Friday, October 29, 2021

Engagement, Creativity, and Fun in the Classroom

This week's article summary is I Teach Escape Room Design to Elementary Students and the Class Is a Literal Game Changer.

I was initially drawn to the article by its intriguing title but then found the content an apt reminder of what we at Trinity provide daily for our students that is sadly lacking in most other schools that, as the author describes, are ‘test-centric.’

As most of you know, children become disengaged from school as early as third grade, just as their enthusiasm for learning and innate curiosity begin to wane, skill and content demands in schools escalate, and high-stakes test result become the standard measure of success.

The author, a fifth grade teacher in a Rhode Island charter school, re-engaged her students by challenging them to design and create their own digital escape room game. While she set parameters and guided her students as needed, she gave them the latitude to be imaginative and exploratory. The kids saw the real-life use in what they had previously viewed as boring discipline-specific skills in math, humanities, science, and art. They worked collaboratively, solved problems and disputes among themselves, and worked harder on their escape room than their ‘regular’ school work. They were excited and had fun as they learned, applied, and demonstrated.

Isn’t that the way school should always be?

The author’s plight is that her escape room activity is a one-time, stand-alone rarity in her school because it measures success via standardized tests. And as we all know, high-stakes test preparations is often tedious and boring and they tests don’t measure creativity or engagement.

As I read the article, I took pride that at Trinity escape-room experiences are the daily norm, not the exception.

Our mantra is ‘We cherish childhood as we simultaneously prepare our student for the future.’ Sadly, most schools don’t see the interconnection between cherish and prepare and that by cherishing childhood schools can maintain student interest, excitement, engagement, and motivation, which in turn leads to better learning.  

I know we can all sometimes take for granted the mission, philosophy, culture, and the what and how we teach at Trinity, yet let’s always be thankful for our continuous efforts to make learning meaningful and fun for our kids.

Enjoy the fun-filled weekend: three Braves World Series games, Georgia-Florida football, and Halloween! 

Joe

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“Ms. Burt, I hate school.”

Gianna, a student in my fifth grade history class, confided in me during a lunch break. Her frustration did not surprise me; we were midway through the first full pandemic school year. Our charter school had lurched between online and hybrid formats more times than I could count. And given the combination of stressful COVID safety procedures, endless technical challenges, and limits on social interactions, I knew that many students were fed up.

“Why do you hate school, Gianna?” I asked, expecting her to list the COVID-imposed challenges. To my surprise, her complaint was not about pandemic learning. Here’s what she said: “School is a waste of my time. We are expected to listen to whatever the teacher thinks is important and then spit it back out. I should be writing my novel or working on a new play instead.”

I knew I was supposed to respond with the following: “Even if there are classes you don’t like, these lessons will help you in the future. You are learning foundational skills that will give you the freedom to choose independent projects in high school and beyond.” But I couldn’t bring my mouth to form words I didn’t believe.

Teaching amid a storm of global disasters — a pandemic, an economic recession, a racial reckoning, and an escalating climate emergency — I felt cynical about how I was supposed to teach, test, and talk to students. I feared that the testing-centric curriculum my school enforced caused students like Gianna to disengage and left them unprepared for the global challenges that will shape their lives. So, I told Gianna the truth: She deserved better. “You have more creativity and perception than this school allows,” I said.

When I was asked a few months later to teach a two-week class of my own design, I jumped at the chance to offer students creative opportunities lacking from their core classes. As a COVID hobby, I had taken up designing escape room games. In these multiplayer, collaborative games, participants work through a series of puzzles and riddles to escape a situation they have been trapped in by a fictional villain. I had been itching to help students create their own escape games, but I knew it would be a challenge. As it was hard for me to create engaging, solvable, and connected puzzles, I knew it would be even more difficult for my young students.

The drive and quick learning I saw in the class surpassed my expectations. On the first day of our virtual class, students worked together to navigate an online escape room. The multi-part puzzles encouraged quick cooperation. The time challenge built into the escape game stood in stark relief to other timed assignments that provoked groans of dread. In the context of a game, the timer became a thrilling motivator.

