Rigor in Education

Below are two article summaries, which are connected by people's misguidedness of how "rigorous" a child's education should be.

Trinity is fortunate in that--by and large--there is agreement from most parents and teachers that kids at Trinity learn best without stress/pressure and that a vital outcome of a Trinity education is continued student excitement and engagement in learning.

While parents—myself included--generally want their children to be in the sweet spot--the proper balance of challenge and competence in the zone of proximal development (I still remember a few things from my graduate education classes!), we also kind of want our kids pushed beyond this sweet spot—and as a result, we can fall into the misguided assumption that if there's no pain, there's no gain. 

Through my years in the classroom and as an administrator, I have had hundreds of meetings with parents about their child not being pushed and challenged enough. (Once I had a parent tell me that I was doing a bad job teaching his daughter because she looked forward to coming to school.) While these conversations have been less frequent at Trinity, I a realist enough to know that this issue can surface anytime and in any grade. 

Coincidentally, yesterday Dawn, Rhonda, and I had a parent meeting with 3s and PreK and we heard that a number of parents were going to bring up this topic. At the beginning of the meeting I spoke about the reasoning and rationale of play-based learning and imaginative, creative play and its connection to brain development. When we finally brought up the topic of "rigor and academics" all the parents had a better sense of not only Trinity's philosophy but the research that supports it—and all they did was compliment our program and approach to learning.

Not all meetings go this way, yet I think the more we can provide the reasoning, rationale, and research for what we know is in the best interest of kids and their learning, the more parents (most of them) will understand and support us.

We are fortunate to be in an elementary-only environment, yet the trickle down demand for more rigor, sedentary school work, and homework can easily slip through Trinity's front gate. 

Enjoy the weekend!

Joe

What’s the ‘Sweet Spot’ of Difficulty For Learning?

Should we be making learning easier for kids—or harder?

The answer, according to research in cognitive science and psychology, is both.

First, let’s think about how and why we might make learning easier. This has to do with what psychologists call “cognitive load”— the amount of information we have to keep in mind as we solve a problem. Decades of research has shown that this capacity is quite limited.

Harvard psychologist George Miller famously said that we could keep seven pieces of information in our minds at a time (he called it “the magic number seven”), but he was looking at studies that used numbers or letters or simple symbols. When the pieces of information are more complex, like concepts or facts, the number of them that we can keep in mind goes down, to about four. And if we are actively manipulating or combining those pieces of information, as we do in most kinds of real-life problem-solving, the number of things our minds can hang on to drops even further, to maybe two or three.

The problem is that many tasks we ask students to do impose too great a cognitive load. They lose track of what they’re doing, they make mistakes, they get lost and give up. Even if they hang on long enough to solve the problem, they don’t have enough mental capacity left over to reflect on what they’ve done — and reflection is where learning really happens.

So: the way in which we should make learning easier is to reduce cognitive load, especially when we are introducing new or complicated materials. Break complicated ideas into smaller pieces, taking them one at a time. Offer lots of opportunities for practice with feedback. Avoid using jargon and other technical terms. Eliminate extraneous or distracting information and focus only on what the learner needs to know at this moment.

What about making learning harder? Is there ever a reason to do that? Yes, and the reason is twofold. 

The first reason to make learning harder is to make it interesting. Learning something new and complicated is hard in itself, as we saw above. Lightening the learner’s cognitive load will allow her to learn more effectively without becoming frustrated or confused.

But once the learner has attained some degree of mastery, ratcheting up the difficulty will help her stay in her “sweet spot” of engagement, where the task is not too hard as to be frustrating and not so easy as to be boring. This is also the place where learners can practice encountering adversity and challenge and overcoming them, a key experience in the development of grit.

The second reason to make learning harder is that it makes learning work better. UCLA psychologist Robert Bjork has developed the idea of “desirable difficulties”—difficulties that we actually want to introduce into students’ learning to make it more effective. Bjork notes that many of the learning activities that make students feel competent and successful—like reading over a textbook passage several times so that it feels familiar—actually do very little to help them learn. What they should do instead is something like this: close that textbook and ask themselves to recall from memory what they’ve just read.

It won’t feel as good. They’ll struggle to remember the words that were just in front of their eyes. But this activity, known as retrieval practice (or simply self-testing) is an example of a desirable difficulty that will dramatically increase students’ learning. You can read more about desirable difficulties here, in an article by Bjork himself.

The Disturbing Transformation of Kindergarten

One of the most distressing characteristics of education reformers is that they are hyper-focused on how students perform, but they ignore how students learn. Nowhere is this misplaced emphasis more apparent, and more damaging, than in kindergarten.

A new University of Virginia study found that kindergarten changed in disturbing ways from 1999-2006. There was a marked decline in exposure to social studies, science, music, art and physical education and an increased emphasis on reading instruction. Teachers reported spending as much time on reading as all other subjects combined.

The time spent in child-selected activity dropped by more than one-third. Direct instruction and testing increased. 

Moreover, more teachers reported holding all children to the same standard.

How can teachers hold all children to the same standards when they are not all the same? They learn differently, mature at different stages – they just are not all the same especially at the age of 4-6.

Is this drastic shift in kindergarten the result of a transformation in the way children learn? No! A 2011 nationwide study by the Gesell Institute for Child Development found that the ages at which children reach developmental milestones have not changed in 100 years.

For example, the average child cannot perceive an oblique line in a triangle until age 5 1Ž2. This skill is a prerequisite to recognizing, understanding and writing certain letters. The key to understanding concepts such as subtraction and addition is “number conservation.” A child may be able to count five objects separately but not understand that together they make the number five. The average child does not conserve enough numbers to understand subtraction and addition until 51Ž2 or 6.

If we teach reading, writing, subtraction and addition before children are ready, they might memorize these skills, but will they will not learn or understand them. And it will not help their achievement later on

Child development experts understand that children must learn what their brains are ready to absorb. Kindergarten is supposed to set the stage for learning academic content when they are older. If they are going to push our kindergarten children to move faster, what does that say for the push for “educating” Pre-K?

Play is essential in kindergarten – in fact in any child under the age of 5. Through play, children build literacy skills they need to be successful readers. By speaking to each other in socio-dramatic play, children use the language they heard adults read to them or say. This process enables children to find the meaning in those words.

Two major studies confirmed the value of play vs. teaching reading skills to young children. Both compared children who learned to read at 5 with those who learned at 7 and spent their early years in play-based activities. Those who read at 5 had no advantage. Those who learned to read later had better comprehension by age 11, because their early play experiences improved their language development.

Yet current educational policy banishes play in favor of direct instruction of inappropriate academic content and testing; practices that are ineffective for young children.

The No Child Left Behind Law played a major role in changing kindergarten. Upper-grade curricula were pushed down in a mistaken belief that by learning reading skills earlier, children would fare better on standardized tests. 

The UVA study found that in schools with the highest percentage of children of color and children eligible for free-and-reduced-priced lunch, teachers had the most demanding expectations for student performance.

It may satisfy politicians to see children perform inappropriately difficult tasks like trained circus animals. However, if we want our youngest to actually learn, we will demand the return of developmentally appropriate kindergarten.