The Thinking Child

Laying the foundations of understanding and competence

Pamela May

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136329050
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Early Childhood Education

What characteristics do children need to become motivated to learn? How do children's experiences and relationships affect their cognitive development? How do you provide learning experiences that meet the developmental needs of every child in your care?

The Thinking Child thoughtfully discusses the key principles of children's cognitive and intellectual development alongside descriptions of everyday practice. It clearly explains the cognitive strategies that children use to learn new knowledge, the development of cognitive milestones such as symbolism, memories and the imagination, metacognition and creativity along with research into how the brain processes information.

Throughout the book, the author considers the key characteristics of effective learning and shows how play is one of the primary mechanisms that children use to access new knowledge and to consolidate their emerging ideas and concepts. These characteristics are then applied to integral aspects of early years practice to show how pracitioners can:

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• motivate children to learn new knowledge about themselves and the world around them;

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• help children to develop their own ideas creatively and use this knowledge as a base to learn new things;

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• reflect on their own teaching methods to encourage children's engagement, motivation and creativity through effective observation and planning;

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• engage with parents and carers to help support children's learning at home whilst maintaining the values of the family;

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• celebrate the uniqueness of each child and provide learning experiences that are appropriate for individuals with particular learning needs, be they physical, emotional or cognitive to ensure that every child has an equal opportunity to succeed.

Emphasising the importance of understanding the theory that underpins children's cognitive development, this accessible text shows practitioners how they can use this knowledge to provide learning opportunities that nourish children's thinking and creative skills.

CHAPTER 1 Setting the scene

The process of discovering how children come to understand the world in which they live requires us to look back in time. In this way we can see how ideas of childhood have evolved and how our current ideas have come about. This chapter will set the scene by exploring historical ideas of childhood and, in doing so, understand why current early years education and care looks the way it does.

There are many views of what childhood should be like, all of them invented by adults. No child comes into the world with an idea of what lies ahead. A child is born into a culture that will largely determine the sort of childhood that they will experience. An example of this is the islands in the Pacific where many three-year-old children are expert at using sharp knives to peel fruit; an idea that would horrify an adult from another culture. Even more controversial is the pride that some boys in Asian countries take in being included in the adult male practice of paid employment such as sewing footballs. It is often seen by them as a rite of passage into adult life rather than an imposition and a loss of childhood.

The wide range of evidence of child rearing through literature and paintings that are available to us might suggest that there are as many ways of raising a child as there are children to be raised. In our own culture, concepts of childhood have reflected this range, documenting both the joyous romanticism of the innocence that was childhood as portrayed in paintings such as Joshua Reynolds’ ‘The Age of Innocence’ in 1788. Contrast this with the extreme poverty and exploitation that accompanied the Industrial Revolution in the nineteenth century, graphically represented by the works of William Hogarth.

One of the earliest philosophers to publish work on how children should be raised and how best to educate them was John Locke in the eighteenth century. He was particularly interested in how children learned and he advocated the introduction of schools in which children could be taught during the part of the day when they were not working. His ideas may sound harsh to our ears, recommending that children from the age of three become accustomed to earning a wage, but he also recognised that ‘learning might be made a play and recreation for children’.¹ He thought that children were born with no innate characteristics and thus children's experiences largely shaped who they would become. This is sometimes known as the theory of the ‘tabla rasa’ or the ‘empty slate’. Thus, it was thought to be vitally important to set a child on the right path early in life. This, in turn, had huge implications for child welfare and it was at about this time that the Foundling Hospital was opened in London by Thomas Coram. The Coram Foundation continues to work with children and their families in a range of ways to this day.

Locke's ideas were hugely influential and his theory that childhood was the foundation for a successful later life led to a common belief that children need to be filled with the knowledge, skills and culture that they would need as adults. The successful adult was seen as being literate, numerate and able to be trained so that a stable, well-prepared work-force would compete in the new, expanding economy. It was as the Industrial Revolution progressed, with its attendant need for adults who could read, write and add up, that the type of instruction known as ‘skills and drills’ emerged. There was no concept of education as a way of encouraging the population to become thinkers or to be creative. It was purely utilitarian and functional. We can read about these types of schools in the novels of the time. Jane Eyre, for example, gives a chilling account of life in Lowood school and describes how learning was delivered to large numbers of children in dreadful conditions.

The eighteenth century saw great changes in people's everyday lives as new ideas followed travelling explorers and contact through trade opened up other countries and other ideologies. The evangelical movement, which came in the wake of Martin Luther's break with the Catholic Church, brought with it a belief in original sin and the opening of Sunday schools which served to keep children safe when they were not at work or school. Sunday schools also instructed children in how to become ‘neat, tidy, even obsequious, tractable, a favourite evangelical word’² which was a far cry from the other major influence on children's upbringing which was holding sway at around the same time, that of Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

As so often is the case with beliefs and understandings, new ideas emerge to challenge the status quo. Rousseau, the French philosopher, had beliefs about children that were diametrically opposed to the improving and functional educational ideals of Locke and evangelicals such as John Wesley. Rousseau believed that children were self-regulating in terms of innate morality. They would search out beauty and goodness and were joyously innocent. ‘Love childhood’, Rousseau suggested, ‘indulge its sports, its pleasures, its delightful instincts’. His view of an idealised childhood are to be seen in paintings of the time such as Sir Joshua Reynolds’ The Infant Samuel, and The Age of Innocence, mentioned above. In these paintings children are seen clothed in white flowing robes, giving the appearance of angelic happiness. There is an atmosphere of calm and graceful simplicity, very far removed from the lives lived by the majority of working children of the time.