During each successive class, students explored a core aspect of game design — story, mechanics, puzzles, aesthetics, and technology — to craft their own digital escape rooms. We also began each session with a “puzzle of the day.” Students solved the puzzle together and then dissected its structure and efficacy.

Student engagement was off the charts. Even kids who disengaged from core classes showed laser focus on their games, working after school to perfect their final projects. The group cheered on each game designer as they presented their finished project. Several parents told me the class had been a highlight of the year for their kids.

It is not a revelation that students learn better in environments where they feel happy and curious. Yet, the challenge of cultivating these spaces remains elusive at many schools. In schools like mine that fall short on academic benchmarks, student creativity is typically a secondary concern. Teachers are pushed to add practice tests, increase homework assignments, and compete with other teachers to achieve the highest test scores.

In my game design course, students tackled grade-level standards — developing their writing skills as they composed game narratives and embracing logic and math to create puzzles. They also learned the value of experimentation, revision, and collaboration.

A recent Gallup study found that in K-12 classes with frequent creative assignments, students are more likely to engage in problem-solving, demonstrate critical thinking, make connections between subjects, and retain key concepts across units. If schools accept the research that creativity ignites learning, they must center hands-on, student-led projects in classes of all disciplines.

As schools grapple with making up for the so-called “learning losses” of the COVID era, I am disheartened to see teachers pushed away from creative projects. Instead, they are pressured to cram in extra review units, use repetitive teaching tactics, and tighten disciplinary rules.

This is a moment to transform how we teach. Educators must listen to students like Gianna, who know that they deserve better than stringent, rote lessons. We must reimagine the classroom as a space for experimentation, invention, and play. Integrating projects like escape rooms and other design challenges into core classes can boost student engagement and foster deeper learning. Most importantly, by championing creative problem-solving skills in the classroom, we better prepare young people to imagine solutions to the crises they will inherit.

Friday, October 22, 2021

The Preschool Debate: Academics Versus Play

 This week's article summary is We Mustn't Make Preschool Less Fun for 4-Year-Olds.

I liked the article for its historical overview of how and why preschools moved to being more ‘academic.’

As we touched on during our SAIS accreditation meeting last week, Trinity is both child centered (we cherish childhood) and academic (we prepare our students for the future), We also know that learning needs to be fun, engaging, and exciting. Particularly for young children play and learning are synonymous: at Trinity, we avoid the either-or/zero-sum extremes of separating academics from play, knowing that all classrooms—from Early Learners to Sixth Grade—are both student centered and teacher guided. Kids are naturally curious yet they also need guidance, explanation, context, and redirection. 

I also liked how the article defines an effective classroom: ‘purposeful instruction that supports deep learning in a playful, engaging, and fun way.’ To me, this definition needs to extend beyond our elementary years to middle schools, high schools, and colleges, which all too often lack play, engagement, and fun.

Think about the best teachers you had when you were a student. More than likely they made learning interesting and fun; held you to high standards; empowered you to think, problem solve, and make--and learn from--mistakes; and provided guidance and support when you needed it. They also valued you as a unique individual and you were known and respected in their classroom.

Although this article pertains to the preschool years in particular, it contains sage advice for all classrooms and teachers!

 Joe

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Which kind of preschool is more beneficial for young children: academic or play-based?  

Recent research has breathed new life into a debate that has been around for decades.

For many parents worried that children are being pushed into structured learning too early, there’s immediate concern when the word academics is associated with preschool. Children need to have fun, be creative and make their own choices, they say. 

To them, the term ‘academics’ connotes flashcards and a rigid, constrained environment. It’s the opposite of letting kids be kids and enjoying a childhood that will soon enough confront homework, lectures, testing, and sitting in desks all day.

Yet many of the parents who object to academic preschool are engaging in the very activities with their own children that are effective in laying the foundation for learning. They introduce numbers to their toddlers, counting fingers and toes, read to them and engage in conversations that are helping them develop the vocabulary they need to be good readers, point out letters on signs, and play games like chutes and ladders that teach counting.

