#001 - The Neuroscience Behind Children's Learning 🧠👶

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Welcome to Neuroeducation, where we're exploring the neuroscience of how to switch on the brain to supercharge learning.

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I'll be sharing with you innovative teaching techniques, effective parenting strategies, and educational advocacy.

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I'm your host, Angie Dee.

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Together, let's revolutionize children's learning.

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Hi everyone, and thank you so much for being here.

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I'm super excited to share my journey with you today about what led me to starting my podcast on neuroeducation and my passion in education.

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So I was the kind of child that always loved kids.

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I always wanted to be around kids.

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And even when I was three or four, I was that kid that was trying to carry the toddler that was barely bigger than me.

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And so my natural evolution of education, when I finished school, I wanted to study early childhood.

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And I loved being in the field of early childhood education because

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What we were encouraged to do was to inspire children to find out their interests and their talents and follow their interests and also to care for the whole development of the child, you know, their emotional development, their physical development, their mental development, also giving them agency in life.

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After a few years, I decided that I would go and study primary school teaching.

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So I did my Bachelor of Education in Bundaberg and we were shown the best that the world has to offer in education.

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And what I loved about my entire degree were our professors showed us what was the neuroscience behind education, how did children actually learn best, and what did child psychology show us that children need to thrive, basically, in education and in life, and how we can use that and the strategies in our everyday classroom teaching.

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When we got to my final year in my degree, basically what I found was when I went out on prac and I went into our current education system was that what was preached about best practice and how children learn best was just not happening in the classrooms.

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And

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It broke my heart a little bit to see these children that were disengaged, they were disinterested and they just didn't want to be there.

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And on day two,

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of my prac, I watched a gorgeous young boy who was just trying to interact with his friends, obviously the wrong time at the wrong place, on the floor when the teacher's trying to give a lesson, she's under her time pressure and he's trying to talk and connect to his friends.

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She gave him several warnings and basically the final warning

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then he was sent to the principal's office.

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However, the story behind this young boy was that he actually saw his mother on a couch after she had committed suicide and he'd moved towns and was now living with his auntie.

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So he'd just experienced

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an insane trauma that I think would have rocked anybody's world.

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However, there was nothing that I could see taking place to take care of this young man and attend to those needs.

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And there he had all of the symptoms that we would usually see of ADHD, of hyperactivity, finding it really hard to sit still, finding it hard to listen, and

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obviously he moved, um, you know, he moved so fast.

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This boy was physically brilliant.

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The day before this incident occurred, he lapped everyone on the oval twice.

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And yet here he was, I was watching him trudge off to the principal's office with his head hung low.

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And I just thought he is on a track to

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delinquency, to being dropout, to drugs, alcohol, all of those things that was rampant through that rural town.

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And I was like, what is being done to intervene for boys like this?

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And so that led me at the end of my educational degree studying primary education to go to America to explore other alternative methods of education.

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I wanted to find what are these schools where what our professors were preaching of incredible learning where children are engaged and the learning is coming alive.

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And so when I went to America, I discovered Montessori, an incredible Montessori school.

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And what was beautiful about this school was everything that I had heard preached

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of the best practice and what's incredible in education, I saw taking place.

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You know, children that were really engaged in learning, that were loving learning, that wanted to come to school, often didn't want to go home, and that the learning was so practical and it was based on real life.

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and these projects that were taking place in this school, the children wanted to be involved in.

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And you could see how this just built every year upon the next.

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And I went to ask the children in grade 10, because this school went from basically at the year three to six classroom, all the way through to grade 10, of what these children wanted to do when they were finished.

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and what inspired me and surprised me was that these children knew exactly what they wanted to do.

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You know, they knew their passion, they knew what their skills were and, you know, one child said to me they wanted to go and study a subspecies of this frog in South America and somebody else knew that they wanted to go to a different state because it specialized, you know, in the arts and another person wanted to become

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a special lawyer that specialized in helping third world problems and it was just something that was so refreshing for me after coming from Bundaberg where unfortunately some of the issues we had there were girls who were actually creating pregnancy packs in grade 12 to get pregnant together

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And in the news, it asked these girls why some of them did that.

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And they said it was because, well, A, they wanted to be pregnant together, but B, it was because they wanted to be on a payment, basically a payment from the government, a parenting payment, and they didn't have to go to work.

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And I just thought, what an absolute travesty.

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Like, what have we done for this 12 or 13 years of education that these girls

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their absolute inspiration for life is getting pregnant and getting on a payment.

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So if you look at the contrast of those two different experiences of children that have come through a mainstream system of education and children that have gone through Montessori, I wanted to understand more about

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What was the difference?

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What activated these children in Montessori to be loving learning and to be loving life and to be so passionate about what they were going to do?

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And the alternative of these children that didn't even want to go out in the world to do anything.

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And so I went on to study Montessori and specialize in Montessori in America.

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And what I found since then is that so many elements of Montessori are indeed backed by so many elements that we find in studies in neuroscience, in child psychology, and also what we find in best practice in education.

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One of the most incredible studies that I found in Montessori while I was in America, they split the group in half.

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200 went to a public school and 200 went to a public Montessori school.

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and in this area is actually in East Dallas, Texas.

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It's kind of known as the Bronx of Texas.

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The children were at the poverty levels about 60%

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which obviously you can imagine these children are very underprivileged, and they wanted to see could Montessori make an impact in that kind of environment.

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And sure enough, as the children went through the public Montessori, what they found was that the graduation rate in the public school, same neighbourhood, same socioeconomic groups,

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was about a 50% graduation rate at the public school.

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At the public Montessori school over 90% of the children graduated.

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At the public school, 2% of the children who graduated go on to university.

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And at the public Montessori school, we had over 80% of those children who graduated go over to university.

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For me, that was an incredible study that really brought to light the power education has and the power education that is obviously backed by neuroscience and teachers to how children learn.

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So when I came back to Australia, obviously I was incredibly passionate about bringing this kind of education to my children.

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And by that time I had three children and I taught in a Montessori school down in Bega, New South Wales, which was a beautiful experience for me.

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And I moved to Bundaberg to be closer to my family.

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However, there wasn't any Montessori school or independent school that I really wanted to send my child to there.

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I set about for almost two to three years with some other parents who were passionate about creating better educational opportunities for their children to start an independent school.

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This took about

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I would say, you know, countless hours from the entire group.

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And year after year, we tried multiple methods.

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We spoke to everyone, everyone possible.

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We finally got funding.

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And then the land that we tried to buy through the funding got taken by somebody else.

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And after about three years of really trying so many things, I thought to myself,

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Why is it that I have to spend two to three years of my life trying to create an educational opportunity or a school that's worthy of my children?

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When we are the taxpayers that are funding our current education system, we should have more say in what is currently going on and we should be creating an education system that's worthy of all children and something where if you have revolution and innovation in every area of society, it should be matched in our education system as well.

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We should have that same level of innovation and that same level of revelations and revolution

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in our education system.

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So it's brought me to this point in my journey where I'm really passionate about sharing with you as parents and teachers what we can do

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to bring on that education revolution in our own backyard and in the schools that your children are involved in and what we can do as a community to make a greater impact on education for our children because they are the future of the world.

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Thank you so much for listening in and watching this podcast.

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It would be an amazing help for the podcast if you can give us a review on Apple Podcasts and Spotify and subscribe on YouTube.

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All the links will be down below and we'll see you for the next episode.