In Rousseau's famous book, Emile, he describes his idea of the perfect education. He suggests that children should not be taught facts and figures but that they should be free to discover all that the world has to offer for themselves. Children's individual personalities and characteristics should be allowed to develop and flourish naturally. There should be freedom from too formal instruction and children should be removed from big cities and placed in a country environment where they could roam freely. Rousseau's ideas have found a sympathetic response from many educators since he proposed them in the eighteenth century. The great educator, Friedrich Froebel, in particular, working in the first half of the nineteenth century, built upon Rousseau's philosophy, introducing the notion of the kindergarten or ‘the garden of the children’ where children's minds, souls, bodies, brains and spirits were nourished. Rousseau, and later, Froebel, recognised that children's development moves through certain stages and that it behoved educators to work with what was developmentally appropriate rather than trying to rush on to the next stage of learning. Froebel's phrase ‘at every stage, be that stage’ suggested that the child should be encouraged to experience each level of learning to the full before being moved on.

The concept of developmentally appropriate stages was continued by Jean Piaget, a Swiss biologist working in the twentieth century. Piaget's ideas have, in recent years, been rightly challenged on many fronts but he retains his position as one of the greatest educational philosophers of recent times. Piaget was the first professional to study children scientifically. This gave him an opportunity to observe and study them with a lack of religious or political bias. Admittedly, his research was based only on his own children but his background as a developmental psychologist led him to the groundbreaking yet simple discovery that children do not think as adults do. He was the first researcher to suggest that each child individually constructs their own view of how the world works depending on their own experience of it. The stages of development that he identified formed the basis of teaching knowledge from the 1950s onwards. His idea of ‘readiness’ meant that a child would naturally pass on to the next stage of learning through their own discovery or through maturation. The teacher had little part to play in this process except to observe and record progress. In practice this meant that, as a teacher of a reception class in the 1960s, I did not give my non-readers books, as Piaget's theory would suggest that, as non-readers, it would make no sense to do so. Instead, they were given a small box containing flashcards which had to be learned by rote. Only then, when these words could be ‘read’, were the children deemed to be readers and to be able to benefit from a book. How educational theories change! Today we see babies coming home from their hospital births accompanied by a bag of books from the ‘Bookstart’ project which states that ‘it is never too early to start reading to your baby’.

Aside from the negative implications of Piaget's theories, he gave us some significant understandings that underpin common good practice to this day. It is to Piaget that we owe the child-centred approach to teaching young children and the wisdom to match learning activities to children's present level of understanding. To him we also owe the notion of the child as an active discoverer of knowledge and this heralded the end, in the 1960s, of static whole-class teaching and rote learning for very young children which had held sway in the Board schools of the nineteenth century.

Piaget's work on how children construct knowledge has been deeply influential. He described how children gathered information through a process he called assimilation. When a new piece of knowledge came along, it would need to be accommodated into what was already understood. If the new piece of knowledge did not fit with existing knowledge a shift had to take place and the existing knowledge had to be adapted or confirmed. This process is also called accommodation and it is the process whereby humans undergo a mental change in order to manage problems that, with our past level of understanding, were too hard to solve. Young children are endearing with what we call their misconstructs; their facts are not accurate but have been logically worked out in their minds based on existing understandings. Take, for example, the four-year-old girl who had been riding on granddad's tractor as he ploughed the fields in September, followed by a host of hungry gulls. When mummy asked what she had been doing she replied ‘We were digging up seagulls’; a very logical answer from her point of view and clearly constructed from the evidence of what she saw and her present level of understanding.

Perhaps the major dilemma that early years practitioners have had to consider is that the Piagetian method of gauging which level of development a child had reached implied that a certain level was ‘normal’ and that any different level was ‘abnormal’. Thus, children began to be measured in terms of what they could not yet do rather than in terms of what they could do. The classic Piagetian example of this was his assertion that young children were egocentric and unable to see another's point of view. A later educationalist, Margaret Donaldson, repeated Piaget's experiments in natural settings rather than under laboratory conditions, and found that children were quite capable of taking on another point of view if they understood the question and what they were expected to do.

Some of Piaget's theories were also challenged by Lev Vygotsky, a Russian psychologist who published research during the twentieth century. One of the strengths of research into how children learn is that it covers a wide range of disciplines. Whilst Piaget considered children from the biologist's perspective, Vygotsky considered a more social aspect, suggesting that although children do make sense of the world individually, they do not, as Piaget believed, do it alone. We learn socially, thought Vygotsky, and he called children ‘cultural apprentices’ as they learn about their world from the adults around them. Later in the twentieth century, the academic disciplines of sociology and neuroscience have greatly contributed to our understanding of how children think and learn, giving us an ever more accurate picture of the early learning process. Continuing with the idea of children as social learners, Vygotsky believed that communication and language were central to successful learning. As practitioners, we recognise that those children who are the most confident learners are those who have a sufficient grasp of language to express their feelings and ideas.