What we know about teaching and learning has evolved to provide a research-based alternative that can satisfy people on both sides of the debate: purposeful instruction that supports deep learning in a playful, engaging, and fun way. 

But engaging in purposeful playful instruction with a group of children requires a great deal of skill – much more than either just letting kids play or giving them worksheets.

The question we should be asking is not either/or, but rather what will it take to bring about a substantial evolution in practice?

In the 1960s, policymakers and educators became concerned about the substantial gap of more than a year in school readiness between children living in poverty and their more affluent peers. Preschool learning became an issue of equity, and the federal government responded by creating Head Start to address the school-readiness gap. Additional pressure on preschools to prepare children academically came from K–12 accountability policies — George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind, morphing into Every Student Succeeds Act under Barack Obama.

Throughout these changes, the play vs. academics debate persisted, with proponents on both sides voicing strong opinions. Those who dismissed exclusively play-based learning cited concerns about the school readiness gap, and pointed to research showing that direct instruction proved most effective in promoting basic math and reading skills.

Resistance to an academic focus came from two central concerns: that the focus on academic learning would crowd out attention to children’s social-emotional development, and that stress over academic outcomes or performance would squelch children’s natural curiosity and intrinsic motivation to learn.

Consider the following activity that I saw unfold in a classroom of 4 year olds:

The teacher maps a 6’ x 10’ grid on a shower curtain, which she spreads on the floor. She asks the children to take off one shoe and sort all of the shoes into six piles — sandals, slip-ons, shoes with laces, etc. Then, in the bottom row of the grid, they place one shoe from each pile in its own square, followed by the rest of the shoes from that category, one each in the squares above the first shoe. After the children count the number of shoes in each column, the teacher asks them what they notice, and the children discuss which columns are longer and shorter and which categories have the most and the fewest shoes. She follows up with questions: Are there any categories that have the same number of shoes? How many more sandals than slip-ons are there?

For the children, this is a game; they do not know they are experiencing instruction. The teacher, however, planned the lesson to help children develop particular math skills, including categorization, counting, graphing, and measurement.

In addition to math, the children are developing social skills — negotiating the shoe classification system, collaborating in creating the columns of shoes and learning to take turns to answer the teacher’s questions.

Young children need to be free to choose and explore on their own. But they also possess a natural curiosity and capacity to learn that, research shows, a skilled educator can harness.

They can learn a great deal about math, literacy, and science. Carefully planned activities with clear learning goals and a developmental progression can nurture young children’s enthusiasm and motivation for learning.

Since research confirms that these well-crafted and playful learning experiences help children develop important and foundational skills and understandings, why aren’t they more common in preschool settings?

One reason is that few teachers are provided with the training and support they need to plan and execute these activities, especially in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM).

Appropriate and effective learning experiences for young children require preschool teachers to master the material they are teaching and know how to plan activities that will help grow the skills of children with varying learning styles and levels of understanding.

Teachers also need to know how to provide an emotionally secure social context and support the development of self-regulation and social skills while promoting academic skills.

We need to move the conversation beyond play versus academic preschool, and focus on the kind of playful learning researchers have shown contributes to young children’s academic skills without undermining their motivation to learn.

To do this we will need to invest in training and supporting the teachers we expect to implement this demanding approach to teaching.

Friday, October 15, 2021

Social-Emotional Support Beyond The Elementary Years

This week's article summary is Middle and High School Students Need Social-Emotional Learning Too But Are They Getting It? 

I feel very lucky to have attended a small (80 kids in my senior class) independent-private school for middle and high school. Even though the school was located in the middle of Long Island’s Gold Coast where opulence and conspicuous consumption were the norms (hence the reason F. Scott Fitzgerald set The Great Gatsby there), the values the school imparted on me were humility, moderation, and simplicity. Academics were important yet teachers also equally cared about their students’ character development. Who I am today (my sense of self, how I treat others, etc.) was significantly shaped by my middle and high school years. As we all know, our teen years require support and guidance beyond academics.

