It seems perfectly reasonable that learning how to play a role
gives
us practice at regulating our behavior, or perhaps better put:
at
acting in the service of some larger goal or longer-term
activity.
When this is done collaboratively and cooperatively, and with
buy-in
by all participants, when we enjoy doing it and want to do it,
it
seems pretty worthwhile. And for many reasons, not just
improving the
"self-control" of working class children or kids who don't fit
the
middle class norms of behavior.
How to facilitate this seems like a worthwhile research area.
But I can't help but wonder about the politics, not of the Tools
of
the Mind approach as such, but of the desire for tools to
replace
external control (expensive, visibly oppressive) with inner self-
regulation (cheap, invisible and hard to resist) in the context
of a
corporatist economy whose biggest problem at the moment seems to
be
getting a labor supply which is both docile and capable of
complex
symbolic value-production. Capital has to be itching for modes
of
education that will increase symbolic skills (multi-
literacies)
without increasing critical resistance to the status quo.
The last big push in this direction, under the misdirecting name
of
"accountability" (and in the US, No Child Left Behind), was to
very
strictly and specifically regulate exactly what skills were to
be
learned and enforce this through testing. Submitting to the
curriculum
and testing regime was supposed to maintain docility, while the
skills
were kept as far from anything "critical" as possible (and I
include
creative as one road to critical).
It didn't really work because it couldn't stimulate higher
mental
functions and still keep everything under control, and its
approach to
the former was too "academic" and middle-class dispositionally
and
culturally to expand the pool of potential symbolic-value workers.
So I worry that what might initially be empowering for children,
to
learn to play roles in big dramas of their own (partial)
devising,
because they like doing it, could so easily become an education
for
docility skills, a preparation to play the role of good producer
and
good consumer in dramas designed by others for their, not our,
profit.
If I were doing research on these experimental classrooms, I'd
be
paying particular attention to the supports for children's
creative
involvement in designing, managing, writing, changing the
dramas, and
for how power relations intersect with play constraints.
Empowerment
isn't empowering if you don't wind up with more power, and
just
because you can better self-regulate does not mean you have
more
power. Even if it is a necessity for the effective use of the
power
you've got, much (but not all ) of the time.
JAY.
PS. In this context, what would be some practical precursors
of
_critical_ involvement?
Jay Lemke
Professor (Adjunct)
Educational Studies
University of Michigan
Ann Arbor, MI 48109
www.umich.edu/~jaylemke
On Sep 27, 2009, at 7:36 AM, Peter Smagorinsky 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> 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> '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> 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> 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> 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> 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."
_______________________________________________
xmca mailing list
xmca@weber.ucsd.edu
http://dss.ucsd.edu/mailman/listinfo/xmca
_______________________________________________
xmca mailing list
xmca@weber.ucsd.edu
http://dss.ucsd.edu/mailman/listinfo/xmca