer in 90 minutes to 2 hours before sleep damaged circadian rhythm. This is, apparently, to do with the proximity and intensity of the light source, which convinces the brain that it is daytime and the stimulation of the interaction with the game makes it hard to sleep. The TV is OK- the light is more distant, more passive and does not have the same damaging effect.

3.) The emotional side- stress and learning don’t mix. Be positive. Refer to study at home as learning- not work. Be interested- your level of interest has actually only got to be quite minimal but it must be positive. Sitting over your child and interfering is counter effective- ‘granny cloud’ is a term invented by Sugatra Mitra at Newcastle University. He invented something called self-organised learning environments. He found that if you gave children resources, and then left them alone, they would learn incredibly effectively. Learning was enhanced if they had Skype conversations. He used grannies and grandpas simple to check in with the kids every now and then just to say, ‘gosh…isn’t that interesting etc.’

4) Routines- they don’t have to be fixed. Giving children options is very effective- snack now and work later or vice versa.

5) Environment- a situated environment is best. Learning doesn’t transfer from location to location. Homework done at same place at same time is far better than being done in different places. Try doing something alongside them- your invoices or bills etc.

I hope that this look into the importance of homework and sleep has been of interest to stakeholders here at HeadStart. Later this term, I will write a little more about English, its importance, and how parents can help their children. Please let me know if there is any other topic which you’d like me to share my thoughts on.