Next Tuesday is our first Admission Open House. Brad talks about how Trinity cherishes the wonder and innocence of childhood and then I follow by talking about how we prepare our kids for future. I cover a strong academic foundation (literacy, numeracy, well-rounded experiences through specials classes) but I spend just as much time discussing how we develop our students’ character: their confident but not entitled sense of self and their sincere care and concern for others.

Focus on the whole child (cognition, character, confidence, curiosity) is a given in most elementary schools, yet too often is lacking in middle and high schools. And as the article points out, adolescents need social-emotional support and guidance today more than ever. The limits of in-person interaction due to Covid is certainly a factor as is the ubiquity of social media and the expectation that kids need to be perfect to get and stay ahead of their peers.

There’s some optimism in the article as middle and high schools begin to devote more time to the social-emotional needs of their students although it takes a long time to effect change middle and high school cultures that are so different from us in elementary school. We do our part in shaping a solid foundation in our students, yet our graduates are still works in progress and need advice, guidance, role modeling, and monitoring.

Joe

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 In the secondary school years, students are grappling with some big questions: Who are they? How do they fit into the world? How do they form healthy relationships? These questions grow to a crescendo in high school where students face another daunting query: What will they do with themselves once they graduate?

Even in normal times, the journey through grades 6-12 can be fraught for students, but the pandemic has made it especially complicated as many are struggling with more anxiety, depression, grief, uncertainty, and loneliness. 

That’s why experts in social-emotional learning and child development say the secondary school years are a crucial time to focus on teaching skills, such as responsible decision-making, emotional management, and nurturing relationships.

But the older students get, the less schools have traditionally emphasized social-emotional learning.

“Not that I don’t think that schools think it’s important, it’s just where are you going to find the time and who’s going to teach it when they’re focused on different academic subjects?” said Tia Kim, from the Committee for Children, a nonprofit that promotes social-emotional learning and student well-being. “In our experience, that’s what we’ve heard—where logistically are you going to fit it in?”

It’s harder to find time to include explicit social-emotional lessons in a secondary school schedule, she said, where students are changing classes and teachers every hour. When schools do carve out the space to teach social and emotional skills, it is often during a specific class period such as advisory or English.

There is also more emphasis—or pressure—in secondary schools to focus on academics, said Kim, leaving educators to feel like they don’t have the time to teach social and emotional skills. 

Education Week has found that schools tended to emphasize social-emotional learning much more in the early grades and less so as students went on to middle school and high school.

Those attitudes may be beginning to shift.

New polling finds that 53% of district leaders say that a lot of focus is placed on social-emotional learning for students in grades 9-12, and 56% said the same for grades 6-8. Those figures are nearly on par with the 58% of district leaders who indicated a lot of focus was placed on SEL for grades 1-3.

In early 2020, when Education Week last put this question to district leaders, 38% said schools in their district placed a lot of emphasis on social and emotional learning in middle school and 31% said the same for high school.

COVID-19 has brought with it an overall rise in interest among educators in investing more in building students’ social and emotional skills to better equip them to handle the pandemic’s unique challenges.

From the student’s perspective, how are schools doing when it comes to teaching social and emotional skills? The EdWeek Research Center put several questions to a representative sample of middle and high school students at the beginning of this school year to get at whether students felt they were being taught important social and emotional skills, and whether their schools provided the support students needed to build relationships and sort out their identities. 

The feedback was mixed. A little under a third of students said their school had not provided them with the help or support they feel they needed over the course of the pandemic to improve on a range of skills central to social and emotional learning, such as making responsible decisions, establishing positive relationships, and managing emotions. Many students indicated they could use more guidance in answering some of the big questions around identity. When asked if adults at their school were helping them figure out their identity—who they are, what they want to be, where they belong, and what they believe—a little less than a quarter of students said they completely agreed with the statement. Nearly half said they partly agreed.

