Producer:  And welcome back to Full PreFrontal, where we are exposing the mysteries of executive function. I am here with our host, Sucheta Kamath. Good morning, my friend. As always, great to be with you this morning, looking forward to this conversation. Please kick us off.

Sucheta:  Good morning, to you, Todd. I have to apologize because I do not have the best working voice today but I’m very glad to be with you. You and I, for the last one-and-a-half years or two years, close to two years now, have been taking this journey in into understanding executive function. And recently, I have added a list of guests who are addressing this need and our focus and our desire to be mindful. We had Mark Burton, talk about it and we will have Chris Willard talk about mindfulness.

But today, we have a very special guest who will do the same. But before I invite her to join our conversation, I have been thinking about this mindfulness aspect of life. You know I grew up in India and yoga, medication, and mindfulness has been part of top of the mind kind of practices. When I grew, even as a child, I had training over a year or two of very specific yogic practices and sitting still was very instilled in our lives, in our households, particularly during prayers. And when I was raising my children, who are now young adults, I don’t see them taking the time to do that mindfulness practice since they have left the house.

One author who I love, his name is Pico Ayer. He is a phenomenal author who used to travel a lot for work and he talks about this wonderful quote. He says, “I have never meditated in my life. I don’t practice yoga nor any religion. I’m a tourist on the realm of stillness.” He has talked about this journey that we take that means, he says we travel initially to lose ourselves and we travel next to find ourselves.

So to me, mindfulness is this particular effort that we all desire for to find ourselves and executive function which is the higher order of thinking skills, our ability to manage our abilities, is kind of switching on the light bulb of mindfulness. And none other than this guest that we have today who is going to give us her insight, a very practical approach and her work which centers around working with children in schools.

So I’m very excited to introduce Dr. Debra Crobin Collins. She’s a Florida licensed psychologist, nationally-certified school psychologist and registered yoga teacher. Dr. Collins’ work includes diagnostic evaluation of children’s learning and behavior and dimensions to promote students’ progress and training for psychologists, teachers, and counselors and parents. She a co-author of Stop and Relax, a yoga-based curriculum that equips teachers and therapists to use visual cues and physical exercise to teach self-calming to children with developmental disabilities such as autism. This particular work is what drew me to her and I can’t wait for her to describe it and share her knowledge about it.

Dr. Collins has focused on training students and staff to support self-regulation of attention, emotions, and behavior. And Dr. Collins has conducted many, many workshops for national and international conferences, including Autism Society of America, Learning in the Brain, and Young Child [00:04:10] Conference. So welcome to Full PreFrontal, Debra. Can’t wait to have this conversation with you.

Debra:  Thank you. It’s quite a pleasure to be here.

Sucheta:  So, I’ve been asking all my guests, before we dive deep into executive function, tell me a little bit about your own executive function and when did you become aware of your learning to think skills, thinking to learn skills, and regulating yourself through those abilities?

Debra:  That is very interesting question. When you ask when I first remember, I first remember as a child sometimes joining in when I was very young with kids in the neighborhood on sometimes switching little rhymes and games and they would be teasing. I remember one day realizing that the teasing aspect of some of these rhymes could actually be hurtful to someone who took it too seriously. And that was, well I think, just planting a seed.

Sucheta:  How so, Debra?

Debra:  Taught me to think about being more mindful of the effects of my actions on others which is a big part of executive functions and not to take it for granted that other people understood my intentions or that I even start thinking about my own intentions.

Sucheta:  I got it.

Debra:  I was about 9 or 10 at the time but I remember it very clearly. It was like a big epiphany.

Sucheta:  It’s interesting you say that because when I was younger, around 9 or 10, I would say, our television at our house came very late, maybe when I was 10 and we had only two channels. One channel only aired 6:30 p.m. onwards and it had zero programming for children. So with that background, we grew up in playing a lot of games. And particularly because of the Indian heat during the afternoon times, the games were indoor games. So I learned playing cards and I learned so much about reading minds of others and really not blurting it out or having a poker face when you have good cards or not getting upset when you lose a hand. Is that what you’re also referring to?

