September 27, 2009 The NY Times Magazine Section
The School Issue: Preschool
Can the Right Kinds of Play Teach Self-Control?
By PAUL TOUGH
"Come on, Abigail."
"No, wait!" Abigail said. "I'm not finished!" She was bent low over her
clipboard, a stubby pencil in her hand, slowly scratching out the letters
in
the book's title, one by one: T H E. . . .
"Abigail, we're waiting!" Jocelyn said, staring forcefully at her
classmate.
Henry, sitting next to her, sighed dramatically.
"I'm going as fast as I can!" Abigail said, looking harried. She brushed a
strand of hair out of her eyes and plowed ahead: V E R Y. . . .
The three children were seated at their classroom's listening center, where
their assignment was to leaf through a book together while listening on
headphones to a CD with the voice of a teacher reading it aloud. The book
in
question was lying on the table in front of Jocelyn, and every few seconds,
Abigail would jump up and lean over Jocelyn to peer at the cover, checking
what came next in the title. Then she would dive back to the paper on her
clipboard, and her pencil would carefully shape yet another letter: H U N.
.
. .
Henry fiddled with the CD player. Like Abigail and Jocelyn, he was a
kindergarten
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student in Red Bank, a small town
near the New Jersey shore. The students at the elementary school came
mostly
from working-class and low-income families, and, like the town itself, the
student population was increasingly Hispanic. Jocelyn, with flowing dark
hair, was the child of immigrants from Mexico; Henry was Hispanic with a
spiky haircut; Abigail was white and blond.
"Abby!" Henry said. "Come on!" He and Jocelyn had long ago finished writing
the title of the book on their lesson plans. They already had their
headphones on. The only thing standing between them and the story was the
pencil clutched in their classmate's hand.
G R Y. . . .
"O.K., we're starting," Jocelyn announced. But they didn't start. For all
their impatience, they knew the rule of the listening center: You don't
start listening to the story until everyone is ready.
"Oh, man," Henry said. He grabbed his face and lowered his head to the desk
with a clunk.
C A T E R. . . .
"Let's begin!" Jocelyn said.
"I'm almost done!" Abigail was hopping up and down now. "Don't press it!"
She bounced from foot to foot, still writing: P I L. . . .
"I'm pressing it!" Henry said. His finger hovered over the play button on
the CD player . . . but it did not fall, not until Abigail etched out her
last few letters and put on her headphones. Only then, finally, could the
three of them turn the pages together and listen to "The Very Hungry
Caterpillar."
When the CD finished, each child took a piece of paper and drew three
pictures to illustrate what happened at the beginning, in the middle and at
the end of the book. Then they captioned each one, first drawing a series
of
horizontal lines under the pictures, one for each word, and then writing
out
each word, or an approximation thereof: For "butterfly," Abigail wrote
"btrfli." Their language skills were pretty impressive for kindergarten
students. But for the teachers and child psychologists running the program
in which they were enrolled, those skills were considered secondary - not
irrelevant, but not as important as the skills the children displayed
before
the story started, when all three were wrestling with themselves, fighting
to overcome their impulses - in Abby's case, the temptation to give up on
writing out the whole title and just submit to the pleas of her friends;
for
Jocelyn and Henry, the urge to rip the pencil out of Abby's hand and start
the CD already.
Over the last few years, a new buzz phrase has emerged among scholars and
scientists who study early-childhood development, a phrase that sounds more
as if it belongs in the boardroom than the classroom: executive function.
Originally a neuroscience term, it refers to the ability to think straight:
to order your thoughts, to process information in a coherent way, to hold
relevant details in your short-term memory, to avoid distractions and
mental
traps and focus on the task in front of you. And recently, cognitive
psychologists have come to believe that executive function, and
specifically
the skill of self-regulation, might hold the answers to some of the most
vexing questions in education today.