There is no question that the pandemic has been hard on students’ social and emotional well-being. Forty-four percent of middle and high school students reported in the survey that their level of social anxiety and loneliness has gone up. Teachers reported in another survey that their students struggled more with procrastination and class participation than they did a year before and that many of their students were more often distracted by anxieties, worries, and fears during class.

But things were hard for adolescents and teens even before the pandemic, said R. Keeth Matheny, who developed a popular SEL program for his school. He said the demands on teens’ and tweens’ social and emotional skills have changed drastically from when he and many other educators were young—in large part because of social media.

“If you made a mistake, it was a mistake, and people didn’t know and define you for the next 20 years based on that,” Matheny said. “Being a teenager today has lots of big challenges with it—not just the emotional part of being a teenager and impulsivity of being a teenager. When you are a teen, you do make mistakes and say and do things that you then later think back on and go ‘I can’t believe I did that.’ But all of the sudden now, those things are recorded for posterity.”

The adolescent years are a time when students are pushing boundaries and trying to work out who they are, he said, and they need more guidance on how to make responsible decisions and grow into their identity. Matheny now runs SEL Launch Pad, a consultancy that helps schools institute SEL programs. Because of his experience with high school students, many of his clients include secondary schools.

“While I do believe that work at younger grades can be very impactful, … I also think the teenage years are very tumultuous with big emotions and novel situations and extreme social pressure,” he said. “We’re seeing our teenagers and tweenagers have significant mental health challenges. And this work can be such a powerful support in the teenage years, whether we’re talking about emotional management or self-advocacy or self-awareness or relationship skills.”

Friday, October 8, 2021

Traditional Versus Progressive Teaching

This week's article summary is The 'How' and 'Why' of Teaching. It’s a longer summary than usual, so I’m sending it out early in case you want to print it and read it over the holiday weekend when you have some spare time.

I like the article for its explanation of the two extremes of education: the more traditional view of students as empty vessels that need to be filled with content knowledge contrasted with the more progressive, child-focused belief that children are innate learners and it’s our (school, teacher, parent) responsibility to engage, inspire, and motivate them to want to continue to learn.

As you’ll see from the article, the traditionalists under the name of ‘cognitive science’ stress the importance of knowledge acquisition as the key to future success, particularly student performance on high-stakes tests. My quibble with these cognitive scientists is they focus exclusively on effective ways to memorize material so it can be stored in long-term memory. For them, learning is a mechanical, one-size-fits-all, rote process where kids receive material from teachers and then commit it to memory. It’s all science and no art, and we teachers know there’s a much art and nuance to great teaching.

We are fortunate that Trinity being elementary-only doesn’t have to deal very often with the above cognitive science arguments that high schools do where content and teacher-centric classrooms rule. When you get to the article’s paragraphs on child-centered teaching, you’ll be in more familiar territory with words and terms like ‘problem solving, internal motivation, process of learning, individuality, student engagement, and play.’

I think It’s important to be familiar with education beliefs different from ours. We can even learn from them. I like reading Daniel Willingham and Daisy Christodoulou (two authors mentioned in the article) and even have some of their books in my office. I do agree with cognitive scientists that content knowledge is important as research consistently shows that background knowledge significantly supports better reading comprehension. Yet it's their pedagogy (the how of teaching) that I take exception with. We at Trinity see the importance of relevance, meaningfulness, and engagement as critical needs for students in and out of the classroom. When the article described how students learn at Michaela Community School I was deeply saddened and engaged. Cognitive science-based teaching is like an old black and white movie, while great teaching is technicolor. 

As we reach the quarter mark of the school year, huge thanks to all of you for an exemplary first eight weeks of the school year despite the continued ups and downs and fits and starts of Covid! Have a restful and enjoyable long Fall Weekend!

Joe

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Speaking at a National Education Summit last spring, Education Secretary Gavin Williamson said: ‘We know much more now about what works best: evidence-backed, traditional teacher-led lessons with children seated facing the expert at the front of the class are powerful tools for enabling a structured learning environment where everyone flourishes.’  

But hang on a moment. Many parents, educators and psychologists across the country responded to Williamson’s speech with a ‘huh?’ 

