Keeping Kids engaged and Learning in Virtual Classrooms
Don Siegel
In today’s pandemic world, in which virtual classrooms have become the default mode of instruction, I am hearing from teachers and students that school is a lot more challenging than normal. Most never imagined that they would be spending hours on-end sitting in front of a computer screen, staring into little Zoom rectangles as the means to interacting with their teachers and fellow students. While it may have been a novelty at first, it did not take long for this approach to become laborious, fatiguing, and down-right aversive. As Edward Thorndike conveyed over a century ago in his law of readiness, learning is best done when kids are ready to learn, not when they have waning energy, increasing disinterest, and are fatigued 1. But this is what we have for the moment, and it behooves us to make the most of the situation in which we all find ourselves.
With this in mind, paraphrasing Winston Churchill, we should not let a good crisis go to waste. In essence, our current situation, which certainly is a crisis, provides us with an opportunity to experiment in ways that we may not have before, in order to make things work a bit better. One such idea that has been around for a while, and used successfully in classrooms, pre-pandemic, is that of brain breaks[a]. The notion for these is to insert some type of a change of pace into classroom activities when things start to flag, and tedium starts to distract from learning. By so doing kids get an opportunity to relax and refresh themselves so that they can subsequently refocus on the topics and tasks that teachers are presenting.
While brain breaks may have been around for a while and evolved over the years in a trial and error fashion, an increasing number of research reports supports their value as a stimulant to engagement and learning, especially for elementary aged students. Seemingly, if brain breaks added value to classrooms prior to our current plight, it certainly seems worth exploring how they may be deployed today in order to rehabilitate what appears to be a devolving virtual educational enterprise.
What Do We know about Brain Breaks
As any seasoned youth worker, teacher, coach, or camp counselor knows, when kids in their schools, camps, or sports, start to lose their focus and have diverted attention, pressing on is a losing proposition. Youth may not only start to tune-out, but opt for alternative ways to entertain themselves, often becoming unruly and causing trouble. At such times, changing things up, and adding a bit of novelty to a situation can make all the difference in getting them back on track. Taking a break and resetting things at such times also makes your interactions with kids more fun, as they learn that you are attentive to their needs, and that you will come up with something to help them negotiate situations that are not particularly enjoyable to them.
While there are many strategies for altering a devolving situation, one that seems to align with kids enduring long sedentary hours in a classroom is to insert short movement breaks. Jumping, twisting, stretching, and exerting muscular strength in various ways, optimally in the context of some type of game or dance routine, seems to reenergize kids and helps them refocus in the post movement period; normally, priming their readiness to resume normal classroom activities. Two popular in-classroom programs are Take 10!3 and Energizers4. Although, brain breaks are becoming increasingly popular, I was wondering what was known about their impact on kids’ classroom behavior, learning, and well-being.
Perhaps the thing that teachers are always striving for is attentional focus from their students. While there is no guarantee that students will learn what a teacher is teaching when students are engaged and focusing on the material being presented, it is certain that nothing good is going to happen in a classroom when kids are distracted, bored, and inattentive. Clearly, teachers need to be aware of their students’ engagement, and students need to be focused on what teachers are presenting and challenging them to do. When both are aware of each other’s attentional state, it seems most likely that optimal learning can occur. As well, when such a mix exists, it is very unlikely that students will engage in any form of off-task disruptive behavior, since attentional focus on task specific information (time on task, TOT) typically precludes attending to irrelevant stimuli that will impede learning.
What do we know about the relationship of short, in-class, physical activity breaks and attentional/behavioral control? Actually there are a number of studies that have found that approximately 10 minute bouts of physical activity embedded during 3-5th grade classes significantly improves students’ TOT post activity in general 5–9, and for such subject areas as math, language arts, and spelling 10 in particular. As well, student affect is improved 11, and the impact may be most important for kids who were initially lower on TOT (improved 20% vs. 8% average in TOT), who were higher in BMI 8, or lower income12,13. Some research also shows that post activity effects can last for as long as 45 minutes 7.
While short activity breaks appear to enhance a student’s attentional focus, cooperative behavior, and academic performance during the post-break period, they also can make a significant contribution to the amount of physical activity that a child gets during the day. Current guidelines state that children and adolescents ages 6 through 17 years should do 60 minutes (1 hour) or more of moderate-to-vigorous physical activity daily, and that most of the 60 minutes or more per day should be either moderate- or vigorous 14. Unfortunately, only 24% of kids are attaining this level 15. Yet, by a relatively modest in classroom physical activity intervention it has been shown that three – ten minute sessions a day increased student step counts by 1500 16. As well, these sorts of physical activity breaks were found to be in the moderate intensity category (greater than 3 METS) 10. Research has also estimated 10-minute activity bouts to burn between 25 – 35 kcals. If we were to put these data together and project the incremental physical activity outcomes over a 180-day school year (assuming 3 – 10-minute bouts/day), children would walk roughly an additional 135 miles during that period (2000 steps/mile) and burn an additional 16,200 kcals. While not the panacea to redressing youths’ failure to meet physical activity goals, such breaks certainly contribute to redressing the problem.