The ability of young children to control their emotional and cognitive
impulses, it turns out, is a remarkably strong indicator of both short-term
and long-term success, academic and otherwise. In some studies,
self-regulation skills have been shown to predict academic achievement more
reliably than I.Q. tests. The problem is that just as we're coming to
understand the importance of self-regulation skills, those skills appear to
be in short supply among young American children. In one recent national
survey, 46 percent of kindergarten teachers said that at least half the
kids
in their classes had problems following directions. In another study, Head
Start teachers reported that more than a quarter of their students
exhibited
serious self-control-related negative behaviors, like kicking or
threatening
other students, at least once a week. Walter Gilliam, a professor at Yale
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's child-study center, estimates that
each year, across the country, more than 5,000 children are expelled from
pre-K programs because teachers feel unable to control them.
There is a popular belief that executive-function skills are fixed early
on,
a function of genes and parenting, and that other than medication, there's
not much that teachers and professionals can do to affect children's
impulsive behavior. In fact, though, there is growing evidence that the
opposite is true, that executive-function skills are relatively malleable -
quite possibly more malleable than I.Q., which is notoriously hard to
increase over a sustained period. In laboratory studies, research
psychologists have found that with executive function, practice helps; when
children or adults repeatedly perform basic exercises in cognitive
self-regulation, they get better at it. But when researchers try to take
those experiments out of the lab and into the classroom, their success rate
is much lower. Angela Duckworth, a psychologist at the University of
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Pennsylvania, has spent the
last seven years trying to find reliable, repeatable methods to improve
self-control in children. When I spoke to her recently, she told me about a
six-week-long experiment that she and some colleagues conducted in 2003
with
40 fifth-grade students at a school in Philadelphia.
"We did everything right," she told me: led the kids through self-control
exercises, helped them reorganize their lockers, gave them rewards for
completing their homework. And at the end of the experiment, the students
dutifully reported that they now had more self-control than when they
started the program. But in fact, they did not: the children who had been
through the intervention did no better on a variety of measures than a
control group at the same school. "We looked at teacher ratings of
self-control, we looked at homework completion, we looked at standardized
achievement tests, we looked at G.P.A., we looked at whether they were late
to class more," Duckworth explained. "We got zero effect on everything."
Despite that failure, Duckworth says she is convinced that it is possible
to
boost executive function among children - she just thinks it will require a
more complex and thoroughgoing program than the one that she and her
colleagues employed. "It's not impossible," she concludes, "but it's damn
hard."
Which is why Abigail, Henry and Jocelyn are potentially so important. They
and their classmates are enrolled in Tools of the Mind, a relatively new
program dedicated to improving the self-regulation abilities of young
children, starting as early as age 3. Tools of the Mind is based on the
teachings of Lev Vygotsky, a Russian psychologist who died of tuberculosis
in 1934, at age 38, and whose educational theories and methods were, until
recently, little known in the United States. Over the past 15 years,
Deborah
Leong and Elena Bodrova, scholars of child development based in Denver,
have
turned Vygotsky's philosophy into a full-time curriculum for
prekindergarten
and kindergarten students, complete with training manuals and coaches and
professional-development classes for teachers. Tools of the Mind has grown
steadily - though its expansion has sped up in the past few years - and it
now is being used to teach 18,000 prekindergarten and kindergarten students
in 12 states around the country. Leong and Bodrova say they believe they
have found the answer to the problem that has bedeviled Duckworth and other
psychologists for so long. Their program, they say, can reliably teach
self-regulation skills to pretty much any child - poor or rich; typical
achievers as well as many of those who are considered to have special
needs.
(They make the claim that many kids given diagnoses of A.D.H.D. would not
need Ritalin
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if they were enrolled in
Tools of the Mind.) And if Leong and Bodrova are right, those improved
self-regulation skills will lead not only to fewer classroom meltdowns and
expulsions in prekindergarten and kindergarten; they will also lead to
better reading and math scores later on.
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.
