Preschool: The Most Important Year

This week’s article summary is Why Preschool is the Most Important Year in a Child's Development, which highlights the contents of the recent book, The Most Important Year, one of our summer reading choices.

Many of you may remember a report on NPR last year on a study of sixth grade—nicknamed the Big Dog Research—that detailed how important the sixth grade year is for kids and the resulting recommendation that sixth graders be as close to the highest grade in their school. Hence, it’s optimal for sixth to be the culminating grade of elementary school rather than the first year of middle school.

This article (and the book) explains why the preschool years are so important and what the key criteria are of high-quality preschool programs.

To me, these two articles are perfect bookend ‘talking points’ of why Trinity has the school structure it has. Having sixth grade in elementary school provides students the opportunity to develop a greater sense of self-confidence and assurance, better equipping them for the peer-pressure, self-doubt, search-for-identity years of 7^th-10^th grade.

A high-quality preschool experience develops foundational academic and social-emotional habits, skills, and attitudes both for the short and long term.

Joe

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Quality really matters.

Pre-K is a foundational year because, for most children, it provides their initial exposure to school and sets the tone for their educational career. They develop certain feelings, perceptions, and ideas about school. Conversely a sub-par experience in pre-K has the potential to create enduring negative emotions about school.

Researchers have found that few pre-K are truly poor quality and few are truly excellent.

The most important thing to look for is how the adults interact with children. You want to see them engage with children in a way that is positive, nurturing and genuinely curious.

In fact, according to her research, the best pre-K programs are staffed by trained teachers who know how to build students’ self-regulation skills; nurture their creativity and curiosity; and foster an environment of playful learning.

Building Self-Regulation Skills: The ability to manage one’s behavior and emotions in a given situation is the most important skill to foster at this age. Good pre-K programs effectively build students’ self-regulation skills that will help them experience success in pre-K and beyond. These classrooms teach children “how to be learners,” including how to deal with difficult emotions, how to pay attention, and how to be peers who listen to and interact positively with their classmates. You want to teach children how and why to behave. What to do instead of just what not to do. Effective pre-K classrooms teach self-regulation through songs and routines; picture prompts can remind children of the steps in a process. Skilled preschool teachers have strategies for redirecting student behavior and use language that provides instruction. Rewards and punishment are not effective tools because they do not teach kids how or why to behave. Rather, it just emphasizes that you want them to do something. Ironically, kids who have the biggest struggle with self-regulation are those most damaged by these strategies. When they are unable to earn the reward, they may feel frustration or shame or simply decide to stop trying.

Nurturing Creativity and Curiosity: Effective pre-K classrooms also engage students’ natural curiosity and creativity. In these classrooms, you will hear teachers using open-ended inquiries such as: How do you know that? How did you figure that out? Explain to me what you are doing. What do you think will happen if we . . . ? This dialogue between teacher and student focuses on the process of learning. In pre-K everything should be process focused and not outcome focused. For example, art projects should be more about exploring materials and techniques than about producing a replica of what the teacher made.

Fostering Playful Learning: Much of the public debate around early childhood education comes down to which matters more: academics or play. That’s a false dichotomy. Play is really the way that young children learn. It’s a way that they experience the world, and it engages them and helps them learn more deeply. Sadly, the “skill and drill” approach to teaching academics is most frequently used in classrooms serving at-risk preschoolers in an attempt to close the gap on school readiness. These teaching methods can turn young kids off to school and introduces the possibility of shame and anxiety. Skill and drill doesn’t teach kids the curiosity and critical thinking skills that they need to develop in early childhood. However, pure free play — an approach advocated more frequently by wealthier cohorts — also misses the mark. If it only involves setting out materials and not thinking about learning goals, there’s a real missed opportunity. For example, researchers have found that children used more sophisticated language about building activity when they had a goal in mind. What effective preschools aim for is guided play or scaffolded play, in which adults create a purposeful play environment that encourages student exploration. For example, in setting up blocks, a teacher might put up pictures of buildings to inspire kids. They may ask students, ‘What are you doing?’ and gently push kids’ thinking by offering new information or nudging them to experiment. Of course, the ability to find this balance rests with teachers. That’s why it’s really important that we invest in teachers and give them the training to find that middle ground — to guide play without overly controlling it and to encourage kids to develop an understanding of letters and numbers without ‘skill and drill.’