What Does all of this Mean?
Overall, what we learn from the research on short physical activity brain breaks in classroom settings is that they help kids reset their attentional focus when it has waned and increases their TOT behavior post-break. This, in turn, is associated with increased learning, especially for kids having the greatest needs. Furthermore, while modest, such breaks have a positive impact on helping children come closer to reaching national standards for daily physical activity. Not surprisingly, both students and teachers report positive feelings associated with incorporating short physical activity breaks into their school days 10.
Given that the benefits of brain breaks appear to exceed any costs identified by researchers or teachers they seem like something we should pilot. Although there have been no studies that have assessed their impact in virtual settings, now might be the time to give them a try. Seemingly, kids are more sedentary than they were pre-pandemic, and their need for activity greater. One of the observations made across studies is that for activities to be done with fidelity teachers need training on how to lead them. In a virtual world, this could also be the case, but one can imagine activity leaders being presented by video clips. Other unknowns include space and equipment availability that kids have or do not have at their disposal from within their homes. How parents and peers might react and support more active, but less supervised kids is another question. Nonetheless, physical activity brain breaks seem like a worthy endeavor to try as we attempt to make the lives of students and teachers a bit less stressful during virtual learning sessions.
References
1. Hilgard, Ernest R., Bower, Gordon H. Theories of Learning. vol. Third Edition (Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1966).
2. Immordino-Yang, M. H., Christodoulou, J. A. & Singh, V. Rest Is Not Idleness: Implications of the Brain’s Default Mode for Human Development and Education , Rest Is Not Idleness: Implications of the Brain’s Default Mode for Human Development and Education. Perspect. Psychol. Sci. 7, 352–364 (2012).
3. ILSI Global. TAKE10: Bringing Physical Activity into the Classroom. (2015). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iBZl6BdAoSk
4. Mahar, M. T., Scales, D. P. & Ed, M. A. Department of Exercise and Sport Science College of Health and Human Performance. 58. https://www.healthynh.com/images/PDFfiles/ckc-resources/K-5-Energizers.pdf
5. Maykel, C., Bray, M. & Rogers, H. J. A Classroom-Based Physical Activity Intervention for Elementary Student On-Task Behavior. J. Appl. Sch. Psychol. 34, 259–274 (2018).
6. Howie, E. K., Beets, M. W. & Pate, R. R. Acute classroom exercise breaks improve on-task behavior in 4th and 5th grade students: A dose–response. Ment. Health Phys. Act. 7, 65–71 (2014).
7. Mahar, M. T. et al. Effects of a Classroom-Based Program on Physical Activity and On-Task Behavior: Med. Sci. Sports Exerc. 38, 2086–2094 (2006).
8. Grieco, L. A., Jowers, E. M. & Bartholomew, J. B. Physically Active Academic Lessons and Time on Task: The Moderating Effect of Body Mass Index. Phys. Act. 6.
9. Perera, T., Frei, S., Frei, B. & Bobe, G. Promoting Physical Activity in Elementary Schools: Needs Assessment and a Pilot Study of Brain Breaks. J. Educ. Pract. 6, 55–64 (2015).
10. Kibbe, D. L. et al. Ten Years of TAKE 10!®: Integrating physical activity with academic concepts in elementary school classrooms. Prev. Med. 52, S43–S50 (2011).
11. Howie, E. K., Newman-Norlund, R. D. & Pate, R. R. Smiles Count but Minutes Matter: Responses to Classroom Exercise Breaks. Am. J. Health Behav. 38, 681–689 (2014).
12. Amin, S. A. et al. The Physical Activity Environment and Academic Achievement in Massachusetts Schoolchildren. J. Sch. Health 87, 932–940 (2017).
13. Hollar, D. et al. Effect of a Two-Year Obesity Prevention Intervention on Percentile Changes in Body Mass Index and Academic Performance in Low-Income Elementary School Children. Am. J. Public Health 100, 646–653 (2010).
14. Physical Activity Guidelines for Americans, 2nd edition. 118.
15. CDC | Physical Activity | Facts | Healthy Schools. https://www.cdc.gov/healthyschools/physicalactivity/facts.htm (2020).
16. Adams-Blair, H. & Oliver, G. Daily Classroom Movement: Physical Activity Integration into the Classroom. Int. J. Health Wellness Soc. 1, 147–154 (2011).
[a] Actually, the term brain breaks is a misnomer since the brain really never takes a break. What they are is a break from what one is currently doing to doing something else. 2
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