Over the last decade or so, the central debate in the field of
early-childhood education has been between one group that favors what you
might call a preacademic approach to prekindergarten and kindergarten and
another group that contends that the point of school in those early years
is
not to prepare for academic study; it is to allow children to explore the
world, learn social skills and have free, unconstrained fun. The
preacademic
camp began to dominate the debate in the late 1990s, drawing on some
emerging research that showed that children's abilities at the beginning of
kindergarten were powerful predictors of later success. If a child reached
his 5th birthday well behind his peers in measures of cognitive ability,
this research showed, he would most likely never catch up. The good news in
the research was that if you exposed struggling children to certain
intensive reading and math interventions in prekindergarten and
kindergarten, when their minds were still at their most pliable, you could
significantly reduce or even eliminate that lag. And so the answer, to many
scholars and policy makers, was clear: there was no time to waste in those
early years on Play-Doh and fingerpainting, not when kids, and especially
disadvantaged kids, could be making such rapid advances in the critical
cognitive skills they needed.
More recently, though, a backlash has been growing against the preacademic
approach among educators and child psychologists who argue that it misses
the whole point of early-childhood education. "Kindergarten has ceased to
be
a garden of delight and has become a place of stress and distress," warned
a
report released in March by a research group called the Alliance for
Childhood, which is advised by some of the country's most esteemed
progressive-education scholars. There is now too much testing and too
little
free time, the report argues, and kids are being forced to try to read
before they are ready. The solution, according to the report's authors, is
a
return to ample doses of "unstructured play" in kindergarten. If kids are
allowed to develop at their own paces, they will be happier and healthier
and less stressed out. And there will still be plenty of time later on to
learn how to read.
On the surface, Bodrova and Leong would seem to belong to the second camp.
They say, after all, that play should have a central place in
early-childhood classrooms. And they do find fault with the academic
approach, arguing that in practice, many of the early-childhood academic
initiatives that have been introduced in the No Child Left Behind
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era have failed to produce
any significant improvement in academic skills. At the same time, they
don't
agree that the solution is unstructured free play. The romantic idea that
children are born with flowering imaginations and a natural instinct for
make-believe is simply wrong, they say. Especially these days, they
contend,
when children spend more time in front of screens and less time in
unsupervised play, kids need careful adult guidance and instruction before
they are able to play in a productive way.
Bodrova and Leong began working together with early-childhood teachers in
1992, soon after Bodrova immigrated from Russia to be a visiting professor
at Metropolitan State College of Denver, where Leong was a professor of
child development. When they visited local classrooms, they were struck by
how out of control things often seemed. It was a period when preschool and
kindergarten teachers were taught to "follow the child's lead," to let
children guide the learning process with their own interests and unfettered
imaginations. In practice, Bodrova and Leong observed, classrooms were
often
chaotic free-for-alls.
Bodrova and Leong had both studied Vygotsky, and they discussed whether
some
of his methods might help improve the climate of these classrooms. For
Vygotsky, the real purpose of early-childhood education was not to learn
content, like the letters of the alphabet or the names of shapes and colors
and animals. The point was to learn how to think. When children enter
preschool, Vygotsky wrote, they are "slaves to their environment," unable
to
control their reactions or direct their interests, responding to whatever
shiny objects are put in front of them. Accordingly, the most important
goal
of prekindergarten is to teach children how to master their thoughts. And
the best way for children to do that, Vygotsky believed, especially at this
early age, is to employ various tools, tricks and habits that train the
mind
to work at a higher level. So Tools of the Mind students learn to use
"private speech" - to talk to themselves as they do a difficult task (like,
say, forming the letter W), to help themselves remember what step comes
next
(down, up, down, up). They use "mediators": physical objects that remind
them how to do a particular task, like CD-size cards, one with a pair of
lips and one with an ear, that signify whose turn it is to read aloud in
Buddy Reading and whose turn it is to listen. But more than anything, they
use play.
