Why fight children’s need to move when using movement and sensory input accelerates learning?

Research shows that pairing motor and sensory input with learning activities increases the areas of the brain engaged in the learning task, deepening children’s engagement with the material and helping them to retain it for longer. When we learn through “embodied cognition,” as these techniques are called, it increases long-distance neural pathways across the brain, increasing children’s capacity to perform the cognitive and motor tasks involved. So why do we continue to ask children to “sit still and listen”?

At Cajal Academy, movement is strategically integrated into the classroom through our exclusive, OT-designed “Body-Informed Learning.” A range of sensory inputs are strategically paired with the academic instruction itself, giving students a visceral meaning and association for even abstract academic concepts. This goes well beyond movement breaks between instruction, tapping into the neurophysiology of human learning. At the same time, this approach ensures a constant diet of re-regulating sensory inputs, neuro-vascular stimulation and more for students who have sensory processing disorder as well as medical conditions such as POTS and connective tissue disorders for whom an even level of physical activity is an important self-management technique. (Oh yes – and our students tell us it’s more fun to learn things like math and spelling rules this way as well!)

Here are some of the benefits from using this approach in the classroom:

Balancing audio, visual and kinesthetic learning

Traditional classroom settings predominately rely on auditory and visual learning: children sit at desks, listen to lectures and perhaps watch a slideshow presentation. This fails to engage kinesthetic learners, who learn best through hands-on experiments, manipulatives and sensory experiences. And, for all children it leaves on the table the power of body experiences as a powerful learning modality.

At Cajal Academy, we take a more balanced approach. New content is presented through a balance of auditory, visual and hands-on strategies, and then movement and sensory input designed by our occupational and physical therapists to engage multiple senses in each learning activity are used to deliver the full neurocognitive benefits of embodied cognition. These learning experiences are designed by our physio therapists, and are differentiated to accommodate for each child’s movement and sensory profile. Movement-based instruction is provided through classrooms co-taught by our occupational and physical therapists, who design the movement and sensory activities to further each child’s individualized OT and PT goals. By removing the walls between the child’s academic and physio needs, we match our supports to the integrated nature of their life-lived experiences. This also increases the amount of therapeutic services that can be integrated into a traditional school day.

We teach this science to the kids themselves—but what they really notice is that it’s just plain more fun. Boring spelling drills have been replaced with obstacle courses that utilize each of the child’s senses in the learning process, including their auditory, visual, proprioceptive (sense of how the body moves through space), vestibular (rotations of the body) and tactile (touch) senses. When we saw that our learners’ visual processing profiles were interfering with their understanding of placeholder value, we replaced worksheets with exercise, having the children jump up a multi-colored mat while skip-counting by the appropriate value for each digit in a 6 digit number, resulting in an “aha” moment when 4 digit addition was introduced.

Using movement-based instruction to build community

Cajal Academy’s academic curriculum is centered around collaborative project-based learning, with our whole cohort of kids working together across grade levels, profiles and personalities to solve a single, multi-disciplinary project. To do this, our students truly have to engage and understand themselves as a community, with shared experiences and a feeling that all members are equally contributing, respected and valued.

Our Body-Informed Learning techniques have taken this instructional approach to a new level. At each of the key collaborative points in the project-based learning process, students come together through activities like obstacle courses in which each child’s prompts and participation is differentiated for their grade level, while giving them the experience of all participating together.

Along the way, the activity frees up access to the creative thinking skills that are essential to brainstorming, and provides access points for getting around the anxiety and perfectionism that all too often plague this cohort of kids. Students ranging in age from 7 to 17 work participate together in a community-wide obstacle course.

Modelling self-care skills for professional life

Our commitment to supporting children’s body needs extends into every aspect of our program design and facilities. Children cycle through different small group classrooms, each of which is furnished to optimize support for a different type of learning—from bean bag chairs for reading to a common workbench in our collaborative project-based learning studio. Our fully-equipped occupational therapy gym is our most valuable classroom.

In the short term, this maximizes children’s availability to learn, by reducing the drain on their attention and brain power from postural fatigue, back and neck pain. Many children do not yet have the postural support required to stay seated at a desk for the long periods of time required in traditional classroom settings. As their muscles fatigue or cramp, it leads to fidgeting, slouching and distraction that exacerbates (or may be mistaken for) ADHD and other executive function concerns. Rather than allow these physio needs to penalize their academic performance, we tailor academic activities to current physio abilities, while using the learning activities themselves to build up the core postural supports and other musculoskelatal needs required to sustain a seated posture in the future.

This approach has even greater long-term benefits, in that we are modelling critical self-care skills for how to identify, monitor and manage physio needs that will serve our high-cognitive cohort well in college and in the stationary, knowledge economy professions that will be attractive to many of our students. This work is tailored to each child’s physio needs, and integrated into coaching for their Personalized Self-Regulation Strategies. By integrating instruction on how to maintain your body needs during the physiologically-taxing task of sustaining a seated posture for a long period of time, we have the opportunity to spare a next generation of professionals from the proliferation of back pain, cervical disc damage and carpal tunnel syndrome among today’s knowledge economy workers.

Learn more about our Body-Informed Learning, on our blog: