Helping Children Learn

Contributions to a Cognitive Curriculum

Sara Meadows, Asher Cashdan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351815901
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education Theory & Practice

Originally published in 1988, this volume presented a new understanding of how teachers in early childhood education helped children learn. It carefully and critically reviews different teaching approaches, and evaluates two innovatory teaching techniques which were at the focus of recent action research studies and which complemented the traditional early childhood curriculum at the time.

The book is intended for all those concerned with early education, including students in initial training or those doing inservice courses for children between 3 and 7. Its contents will still be of relevance to people interested in playgroups and parent education.

CHAPTER 1

Introduction

The concern of this book is how we may help young children learn in nursery schools and similar settings. We do not present an entirely new curriculum for early childhood education, for the good reason that there is much that is excellent in the existing curriculum. Nor do we offer a theory of how young children learn that is radically different from earlier theories, for similar reasons. What we are proposing is a shift in emphasis in both curriculum and the theory that justifies it. We are doing so because we believe that what is normally done in nursery schools and classes (and in playgroups and in infant school reception classes) is enjoyable and useful but not, perhaps, quite fulfilling our high hopes for its educational potential.

We are in full sympathy with the long-standing and important aims of early childhood education: to facilitate the social, physical, intellectual, cultural and emotional development of children; to enhance and complement the contributions of their homes; to ready them for the years of compulsory schooling; to begin to ameliorate the effects of disadvantage. We regard these as part of what should be one of society’s highest priorities – the care and education of its youngest members. Undoubtedly nursery teachers are making an important contribution to these goals. They are doing so in a spirit of warm commitment, busily doing marvels of creativity with limited resources, lovingly supporting children and families under stress despite the considerable strain of their responsibility for twenty or thirty active small children. Their job would certainly be made easier if there were, simply, more staff and less need to ‘make do and mend’, though staff management takes up time and teachers rightly take pride in their creative improvisations – the ‘1001 things to do with an eggbox’ game! However, even without the improvements in resources and prestige which we would like to see, we think there are things not at present often done which, used more widely, could enhance children’s experience in the nursery classroom. The aim of this book is to present two possible extensions of the traditional early childhood curriculum, justifying their usefulness by looking at what goes on in the ordinary nursery regime and what effects can be seen, and at ideas about young children and their learning.

Both our proposed innovations have long pedigrees, and bear some resemblance to elements of ‘normal good practice’. This is as it should be. Apart from innovations dependent on new technology and science, most creativity in education (and elsewhere) involves a more harmonious rearrangement of things that were already known about. It is the reader’s job to consider our suggestions rather than to say ‘we already do that’. It may be useful to compare what ‘we already do’ with what has worked well elsewhere, and, in the case of our two curriculum innovations, has been evaluated rather more systematically than practitioners can easily do in day-to-day practice.

Both our innovations involve language, but not with the development of language skills as a main or only goal. We are firmly committed to the view that language is a crucial tool for learning for 3–5 year olds, as it is for older children and adults, but that does not mean we ought to be concentrating solely on teaching children about language or even how to use it. We want to see not children acquiring more and better language for its own sake but children using language for important purposes and, in so doing, improving their language skills. Sometimes, certainly, there is need to stop the use and look at the tools and how they are being used, but then this should be done explicitly. Objectives for the teacher should be offered as objectives for the child. Too many covert intentions, too much ‘hidden curriculum’, will be demoralising for all concerned and may make the intended learning less likely.

We are recommending curriculum innovations that have at their core two specialised uses of language – the tutorial dialogue and the enjoyment of literature. These may be unfamiliar ways of using language for some children. We do not associate ourselves with those who regard ‘unfamiliar’ as meaning ‘deficit’. Very few children have defective language development, as we discuss later. Some are well-practised in answering display questions; others may be more familiar with using language to tease and tell jokes. Some may never have lacked a book to look at and an adult to read it to them; others may not have been read to or told stories. Almost all can, nevertheless, use language in much the same range of different ways. If they do not show their competence in school, this does not necessarily mean that it is altogether lacking. The differences in their earlier experience lead to differences in what use they can at first make of school’s facilities, not to broad linguistic or cognitive deficits in and beyond education. The task of the teacher is to make sure that children’s experience of the classroom does not deter them from using language at least as competently as they do elsewhere. We will see later that there is evidence that it is difficult for teachers to do this, that many teacher-child conversations are artificial, mundane or fragmentary. Our curriculum innovations help get round this problem and do facilitate better language use. As we said earlier, however, their main focus is not teaching language. Tutorial dialogue and literacy are crucial components of later education, and some early familiarisation may perhaps be helpful, particularly for children nearing their entry into compulsory schooling. However, we see the main value of our innovations as being in their allowing a more fruitful interchange between teaching and learning, two activities whose relatedness has recently come to be seen in a new way.