Most of Vygotsky's counterparts in the field of child psychology, including
influential figures like Jean Piaget and Maria Montessori, held that
imaginary play was an immature form of expression, a preliminary stage of
development. But Vygotsky maintained that at 4 or 5, a child's ability to
play creatively with other children was in fact a better gauge of her
future
academic success than any other indicator, including her vocabulary, her
counting skills or her knowledge of the alphabet. Dramatic play, he said,
was the training ground where children learned to regulate themselves, to
conquer their own unruly minds. In the United States, we often associate
play with freedom, but to Vygotsky, dramatic play was actually the arena
where children's actions were most tightly restricted. When a young boy is
acting out the role of a daddy making breakfast, he is limited by all the
rules of daddy-ness. Some of those limitations come from his playmates: if
he starts acting like a baby (or a policeman or a dinosaur) in the middle
of
making breakfast, the other children will be sure to steer him back to the
eggs and bacon. But even beyond that explicit peer pressure, Vygotsky would
say, the child is guided by the basic principles of play. Make-believe
isn't
as stimulating and satisfying - it simply isn't as much fun - if you don't
stick to your role. And when children follow the rules of make-believe and
push one another to follow those rules, he said, they develop important
habits of self-control.
Bodrova and Leong drew on research conducted by some of Vygotsky's
followers
that showed that children acting out a dramatic scene can control their
impulses much better than they can in nonplay situations. In one
experiment,
4-year-old children were first asked to stand still for as long as they
could. They typically did not make it past a minute. But when the kids
played a make-believe game in which they were guards at a factory, they
were
able to stand at attention for more than four minutes. In another
experiment, prekindergarten-age children were asked to memorize a list of
unrelated words. Then they played "grocery store" and were asked to
memorize
a similar list of words - this time, though, as a shopping list. In the
play
situation, on average, the children were able to remember twice as many
words. Bodrova and Leong say they see the same effect in Tools of the Mind
classrooms: when their students spend more time on dramatic play, not only
does their level of self-control improve, but so do their language skills.
In the past, when psychologists (or parents or teachers or priests) tried
to
improve children's self-control, they used the principles of behaviorism,
reinforcing good and bad behaviors with rewards and punishments. The
message
to kids was that terrible things would happen if they didn't control their
impulses, and the role of adults, whether parents or preschool teachers,
was
to train children by praising them for their positive self-control ("Look
at
how well Cindy is sitting!") and criticizing them for their lapses. And in
most American prekindergartens and kindergartens, behaviorism, in some
form,
is still the dominant method. But Bodrova and Leong say that those
"external
reinforcement systems" create "other-directed regulation" - good behavior
done not from some internal sense of control but for the approval of
others,
to avoid punishment and win praise and treats. And that, they say, is a
kind
of regulation that is not particularly valuable or lasting. Children learn
only how to be obedient, how to follow orders, not how to understand and
regulate their own impulses. The ultimate goal of Tools of the Mind is not
emotional or physical self-regulation; it is cognitive self-regulation -
not
the ability to avoid grabbing a toy from the kid next to you (though that's
an important first step), but the much more subtle ability to avoid falling
for a deceptively attractive wrong answer on a test or to concentrate on an
arduous mental task. And those abilities are more difficult to affect by
other-directed regulation. Because the abilities are more abstract, they
are
less likely to be elicited by rewards. Kids are rarely able to organize
their thoughts better in order to get an ice-cream cone.
As a result, many practices that most prekindergarten teachers consider
essential are more or less banned from Tools of the Mind classrooms. There
are no gold stars, no telling the class that they are all going to have to
wait until Jimmy is quiet; even timeouts are discouraged. When there is a
conflict - when, say, Billy grabs a toy from Jamal - the Tools of the Mind
teacher's first questions are supposed to be: What was it in the classroom
that made it hard for Billy to control himself? And what mediators could
help him do better next time? The teacher does remind Billy that there is a
rule and he broke it, but she doesn't make a big deal out of the incident.
"We pretty much try not to use this whole concept of misbehavior," Bodrova
told me. "These kids are not born criminals. Even if they do something that
is completely out of bounds, they do it because they can't stop
themselves."