Debra:  That’s an extension of it. But even before that, it was just my first realization that something I said innocently could actually offend someone else and that made me take another look at some of the games we were playing as children.

Sucheta:  That’s great. So how about learning to learn process? How did you discover that and how did you apply that to your own learning and mastering your skills?

Debra:  Learning to learn, I think of more fairly – one of the best, I think, examples would be in college, having to be on my own for the first time and organize and prioritize all the demands of the different classes, the schedule, getting from here to there, making sure I ate, making sure I slept, all of those things. It was the first time I was responsible for doing all of that on my own and coming up with just some routines and strategies for studying, for example, that were proactive for me so that I did not end up feeling at a loss like I was cramming at the last minute when I was going to have a paper or a test to write.

But also a balance of having good times and relaxation too. I saw a lot of people in my dorm who just became constant workers. It was a very competitive atmosphere among the other women on the floor. They would just work and work and not even take a breath. So, I also did not want to do that. I wanted to have [00:08:23].

Sucheta:  Fantastic. So with that now, let’s talk a little bit about your role. You are a school psychologist and a practicing one which is such a joy for me to have because you are informed on a daily basis by children who you actually see and those you have to provide practical strategies on a daily basis. So tell us a little bit about your day-to-day work and what pressing issues that you’re tackling on a daily basis.

Debra:  I’ve been a school psychologist for nearly 40 years now. Most of that time, the last about 27 years, I’ve been in [00:09:00] Country, Florida, the Fort Lauderdale area. It is the sixth largest school district in the United States and it’s extremely diverse, extremely diverse in its population in terms of languages, ethnicity, social economics, religions, neighborhoods, request [00:09:23] adaptability.

And what the Department does with school psychologists is it gives us generally assignment to two schools that we go to regularly. We go to each of those schools twice a week and then we are pulled out to other venues as needed. In the schools that we’re assigned, we are responsible for promoting students progress in academic achievement and social growth, and promoting positive behavior and mental health.

So in order to promote the progress of the students, part of my role is diagnostic. I need to do assessments and identify why any child would be having particular academic or emotional behavioral problems. Once the assessment is done, then it moves on to helping with interventions, making recommendations at a minimum but actually teaming with teachers and parents to implement interventions.

So we’re talking about, you know, just students in general but also those who have specific educational or psychological diagnoses such as attention deficit disorder or autism spectrum disorder, learning disabilities, and so forth. So for the past 20 years, I’ve been assigned strictly to elementary or pre-school level students.

Sucheta:  So what are some of the challenges of children who are being raised in 21st century? How does it translate into success or failure in the classroom learning? And another part of this question is, what is different for educators compared to how things were 20-30 years ago that they have to battle?

Debra:  Since my career spanned the bridge from the 20th to the 21st century, that’s really appropriate. The sheltering more recently, especially since the advent of the internet and so forth. Again, I’m looking mostly at what the young children are doing because that’s where I’ve been the last 20 years and less so at the teenagers and the high school students.

So looking at the little ones, even the ones coming in for preschool and then going through elementary, I see that the children are very used to being constantly stimulated. It’s not like what you said about the mindfulness and the stillness in India. And even for myself when I was a child waiting for Saturday morning when the cartoons would be on and otherwise, we had to amuse ourselves.

Sucheta:  Yes. By the way, these has all changed in India too. Just FYI.

Debra:  So from very little, they have phones and tablets in their hands and it’s in many ways, I’ve seen it used as a pacifier where the children, even just coming in for an assessment with their parents, the preschoolers are already on their tablet. They come into the waiting area and there are toys and things there. One might have to prompt them to go to the toys rather than stay on the phone or the tablet. But they’re so used to this, they are constantly looking to be able to get on those media when they have access to like the computers or the laptops. We have to set strong boundaries so that they don’t start playing games on them.

The main thing I see, to sum it up, is that a lot of these children do not appear to me to have experiences that much frustration in the sense that they have to cope with being frustrated or bored or challenged because they are used to being on a video interface. And their behavior at leisure is directed by the game they are playing or the video that they’re watching. And when I think they’ve become frustrated in their lives, often they’ve been given this is a way to calm them down and stop any kind of complaining or tantruming that might be going on.

