Unfolding thinking: teaching makes you smarter?

How do you know if you've been successful at teaching someone a complex process? Specifically, how do you know if your kids really understand what they're supposed to be learning in school? Perhaps the answer is to have them teach it to someone else.

Petter Kristensen, and Tor Bjerkedal wrote in Science that it is possible that the act of teaching may, in fact, make you smarter. Their claim, through a study of Norwegian kids, is that eldest siblings are, on average, 2.3 IQ points more intelligent than their younger brothers and sisters. And it's not necessarily being born first that makes the difference — it's being raised as the eldest child. What causes the difference? The fact that it's down to social upbringing rather than biological birth order leads Kristensen to think it's because of factors such as parental attention to older siblings, or time that the elders spend tutoring younger sisters and brothers.

Leong and Bodrova illuminate us further:

Through talking and communicating with another person, the gaps and flaws in one's thinking become explicit and accessible to correction. Once concepts are internalized, they may exist in a folded state so that mistakes are not easily revealed. Children may be able to come up with an answer but have only a vague understanding of how they got it. In talking and writing, or drawing for someone else, thought becomes sequential and visible to the thinker. Shared activity forces the participants to clarify and elaborate their thinking and to use language. To communicate to another person, you must be clear and explicit. You have to turn your idea into words and talk until you believe the other person understands you. You are forced to look at different aspects of an idea or task and to take another person's perspective. As a result, more and more sides or characteristics of an object or idea are exposed.

The question is, how do you teach children the idea of how to teach? I suspect the answer lies in how one draws out a child in conversation. If it is difficult for a child to explain something, then it is the parent/teacher/coach's responsibility to break the concepts up as simply as possible until the child can explain their thoughts. Those simple concepts will build on each other ultimately, into complex and coherent systems.

Mozart has a Marketing solution to the Recession?

If you're curious about how Mozart resembles an integrated marketer, look no further than this multi-media piece I co-authored with Judy Franks. The audio streaming from this multi-media piece musically illustrates how the current recession plays out for integrated marketers. You then hear what Mozart's solutions would be.

As for the string quartet performance: I sat in playing second violin with friends of mine from the Chicago Symphony Orchestra: Qing Hou, on first violin, Larry Neuman on viola, and Brant Taylor on 'cello. The exception is when I scored the whole quartet for solo violin. I performed that bit of awkward musical gymnastics.

Assisted Active Learning

More on the Vygotskyian approach to learning:

from Bedrova and Leong:

No learning occurs if the learner is relatively passive - just following the adult's directions. No learning occurs if the learner is not mentally active. All participants, whether they are equal or unequal in knowledge, must be mentally engaged, or the activity will not be shared. With sharing, playing or working next to each other is not enough. The participants must communicate with each other by speaking, drawing, writing, or using another medium. Without rich verbal, written, or other kinds of exchanges, sharing will not produce the highest level of assistance possible. Language and interaction create the shared experience.

I think of Daniel Coyle's deep practice idea, describing how the learner must engage in highly focused, mental stretching. The learner/deep practicer is always seeking feedback. In this Vygotsyian context, the parent/coach/teacher must engage the student and teach them to give as well as demand feedback which ultimately influences their progress.

Metacognition

Thinking about thinking, or self-awareness, as metacognitive thinking is called, is the ultimate goal for Vygotsky's highest mental functioning. In children, this leads to more deliberate actions, and less moving towards the flashing light or shiny object.

from Bodrova and Leong:

Young children lacking deliberateness react to the loudest noise or the most colorful picture. When children acquire higher mental functions, they direct their behavior to the environment most pertinent to solving a problem.

In terms of listening, isn't this the same idea as focusing one's attention on whom you are listening to, while mindful of setting aside your own judgments, as well as the inclination to interrupt with one's own thoughts?

Vygotskyian approach to learning

After having my interest piqued by the NYT magazine article about the right kinds of play teaching self-control, and blogging about it in Listening in Kindergarten, I've decided to dig deeper into the Vygotskyian school of psychology and education. Vedrova and Leong's book, Tools of the Mind, lays out Vygotsky's vision for teaching self-regulation through a social context. Tools of the Mind starts out with the idea that humans separated themselves from primates by our use of tools. Vygotsky claims the mantle of "tools of the mind" by articulating how educators use the social context of "scaffolding" to increase a child's abilty to navigate their social context.

