"Duh" Research Strikes Again

Interesting piece in the New York Times this morning--The School Issue - Preschool - Can the Right Kinds of Play Teach Self-Control? It's yet another in that long series of discoveries by researchers that kids learn better in ways that unschoolers have advocated for decades.

Researchers are coming to believe that impulse control and behavioral skills are more important than IQ, but they're finding that formal instruction in those skills is often ineffective. One program, called Tools of the Mind, is taking another approach:

At the heart of the Tools of the Mind methodology is a simple but surprising idea: that the key to developing self-regulation is play, and lots of it. But not just any play. The necessary ingredient is what Leong and Bodrova call “mature dramatic play”: complex, extended make-believe scenarios, involving multiple children and lasting for hours, even days. If you want to succeed in school and in life, they say, you first need to do what Abigail and Jocelyn and Henry have done every school day for the past two years: spend hour after hour dressing up in firefighter hats and wedding gowns, cooking make-believe hamburgers and pouring nonexistent tea, doing the hard, serious work of playing pretend.

I can't help but notice (again) that this program shifts the responsibility for learning to kids and away from teachers--that little matter of autonomy makes a difference every time.

Super-Duh! (& more from Deci)

Nice little article from Alfie Kohn in yesterday's New York Times ("When a Parent’s ‘I Love You’ Means ‘Do as I Say’") about the potential baleful effect of positive reinforcement:

Conditional parenting isn’t limited to old-school authoritarians. Some people who wouldn’t dream of spanking choose instead to discipline their young children by forcibly isolating them, a tactic we prefer to call “time out.” Conversely, “positive reinforcement” teaches children that they are loved, and lovable, only when they do whatever we decide is a “good job.”

Kohn goes on to describe research by Edward Deci (of Why We Do What We Do) and two Israeli researchers about the effects of using affection as a control mechanism:

Avi Assor and Guy Roth, joined Edward L. Deci, a leading American expert on the psychology of motivation, in asking more than 100 college students whether the love they had received from their parents had seemed to depend on whether they had succeeded in school, practiced hard for sports, been considerate toward others or suppressed emotions like anger and fear.

It turned out that children who received conditional approval were indeed somewhat more likely to act as the parent wanted. But compliance came at a steep price. First, these children tended to resent and dislike their parents. Second, they were apt to say that the way they acted was often due more to a “strong internal pressure” than to “a real sense of choice.” Moreover, their happiness after succeeding at something was usually short-lived, and they often felt guilty or ashamed.

In a companion study, Dr. Assor and his colleagues interviewed mothers of grown children. With this generation, too, conditional parenting proved damaging. Those mothers who, as children, sensed that they were loved only when they lived up to their parents’ expectations now felt less worthy as adults. Yet despite the negative effects, these mothers were more likely to use conditional affection with their own children.

Go read the whole thing.

Oh, Noes?! Not So Much

Nifty little bit over at Wired (Clive Thompson on the New Literacy) on what the Stanford Study of Writing is showing about the effects of technology and the Internet on the ways people write.

Turns out all that fretting and moaning about Twitter and Facebook and texting destroying our kids' ability to write is all wrong. All that modern technology is creating a population that not only writes habitually but is accomplished at writing for many diverse audiences (and is--not surprisingly--relatively unenthusiastic about writing done solely for a grade).

Learning by doing, indeed.

See You Next Time? Someday?

When my kids were little, they wanted to grow up to be LeVar Burton.

Actually, that's not quite right. They didn't want to BE LeVar Burton--they just wanted his job.

They weren't alone, though. I wanted his job, too.

We all thought there couldn't be any more fun or more interesting job in the world than to be the host of Reading Rainbow.

So it was a shock this morning when I woke to NPR telling me that today was the last broadcast of Reading Rainbow on PBS. The reporter said, "Even if you can't remember a specific episode . . . "

Even if you can't remember a specific episode?

I can't count the specific episodes I remember. I mentioned the puppy episode (Book: Best Friends; related segment: Guide Dog puppy raiser), the cat episode (Book: can't remember; related segments: tigers at the then-MarineWorld/AfricaUSA and actor getting made up for Cats role), the one where Juila Child read the story about the mixed up real and artificial cakes, and the comedy show (Book: Ludlow Laughs, read by Phyllis Diller; related segments on slapstick) in the lament I sent this morning to my daughters (now in their 20s).

My older daughter wrote back:

And the hat one, with Zelda Rubinstien reading the book? And the here-are-all-sorts-of-different-jobs one, with the pizza guy and the dog walker and the professional LEGO builder? And the fashion one? AND THE STAR TREK ONE?!?!?!?! AND WOULD WE EVEN HAVE GONE TO **ANY** RENAISSANCE FAIRS WITHOUT THE RENAISSANCE FAIR ONE?!?!?!??!?!?!

Which, of course, made me think of more: Dinosaur Bob and Dinosaur National Monument; The Ox-Cart Man, read by Lorne Greene, with LeVar visiting Old Sturbridge Village (and because of which Kate and I went to Old Sturbridge Village when we went back east to visit potential colleges for her); the devastatingly affecting Vietnam Memorial episode with Maya Lin; Humphrey the Wayward Whale, which was fun because it used news footage from one of our local TV stations; Abiyoyo, with Pete Seeger; the one with the woman who decorated those amazing Ukrainian eggs; . . . I won't go on, even though I could easily list a dozen more.

And why are we losing Reading Rainbow after 26 years? (Among PBS children's shows, only Sesame Street and Mr. Rogers have had longer runs.) We're losing it because nobody will fund it, because the powers-that-be have decided that "phonics and reading fundamentals"--the how of reading--are now more important than the why of reading, the joy of reading.

Reading Rainbow was never about telling kids that reading was good for them. It was all about showing them the doors that reading opens, the worlds we can reach and explore, the way one adventure leads to another, and more beyond.

No matter how much phonics and decoding skills are dressed up to make them appealing and entertaining, they're still mechanical skills that kids are told are good for them. Reading's important, and these are the skills needed to become a successful, serious person--in other words, learning to read's a chore, and we have to try to make it fun, because otherwise it'd be too boring to bear.

Reading Rainbow always took the approach Frank Smith recommends in Joining the Literacy Club. Learning, Smith says,

is primarily a social rather than an individual accomplishment. We learn from other people, not so much though conscious emulation as by "joining the club" of people we see ourselves as being like, and by being helped to engage in their activities. Usually we are not even aware that we are learning.

and that

Literacy is more than the shunting of information between one person and another. It is the exploration of worlds of ideas and experience.

The NPR story says that Reading Rainbow operated on the idea that its kid viewers already had reading skills, but I'm not so sure about that. My kids were entranced by the show long before they learned to read, but they loved the storybooks on the show and they loved the related segments. We made countless library and book store trips in search of books we learned about from Reading Rainbow and looked into local versions of sites and activities we saw on the show.

Reading Rainbow never helped my kids learn to read, in this dreary modern phonics-and-reading-fundamentals sense. But it helped them in a more truly fundamental way--it helped them WANT to read, and without that, all the decoding skills in the world won't create a reading child.

Here's Another One

For my collection of "duh" research, that is.

This one's not really a new study but a summary of current thought on the importance of free play--not organized sports, not music lessons, but real FREE play--in child development.

The Serious Need for Play: Scientific American

I knew this already. It's sad that so many people now see real play as wasting time.