Sucheta:  So are you saying that the organic nature of life, so to speak, as we live it, things just don’t work out and you have to wait or you have to do something else or you don’t get your way. But when the video interface is designed such as with UX or user experience in mind that things are made to work out well so that the user has seamless experience in a way the current generation is getting pampered to have something, want it and get it. Is that what you mean?

Debra:  Yes, I do. And I know this is just a small little slice of things that are affecting children today. But with that particular slice, the young kids who were used to playing these games or watching these videos, they can be at a minimum entertained and more than that, they are guided through the video or the game. It’s prompting them and helping them get to their next level.

Honestly, the kids can have terrible tantrums if they can’t make it to the next level or if you take away the tablet. I remember when my son was little, the internet and his video games were very new. I remember one of the first rules I had to set once he started playing these games was that he had to learn how to keep his cool if he became frustrated with the game or if I had to tell him to turn it off and then come for dinner or something. If he could not keep his cool and his composure when faced with that shift, which is an executive function, “Turn it off now or in five minutes and then come to dinner,” or faced with the frustration, “I’m trying to get to this next level now. I can’t seem to beat it.” If he could not handle those things, then he had to take at least a day off and then try again.

Sucheta:  Yeah. You are saying something so important and I think most people are kind of addressing it or handling it in a very casual sense. But I think it’s a organic problem that I see is pervading every technology experience that the child is having. The technology is designed in a way that it is prompting problem solving and moving someone along so that they can reach the goal but the goal is created by the person who has designed that piece of technology.

Debra:  Yes.

Sucheta:  So that is lost on children, of course, but real life has no semblance of that type of seamless transitions. And I see, like you mentioned, a very powerful statement that the tools are used as a pacifier. So imagine a 9-year-old on a pacifier, we’ll be horrified. They have a iPad.

Debra:  I tell the parents that they’re always plugged in, that their port is [00:16:44]. The thing is that when you said how the game is guiding them in a certain direction, often when I’m trying to communicate to teachers and parents the type of problem a child is having with thinking for themselves, I compare it to thinking of a train, going to your destination on a train or getting to your destination in an automobile. If you’re on a train, the path is already laid out for you and you go from track to track, rail to rail on the track on the track. Rail to rail to rail to rail, station to station. You never depart from that route and you steadily, in increments, step-by-step, get to your destination.

But if you’re in an automobile, then if you’re driving that, you can choose from all kinds of ways to get to your destination. And all kinds of unexpected things could happen on the way. There might be a detour or you have to deal with the red lights and the green lights or people merging into your lane and this and that, and whether to take the scenic route or the most efficient route, and so on.

I try to point this out because sometimes the children that I’m working with are having trouble thinking for themselves in doing that kind of problem-solving the way you would in my automobile metaphor, and they’d rather be on the train where the rubric and the stats are just laid out for them and they just march from one to the other.

Sucheta:  So give us a little bit of an insight into the educators who are entering this space where the children are primed to learning with this kind of mindset. What are the challenges they are facing (1) with their own usage of technology or their own having to navigate this multifaceted life but then also dealing with less prepared children who may not have the emotional acumen that comes from having learned to wait and see, wait and learn?

Debra:  There is so much. Again, just like how with your first very broad question, I focused on this pacifier and not learning frustration management. There’s so much but a lot of it is this combination of factors that create a tremendous amount of stress. Moving from 40 years ago, 30 years ago to now, there has been the movement in education to emphasize or to check accountability and efficiency in education by having these tests that the students have to take and the tests are very high stakes for the students and the teachers. Because the teachers in many school districts such as mine, their evaluations and their pay depends in good part on how well their students’ score on these tests. The students at certain grade levels will be retained even if they don’t pass these tests or an accepted alternative to them. And there have been other kinds of stresses.