Investing in Teacher Training: Teachers need research-based training, information about what developmentally appropriate practices look like

Self Discovery Versus Direct Instruction

This week’s article summary is The Effects of Telling First on Learning and Transfer.

A pedagogical conundrum for teachers is how often to directly instruct students and how much to let them self-discover?

My guess is most teachers support self-discovery as an ideal, yet in my case I often struggled to provide enough of it in my classes as a history teacher.

About 7 or 8 years ago, I visited a public high school that had totally committed to self-discovery. Teacher lecturing was frowned upon. I visited a few classes—mostly science/math combos—in which the students were asked to complete projects with minimal background information or explanation from teachers. Teachers moved around the classrooms observing student groups working on projects and often offered comments, but they didn’t share their expertise and knowledge with the students. It was pretty evident as I observed each group that the students were frustrated: they knew where the project was supposed to go (if I remember correctly, it was something to do with determining how to land a space craft on Mars) but they were adrift and puzzled with how to get there. They clearly didn’t possess the requisite math and physics background. I saw a lot more blank stares than idea generation. Finally I asked a student how she enjoyed this new type of self-discovery, DIY, project-based-learning, design-thinking teaching; she whispered conspiratorially so not to be overheard, “I just wish the teacher would call the whole class together and give us some direction. I really miss lectures. I think I might transfer to the district’s other public school.”

As teachers, we all know the importance of prior knowledge (see last week’s article summary) as a significant boon to subsequent learning, and typically it’s the teacher who supplies that background content in order for students to then acquire new knowledge.

As such, I’ve always been skeptical of project-based learning as a means of learning new knowledge. It is often fun and can be used to apply what you’ve learned, but to me it’s an inefficient and ineffective way to learn new content.

With all that said, I was surprised by the findings in the article below: self-discovery, in fact, does support long-term learning better than direct instruction.

Due to confirmation bias (it’s tough to unlearn something), it will take more than one research study for me to change my opinion.

But this article provided some healthy cognitive dissonance to make me reconsider my thoughts on self-discovery.

Joe

The most common pedagogical sequence in U.S. schools it to tell students the important principle or skill up front and then have them practice on a set of well-designed problems. This approach is a convenient and efficient way to deliver accumulated knowledge.

Nevertheless, many scholars are working on instructional alternatives, for instance, having students wrestle with a problem through a project, inquiry, or guided discovery and only then revealing the “answer” or underlying principle. The mechanics of these alternatives withhold didactic teaching at first lest it undermine the processes of discovery. The theory is that students first need to experience the problems that render told knowledge useful.

But is the experience-first approach effective?

In a recent study, researchers compared eighth-grade teachers who used telling-first and those who used an experience-first approach. Students’ initial recollection and test performance was the same in both groups, but long-term transfer was significantly better in the experience-first group. Why?

The researchers believe it’s because:

• Telling-and-practice pedagogy prompts students to apply solutions, one problem at a time, which reduces their chances of seeing similarities across cases.
• Giving students the end-product of expertise too soon short-cuts the need to find the deep structure that the expertise describes.
• Without an appreciation of deep structure, students are less likely to see the structure in new situations that differ on the surface, and they will fail to transfer.”

That said we aren’t in favor of frustrating students with uncertainty. There is definitely a time for telling.  It’s important for teachers to help students tolerate the short-term ambiguity of not being told the right answer. The effort to find and characterize the structure can improve learning and test performance in the long run.

The ABCs of Learning

This week’s article summary is “An Alphabet of Research on Teaching and Learning” which is a summary of the book The ABCs of How We Learn.

The book’s authors use each letter of the alphabet to highlight an effective method of learning. (As you’ll see, they stretched a bit on the letters X and Y.)

