What’s good for pupils with SEND is good for everyone.
This is a favourite axiom of mine. A great example of where it applies is when we think about how to understand cognitive flexibility. By this, I mean children’s ability to think and adapt plans in the face of obstacles, setbacks, new information, misconceptions or mistakes.
The context for this is an increasing awareness of executive function - how the brain processes planning, self-organising and the self-regulation of behaviours.
Cognitive flexibility is a core aspect of executive function, and seeing why it has such an enormous impact on learning can help teachers to work out how to support children with poor executive function in the classroom.
This is especially important for young people with neurodevelopmental challenges, but also helps us to teach all pupils who will, at some time, find themselves struggling or becoming stuck.
Some learners will become angry, upset or will withdraw in the face of change. You might find they do things like argue the same point over and over, become frustrated when small things go wrong, repeat the same mistakes, express anxiety over new schedules or plans, or have trouble switching from one activity to another.
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Cognitive flexibility helps children to overcome these challenges, opening opportunities to learn by allowing them to see different points of view through a lens of empathy and understanding.
Cognitive rigidity does the opposite: it limits learning by making it more difficult for pupils to draw on prior knowledge and to apply or generalise knowledge.
The cognitive profile of children will determine their capacity to shift attention or shift tasks. So, how can a teacher tell what that profile might be?
I’ll give you a clue: it varies.
But if a child is persistently reluctant to move from carpet to table in early years, to new seating arrangements in Year 4, or to a new teacher in Year 8 - these are all good indications that teachers should look more closely at what is happening academically and socially for that child.
Looking out for these rigid tendencies will give teachers the chance to incorporate small changes that can increase their pupils’ tolerance to change.
For example, more explicit modelling of alternative approaches can help. Pre-teaching is another useful way to prepare pupils ahead of time and to rehearse possible scenarios. Talk about what to expect in the lesson beforehand, what things might happen, what things might be hard and what pupils can do when they are struggling.
Praise learners for showing flexibility. It helps them to recognise and be more deliberate about thinking flexibly. Small steps, lower stakes, recognition that switching can be tricky, pre-teaching or pre-planning; all of these things can support the pupil who is fixed to flex.
This is important because I am concerned that the huge intellectual investment placed by schools into CPD on the science of learning could be so much more valuable if it wasn’t for the fact that it fails to recognise the different start points for children and their relative strengths.
The current emphasis on one-size-fits-all planning does not lead to better adaptive and inclusive teaching. We need to understand why a new strategy works in order to understand when to use it and improve teaching for all children.
By the way, teachers also require cognitive flexibility to work with classroom environments that are unpredictable and require changes or adaptations to planned activities. But that’s for next time.
Margaret Mulholland is the special educational needs and inclusion specialist at the Association of School and College Leaders