There’s been back and forth between the tests being administered with paper and pencil that the students would bubble in their answers versus having them administered online. Again, to prepare the students to answer in very, very different ways, the practice tests are a whole ordeal in themselves and the students must take the test unless there are special reasons under – very limited reasons that you have to have a lot of evidence for. They take the high stakes tests at their grade level, not at their level of independent learning and production.

Some of the children have so much stress just for practice tests. The teachers are anxious, the students are anxious. The teachers are under pressure to deliver the curriculum. Again, hitting these prescribed standards, doing it in these prescribed ways that people will come into their rooms to observe them, sometimes more than one person like a group that has responsibility for observing whether the teacher is holding to a good pace and efficiency in delivering the curriculum.

They will give the teacher a black mark if they depart from – the teachable moment is not really accepted in that sense. It’s hard for me to express without you being there. But if the teacher schedule says that they’re supposed to be working on reading comprehension at this time and something comes up that might be an interesting anecdote or question a student has on another topic or a student might be in distress and needs some help. These things actually take the schedule.

Sucheta:  I see. Yes. You know, it’s so funny, it reminds me the way you are describing this using your own automobile versus train track analogy, that a more efficient or effective teaching will happen if the teacher is given the opportunity to ride a bus or a car on an open road as long as she reaches her destination. Instead, somebody else is laying the tracks and saying you must be on these tracks.

Debra:  Yes.

Sucheta:  And then if you don’t hit a scenic route because this track just doesn’t go through any scenic route, tough luck.

Debra:  Yes. And so the other thing is that the curriculum is being made increasingly verbal and abstract in many ways. So the teachers and the parents will express concern that for math, the students are expected to explain the concepts behind their answers, when they haven’t even memorized the basic facts yet and they have to explain not only why something is right but why a certain answer would be wrong. I’ve seen these things presented in second grade, to 7 and 8-year-olds. It’s part of the curriculum.

The kindergartens have become so reading-oriented that the preschools are doing worksheets with children. Toys, housekeeping, that kind of play has largely been taken out of kindergarten. In one school, I wanted to assess the child some years ago and I went into a kindergarten classroom to get some blocks to see how this child would work with blocks. They didn’t have any blocks. The children weren’t allowed to use them.

Sucheta:  Oh, my goodness.

Debra:  In one school, the kindergarten teachers were told not to have the children color because it was taking time away from reading instruction. It’s a lot about child development reason I see a big disconnect. The reason I like to go to conferences such as Learning in the Brain are that they’re multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary conferences that are looking at psychology, psychological development, the development of learning and memory of executive functions and self-regulation and how to take our wonderful, increasingly brilliant understanding of how these processes evolve and translate it into effective learning opportunities for children. And yet, there is such a contrast between that and this sort of autocratic nature of the way the tests are expecting the children to go through and acquire the curriculum. I feel like the concept of the children is that they’re just little computers to be programmed.

Sucheta:  There’s so many ways. There’s some structural elements in educational context that is making learning less stressful. And God forbid if there is a child in the system who has difficulty, he is not going to bounce back with resiliency because he’s got issues and he can’t keep up this programming schedule, so to speak.

Debra:  There’s a tension between the scheduling aspect and the organic developmental creative aspect of learning and engaging children. A lot of teachers will say that the fun has gone out of it, the creativity has gone out of it.

Sucheta:  Let’s talk about the stress in a daily classroom that we recognize or at least psychologists like you is recognizing, the teachers are probably reaching out to you to get help from an individual student. But what you are thinking about is more a global approach so that all children can receive this stress reduction approach. I think I’ve had Paul Solazo and Stephanie Carlson on the podcast before who talked a lot about hot versus cool brain. Can you tell us a little bit – I thought your analogies were amazing, so do you mind talking a little bit about how you introduce these ideas to the children or even I assume to teachers? And how do you get them to engage by taking care of their brain by paying attention to the different types of brains?

Debra:  Well, if you don’t mind, first I’d like to explain to everyone why I got interested in the hot versus the coil brain.

Sucheta:  Sure, I would love that.

Debra:  That was because back around the turn of the century, I was at a school where there was an effort to work with the inclusion movement, to include children with autism spectrum disorders in a general education school, elementary school. And so there was a lot being done to have these children be part of the campus and it was a combination of, and still is, self-contained classes for children particularly those who are less verbal and less flexible, and then children being in general education classes with support.