The list is a reminder about how we all best learn and store content in our long-term memories: techniques such as frequent practice, imaginative play, and hands-on learning.

The article also reminds us how important prior knowledge and ample sleep are in the learning process.

As I read through the list, I was gratified Trinity employs all of these effective pedagogies in a variety of combinations. Not only do we make school fun for kids, we also never forget that our ultimate goal is student learning!

Joe

Below are 26 principles of pedagogy matched with a letter of the alphabet from the book The ABCs of How We Learn. Each is accompanied by an overview of the research, how the item works, how to use it in the classroom, what it’s good for, its risks, examples of good and bad use, and a short summary.

Analogy: By identifying the underlying similarity between things that have surface differences (for example, blood vessels and highways), analogies help people learn principles and apply them in new situations. “Analogies help students sort out the wheat of deep structure from the chaff of surface features,” say the authors. “Analogies can help students make a positive transfer.”

Belonging: Feeling that they belong to a learning community makes students try harder and decreases distracting thoughts of inadequacy and alienation. “Learning is social,” say Schwartz, Tsang, and Blair. “Belonging is the perception of being accepted, valued, and included. Belonging can help learning by increasing effort and decreasing negative distancing thoughts.” Teachers who explicitly create an atmosphere of respect and community boost learning and close racial and economic achievement gaps.

Contrasting cases: Noticing the difference between two or more examples that seem the same at first glance – for example, a spider and an insect. “Contrasting cases help people notice subtle but important details that they might otherwise overlook,” say the authors.

Deliberate practice: Applying focused and effortful practice to develop specific skills and concepts (for example, playing the guitar or solving physics problems) beyond one’s current abilities. “Deliberate practice automatizes skills and concepts so they become faster, more accurate, more variable, and less effortful to execute,” say Schwartz, Tsang, and Blair. “This allows people to see new patterns and frees cognitive resources so people can attempt more complex tasks.”

Elaboration: Explicitly connecting new information to prior knowledge, which increases the chances of remembering it later. “Human memory is vast,” say the authors. “Remembering depends on finding the right memory at the right time. Elaboration makes connections among memories when learning, so it is easier to find a path to the stored information later.”

Feedback: This allows people to sense a discrepancy between what they did and what they should have done, which allows them to adjust future actions. “People would have a hard time learning something new if they never knew whether they were on the right track,” say the authors. “Feedback, particularly constructive negative feedback, guides people toward what they can do to improve and learn.”

Generation: Retrieving a specific memory (like where you parked your car in a multi-story garage) given partial cues or hints improves future retrieval. Retrieval – testing yourself – increases the strength of the memory, making it easier to retrieve later on. Spreading out retrieval practice over several days enhances the effect.

Hands-on: Recruiting the body’s intelligence makes it possible to understand abstract concepts. “The perceptual-motor system contains tremendous intelligence,” say the authors. “This intelligence provides meaning for simple symbols and words… Hands-on learning recruits the perceptual-motor system to coordinate its meaning with symbolic representations.” Two risks: hands-on activities can become procedures for finding answers rather than a source of sense-making; and students may become too dependent on them.

Imaginative play: This involves creating a story that is different from the reality in front of us, letting one thing stand for another – for example, a child pretends a fork (a mother) is scolding a spoon (a child) for not eating her peas. There isn’t a lot of research evidence on the efficacy of play, but the authors say it “can serve as a great vehicle for delivering activities known to support maturation and learning.”

Just-in-time telling: Students are immersed in a simulation of a problem and are then given an explanation. “The simulation provides students with rich experiences,” say the authors, “and the debriefing provides an explanation or framework for organizing those experiences. Without the experience, the explanation would be too abstract. Without the explanation, the experiences would just be a collection of memories. Together, they produce usable knowledge.”

Knowledge: Prior knowledge enables people to make sense of new information and is essential to learning. But knowledge can also blind people to new conditions that have different patterns; for example, the vaults being set two inches lower in the 2000 Summer Olympics caused major problems for female gymnasts who had trained on a different elevation. The trick is to combine extensive knowledge with the ability to adapt.

