NurtureShock
Page 15
This isn’t just a matter of experience at the wheel—it’s really a matter of age and brain wiring in the frontal lobe. So schools can’t on their own turn teens into safer drivers. Instead, they make getting a license such an easy and convenient process that they increase the supply of young drivers on the road. In 1999, the School of Public Health at Johns Hopkins University reported that nine school districts that eliminated Driver’s Education experienced a 27% drop in auto accidents among 16- and 17-year-olds.
Research like that has convinced states that school driving classes aren’t the answer; what really reduces auto accidents are graduated-licensing programs which delay the age at which teenagers can drive at night or with friends in the car. These decrease crashes by 20 to 30 percent.
In our schools, kids are subjected to a vast number of well-meaning training programs that sound absolutely great, but nevertheless fail the test of scientific analysis. Schools take seriously their responsibility to breed good citizens, not just good students—but that sometimes means that good intentions are mistaken for good ideas. The scarier the issue, the more schools hurriedly adopt programs to combat it. For example, D.A.R.E., Drug Abuse Resistance Education.
Developed originally in 1983 by the Los Angeles Police Department, D.A.R.E. sends uniformed police officers into junior high and high schools to teach about the real-life consequences of drugs and crime. And we’re not talking about just a single assembly, either—in its full form, students participate in a 17-week school curriculum complete with lectures, role playing, readings, and the like. It seemed like such a promising idea, D.A.R.E. spread like wildfire. Within two decades, some form of D.A.R.E. was present in 80% of the public school districts in the United States. It claims influence over 26 million students, at an estimated annual budget of over $1 billion. As a society, we believe in the way D.A.R.E. delivers its message. Teachers support it incredibly strongly; 97% give it a “good” or “excellent” approval rating. Parents do, too: 93% believe it effectively teaches children to say no to drugs and violence.
However, any program that popular, which receives that much government support, attracts extensive scientific analysis. Throughout the 1990s and 2000s, studies randomly assigned students to a D.A.R.E. class or not. In some studies, D.A.R.E. shows a very slight decline in cigarette use, alcohol use, or drug use immediately after the training, but in all studies it shows no comparative reduction long-term.
D.A.R.E. is not alone, and it shouldn’t be singled out. Hundreds of drug-prevention programs receive federal grants; the Department of Health and Human Services looked at 718 of them, and it found that only 41 had a positive effect.
Programs meant to reduce high school dropouts have a similar record. Of the 16 most well known, only one has a positive effect, even though all of these programs seem to have the details right—a high ratio of counselors to students, and a vocational bent creating a bridge to future careers.
In our research for this book, we came across dozens of school-based programs that sounded wonderful in theory, but were far from it in practice.
Among scholars, interventions considered to be really great often have an effect size of something like 15%, which means that 15% of children altered their targeted behavior, and therefore 85% did not alter it. Interventions with an effect size of only 4% can still be considered quite good, statistically—even though they have no effect on 96% of the students.
Does this mean the bar is too low for scholars? Not really. Instead, what this data indicates is that human behavior is incredibly stubborn. We’re hard to budge off our habits and proclivities. While it’s possible to inspire a few people to change, it’s nearly impossible to change a majority of us, in any direction. Interventions for children are even more of a challenge—since developmentally, kids are by definition a moving target.
I explain all this to set the stage, and provide proper perspective, on something we found that does work. This program’s success rate is marvelous on its own, but all the more astonishing in light of how difficult it is to create something that produces results with a sizeable effect. It’s an emerging curriculum for preschool and kindergarten classrooms called Tools of the Mind. It requires some training for teachers, but otherwise does not cost a penny more than a traditional curriculum. The teachers merely teach differently. What’s even more interesting than their results is why it seems to work, and what that teaches us about how young children learn.
Ashley visited pre-K and kindergarten Tools classes in two relatively affluent towns that ring Denver; I visited both types of classes in Neptune, New Jersey, which is a comparatively more-impoverished township about halfway down the Garden State Parkway between New York and Atlantic City.
