Book review: The Importance of Being Little

Practice makes progress. My 4-year-old is learning this. If you work at it, you’ll get better. It’s an important lesson for kids. But while practice makes progress, it doesn’t make new, according to Wharton professor Adam Grant in a recent New York Times op-ed. In other words, it doesn’t foster creativity. 

Expertise relies on depth of knowledge. People can get really good at something with a lot of practice, but it doesn't necessarily lead to something new. Creativity, Grant points out, relies on both depth and breadth of knowledge. Grant urges parents to back off a bit. He says "creativity may be hard to nurture, but it's easy to thwart." Focus on values rather than rules and respond to the intrinsic motivation of your children. Give them guidance, facilitate practice, but give them the room to discover and explore interests. Let them go into the weeds to see what's there.  

It was Grant's article that I kept coming back to as I read Erika Christakis' book, The Importance of Being Little: What Preschoolers Really Need from Grown Ups. Christakis reflects on her experiences as an early childhood educator and offers guidance about closing the gap between schooling and learning, two things she laments are often not aligned. Young children have the capacity for tremendous growth, learning, and creativity, but rather than focus on those dimensions of learning most crucial to development, standardization (increasingly even at the preschool level) has led to a focus on "skills and metrics that look nice on paper but don't really tell us much about what individual human beings do." 

Christakis, like Grant, urges us to back off. Only she is talking to all of us: parents, educators, politicians, pundits, and anyone else responsible for schooling but not focused on learning.

To be sure, Christakis doesn't succumb to the either/or dilemma John Dewey lamented in Experience and Education. Namely, that one must choose between traditional or progressive instructional ideas. Like Dewey, she argues for recognition of the intermediate possibilities. 

And that's one of the most valuable lessons of the book. Christakis attempts to articulate what occupying the middle space would look like for the preschool world. While she notes that "getting out of the way is often the best thing we can do for a young child," her book makes the point that child-centered doesn't mean unstructured. Just the opposite. It takes tremendous effort and expertise to design and facilitate learning environments that take into account the intermediate possibilities. 

Christakis argues that among the obstacles we face in changing how we think about early childhood education is changing the way we think about childhood. One unintended consequence of advances in the understanding about individuality is what Christakis calls the "fragmentation" of childhood. Rather than looking at childhood holistically, as a period of life through which all people go and in which variances could be considered normal, our learning has narrowed the focus from childhood as a thing unto itself to childhood as a collection of discrete parts, resulting in labels that she fears may be inhibiting or leading to some of the obstacles put in the way of children. Behaviors, personality traits, learning styles, disorders, and symptoms, while, on the one hand, reveal much about the human experience and have led to appropriate, helpful treatments also lead to labels that perhaps, on the other hand, result in restrictive learning environments and undermine children's confidence or freedom to learn. 

"The human brain appears unwilling to zoom in on both the background and the foreground at the same time," she writes. "So, at every level of observation, we are missing something - the big picture or the small parts - and there is always a cost to observing only one."

What's the cost? 

American scores in creative thinking measures have declined in the last 20 years with the greatest declines occurring among elementary and early secondary aged children. Kyung Hee Kim of the College of William and Mary found that children’s ability to produce ideas has significantly decreased. Children have become less verbally expressive, less imaginative, less perceptive, and less able to connect seemingly irrelevant things. Kim suggests the causes include children’s diminishing freedom to participate in the mental processes required for creativity and their diminishing ability to assess themselves apart from the assessment of others (internal locus of evaluation).

I think this is reflected in what Christakis observed in The Importance of Being Little. 

While explicit and systematic instruction is effective for "imparting intentional knowledge," young children "learn primarily from their relationships" and benefit from opportunities to be creative. For Christakis, creativity means "a sense of generativity" or a child's desire to be productive. "Creative, generative children feel confident that they can create meaning - whether from an idea or even a relationship - because they see a world of possibility and see themselves as capable of unlocking that promise."