What is this evidence he’s talking about? How does it square with the research showing how important play and motivation is for learning? Where did he get that confidence about the same thing working for everyone, when any teacher knows that each child is different and that teaching a class of children rarely results in them all learning the same thing?

Williamson is referring to a school of thought which has gained traction in recent years, that of education based on ‘cognitive science’. 

Advocates such as Daniel Willingham (Why Don’t Students Like School?), Daisy Christodoulou (Seven Myths about Education) and Katharine Birbalsingh (Battle Hymn of the Tiger Teachers) argue that the research illustrates progressive educational techniques don’t work. 

By progressive techniques they mean a wide range of methods, including the idea that schools should teach transferable skills (Christodoulou), that teachers should make an effort to make their lessons engaging and interesting to children (Birbalsingh), or that children should be encouraged to think critically and solve problems from early on (Willingham).  

From this perspective, progressive techniques are responsible for most of the educational ills of the world, and the whole thing could be put right if we just applied the science. Their approach is simple: An expert teacher instructs, children listen, repeat and learn. 

There’s an impressive body of research to back them up. So much so that it’s tough for your average parent or teacher to disagree. The studies are real, the findings are robust. Yet within that narrative there are some leaps of logic which may explain the disconnect between the ‘evidence-backed’ certainty and the day-to-day experience of most children and teachers. The research they cite is from cognitive psychology, and it looks at how humans acquire knowledge and skills. 

Cognitive scientists such as Daniel Willingham say that it is now indisputable that ‘thinking well requires knowing facts’. His book explains his model of how the brain works, which, when applied to schools and children results in the expert at the front, children as the audience model of education. This model is essentially an analysis of the process by which people move from being novices to experts. Willingham’s book explains in detail how experts have more information stored in their long-term memories, enabling them to ‘chunk’ their knowledge and therefore use their working memory capacity efficiently and creatively. 

The qualitative difference in the thinking between experts and novices is what leads to the claim that in order to ‘think well’, we first require factual knowledge. And when applied to children, this means that the central task of education becomes getting as much knowledge as possible into children by the most efficient means.   

Or as Christodoulou puts it, schools should focus on ‘knowledge accumulation’. She says this is essential before children can engage in what she calls ‘sophisticated higher-order responses’. Those sophisticated higher-order responses include critical thinking, hypothesis testing, and problem solving. 

Once it’s agreed that knowledge accumulation is the aim, the next step is how to achieve that. Here, another set of research findings come in. This is research into memory, and how information is best committed to memory. If your desired outcome is specific information committed to long term memory, repetition and practice over an extended period of time are what works. Many studies back this up. It doesn’t matter too much whether a person understands what they are meant to be remembering in this model, as it’s the retention of information which is important.  

So, the guiding principles are these. Experts think in a more sophisticated way than novices, and the difference between a novice and an expert is the amount of information stored in their long-term memory. Therefore, in order to turn children into people capable of sophisticated thinking we must first make sure they have lots of information stored in their long-term memory, and the sophisticated thinking will follow. Therefore, there is no point in wasting time at school in activities which create opportunities for novice children to use higher order thinking skills… it’s more efficient to spend the time on knowledge acquisition. 

Birbalsingh has founded a school, Michaela Community School, which takes these ideas as their founding principles. Teachers at Michaela focus on teaching content, students are expected to focus on retaining the information. There is no variation in teaching methods across the school, and there is no differentiation between pupils. If a child isn’t learning, that is their responsibility, and if they don’t comply precisely with expectations, they are punished. Teachers at Michaela, as they explain in their book, give detentions and demerits for infractions such as slouching at your desk, and there are no exceptions for difficult circumstances. From their perspective, those children who have experienced the most adversity have the highest needs for strict rules and so difficult home situations or a trauma history aren’t reasons for non-compliance. Michaela gets results. Children don’t have much other choice – if they don’t comply, they will quickly find themselves put under intense pressure to do so. Parents are expected to buy into the model too, and so the children are surrounded with the same ethos.    