Listening and sharing: Students may be disengaged and bored in class, trapped in their own thoughts, and lacking the skills needed to work together. Once those skills have been taught, say the authors, “students maintain joint attention, listen, share, coordinate, and try to understand one another’s points of view. This can help learners exchange information and develop a multifaceted understanding.”

Making: Producing an artifact or performance, getting feedback, and setting new goals – for example, writing a poem to perform at a local spoken-word festival. “Making has motivations that naturally produce a learning cycle that expands one’s means of production,” say the authors. “Motivations include the desire for feedback on the realization of one’s ideas, and the creation of new challenges that motivate makers to learn more skills and methods.”

Norms: These are the informal rules that regulate social interactions – for example, student-generated classroom rules or a protocol for mathematics debates. “Good norms help coordinate learning interactions,” say the authors, “both at the level of good behaviors and at the level of the way different disciplines engage their topics.”

Observation: “Human brains are wired to learn by observing others,” say the authors. Often trial-and-error is slow and inefficient, a behavior is too complex to explain verbally, and learners are not sure how to act or feel. Learning by observing and imitating other people’s behaviors and affective responses is more efficient, as is vicariously seeing the consequences of others’ behaviors.

Participation: This “provides learners with access to the goals, consequences, methods, and interpretations that render learning meaningful,” say the authors. An example: a surfing instructor tows beginners out to sea and pushes the surfboard at the right moment to catch a wave, so the novice can focus on balancing and experiencing what it means to surf. Gradually the scaffolding is withdrawn.

Question-driven: Being asked to answer a driving question increases curiosity, purpose, attention, and well-connected memories and may develop problem-solving skills. For example, a class might investigate how noise pollution affects the wildlife around their school.

Reward: Rewards, extrinsic and intrinsic, can motivate desired behaviors, and rewarding successive approximations of proficiency can help students achieve the desired level. But rewards can backfire if people already find something intrinsically motivating or if the goal is creativity and exploration. Rewards can also reduce intrinsic motivation by making people dependent on external reinforcement.

Self-explanation: Silently talking through expository material improves understanding by revealing gaps in knowledge, and forces one to fill in missing information to make a coherent explanation. The main learning problem this addresses is overconfidence.

Teaching:  “Teaching is not just good for pupils,” say the authors; “it is good for the teacher, too… Asking older students to tutor younger students is an excellent example of learning by teaching. Tutors improve their understanding nearly as much as tutees.”

Undoing: Identifying misconceptions and faulty reasoning and replacing them with correct information; for example, a child says 13 – 7 = 14, perhaps believing that she can’t subtract 7 from 3 so she subtracts 3 from 7. The teacher needs to make this misconception explicit and teach some basic arithmetic principles to keep the misconception from becoming entrenched.

Visualization: Drawing spatial representations – maps, diagrams, sketches, graphs, Venn diagrams, matrices – helps organize complex information, make it understandable, and embed it in memory. A classic example: in the early 1900s, Harry Beck created a simplified map of the London subway system that sacrificed exact geographical detail for a structure more relevant to a subway rider. This type of map is now used in nearly every subway system around the world.

Worked examples: These are step-by-step models of how to complete a procedural task – for example, doing a long-division problem. Worked examples build on observational learning, allowing the learner to observe and imitate well-defined steps.

eXcitement:  “Excitement increases psychological arousal, which focuses attention and improves memory acquisition,” say the authors. “However, too much excitement interferes with performance and learning. Arousal and anxiety combine to cause choking under pressure.”

Yes I can: Self-efficacy – believing one can succeed – makes people more willing to take on a challenging activity, persist in the face of difficulty and failure, take on more challenges, and accomplish more. This is what Carol Dweck calls a growth mindset.

ZZZs: Research has established that while we sleep, recent memories are consolidated into long-term storage and integrated with prior knowledge. John Steinbeck once wrote, “A problem difficult at night is resolved in the morning after the committee of sleep has worked on it.”