Creative. Confident. Capable. Sounds like a pretty good outcome to me. ★★★★★

• Christakis, E. (2016). The importance of being little: What preschoolers really need from grownups, New York: Penguin Random House.  
• Kim, K. H. (2011). The Creativity Crisis: The Decrease in Creative Thinking Scores on the Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking. Creativity Research Journal, 23(4), 285–295. doi:10.1080/10400419.2011.627805

'Good-old fashioned' not enough

The French microbiologist Louis Pasteur and the British surgeon Joseph Lister made extraordinary contributions to the world in the 19^thcentury. Pasteur's work in microbiology provided support for the germ theory of disease and advanced the concept of vaccination. Lister was the first to develop antiseptic surgical methods. He introduced the use of carbolic acid to sterilize surgical instruments and to clean wounds, which made surgery safer for patients. Before the introduction of vaccination and antisepsis, people commonly died due to unsanitary conditions in the home, or following surgery, or even childbirth. These breakthroughs in medicine have saved millions of lives and are among the greatest discoveries of the 19^th century.

Today, when you need medical care you would want a practitioner whose training accounted for the contributions of these two men. My guess is, however, you would not actually want one of these two men providing your care, or anyone from the 19^th century for that matter. After all, much learning has taken place since then.

I read an article recently that suggests it's time to revive good, old-fashioned education. This makes me nervous. Not because good old fashioned is bad. It’s not. Pasteur and Lister are old-fashioned by today’s standards. I worry that good old fashioned education does not account for new learning, for today’s context.

Journalist Joanne Lipman asserts, in a piece published in the Wall Street Journal, Why Tough Teachers Get Good Results, that “a kinder, gentler philosophy” has errantly “dominated American education over the past few decades” and that "conventional wisdom holds that teachers are supposed to tease knowledge out of students…” and that “projects and collaborative learning are applauded…” while “...traditional methods like lecturing and memorization--derided as 'drill and kill'-- are frowned upon, dismissed as a surefire way to suck young minds dry of creativity and motivation."

She argues that this so-called conventional wisdom is wrong. The problem with this position?

First, projects and collaboration are not conventional. The individual's ability to recall, in fact, is still the most highly valued skill in most schools. Lecturing and direct instruction are still the most prevalent instructional methods. And memorization is still the most common cognitive student activity. So any conclusion that practices that include projects and collaboration are not working is, at best, incomplete.

But there is a bigger problem with her argument. She frames this discussion as an either/or proposition. That somehow we must choose between what we know and what we are learning. Ironically, her argument about learning does not account for, well, learning. While Lipman outlines a number of interesting discoveries across the social sciences, her synthesis does not support the argument that good old fashioned education is enough.

The reason?

It's not an either/or proposition. It's not memorization or inquiry. It's not lecturing or projects. It's not independent practice or collaboration. It's not having kind teachers or demanding teachers.

It's all of them.

Lipman’s argument is not wrong. It just falls short. Good old fashioned in education is not enough. Not anymore.

Here’s my two cents on some of what she presents:

Lipman writes about rote learning...
"Rote learning, long discredited, is now recognized as one reason that children whose families come from India (where memorization is still prized) are creaming their peers in the National Spelling Bee Championship."

My two cents...
Rote learning has not been discredited. It simply is one kind of learning, probably quite relevant if your goal is to win a spelling bee. Relevant, but not sufficient, if your goal is to develop the capacity to invent something, produce a great piece of writing, start a company, or pass a modern standardized test to graduate high school.

Lipman writes about memorization... 
"William Klemm of Texas A&M University argues that the U.S. needs to reverse the bias against memorization. Even the U.S. Department of Education raised alarm bells, chastising American schools in a 2008 report that bemoaned the lack of math fluency (a notion it mentioned no fewer than 17 times). It concluded that schools need to embrace the dreaded 'drill and practice.'"