It was stressful in that there is a lot for the children to adapt to and the school building even with the support, there are a lot of sights and sounds and procedures and movement and of course the tests because we already had the tests at the time I entered the school that these kids were going to have to take.

The children would have meltdowns. They would have terrible tantrums that often happen frequently and sometimes took a long time for them to calm down. The meltdowns ranged from very withdrawn behaviors, what people would call like shutting down or even to the point of hiding, to screaming, yelling, crying and aggressive behavior, and sometimes a mix in between.

We were doing whatever we could possibly do that was in our wheelhouse at the time. To address this, we were trying to minimize distractions and sensory triggers, loud sounds and wide open spaces, help the kids secure in their environment. We were trying to provide as much structure and routine and predictability as possible. There is where the contingency is set up, that when the child completed this work or follow this instruction, there would be a point or some other reinforcer, finding out what the reinforcers were.

Those in particular only seem to work when the children were already calm. At that time, yoga came into our neighborhood and some of us, myself included, started going to yoga classes and experiencing a type of relaxation and freedom from stress and a sense of being grounded and being still that we hadn’t experienced before. And that made us look at the children and say, “Oh, my goodness. Look at them.”

A lot of these kids that we’re working with look like they have forgotten how to take a deep breath. They go through the whole school day and never seem to be relaxed. How can we —

Sucheta:  Just a quick clarification here. I mean, coming from India and now in a Western world, I think the term yoga is sometimes not used appropriately, I find.

Debra:  Yes.

Sucheta:  So I just want to clarify that. I mean, we were traveling, my husband and I were, in Las Vegas and the hotel we stayed was offering jazz yoga. I don’t know what that was all about but can you talk a little about that?

Debra:  This was hatha yoga. Hatha is the yoga branch that approaches the journey towards stillness and harmony through the physical. And so the yoga studio that my colleagues and I were going to was very much about the breath and about mindful movement into this specified posture that we were being instructed into.

Sucheta:  Beautiful. Because this is another distinction. I think people have now – I see a branch of yoga being practiced even in schools under the umbrella of the term “yoga” but there’s emphasis on movement and not mindful attention to the movement and anchored in breathing. So if you’re not doing breathing and if you’re not moving with great fluidity by paying attention, then it’s not really yoga.

Debra:  No. It’s more like dancing or phys ed.

Sucheta:  Yes.

Debra:  Yes. What happened was we thought we have to bring this gift of relaxation to these children. We have to find a way for them to do it. That’s where I was working with two teachers who were teaching the children and a yoga therapist in our community who joined us on this project. We began to explore using these breathing and postural exercises because the students were constantly being told, “Clam down. It’s okay. It’s alright. Calm down. Stop doing that. Come back.” But those words, as well intended as they were, just seem to escalate and irritate the kids further. It didn’t have the effect of calming them down.

Anybody knows that if your spouse tells you to calm down, that you just want to lash out. So it doesn’t work. Many of these children, the things we had looked up that were about calming had to do with helping a child rate how tense are you on a scale from 1 to 10? Or what does it feel like when you feel frustrated versus when you feel relaxed? These couldn’t be approached in that way. They didn’t have these concepts. They weren’t necessarily verbal but they could learn how to take a breath and they can learn how to balance. That is where it started and the results were just magnificent, just magnificent.

Sucheta:  So I see, Debra, that’s such a powerful – you started in the right place and you brought the most amazing perspective, probably unfamiliar to many. So tell us how you incorporate that into school system and how do you implement this?

Debra:  Well, it had me focused on the idea of the hot and cool as you said with the hot brain being a metaphor for going into fight-flight reactions, and the cool brain being a metaphor for being in the cortex and using the thinking brain, the executive functions. I know there’s a lot of neuropsychology and technical writing on this but I will focus on how I try to communicate this with teachers and students.