There are not yet firm experimental data that prove that Tools of the Mind
works. But two early studies that began in the late 1990s in Denver showed
some promising results: After a year in the program, students did
significantly better than a similar group on basic measures of literacy
ability. And more recent studies, including one overseen by Adele Diamond,
a
professor at the University of British Columbia who is one of the most
prominent researchers in the field of cognitive self-control, have shown
that Tools students consistently score higher on tests requiring executive
function. Angela Duckworth told me that when she read Diamond's report,
which was published in Science in 2007, "I got very excited." Her failed
2003 study had persuaded her that the usual approach to self-control in
early-childhood education, a brief intervention here or there, wouldn't
work. But Tools of the Mind was clearly a different strategy. "It's an
immersion approach," she said. "It's not that these kids are pulled out and
they do self-control for half an hour a day. Everything is about
self-regulation, every single moment. Everything about the culture that the
classroom creates reinforces that."
It's one of the reasons that visiting a Tools of the Mind classroom can
cause moments of cognitive dissonance. While there's a lot of dressing up
and playing with blocks, plenty of messing around with sand tables and
Legos
and jigsaw puzzles, there are also a few activities that seem not just
grown-up but protocorporate, borrowed directly from the modern office.
Every
morning, before embarking on the day's make-believe play, each child takes
a
colored marker and a printed form called a play plan and draws or writes
his
declaration of intent for that day's play: "I am going to drive the
choo-choo train"; "I am going to make a sand castle"; "I am going to take
the dollies to the beach." At the beginning of prekindergarten, children
are
coached on dramatic play - called Make-Believe Play Practice - with the
teacher leading the children, step by step, through the mechanics of
pretending. (The training manual describes how a teacher might coach a
child
to feed a baby doll: "I'm pretending my baby is crying. Is yours? What
should we say?") In kindergarten, every student carries around a clipboard
with the day's activities on it - that's what Abigail was writing on at the
listening center - and each Friday, every child has a 5- or 10-minute
"learning conference" with his teacher, a mini-performance review in which
the children discuss what they accomplished in the last week, where they
fell short and what skills they want to work on in the week to come. All of
these practices, along with plenty of others that fill the day, are
designed
to reinforce habits of self-control.
This comprehensiveness creates an extra level of complication for
researchers examining Tools of the Mind. There are now four separate
large-scale long-term experimental studies under way across the country.
But
even if the researchers do find, in a few years, that the program has
long-term effects on executive function and school performance, they still
won't know exactly which techniques in the Tools of the Mind package are
the
most useful, or whether they all need to be employed in concert in order to
have an effect. Stephanie M. Carlson, a professor of child psychology at
the
University of Minnesota
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who studies executive function,
told me she is impressed with what she has seen so far of Tools of the
Mind.
But, she pointed out, "it's a really heavy-hitting approach, and there are
a
lot of different techniques used during the course of the day. What we
don't
know is what the secret ingredient is." It might be all the dramatic play,
but it also might be the literacy practice, or the learning conferences, or
something else entirely.
In the end, the most lasting effect of the Tools of the Mind studies may be
to challenge some of our basic ideas about the boundary between work and
play. Today, play is seen by most teachers and education scholars as a
break
from hard work or a reward for positive behaviors, not a place to work on
cognitive skills. But in Tools of the Mind classrooms, that distinction
disappears: work looks a lot like play, and play is treated more like work.
When I asked Duckworth about this, she said it went to the heart of what
was
new and potentially important about the program. "We often think about play
as relaxing and doing what you want to do," she explained. "Maybe it's an
American thing: We work really hard, and then we go on vacation and have
fun. But in fact, very few truly pleasurable moments come from complete
hedonism. What Tools does - and maybe what we all need to do - is to blur
the line a bit between what is work and what is play. Just because
something
is effortful and difficult and involves some amount of constraint doesn't
mean it can't be fun."
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