My two cents...
Now, if not so much the U.S. Department of Education, I certainly do love Texas A&M University (Whoop! '95), but there is no bias against memorization in education. This doesn't even really make sense. Memory is a good thing. I'm using mine right now. Cognitively, memory is the residue of thought. The more you think about something, the more likely you are to remember it. Rote learning is a memorization technique. It's great if the goal is to recall. And recall is necessary if one is to think. But in schools, we too often stop at recall. We also need to ask students to think, to recall information for a larger purpose. By helping students acquire knowledge and then asking them to use it to analyze problems, research, and develop solutions, we are asking them to think, which in turn improves the likelihood they will remember what they are thinking about. Ironic, isn't it?

Lipman writes about praise...
"Praise makes you weak..."

My two cents...
This is an incomplete analysis. It is true there is good research to suggest praise that supports the fixed mindset (that you are what you are and you can't do anything about it) inhibits confidence building and self determination. But praise that supports a growth mindset (that you are what you work for) facilitates greater confidence. It's not whether you praise or not, it's how you praise. Praise can make you weak, but it can also make you strong.

Lipman writes about complex problems...
"...American students struggle with complex math problems because, as research makes abundantly clear, they lack fluency in basic addition and subtraction—and few of them were made to memorize their times tables."

My two cents...
This is a good point, an example of the necessity of rote learning and the reality that it is not enough. Solving complex math problems requires that students develop automaticity in basic mathematics functions. They need to be able to recall without working at it. Rote learning of the times tables is probably a good idea. But complex problems require critical thinking. You have to have knowledge to think critically; to analyze, to conceptualize, to create. So it's not either/or, it's both.

Lipman writes about creativity...
"The rap on traditional education is that it kills children's' creativity. But Temple University psychology professor Robert W. Weisberg's research suggests just the opposite. Prof. Weisberg has studied creative geniuses including Thomas Edison, Frank Lloyd Wright and Picasso—and has concluded that there is no such thing as a born genius. Most creative giants work ferociously hard and, through a series of incremental steps, achieve things that appear (to the outside world) like epiphanies and breakthroughs."

My two cents...
Right! Geniuses aren't generally born. Thomas Edison worked hard as did Frank Lloyd Wright and Picasso. But I doubt rote learning got Edison to the phonograph, or Lloyd Wright to the Prairie House, or Picasso to cubism, or Albert Einstein to the theory of relativity. Einstein, whose success was predicated on imagination, thought, and creativity, had his richest educational experience at a school in Aarau, Switzerland where rote drills, memorization, and force-fed facts were avoided and hands-on observations, visual imagery, and conceptual thinking were promoted. Now that’s a theory!

Lipman writes about grit...
In recent years, University of Pennsylvania psychology professor Angela Duckworth has studied spelling bee champs, Ivy League undergrads and cadets at the U.S. Military Academy in West Point, N.Y.—all together, over 2,800 subjects. In all of them, she found that grit—defined as passion and perseverance for long-term goals—is the best predictor of success. In fact, grit is usually unrelated or even negatively correlated with talent.

My two cents...
This is good stuff. But the question is where does passion and perseverance--or grit-- come from? In the study referenced by Lipman, Angela Duckworth cites the work of Benjamin Bloom regarding the development of world class pianists, neurologists, swimmers, chess players, mathematicians, and sculptors. Bloom observed that in every studied field, high achievers had a strong interest in the particular field in which they excelled. In other words, it was meaningful to them. Self-determination theory helps to put grit into context. According to SDT, intrinsic motivation develops when people, in the pursuit of something, are able to feel competent, connected to others, and in control of their own behaviors and goals. When people experience these three things, they become self-determined and are able to be intrinsically motivated to pursue the things that interest them, to persevere in the face of difficulty… to show grit. Furthermore, while extrinsic rewards are strongly linked to low level tasks, intrinsic motivation is more strongly associated with complex, creative endeavors. In fact, extrinsic rewards can undermine creativity. Therefore, grit, in the pursuit of learning, seems most likely to appear when the work learners are doing is challenging and personally meaningful.

