Madeline Harms felt a strong urge to change the focus from merely identifying the problem to actually finding solutions when she came across research that highlighted cognitive and social disadvantages faced by children from low-income families. Research often noted barriers to success in school faced by children from disadvantaged backgrounds, but not much was mentioned of practical ways of helping these kids thrive.
Madeline saw that one big and important issue was that too much of the research related to education and neurobiology had been taking place in separate silos. Education research would address the practical issues around teaching and learning and would largely position itself away from the serious biological and psychological issues that affect student behavior and cognitive development. Likewise, neurobiological research would essentially remain in the domain of basic research with few, if any, applications to real-life situations in the classroom. The interesting insight from this disconnect was that an intersection between neurobiological studies and educational studies would be able to address areas around which basic learning research and insights would often provide questions for consideration.
Neurobiology and Education and Their Connection to Student Development
Neurobiology is the science of the workings of the brain and of the nervous system. Recent findings have further opened up the understanding of stress neurobiology and how chronic stress affects the brain, especially in children. Harms and colleague Sherona Garrett-Ruffin have investigated this interface between brain and education. One conclusion was that while both sectors play important roles in understanding student challenges, they seldom come together.
Neurobiological research into stress clearly shows that chronic stress, which is a common experience for the children of poor families, inhibits the brain’s ability to distinguish between threat and reward. The resultant disruption leaves long-lasting scars in behavior, learning, and academic performance. Chronic stress has also been known to structurally alter areas involved in memory, attention, and emotional regulation, thus making it all the harder for children to cope with the heights of academic demand. This neurobiological insight thus helps explain why some children are unable to stay in school despite the potential to do so.
On an opposite note, education research tends to focus on solutions for the here and now: teaching practices, curriculum development, and social-emotional learning (SEL). SEL properties are characteristics affirming that children acquire emotional conception, build relationships with others, and make responsible decisions; this is highly valued among children who are facing considerable challenges outside of the classroom, helping them manage stress and emotions, thus reducing their perception of threat at school.
The essence of social-emotional learning and its constraints
The schools have become a big network for the implementation of social-emotional learning programs. These are instituting strong lines of barriers to learning by working on the emotional resilience of students. The programs teach children the vital competencies a child would use to regulate his or her emotions, build relationships, and face challenges with perseverance. It is important that these children learn self-regulation because such children may come from backgrounds of stress such as poverty, trauma, or dysfunctional home environments. The vital importance of SEL is the creation of a more safe and caring school environment.
Still, while promising, SEL has had some mixed results, and there is still much to learn about how to implement these programs effectively. The research has shown that SEL can be effective in closing achievement gaps and helping children really to learn; however, the implementation of these programs varies widely and interacts with the unique needs of students in quite different ways. For example, there may be a subgroup of children who may respond positively to one type of SEL application, while another subgroup may not. It becomes critical then to understand which components of an SEL experience are best for children in high-stress environments to actually promote better outcomes.
Despite its importance, it still remains an under-researched area how teaching methods relate to students’ stress management ability. We know that chronic stress interferes with learning, but how various teaching methods, classroom environments, or even cultures within schools might help students cope with or even lessen that stress remains elusive. Emphasizing interdisciplinary research, Harms and Garrett-Ruffin argue for bringing educators, psychologists, and neuroscientists together to further investigate these interactions. Through this understanding, educators will develop the respective strategies with which to help students at risk.
Practical Issues That Require Interdisciplinary Collaboration
Harms argues for increasing the collaboration of neurobiologists, psychologists, and educators to facilitate developing practical, evidence- based interventions that address the root causes of inequities in achievement. Too often, studies done in one vein of research do not connect to or inform research in another thick line. For instance, the description may allow neurobiologists to detail some of the stressing factors within children’s environments, but this knowledge would hardly ever trickle down to influence any of the educators’ decisions for implementation in real classrooms. The other way around holds true too: promising interventions may be detected by educational researchers without any insight from neuroscientists on why these interventions work or how their refinement occurs.
The establishment of interdisciplinary teams constituting experts from various fields would get more chance to design integrated solutions that would address students’ intricate lives inside and outside classrooms. This collaboration would be beneficial in constructing more effective, targeted interventions, thus helping children build resilience and fulfill academic expectations irrespective of their external conditions.
Moving forward: The Road to Achieving Less Inequality
However, the association of neurobiology and educational research appears very promising regarding outcomes for children under adversity. It can prepare educators to address individual needs while providing support and interventions as it goes beyond chronic stress and other biological induce dysfunctional performance in terms of academic success. Simultaneously, understanding how educational strategies, most particularly SEL programs, help in alleviating these effects can further strengthen the caliber of all students’ education.
It is one thing to be emerging in the area of new research involving collaboration of education and neurobiology, but it should also ensure that these efforts are aimed at evidence-based strategies for resilience and promise at the level of every child. If such focus is put on solutions and collaboration, then the inequalities that remain in education can start to be addressed and all children enabled to reach their full potential, regardless of their circumstances.