Because I’ve since moved into other school settings and I see that in the elementary schools and general education where I am, the students that I’m getting asked to help with are students who are good kids. Good in the sense that they want to please, they want to learn, they want to behave properly. They’re not trying to disrespect their teachers or thwart the teachers’ power. But they lose their temper all the time or they shut down all the time. It’s a similar dynamic to the meltdowns I had worked with previously.

These children are having frequent fight-flight reactions. And because the behaviors of shutting down and refusing to do an assignment or starting to scream and yell and maybe even throw things are so challenging, they’re often seen as deliberately oppositional.

Sucheta:  Yes.

Debra:  That is what is very important to me to differentiate. There’s quite a difference between a child who is deliberately oppositional and a child who is helpless, inconfident, and anxious but the behaviors are similar. So the child I’m working with is the child who is lacking the skills, the executive functions to do better.

Here is where I’d like to break down the executive functions because often, they’re lumped together and people are thinking, well, there is initiating a task, planning for it, organizing it, having them memoried or remember all the steps. That’s when you’re getting into the task itself. But before that, there is your attention and your emotional stability.

Sucheta:  Yes. And brain in a state of equanimity, where like the soil that is tilled or at least the rocks have been removed, so to speak, so you have access to the soil itself. You’re saying something really important which is I think that we almost – I don’t know when this have began to happen but we began to look at learning as a sterile process, emotionless process.

Debra:  Yes.

Sucheta:  Mary [00:36:00] talks a lot about that this work about learning is an emotional thing. More emotionally connected you are with the content created, chance you will remember it. So you recognized that and you were providing with the solution. Does this only apply to more severely-challenged children or do you see its merit for students who are in high stakes environment or are going through very stressful and how the stress could be self-created?

Debra:  I like to sue these methods for the population in general because we’re all affected by it. So, in looking at this aspect of hot versus cool I was drawn the compassion that’s often used of lizard brain-wizard brain, where the hot brain, the lizard brain is where the amygdala and the limbic system are and the survival reactions, that fight-flight. I’m very uncomfortable with whatever is happening right now. I want it to go away. I’m not thinking. I am just in sort of survival mode and my choices are basically escape or push it away, fight-flight. Whereas the wizard brain is the analogy for the cortical functions where you’re thinking, reasoning. You have the luxury of time to weigh different options and consider what the best path is to take and then consciously, mindfully act upon these ideas.

And so children are constantly losing the opportunity to exercise the wizard brain if they are going into lizard mode and reaction out of insecurity, anxiety, and stress throughout the day. And so are the teachers.

Sucheta:  Absolutely.

Debra:  Because one thing that is very to see is that if someone is in the lizard brain mode, where they’re becoming more emotional and more reactive, what I want to explain to teachers and kids, I’m doing PowerPoints and slideshows with cute pictures to grab their attention and give them this concepts in a way they can visualize. If you’re getting more reactive, less thoughtful, more and more you’re likely to start yelling, flailing, and your behaviors become less kind and less safe. That’s how I want to frame it. I don’t like it when we give children the idea that they’re bad, their behavior is bad, they’re making bad choices was something we often say.

Sucheta:  I love that, Debra.

Debra:  But [00:38:48] the choice. [00:38:51] about you’re not making a choice.

Sucheta:  No, and I think in the way you frame, you are helping the children develop that meta-cognitive awareness but when one phrases it that behaviors become less kind and less safe, you don’t become less kind and less safe.

Debra:  No.

Sucheta:  And there’s such a distinction between the two because a kind person can lose their mind and we have seen many of those on flights I’ve taken.

Debra:  Yeah, because we all have the lizard. And I want them all to see, the students and the teachers, that we all have the lizard and the lizard is not inherently bad. Lizard brain has a very important function. It’s there to make sure that we don’t waste time when we really do need to react for our own safety by fleeing something or by pushing it away. But the abstract things that cause us to go into this mode are the things like “Are they laughing at me?” Or “Am I ever going to through this problem? Am I going to fail this test? Will I be retained in this grade?” “Will this child ever start their work? How many times do I have to tell this child to get started?” I’m talking from the teacher’s point of view now.