Duckworth closed her research findings about grit by reminding us that the goal of education is not just to learn a little about a lot but also a lot about a little. Not one or the other, not either/or, but both.

“Good old-fashioned” can get us a little about a lot, but that’s not enough. Not anymore.

• Deci, E. L., Koestner, R., & Ryan, R. M. (2001). Extrinsic Rewards and Intrinsic Motivation in Education: Reconsidered Once Again. Review of Educational Research, 71(1), 1–27. 
• Dewey, J. (1938). Experience & Education. New York, NY: Kappa Delta Pi
• Duckworth, A., Matthews, M., Kelly, D., & Peterson, C. (2007). Grit: Perseverance and Passion for Long-Term Goals, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 92, (6), 1087–1101
• Hattie, J. (2009). Visible learning: A synthesis of over 800 meta-analyses relating to achievement. New York: Routledge.
• Isaacson, W. (2007). Einstein: His Life and Universe. New York: Simon & Schuster
• Kim, K. H. (2011). The Creativity Crisis: The Decrease in Creative Thinking Scores on the Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking. Creativity Research Journal, 23(4), 285–295. doi:10.1080/10400419.2011.627805
• Mangels, J. A.; Butterfield, B.; Lamb, J.; Good, C.; Dweck, C. (2006). "Why do beliefs about intelligence influence learning success? A social cognitive neuroscience model". Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience 1 (2): 75–86.
• Schlechty, P. (2011). Engaging Students: The Next Level of Working on the Work, Wiley, John & Sons, Inc.
• Willingham, D. (2009). Why don’t students like school? A cognitive scientist answers questions about how the mind works and what it means for the classroom, San Francisco, CA: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.  

What about teacher engagement?

In Todd Whitaker's parable, The Ball, teacher Annie Erickson realizes she has forgotten what is most important to her in her work. She realizes she is not connecting with her students, and she recognizes the students are not invested in the work she creates for them.

"When I first started teaching," she began, "I loved coming to school every day. Every aspect of my work was fun. I especially loved teaching students about life, and I tried to bring that into the  classroom whenever I could. We had some wonderful lessons. 

"But the best part of the day for me didn't take place in the classroom at all. It was recess! It wasn't that I wanted a break from teaching. I just loved going outside with the children to play...I loved interacting with my students."

While participating in a discussion about this book with colleagues recently, I recognized that what Annie was describing in the parable relates to the psychological needs we all have to feel autonomous, competent, and emotionally connected to others in our work. Ms. Erickson was talking about the elements of self-determination that predict engagement, especially the need for relatedness. Ms. Erickson seemed to no longer be engaged. 

While Annie Erickson's description of her problem reflected issues related to all the needs addressed by self-determination theory (the need for autonomy, competence, and relatedness), her greatest regret seemed to be what she perceived as a diminishing personal relationship between herself and her students.

A study published this year in the Journal of Educational Psychology sought to understand the influence of relatedness with colleagues and relatedness with students on teacher engagement. The authors, believing that teaching is unique among professions due to its reliance on the establishment of "long-term, meaningful connections with the 'clients' of the work environment" because of the amount time they spend with students each day, conducted three related experiments analyzing teachers' relatedness with their colleagues and teachers' relatedness with their students.

The authors found that autonomy support (climates in which principals encourage teacher empowerment) was positively related to teacher's relatedness with colleagues and students. Furthermore, all three experiments, using three different measures, found relatedness with students was a significant predictor of workplace engagement among teachers and facilitated higher levels of enjoyment and lower levels of anxiety, anger, and emotional exhaustion among teachers. Also, it was the connection with students rather than with colleagues that was more strongly associated with teacher engagement. These results were true among both elementary and secondary teachers.