The ‘transmission’ model of teaching and learning dominated much of formal education, even the education of young children, until relatively recently. Children were there to be told: if they were told, they should then know. Failure to learn could then be attributed to the child’s laziness or inattention or poor ability, or to poor transmission on the part of the teacher. Such a model was realised physically in the arrangement of the classroom – quiet children sitting in neat rows, all facing the one, talking, teacher. The larger their ears and the better they were pointed in the right direction, the more successfully they would learn what the teacher was teaching, or so the model said. In the latter part of the nineteenth century, 3–5 year olds were taught like this, and of course some education is provided like this still. In early childhood education, however, the transmission model gave way to a much more child-centred view of the learning process, dominant now for the last forty or fifty years. Here the responsibility for actions leading to learning is transferred very largely to the children themselves. The teacher’s role is seen to be that of guide, friend, counsellor, facilitator. Teacher intervention should be of the gentlest kind, the teacher’s main skill lying in the provision of appropriate materials for learning, and the structuring of the classroom context, both social and intellectual, so as to make learning more likely and attractive. Any intervention should follow careful observation of the child’s spontaneous activities and should typically involve suggestions for the use of particular material, such as a new way of playing with water which will help the child leave an unproductive or repetitive routine or take up a new opportunity.

While this is a more appealing model than the transmission one, so far as early childhood education is concerned, both models deny the teacher a full role in the most demanding aspect of assisting in a child’s education, that of operating at a high level of skill as a teacher. This is because both models are one sided, the two separate aspects of what is really a twin process (as English terminology obscures by contrasting ‘teaching’ and ‘learning’, but Russian underlines by using the word ‘obuchenie’ for both). Both are essentially soft options. It is extremely easy to stand in front of people and tell them things if you assume that their failure to remember or act on what you have transmitted is their fault not yours. It is also comparatively easy to provide a fertile environment and make it the responsibility of the learner to grow in it. To take on a fair share of the whole teaching-learning process, to teach somebody something that they do not already know, is really rather difficult. Close observation of what happens in classrooms has suggested that it doesn’t happen all that often. Either the task proves so easy that the pupil can successfully perform it already, and it may be the teacher who has learned (about the pupil’s skills) rather than the pupil; or the task proves so difficult that only an enormous amount of teacher skill and time will help the pupil to succeed at it. In the first situation the teacher’s professional skills are irrelevant; in the second they are certainly necessary but the pressures of classroom life all too often mean they cannot be deployed successfully.

We are concerned to make events in the middle band more frequent and more successful. We see the best teaching and learning occurring when there are tasks correctly tailored to the child’s level and need, which, with the help of an intelligent and experienced expert (that is, a trained teacher), the child can handle successfully. Teachers have the theoretical and practical knowledge of learning, of how it occurs and where it goes wrong, that enables them both to have a good sense of what the learner is doing and to adjust the learning task and its context to maximise success. Doing this is the essential core of teaching – to do less is an abdication, to do more is to risk forcing events. While we all are used to making adjustments of this sort in everyday conversation, where we automatically monitor the success of our communications, the professional skills of teachers give them an advantage over nonprofessionals such as parents, important though the latter are in the education of children. Parents have, ideally, the advantage of a natural context for learning, shared interests and purposes, detailed knowledge of their children, time to spend with them as individuals and an interest (sometimes too pushy an interest) in the children’s achieving the goals they have set themselves. If teachers can gain some of these advantages, they can bring their professional skills to bear more fruitfully. One of the strengths of our curriculum innovations is that they provide shared context and interests, and so facilitate the ‘matching’ of teaching and learning.