So if standardized test results are the final benchmark of education, all that really matters, then perhaps the Education Secretary is right? 

Those of us who work with children might want more out of education, however. We might want to look at what children learn about themselves and their place in the world, and we might want to know how being so strictly controlled at school affects children’s wellbeing and ability to cope when they get into the less structured environment of university or work – one where intrinsic motivation matters.    

For this model of learning is all about how to get knowledge and skills into children. The science is procedural and mechanistic. Any difficulties in education are reduced to how can we persuade children to comply with the regime of instruction, practice and repetition. Educational philosophy is completely missing from their approach. The question of why children might learn goes unmentioned, and the question of what they will learn is answered again by ‘the science’.  

What’s missing in this Brave New World vision of well-behaved children sitting in rows absorbing knowledge? Well, remember that most of the research we’ve encountered is with adult experts, who have chosen to learn about something because they are highly motivated. Their drive to practice and read and learn comes from within. I’ve seen this process in action with my own children with a rather different pursuit – Minecraft. I did not set out to create Minecraft experts and I suspect that if I had, they would not have been interested. No direct instruction was required for them to acquire expertise: playing Minecraft.

The issue of motivation is a serious one. Children do not typically come to the school because they are fascinated by phonics or fractions. They learn because an adult somewhere has decided that this is what they should be learning. This means that most schools, as with Michaela, have to set up a complicated system of incentives and punishments in order to persuade children to comply with their demands, or they have to try to engage children on their own terms, perhaps by giving them more choices or a chance learn things they are interested in – so called ‘progressive techniques’. 

External motivation is less effective for learning than internally driven motivation, and affects the quality of learning. Low quality motivation typically shows itself through behavior, with children being disruptive or refusing. Schools then have to resort to ever more extreme behavioral regimes, and even then, not all children will comply. 

Beyond that motivation issue, there are other ways to think about learning. The cognitive model is only one of many. There is an extensive body of research which shows how, from a very early age, children are engaged as active agents in their learning and learn through play. They test hypotheses, problem solve, and come up with creative solutions. Alison Gopnik calls this the ‘child as scientist’ theory of learning, and anyone who has spent time with a young child will have seen it in action. They mix things together, they experiment with floating and sinking, they ask purposeful questions. 

It’s hard to square observations of young children learning with the idea that higher order thinking is impossible without extensive background knowledge. They are novices in every way, and yet their observations and experiments are frequently more creative and insightful than the adults around them. On the other hand, their ability to remain seated and listening to an expert is seriously lacking when compared to most adults, and so it seems perverse to insist on a method of learning which plays to children’s weaknesses rather than their strengths. 

To Gopnik, and to most developmental psychologists, learning is best understood as an interaction between what a child already knows, and what they experience around them.  Direct instruction can actually interfere with this, as the research shows that when children are told what to do with a toy they imitate the adult, whereas without direct instruction they explore freely and in the process discover more about the toy. 

The child is not an empty vessel, to be filled with expert knowledge, but an agent who acts upon the world around them. As they explore the world through play, they acquire higher order skills and knowledge – but the knowledge they acquire is not necessarily the same as the next child along. 

One child may learn all about the properties of mud and water, whilst another learns about tractors and diggers. It doesn’t really matter, because much of what they are learning is how to learn. This is constructivism. Knowledge is constructed by the child, based on what interests them, what they know already, and what experiences they have available to them.  

From this perspective, no two children will learn the same things from their experiences and so standardized curriculums can never guarantee standard results. But from this standpoint, it is not simply knowledge acquisition which an education should focus on, but rather the development of the child as an active learner, a person who sees that their choices matter and that they can have autonomy over their lives. These are the transferable skills.    

If your aim is for all children to learn a specific body of knowledge and retain it, and you are confident that you can motivate children to do so, then direct instruction from an expert with lots of repetition (otherwise known as drilling) may well be effective. 

If your aim is children who can think critically and creatively, and who are developing their potential as active and diverse human beings, then there is no evidence that drilling them will achieve this.