Re: [xmca] Can the Right Kinds of Play Teach Self-Control?

[Nancy Mack <nancy.mack@wright.edu>]

This approach to meaningful play reminds me of Dorothy Heathcote's work with creative dramatics.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=4499514300126414014#docid=-4541729052489763567
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=4499514300126414014#


Nancy Mack

English Department
Wright State University

http://www.wright.edu/~nancy.mack





----- Original Message -----
From: Elia Nelson <eliajn@gmail.com>
Date: Sunday, September 27, 2009 2:56 pm
Subject: Re: [xmca] Can the Right Kinds of Play Teach Self-Control?
To: "eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity" <xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>

> For related work, one might see Vivan Gussin Paley's book "The 
> boy who would
> be a helicopter: The uses of storytelling in the classroom." 
> (1990, Harvard
> U. Press, ISBN 0-674-08031-9)
> 
> It's not particularly "academic," but offers a pretty powerful 
> case study of
> a method that strikes me as awfully similar to what Leong and 
> Bodrova are
> doing.  Paley's focus is on stories that the children write 
> and then
> dramatize together, and the focus for behavior is on the 
> constraints of a
> dramatic role.  If you're the daddy in the scenario, you 
> can't throw a
> temper tantrum, and if you're the helicopter, you can only enter 
> the story
> space when your peers agree that a helicopter rescue is needed.
> 
> Elia
> 
> On Sun, Sep 27, 2009 at 10:36 AM, Peter Smagorinsky 
> <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
> > <
> > 
> http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/n/no_child_lef> 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
> > <
> > 
> http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/u/univers> 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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> > http://dss.ucsd.edu/mailman/listinfo/xmca
> >
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