They do so across the subject curriculum. The literary-centred curriculum is obviously an important component in learning about language, literacy and the arts, but its story centre can also serve as a motivator for scientific, mathematical and practical work. Similarly the dialogue approach has been allied to ‘scientific’ problem solving, offering strengths in careful observation and experimentation, but it can pervade the whole curriculum. We believe that what is needed for the best curriculum for early learning is a core of techniques and practices that allow the teacher to develop a fine-grained analysis of the strengths and needs of the children, and to train the children to satisfy these needs themselves. This means a structuring of the whole classroom environment so that it is conducive to intellectual development, a fit place for the self-running problem solvers we want the children to be; a structuring that will also enable the teacher to spend much more time facilitating the children’s learning rather than managing the environment. Our approaches should be not separable parts of the curriculum but part of the whole texture of the activities and relationships shared by teacher and children.

CHAPTER 2

‘Mainstream Good Practice’: Is There a Discrepancy between Hope and Achievement?

The mainstay of early childhood education has been the provision of opportunities for supervised, but freely chosen, play for children. The adults concerned – teachers, nursery nurses, playgroup personnel and so forth – decide on materials and activities. They set them out and let the children choose what to play with, sometimes suggesting an activity to an underoccupied child, sometimes telling children that they must wait to take their turn with a popular activity. Adult supervision ranges from tight control over activities that children cannot manage alone, via intervention as needed to support or extend what a child is doing, to ‘just keeping an eye on’ activities that don’t seem to need much adult attention. Most commonly it is a discreet supervision making sure that no one comes to grief. Children choose their own activities and develop them, by and large, as they themselves elect. Adults do not often direct play, though they may suggest new possibilities or keep the child’s developments within the bounds set by considerations like not inconveniencing other people; they rarely play themselves, beyond a brief response to a child’s invitation to join in pretend play or a little modelling of art activities such as making plasticine models. The adults have thought about what materials and activities are desirable and what their educational potential is, and try to provide both activities at the level particular children ‘need’ and a ‘balanced menu’ for the whole group. This menu is likely to include opportunities to paint and draw, to play with bricks and construction toys, to role play in a Wendy house or other setting, to do puzzles and investigative or thinking games, to play with sand, clay or water, to look at books and to play with model toys and dolls. There may also be school-like activities such as tracing or reading flashcards and craft activities such as assembling Easter Bunnies, which have more direction from adults, and opportunities for gross motor play on swings, bicycles and so forth, which are less supervised. Each day some activity is offered which could contribute to the social, physical, intellectual or emotional development of the child: children are mostly left with considerable freedom to make what they wish of these activities.

The degree of child-centredness and learner-choice that this involves is probably greater than at any other point in the education system. It may seem paradoxical that it is the least experienced learners who are left most free to choose their own learning; and the reasons for this practice are indeed complex. Historically, it has not always been so. In the late nineteenth century, many 3 and 4 year olds were taught in ‘baby classes’ where they sat throughout the school day in rows doing rote exercises on the ‘3 Rs’ – if they were able to stay awake. Some early enthusiasm for free play was a reaction to this not very satisfactory curriculum. Theoretical rationales were derived from Froebel and from Susan Isaacs, and later from Piaget: we examine these models of how children learn in Chapter 4. Briefly, the idea is that young children need to have rich experience and learn from it at their own pace. Teachers are to act as sympathetic and imaginative observers, to provide advice and guidance when it is asked for, to trust the child’s own sense of timing and not try to accelerate development.

This sort of approach requires the teacher to know a great deal about child development in general and each child’s individual development in particular. If she is to be able to provide appropriate facilities, advice and guidance, she must be able to diagnose what the child can do at present and what the next thing to be learned might be, as these facts about present state and immediate potential will determine what the child should be offered next. She should also know, incidentally, quite a lot about the child’s past history of learning and about what other adults may be providing, if her help is to be really on the spot. It is remarkable how good teachers can be at making these diagnoses, at making subtle choices about what to offer children or how to direct their activity. Their understanding of ‘the whole child’ and how to adjust the curriculum moment by moment for optimum learning can be immensely fruitful, but the demands it makes should not be underestimated. In its respect for children’s creativity and autonomy, and in its denial of the competitiveness and pass/fail attitudes that increase in their effects later in the schooling of children, this is an attractive model. However, we do need to justify it in educational terms if it is to be part of an education system. To do so, we need to see whether having had pre-school experience in a free play setting does indeed enhance children’s cognitive, social and emotional development.

