Tag: john dewey

Passing the test of knowing how to talk to kids

Marcie Hull said something toward the beginning of our friendship that told me we would get along well.

When pointing to a couple at a restaurant during one of our first meals together, Marcie said, “He knows how to talk to kids.”

The he of the mixed-sex pair, was presumably the father of the 6 or 7 year old girl sitting between them.

I paused for a moment to eavesdrop on the conversation going on at the other table before asking Marcie what she meant.

I heard the man talking to the child in a voice that was warm, engaged, and likely very similar to the same voice he would use with the woman sitting with him or to a server that happened by.

I asked Marcie if what I was inferring had captured her meaning, and she said it had.

Since that conversation, this has become one of the litmus tests I use the first time I meet adults who work with children. Right or wrong, it is my brain deciphering how much those adults believe children are capable of.

The tone we reserve for babies and pets does not urge children to respond with aspiration.

It is a tone not of equals, but of esteem. Often, adults to who use this tone or register with children are also willing to have conversations with children to help them work through whatever they may misunderstand or question about a situation.

In his book How Children Learn, John Holt brings up this point again and again when describing encounters with children intent upon learning something. A child proffers a question and Holt proffers an answer in a tone he might also offer a colleague of similar age and experience.

His words (and the words I’ve seen Marcie use time and again when helping children work through difficult problems) are perhaps more intricate. They contain fewer assumptions of the shared language of mastery that can build up over time.

This is the tone we should use with our students, those who show up to learn alongside us each day.

They are, as Dewey implied, more immature in their learning, but not in their curiosity about the world.

The tone we reserve for babies and pets does not urge children to respond with aspiration.

I should make the distinction here between tone and content.

There are some who agree with what I’ve written so far with whom I deeply disagree. These are the people who talk to kids in the tone I’m describing, but bring that tone to bear encumbered by the expectations of adulthood. These adults forget the tempest of emotions they likely experienced during their youth and the vulnerability that comes with learning something new or complex like engineering or fitting in to new social situations. They forget they are the adults in the conversation and that the children with whom they are speaking are in their care.

These adults confusing speaking as an adult with speaking to an adult.

That’s unfair.

Working with a new class of ninth graders, Marcie speaks to them with a tone of esteem and respect, but her words also denote an underlying listening that is taking place between each thing she says. She is probing to find out how she can most effectively leverage her own experiences as a technologist, an artist, or a person against the learning taking place without becoming overwhelming.

Holt understood this too. He wrote about answering a child’s questions and accepting when the child wandered off, ready to mess about with something else. He wasn’t angered. He didn’t try to fill the space between them with more and more content as the figurative passing bell chimed. Not only was the tone he used respectful of the people he was interacting with, but he was respectful when they signaled they’d received the answers they needed. I think of this as the same way you or I would accept the signals from adult colleague when they noted they were ready to move on.

I know there are many ways to talk about this, from discussions of register to developmental tones. For me, what helps me keep my thinking centered, is Marcie’s plainly laid out knowing how to talk to kids.

138/365 Teachers will Learn when Teachers Can Play

LEGO blocks

In our conversation around Jim Knight’s Unmistakable Impact, the following question has come up:

What does it look like when we provide an environment where our teachers are “energized, thrilled, and empowered by learning?”

My gut answer is to look toward kindergarten and pre-school. Our earliest, intrinsically-motivated learning comes through play. The students I got to observe briefly yesterday at Spark! pre-school were playing through their ideas of what pieces of the puzzles they were working on went where and could easily fail without worry of reprucussions from their peers or their teammates.

In his investigation of play research with Christopher Vaughan, Stuart Brown outlines what more advanced players do when they realize they could easily dominate the field – they pull back enough so that they still find the activity enjoyable and so that those people they’re playing with are not overwhelmed. The activity remains fun because those playing are doing so to play and learn, not to win. This is what I saw when I noted something not going quite right for the Spark! students. The teacher didn’t jump right in to correct, and the surrounding students offered suggestions, but didn’t feel the need to take over and show. Everyone realized playing is more fun when you get to do.