The idea that teacher engagement can be enhanced by their connections with students is not surprising and is found throughout the research. However, in addition to losing focus on connecting with her students, Annie Erickson expressed frustration with greater demands on her time due to school, district, and state mandates. She had lost a sense of autonomy in her work. The idea that autonomy support is strongly correlated with relatedness between teachers and students is new in the research and, if true, has implications for those designing the various systems of educational workplace environments, since the research also shows that the relationship between teachers and students is the most significant factor in student learning once students enter the school building.

• Klassen, R., Frenzle, A., & Perry, N. (2012). Teachers' relatedness with students: An underemphasized component of teacher' basic psychological needs. Journal of Educational Psychology, 104(1), 150-165.
• Whitaker, T. (2010). The Ball. Bloomington, IN: Triple Nickle Press.

How can educators identify engagement in their students?

I served as a judge recently in our school district's junior high National History Day competition, and while the projects we evaluated were all very good, I was most impressed by the work of students who were able to connect their learning to personal experiences. National History Day is a curricular program that involves students in discovery, critical analysis, interpretation, and creativity. Students operate within a theme to produce dramatic performances, exhibits, multimedia documentaries, websites, and research papers - all elements of academic work that most parents and educators believe is important for students. The students I talked to found meaning in the work they were doing. They were emotionally invested in their projects. They were engaged. How do I know this? They told me.

There is much to be learned from the National History Day framework when thinking about how to design engaging learning experiences for students. However, research, analysis, collaboration, independent study, creating products, and reporting findings are learning activities. They represent conceptual, pedagogical elements of a learning environment that can potentially be cognitively engaging for students but do not, in and of themselves, facilitate student engagement. The authors of a recent study in the Journal of Youth and Adolescence that analyzed factors that facilitate student engagement would refer to them as objective indicators. They argue that learning environments are evaluated differently depending on "a variety of psychological and ecological characteristics of the student and the setting" so that any consideration of engagement must include the student's perceptions of the learning environment.

The authors use self-determination theory (SDT) to analyze engagement. SDT asserts that self-regulation and self-motivation are driven by psychological needs to feel autonomous, competent, and emotionally connected to others. In other words, there is an emotional aspect to engagement that requires educators to understand how students will interact with the objective indicators of instructional design. Defining emotional engagement as students' affective response to learning activities and the people involved in those activities, the authors sought to understand the connection between students' perceived fulfillment of their needs for autonomy, competence, and relatedness and their engagement in particular learning contexts. The authors used the Experience Sampling Method (ESM) to collect data from individual students while they were participating in various learning environments over a three-year period to better understand how engagement may fluctuate depending on a student's environment.

The authors found that emotional engagement was unstable across learning environments when analyzing individual student variation. For each student, perceptions of autonomy, competence, and relatedness within a particular setting informed their level of engagement. To the extent that these needs were perceived by students to have been met within an individual learning context, they were engaged in that context. The authors also found this to be true "over and above the effects of students' gender, race/ethnicity and achievement level."

I think this study has some implications for schools that are seeking to find ways to engage their students. First, engagement is not an objective measure but depends heavily on subjective concepts like meaning, confidence, and connection. The fluidity of emotional engagement across contexts suggests that the inclusion of only objective indicators of engaged learning (the actual activities) is not enough. The work of instructional designers should also account for the subjective elements of emotional engagement. Education is a people business not a product business.

Second, an encouraging implication is the idea that the design of learning contexts that account for student needs for autonomy, competence, and relatedness are relevant with diverse student populations and among students at various levels of achievement. While there are variables that are outside of the school's control, this finding is encouraging because it suggests that many of these variables may be less powerful than the contextual factors over which schools do have control.

Finally, this study is a great process model for showing educators how they can identify engagement in their students. The long and short of it? Just ask them.

• Park, S., Holloway, S. D., Arendtsz, A., Bempechat, J., & Li, J. (2012). What makes students engaged in learning? A time-use study of within- and between-individual predictors of emotional engagement in low-performing high schools. Journal of youth and adolescence, 41(3), 390–401. doi:10.1007/s10964-011-9738-3