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pktechgirlbackupI'm going to expand on this, but the post below can be summarized in three sentences: when kids are told to stand still for as long as possible, they average 2 minutes. When told to pretend they're a soldier and stand still for as long as possible, they average 11 minutes. Design your school curriculum accordingly.
Baby animals learn through play. All those adorable things they do are designed to help them develop the muscles and skills to hunt or escape or build places to sleep. Human young are no different: they copy their parents, or other convenient models, under the assumption that the things their parents do will be useful to them some day. I was a year and a half when my mom was studying for the bar, and apparently spent a lot of time scribbling on paper saying "I study, I study." When I was 10, raking the leaves seemed less boring if I pretended I was playing Animal Farm. And yet, all of school seems designed to separate learning from the real world as much as humanly possible. Even in college it slowed me down to learn a data structure a week before being told the problem it solved: why on Earth do we expect seven year olds to spend a year learning skills they won't see the relevance of until years from now?
Nurtureschock talks about an alternative: Tools of the Mind. At first the description, "Teachers direct kids in play", sounds horrifying, but the implementation is actually quite good: at the beginning of a unit, the kids are read a story or description or something. At some point, they switch to acting out the story: each kid picks a role (in the restaurant example you have customers, waiters, and cooks), writes it down (which is just scribbling in the case of younger kids), and acts it out. As they get older the scenarios become more complex and are less directed by the teacher. The curriculum was originally developed to help with "executive function": i.e. help develop the grown up part of the brain that helps with impulse control and social relations, but it turns out these kids actually learn to read and do math faster as well.
Many teaching styles test well in pilot studies but fail when expanded, because the critical variable wasn't the style itself, but a teacher who cared enough to try something new, and is generally getting better support. But thus far Tools of the Mind seems to be scaling, and I would like to see that continue.
In a weird way, these remind me of Knowledge Is Power Program. KIPP schools differ from standard schooling in a lot of ways, so it's hard to trace their success to a single variable, but as far as we can tell, one of the valuable things they do is teach kids the skills middle class kids take for granted- things like eye contact, standing in an orderly line, and voice modulation. On one hand, it seems incredibly insulting to teach a middle schooler how to stand in line. Not just insulting to the child, but the worst kind of white-man's-burden colonialism. On the other hand, it seems to help. One critical difference, as far as I can tell, is that there's no effort to tell kids they or their culture are wrong, they're just being taught a new skill for a new place. In some ways, that seems like the more advanced version of the TotM curriculum: we're going to pretend to be middle class office workers, here are the skills you need to pretend to be a middle class office worker, and some day, you can be a middle class office worker.
Spending more money on our current educational system has proved itself to not work. These programs may not scale indefinitely, and they may not be right for every student, but given the results they produce, they're worth expanding until we hit their limit.
Baby animals learn through play. All those adorable things they do are designed to help them develop the muscles and skills to hunt or escape or build places to sleep. Human young are no different: they copy their parents, or other convenient models, under the assumption that the things their parents do will be useful to them some day. I was a year and a half when my mom was studying for the bar, and apparently spent a lot of time scribbling on paper saying "I study, I study." When I was 10, raking the leaves seemed less boring if I pretended I was playing Animal Farm. And yet, all of school seems designed to separate learning from the real world as much as humanly possible. Even in college it slowed me down to learn a data structure a week before being told the problem it solved: why on Earth do we expect seven year olds to spend a year learning skills they won't see the relevance of until years from now?
Nurtureschock talks about an alternative: Tools of the Mind. At first the description, "Teachers direct kids in play", sounds horrifying, but the implementation is actually quite good: at the beginning of a unit, the kids are read a story or description or something. At some point, they switch to acting out the story: each kid picks a role (in the restaurant example you have customers, waiters, and cooks), writes it down (which is just scribbling in the case of younger kids), and acts it out. As they get older the scenarios become more complex and are less directed by the teacher. The curriculum was originally developed to help with "executive function": i.e. help develop the grown up part of the brain that helps with impulse control and social relations, but it turns out these kids actually learn to read and do math faster as well.
Many teaching styles test well in pilot studies but fail when expanded, because the critical variable wasn't the style itself, but a teacher who cared enough to try something new, and is generally getting better support. But thus far Tools of the Mind seems to be scaling, and I would like to see that continue.
In a weird way, these remind me of Knowledge Is Power Program. KIPP schools differ from standard schooling in a lot of ways, so it's hard to trace their success to a single variable, but as far as we can tell, one of the valuable things they do is teach kids the skills middle class kids take for granted- things like eye contact, standing in an orderly line, and voice modulation. On one hand, it seems incredibly insulting to teach a middle schooler how to stand in line. Not just insulting to the child, but the worst kind of white-man's-burden colonialism. On the other hand, it seems to help. One critical difference, as far as I can tell, is that there's no effort to tell kids they or their culture are wrong, they're just being taught a new skill for a new place. In some ways, that seems like the more advanced version of the TotM curriculum: we're going to pretend to be middle class office workers, here are the skills you need to pretend to be a middle class office worker, and some day, you can be a middle class office worker.
Spending more money on our current educational system has proved itself to not work. These programs may not scale indefinitely, and they may not be right for every student, but given the results they produce, they're worth expanding until we hit their limit.