The need for pre-school provision

In one sense, all children receive a pre-school ‘education’ just by being alive, by seeing, hearing, smelling and so forth what their bodies can do and what goes on around them – the very earliest stages, perhaps, of ‘the school of life’. This fact – that even the very youngest babies experience all sorts of sensations and observe all sorts of happenings and gradually absorb from them a tremendous amount of knowledge of their world – could be supplemented by an idea that has been very powerful in our understanding of children’s learning (an idea we will discuss in Chapter 4) – that young children can learn effectively only through their own spontaneous investigations of their environment, that the only motivation operating is their need to solve their own individual, internally arising, self-posed, and immediately pressing problems, and if we impose or induce any other motivation, such as seeking to please the teacher or win her praise, we will disturb the child’s ‘natural’ way of learning.

There are very complex and difficult issues here about what children are like and what ‘education’ is, which we tease out in Chapter 4; for the moment we will just point out that this argument could imply that there should be no special provision at all for the education of young children. The argument would be that children do learn from their day-to-day living, that they can only learn from that and there’s no point teaching them (or even that teaching them interferes with their development), so just let them grow, without any more special attention or facilities than will preserve them from serious physical harm. People who believe in this argument might extend it to later stages of education too, abolishing all formal schooling; or they might, less radically, agree that older children do have to be taught, but maintain that young ones should not be, either because they have not yet become ‘ready’ to profit from instruction or to preserve their freedom and spontaneity for as long as possible. We go into the validity of some of these ideas later. However, a verdict on the idea of the child as being entirely an individualistic learner who is not taught or helped to learn by other people can clearly be given here. It just is not true. ‘The child’s environment’ obviously includes other people and social institutions. Having to live with other people is indeed one source of the child’s own ‘internally arising’ intellectual problems, and of their solutions. In fact some scientists concerned with why homo sapiens developed so much more brain and intelligence than other species argue that it was because early Man lived in social groups whose members had to be intelligent in order to get on with each other successfully. Whether this hypothesis is correct or not, it is clear that all societies make some sort of social provision for even the earliest stages of children’s education and it is extremely unusual for the child to be left alone and never taught at all: the only questions to be asked are ‘who provides the education?’, ‘when?’, and ‘what sort of education should it be?’.

One traditional answer to the question ‘who should provide the child’s education?’ is ‘the family’. Families do indeed educate their children and the most accurate single predictor of a child’s educational attainment is still that of his or her parents. Nevertheless, it has long been recognised that the family should not be the only educator of the child, and schools are provided, in fact are compulsory, for all children between 5 and 16. A few children do not go to school because their parents satisfy the state that they can provide the children with a good education outside the school system, but they are very much the exception. State and parents normally agree that it is a good thing, both for the individual child and for the wider society, that all children except the most severely mentally and physically handicapped should go to school. There may be less agreement on why it is a good thing and about what schooling should consist of, but the need to educate children and the good sense of not leaving this entirely to their families are seen as obvious.

Does this apply to the years before school attendance is compulsory? Should there be ‘schools’ for ‘pre-school’ children, or can their education be left to their families? Here there is still real disagreement, and coming to a sensible answer involves many considerations. Among them are the characteristics, needs and competences of young children; the characteristics, needs and competences of their families; the characteristics of ‘pre-school schools’; the similarities and differences among the effects on children and families of different existing ways of providing children with pre-school education; what we would hope early childhood education could ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Foreword by Professor Peter Robinson
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Mainstream Good Practice: Is There a Discrepancy between Hope and Achievement?
• 3. The Details of Teaching and Learning as Seen in Pre-school
• 4. How Young Children Learn
• 5. The Dialogue Approach: Tutorial Teaching
• 6. The Literary-centred Curriculum
• 7. Summary and Conclusions
• Bibliography
• Index