Breaks and the Most Important Break of All: Sleep
By: Curtis Kelly
A Surprise in This Issue
This and next month, we are going to look at breaks and rest, topics that have long evaded the literature of our field, and thus teacher training. For that reason, we will try to fill that gap here. I have already read through this collection of articles, adding some to my Best-of-the-Year list and others to the Darn-I-Wish-I-Were-Still-Teaching list. Enjoy this wide range of perspectives and ideas.
The videos this month are eye-openers, at least they were for me. The short Main video, from the wonderful Edutopia site, provides a powerful argument for breaks, informing us that the brain is never really at rest, even during a break, staying active all the time. But research has found that during that break, especially if it does not have some strong cognitive activity, the brain shifts back and forth between what was just learned and the memory centers, most likely implanting that new knowledge. Sometimes there is even more learning happening during the break than during the active on-task time.
The longer More video is a webinar of greater depth on the power of breaks and how we can incorporate them into our classes. Even short breaks are useful. Or should we say necessary? As the Main video tells us, “Depriving kids of regular breaks, as it turns out, is a threat to the whole proposition of learning.”
For me, the importance of breaks was a jaw-dropper. The day before, I had just heard Chiyuki Yanase talk about teaching yoga to children but, as always when someone talks about yoga (or meditation) in the classroom, I wondered if the idea came from some serious benefit or just that individual’s own passion for yoga. “It relaxes them and they like it” was never enough for me. The same is true for chocolates. But hearing that breaks before and after a learning event enhance learning, and that young learners need the breaks more than older ones do, and that yoga, with its low cognitive draw works well, sent shivers of excitement through my body. I typed out a feverish email to Chiyuki right away.
You, too. Start planning classroom breaks, even very short ones.
The Big Brother of All Breaks, Sleep
In my opinion, in addition to breaks, we need to know more about their big brother, sleep. Sleep is critically important in our field, although we rarely talk about it, because sleep is an essential driver of student achievement. It bothered me that we were not discussing sleep in these two issues, so I will. After all, sleep is to learning, what electricity is to computers. Indeed, this topic fits our Think Tanks, since, as Hobson wrote, “sleep is of the brain, by the brain, for the brain.”
One of the main roles of sleep is consolidating new learning into permanent memory, something we did not know until a decade or two ago. As with breaks, your brain is not inactive while you are sleeping, it is fully active most of the time, replaying and sorting through new experiences from the day before and filing them into long-term memory. But not just that. New memories are reactivated during non-REM sleep for days afterwards, where they are further refined, going from something we just know to something we understand (NIH).
One of the prominent experts on sleep, Matt Walker, explains the process as follows. Your hippocampus, the memory management part of your brain, is like an information in-box for your brain, where new memories are held until they can be processed. Powerful brain wave spikes, during the deepest stages of sleep, represent the file transfer system, when this new information is integrated into other memories.
You need sleep after new experiences to put them into memory, but it was recently discovered you need it before as well. As Walker puts it, without sleep before, the memory center, which should be like a dry sponge ready to soak up incoming memories, becomes waterlogged and unable to do so. One particular study compared memory formation between a group of subjects who got eight hours of sleep before a learning experience, and another who pulled an all-nighter. The difference was startling. The no-sleep group learned 40% less than the sleep group. If you think of that as a test score, 40% represents the difference between an A+ and failing.
In Japan, where I taught, university entrance exams are crucial turning points in one’s life. Passing one for a top university is the first step towards better work, wealth, and partnering. So, I wondered. Was the old adage that all-night study led to better test results really true? From what we know about learning, probably not. And how were Japanese youth, already experiencing sleep deprivation, faring in this “Exam Hell”?
At that time, I was teaching in one of the top universities in my area and one of the lowest. Same tuition, only four kilometers apart, so they were serving the same population of youth. I conducted an informal survey. I asked my first-year English students at both universities how much sleep they tended to get the previous year, wondering if that might have been a factor in which of the universities they could enter. I found that the ones who had gotten into the better university had an average of close to a whole hour more sleep per night, both on school days and weekends than those who did not. A whole hour! Although I did not have the resources to do a formal study and control for other factors, these results still imply that there is a strong relationship between amount of sleep, exam study efficacy, and success at getting into a better university.
Oh, by the way, I had to throw out the data for two of the students in the lower-level university class, because they were second-year students, repeaters, since they had failed the class the year before. But get this: Their average hours of sleep was THREE hours less than the students at the top university, only about four hours a night. Think about that for a minute.
So, the takeaway here is that if we, as educators, are devoted to learning and giving our learners better lives, it is imperative that we teach them how important sleep is. Tell them every few classes. In Walker’s words: “Sleep is not an optional lifestyle luxury, it is a non-negotiable biological necessity.”
Keep This
I don’t want you to gloss over and misplace these important ideas, so please get a good night’s sleep tonight. And before you read on, stand up and do something that doesn’t take much thought, like visiting the fridge.
Curtis Kelly (EdD) cherishes breaks. He wrote this article while on a long one. It was started in San Diego and finished on Awaji Island in Japan, at the Grand Mercure Resort.