Vedrova and Leong:

Vedrova and Leong:Social context plays a central role in development, becuase it is critical for the acquisition of mental processes. Vygotsky's unique contribution was to see the possibility of the sharing of higher mental processes. Mental processes not only exist internally to the individual but can occur in an exchange among several people. Children learn or acquire mental process by sharing, or using it when interacting with others. Only after this period of shared experience can the child internalize and use the mental process independently.


Scaffolding in this sense means adults sharing information about increasingly sophisticated processes (in a facilitative manner) while interacting (playing) with kids.

Expertise and experience count for something

Christopher Kimball writes an opEd in the NYT about the shuttering of Gourmet Magazine:

The shuttering of Gourmet reminds us that in a click-or-die advertising marketplace, one ruled by a million instant pundits, where an anonymous Twitter comment might be seen to pack more resonance and useful content than an article that reflects a lifetime of experience, experts are not created from the top down but from the bottom up. They can no longer be coronated; their voices have to be deemed essential to the lives of their customers. That leaves, I think, little room for the thoughtful, considered editorial with which Gourmet delighted its readers for almost seven decades.

To survive, those of us who believe that inexperience rarely leads to wisdom need to swim against the tide, better define our brands, prove our worth, ask to be paid for what we do, and refuse to climb aboard this ship of fools, the one where everyone has an equal voice. Google “broccoli casserole” and make the first recipe you find. I guarantee it will be disappointing. The world needs fewer opinions and more thoughtful expertise — the kind that comes from real experience, the hard-won blood-on-the-floor kind. I like my reporters, my pilots, my pundits, my doctors, my teachers and my cooking instructors to have graduated from the school of hard knocks.

The incompatible nature of expertise and artistry with the marketplace of the Lowest common denominator is rooted in the culture of convenience. It is the same clash of slow food and fast food. Sitting still to listen thoughtfully to a concert vs. having a sensory explosion experience with 100 decibals. The irony of technology making life easier for us, is the atrophying of our patience to think about something not easily understood. The cultivation of the complex is the casualty.

Listening in Kindergarten

I was reading in the September 27 issue of the New York Times Magazine about how certain kinds of dramatic play develops cognitive function in pre-K and kindergarten aged children. The idea is that certain structured dramatic play stimulates cognitive-self regulation, rather than externally induced behavioral regulation.
The author, Paul Tough, writes:

"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."

Tough describes the work of Leong and Bodrova, who examine this role of self-regulation in children:

"Over the past 15 years, Deborah Leong and Elena Bodrova, scholars of child development based in Denver, have developed a program called Tools of the Mind, 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. 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 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.

Dramatic play, believed to improve cognitive self-control, is a central part of the Tools of the Mind curriculum.

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, 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."

Full disclosure: I have 2 children ages 4 and 6, where I observe all kinds of examples of this behavior at home.

I have witnessed dramatic play with my kids that resembles chaos, and play where I swear that I was witnessing the beginning of self-directed cooperation. The Times magazine article talks about how dramatic play is where self- narrative enables children to posses a larger capacity for controlling their own behavior. They are playing a role, and their specific narratives allows them to fit specific behavioral norms into their character. The multi-stimuli of their normal world is filtered by the rules of the character they are playing. For example, if the child is playing a fireman, they can only do and say what a fireman does. The very practice of this strengthens their abilty to filter out distractions when inhabiting their real-life personas. Perhaps this kind of play myelinates the cognitive pathways that helps them ultimately resist every new enticing stimulus that would distract them from performing well in their lives.

I find this idea to have many implications for how we can practice engaged listening. If our child's narrative or role is to practice observing a set of rules for how they interact, they are practicing how to control the filters of the inputs and outputs of their minds. They are practicing listening and expressing themselves under a set of rules that they consciously impose for themselves. There is a choice, or mindfullness in this. Perhaps it is difficult, as adults to practice the discipline of engaged listening, (while holding our judgement to the side when considering an external idea). What if our "play" narrative is to be the character who is the engaged listener? Are we able to listen, and think in a way consistent with this listening character we are trying on? It is a new interpretation of Descartes, I think, therefore I am?
"I think I am a listener, therefore, I am a listener."