And it’s that kind of stress that accumulates and sooner or later, it’s the last straw and the lizard wakes up. But lizard isn’t bad. It’s just reacting to things that lizard is not the best problem solver for those things.

Sucheta:  Yes. And lizard is not useful in all situations. It needs the right time and right place. And if it shows up to a party that it’s not invited, it’s going to be a bad thing.

Debra:  But one step into the street then suddenly a bus comes screaming around the corner at me, then I am depending on lizard brain to get me out of the way. I’m not going to sit and reason about it and have a thoughtful consideration of alternatives.

So I’m trying to teach them that lizard brain is manageable if we use our wizard ways. And if we practice mindfulness, the lizard brain will feel safe and secure. There’s many other things to practice but I start with mindfulness. Feeling safe and secure, then lizard brain knows that it’s not needed right now. Lizard brain can be in charge because we do have time to think about what we’re doing. Honestly, as I say this, I’m seeing a big analogy toward Twitter world right now, where instead of waiting till the next day for reasoned analysis by top newscasters of what some speech was, people are reacting very swiftly and in very often with not optimal discrimination about whether their kinds are kind.

Sucheta:  Debra, I know we have so many things to cover but that brings me to our last question and it’s a very critical question for success in school which is transitions.

Debra:  Yes.

Sucheta:  So the child is transitioning from activity to activity, task to task, class to class, from break to schoolwork, from schoolwork to playground, or from end of the day to home. These transitions are really sticky for most of our children that you and I work with who actually need our specific individualized help which is those with executive function problem. How does this mindfulness practice and recognizing the relationship between your lizard brain and wizard brain help these young children in your experience?

Debra:  Well, I’m hoping to help teachers make it routine to reset people, reset themselves and their students frequently throughout the day by doing simple breathing exercises, listening to a chime, and closing your eyes and listening to it just until the sound completely goes away. Standing and balancing on one foot, thing like that, that will reset them and ground them and bring them back to that one still point so that then they can start thinking again instead of getting more and more wound up where you’re more and more likely to react. So I would like these to be regular practices especially at transition times.

I also encourage teachers to use what I call an ABC method, when they need children to respond promptly and correctly, make sure you have their attention, that’s A. Keep your instruction brief, that’s B. And make it very clear. I especially like when you tell them what you want them to do instead of what you’d rather they don’t do..

Sucheta:  Exactly.

Debra:  So that it’s very clear and those are some of the practices I tried. But mainly on the kids are very interested, the teachers are very interested too. One of the challenges is that the teachers, again, they have so much that they are supposed to hand on and accomplish that it’s hard for them even to learn to fit that little transitional break in.

I keep saying that in schools. They’re trying now, our district is getting all this initiatives. Let’s all do social-emotional learning. Let’s all do mindfulness. It comes from the top-down. But they’re not giving it roots because they’re treating it like it’s the cherry on the sundae. The mindfulness, the stealth regulation of your attention and your emotion is not the crowning glory. It’s the foundation. If I use the sundae analogy, it’s the bowl.

Sucheta:  Exactly. We’ve talked about this, yes.

Debra:  Yes. If the academics are the ice cream, great, but you got to have the bowl or it’s going to melt on the floor.

Sucheta:  Well, Debra, this has been such a joy. I don’t think you and I actually believe that the time passed. But it has passed so well and you’re a real powerhouse of amazing creative ideas but also deep care for the students and their success. And most importantly, I think taking, reorganizing the priority of struggling children particularly their emotional needs supersedes their cognitive need to think and become a stellar academician, they need sound settled mind, settled emotions. And I love the way you laid the foundation. So, I can’t thank you for being on this podcast today and it’s been such a pleasure to have you.

Debra:  It’s been a pleasure to be here. Thank you so very much.

Producer:  Alright. That’s all the time we have for today. If you know of someone who might benefit from listening to today’s episode, we would be most grateful if you would kindly forward it directly to them. So on behalf of our host, Sucheta Kamath, today’s guest, Dr. Debra Crobin Collins, and all of us at Cerebral Matters, thanks for listening today and we look forward to seeing you again right here next week on Full PreFrontal.