I am pushed to get ready for classes monday, Ageliki.
I would be glad to discuss the issue I referred to as re-framing
within the
context of the discussion of learning sciences and vygotsky just to
keep it in the bounds of time constraints-- have you read that
discussion? Otherwise my comments will make no sense.
Within that context, I might start with executive functioning as a
"neuroscience term," the discourse on 0-3 and ways to make babies
brains develop more quickly (see xmca discussion of brain and
education),and the linkages to no-child-left behind. Seems a long way
from Kharkov in the late 1930's, or 1990's, or the recent (to the
NYTimes) discovery of Vygotsky.
mike
Sun, Sep 27, 2009 at 9:15 AM, Ageliki Nicolopoulou <agn3@lehigh.edu
<mailto:agn3@lehigh.edu>> wrote:
Hi Mike,
Can you explain a bit what you mean by re-framing and why you see
it as an issue of re-framing?
Thanks,
Ageliki
--
**********************************************
Ageliki Nicolopoulou
Professor
Department of Psychology, Lehigh University
17 Memorial Drive East
Bethlehem, PA 18015-3068
Personal Webpage: http://www.lehigh.edu/~agn3/index.htm
<http://www.lehigh.edu/%7Eagn3/index.htm>
Departmental Webpage:
http://www.lehigh.edu/~inpsy/nicolopoulou.html
<http://www.lehigh.edu/%7Einpsy/nicolopoulou.html>
**********************************************
mike cole wrote:
Thanks Peter-- I was just about to forward this story. Apart
from its
considerable intrinsic interest to members of this group, it
seems relevant
to the prior discussion the origins of learning sciences and
the ways in
which re-framing can operate to change the terms of discourse.
mike
On Sun, Sep 27, 2009 at 7:36 AM, Peter Smagorinsky
<smago@uga.edu <mailto:smago@uga.edu>> wrote:
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
<
http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/e/education_pr
eschool/index.html?inline=nyt-classifier<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/e/education_pr%0Aeschool/index.html?inline=nyt-classifier>>
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
<
http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/y/yale_un
iversity/index.html?inline=nyt-org<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/y/yale_un%0Aiversity/index.html?inline=nyt-org>>
'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
<
http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/u/univers
ity_of_pennsylvania/index.html?inline=nyt-org<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/u/univers%0Aity_of_pennsylvania/index.html?inline=nyt-org>>
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
<
http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/health/diseasesconditionsandhealthtopics
/ritalin_drug/index.html?inline=nyt-classifier<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/health/diseasesconditionsandhealthtopics%0A/ritalin_drug/index.html?inline=nyt-classifier>>
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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t_behind_act/index.html?inline=nyt-classifier<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/n/no_child_lef%0At_behind_act/index.html?inline=nyt-classifier>>
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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ity_of_minnesota/index.html?inline=nyt-org<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/u/univers%0Aity_of_minnesota/index.html?inline=nyt-org>>
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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