Rhythm, movement & self-regulation
Queensland Teachers' Journal, Vol 125 No 8, 6 November 2020, page no. 16
The QTU’s Primary Music Specialist Special Interest Group meets to support primary music teachers and to advocate for the subject of music and its benefit in the education of our students. The following article highlights the value of music education for students.
The “musician advantage” is well known. Children and adults who have had at least two years of formal music training tend to be better listeners, better readers, and importantly, better self-regulators. There is nothing teachers love more than a student who can self-regulate, pay attention, calm their own emotions, and show organised behaviour in the classroom. So, should all children have instrumental lessons from a young age? While that would be ideal, it may not be necessary. Instead, music educators can, and do, build children’s social-emotional skills in their daily work with them, and can also provide specialist support to all teachers to use rhythm and movement to help build brains.
Why we should care?
Self-regulation is the ability to control your own thoughts, feelings and behaviours in ways that are conducive to a successful life. Self-regulation includes being able to pay attention, being able to calm yourself when needed, and managing behaviour in a public setting. Executive functioning is a part of self-regulation, covering higher-order brain functions like working memory and mental flexibility needed for problem solving. Self-regulation and executive function develop right across the lifespan but, like everything, have their grounding in early childhood. People with these skills are more likely to be successful at everything life has to offer - education, career, relationships and wellbeing - and stronger early self-regulation means less risky behaviour in adolescence (Howard & Williams, 2018). Self-regulation skills are more predictive of academic success than IQ and are a protective factor for children at risk of underachievement, such as those from low socioeconomic backgrounds (Ursache, Blair & Raver, 2012). So, we really do want to support these skills in students, and we want the ways we support them to be effective, and of course fun!
Rhythm and movement
The underlying mechanism behind the “better brains” of musicians, seems to be about rhythm, and more specifically about rhythmic movement. Neurologic music therapists use rhythm to support stroke and brain-injured patients to learn to talk and walk again. We know that professional drummers have advanced skills in auditory processing - a skill that supports all learning, speech and communication and probably also self-regulation (Slater & Kraus, 2016). Children who struggle to find and tap to a steady beat in music (beat synchronisation) often have more difficulty with developing speech and early reading skills and are also more likely to have self-regulation difficulties (Lesiuk, 2015; Woodruff Carr et al., 2014). So, rhythm really matters.
A new early childhood program called RAMSR (Rhythm & Movement for Self-Regulation), developed by a Queensland University of Technology team led by me, aims to bring better rhythmic skills and the musician advantage to all teachers and young students. RAMSR is a low-resource, low-skill program that supports teachers to lead fun, engaging, and challenging rhythmic movement activities designed specifically to boost self-regulation in 3 to 6-year-olds. Early evidence is promising, suggesting that children who participated showed more growth in emotional regulation and executive functioning over a term than children who did not (Williams & Berthelsen, 2019).
So, what can we all do?
- Value music specialists and music lesson time for students, not only for the sake of music education (very important) but for the benefits for self-regulation development, which will support all learning.
- Talk to your music specialist about some rhythmic warm-up and brain break activities you could use to bring some fun and brain building to your day.
- If you teach in the early years, consider putting some RAMSR into your routine. Self-paced online courses are available through QUT and there are also some free learning at home resources (https://research.qut.edu.au/ramsr/).