Another aspect of social learning that Vygotsky highlighted was the role that the adult (sometimes called the ‘expert other’) played in the learning process. Following the Piagetian model, the teacher observed and awaited ‘readiness’ but Vygotsky suggested another kind of readiness: ‘Readiness in Vygotskian terms involves not only the state of the child's existing knowledge but also his capacity to learn with help’.³ Thus, the child's current level of understanding can be observed and at this point the expert can intervene and support the child to its next stage of understanding. This gap between what the child can do alone and what they can achieve with help, Vygotsky called the ‘zone of proximal development’. It is at this point that much can be achieved by sensitive staff who can see what is the next step of learning for the child and can provide the support that is needed. This point has been recognised as being significant by the recent Effective Provision Pre-School Education (EPPE) research. Sustained shared thinking was described as ‘An episode in which two or more individuals “work together” in an intellectual way to solve a problem, clarify a concept, evaluate activities, extend a narrative etc. Both parties must contribute to the thinking and it must develop and extend’⁴ Sustained shared thinking supports the idea of a co-operative model of thinking which often has no pre-ordained outcome; in other words, the end result is sometimes surprising and not pre-planned. It is this type of thinking that can lead to creativity and metacognition (thinking about thinking).

Sustained shared thinking relies on an individual child's capacity or aptitude to learn from another person. Here is a prime example of where other aspects of a child's development interact with the intellectual area. Young children will only learn from their ‘Important people’⁵: their ‘companions’ or trusted adults whom they know well. Thus, it is vital that each child has a key person at their setting with whom they can engage in this sustained shared thinking. A child who does not feel emotionally secure will be less inclined to explore new knowledge, which is often unpredictable. Emotional security plays a key role in the child's ability to go out on a limb and think in ways that may, or may not, be successful. Creative thinking is a risky business and failure must be acceptable; with the young child knowing that they will still be loved regardless of the outcome of the unpredictable business of exploring new knowledge and skills. Sometimes this area of thinking is known as ‘If not, what if?’ and encourages a child to think of alternative solutions to problems. Stories are a good way to introduce this type of thinking in young children; I recommend The Three Little Wolves and the Big Bad Pig by Helen Oxenbury as a great illustration of the idea of alternative and creative thinking.⁶

Jerome Bruner, one of the giants of modern educational thought, is still working in the field of cognitive psychology. He believes, with Vygotsky, that learning is a social activity and he describes a rich early years setting as comparable to a scientist's laboratory where children explore, experiment and experience failure and success in a supported environment. The word ‘apprentice’ emerges again here as Bruner suggests that a child learns most effectively with an ‘expert other’, usually an adult, scaffolding or supporting the learning until the child has grasped the concept and no longer needs to be an apprentice. Bruner has debated different ways in which humans code information, calling them enactive (action-based), iconic (image-based) and symbolic (language-based). It is thought that all humans continually represent new knowledge in one of these ways, although with increasing maturity and competence the symbolic mode is increasingly used.

I remember, for instance, an occasion when I was called to an interview at a university campus. Not only did I drive to the campus the week before the interview date to be absolutely sure that I knew where the campus was (the enactive mode) and to find where I could park my car, but I also took a map (the iconic mode). Some weeks into my new post I dispensed with the map as I had successfully internalised the directions and had the confidence to arrive at my destination with no external aids. Admittedly, many people have a better sense of direction than I have and would not need these props but we can see, in children's play, the strategies they use to externally represent experiences that they have encountered in their lives. In the following chapter we will be exploring the part that play has in helping children to learn and, in particular, the ways in which pieces of thinking are knitted together by the use of external props, or schemas.

Bruner considered that, to some extent, children's learning could be hampered by the adherence to a belief in inflexible stages of development. He thought that any subject could be taught in some intellectually honest form to any child at any stage of development. For example, a young child who notices that flowers die without water can be helped to understand that plants take water up through their stems (perhaps by seeing coloured water changing the colour of a flower) but does not need to be told about the entire scientific process of osmosis. Using fruit to make alternating printed patterns can be thought to be the beginning of understanding about algebra, and caring for a pet gives valuable lessons in beginning to understand the differences between living and non-living things.

Leading on from the assumption that most knowledge can be translated into forms that young children can understand comes Bruner's theory that children's learning develops by having ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Information
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction to the series
• Introduction to The Thinking Child
• 1 Setting the scene
• 2 Playing, exploring and learning
• 3 Active learning
• 4 Creating and thinking critically
• 5 Observing and assessing children's progress
• 6 Partnerships with parents and community
• 7 Thinking differently
• 8 Thoughtful organisation
• 9 Equipped for life, ready for school?
• Epilogue
• Notes
• Author index
• Subject index