Knight sees this too, writing, “When we take the humanity out of professional learning, we ignore the complexity of any helping relationship, and we make it almost impossible for learning to occur.”

In a professional space, where the organization has an intention of moving in a certain direction, there is certainly the challenge of feeling as though completely open and free play is not an option.

To this end, I’d turn to Dewey (of course). When he spoke of creating educational experiences for students, Dewey was not advocating a completely hands-off approach such as you might find in an open school.

Dewey recognized there were certain things schools needed to do to accomplish their mission. The key in moving toward these missions is to provide experiences that build on the pasts of learners and accesses what they’re already curious about.

Teachers will be “energized, thrilled, and empowered by learning” when there is space to play aligned with institutional goals and driven by their personal learning experiences and curiosity.

The trouble here is finding the balance and trust necessary to remember the humanity Knight speaks of. If we can remember his “simple plans, with clear goals.” We will move in the right direction.

LEGOS work because the rules are simple and clear: Build something with the blocks by putting them together. The more restrictions we place on what you can build, the less you will be interested in learning what you can build. The more we trust you to follow the simple rules, the more likely you are to build something we’ve never seen before for the benefit of deepening our understanding of what is possible.

Flickr image via Slack pics

85/365 Experts are Necessary

In a conference panel presentation on the crafting of public policy and the policy discussion, the floor is opened to questions from the audience.

Throughout the conversation, mention has been made of how new technologies have opened up pathways for dialogue between policymakers and citizens toward the goal of a more democratic society.

In this vein, an audience member steps up to the microphone and suggests the possibility of crowdsourcing a policy on something like telecommunications or open government policies. “Wouldn’t something like this be the ultimate in democracy?” he asks.

It is a fair question given the direction of the conversation up to this point. The answer, though, is better than the question. It is a stark reminder that, despite the proliferation of information, some of us know things other people don’t.

“I’m not sure how that would work,” one of the panelist responds, “and I think it’s a good idea to remember there are experts on these topics who understand the nuance of these issues.” She points to two fellow panelists who have worked at the highest levels of city and federal government. “I’m glad that we have people like these to whom we can turn for these complex issues.”

In the schools we need, it’s important to remember experts are acceptable.

The most obvious application of this principle is to the role of teachers. In an infopresent age, it is tempting to suggest the death of the expert. When anything from auto repair to ordination can be found within seconds, the roll of the teacher could appear to be hazy. In truth, it has never been more important to bring precision to what we see as the place of the teacher in learning spaces. Those who have paid lip service to their rolls as “facilitators of learning” and “helping students on journeys of discovery” while retaining teaching practices that feature long lectures and worksheets will be forced to decide whether they pass their own muster.

John Dewey had designs on such a role in his thinking on education as he maintained the need for an authority in children’s lives as they learned to help guide them in finding questions worth asking and materials worth utilizing. Learners need experts.

Dewey’s other major goal for education – the crafting of educational experiences – is also more within reach than ever before. Tools and connectivity mean students can take on roles as junior experts in areas they find interesting without committing to a full journeyman model that has then apprenticing for nearly a decade to vocations that they’re only interested in as hobbies.

Here too, experts are valuable. They offer a bar for comparison as students mess about in learning experiences. These bars help students remember they are not experts after completing what David Perkins refers to as the “junior version of the game.” Yes, they’ve gained understanding and ability after participating in the aquisition and synthesis of knowledge, but there’s always more work to be done, and there’s always someone to learn from.

Experts are valuable in the sense that the panelists pointed out in response to the questioner. They help us to navigate some of the more complex nuances of the issues and problems we try to solve. They’re helpful in the classroom in helping to find the right questions to ask and in the organization of learning experiences. Perhaps most importantly, experts help us to understand what we don’t know in a straightforward sense and as a basis for comparison in our own development. The schools we need see and appreciate each of these expert spaces, and the adults and children in these schools know when to turn to experts as they work to turn into experts.