Most elements of the school day are negligibly different from a traditional class. There’s recess and lunch and snack time and nap time. But a typical Tools preschool classroom looks different—as much because of what it is missing as what is there. The wall calendar is not a month-by-month grid, but a straight line of days on a long ribbon of paper. Gone is the traditional alphabet display; instead, children use a sound map, which has a monkey next to Mm and a sun next to Ss. These are ordered not from A to Z but rather in clusters, with consonants on one map and vowels on another. C, K, and Q are in one cluster, because those are similar sounds, all made with the tongue mid-mouth. Sounds made with the teeth or the lips are in other clusters.
When class begins, the teacher tells the students they will be playing fire station. The previous week, they learned all about firemen, so now, the classroom has been decorated in four different areas—in one corner is a fire station, in another a house that needs saving. The children choose what role they want to take on in the pretend scenario—pump driver, 911 operator, fireman, or family that needs to be rescued. Before the children begin to play, they each tell the teacher their choice of role.
With the teacher’s help, the children make individual “play plans.” They all draw a picture of themselves in their chosen role, then they attempt to write it out as a sentence on a blank sheet of paper to the best of their abilities. Even three-year-olds write daily. For some, the play plan is little more than lines representing each word in the sentence. Still others use their sound map to figure out the words’ initial consonants. The eldest have memorized how to write “I am going to” and then they use the sound map to figure out the rest.
Then they go play, sticking to the role designated in their plan. The resulting play continues for a full 45 minutes, with the children staying in character, self-motivated. If they get distracted or start to fuss, the teacher asks, “Is that in your play plan?” On different days of the week, children choose other roles in the scenario. During this crucial play hour, the teacher facilitates their play but does not directly teach them anything at all.
At the end, the teacher puts a CD on to play the “clean-up song.” As soon as the music begins, the kids stop playing and start cleaning up—without another word from their teacher. Later, they will do what’s called buddy reading. The children are paired up and sit facing each other; one is given a large paper drawing of lips, while the other holds a drawing of ears. The one with the lips flips through a book, telling the story he sees in the pictures. The other listens and, at the end, asks a question about the story. Then they switch roles.
They also commonly play games, like Simon Says, that require restraint. One variation is called graphic practice; the teacher puts on music, and the children draw spirals and shapes. Intermittently, the teacher pauses the music, and the children learn to stop their pens whenever the music stops.
The kindergarten program expands on the preschool structure, incorporating academics into a make-believe premise that’s based on whatever book they’re reading in class. Overall, the Tools classrooms seem a little different, but not strange in any way. To watch it in action, you would not guess its results would be so superior. In this sense, it’s the opposite kind of program from D.A.R.E.—which sounded great, but
had weak results. Tools has great results, despite nothing about it having intuitive, visceral appeal.
The Tools techniques were developed during the 1990s by two scholars at Metropolitan State College of Denver, Drs. Elena Bodrova and Deborah Leong. After pilot-testing the program in a few classrooms and Head Start centers, they put it to a true test in 1997, in cooperation with Denver Public Schools. Ten kindergarten teachers were randomly assigned, to teach either Tools or the regular district curriculum. In these classrooms one-third to one-half of the children were poor Hispanic students who began the year classified as having limited English-language proficiency: they were starting kindergarten effectively a grade-level behind.
The following spring, all the children took national standardized tests. The results were jaw-dropping. The children from the Tools classes were now almost a full grade-level ahead of the national standard. In the district, only half the kindergartners score as proficient at their grade-level. Of the Tools children, 97% scored as proficient.
Reports of the program’s success began to spread within the research community. In 2001, two scholars from the National Institute for Early Education Research at Rutgers, Dr. Ellen Frede and Amy Hornbeck, visited the Tools classrooms. New Jersey was implementing free, public preschools in the neediest zones of the state. Impressed by what they saw, Frede and Hornbeck decided to test Tools in a preschool during its first year of operations, so that Hornbeck could compare the program’s efficacy to that of a traditional program.
The researchers chose a site in Passaic, New Jersey, that served children from low-income families; 70% of the students came from homes where English is not the primary language. The new preschool, created in an old bank building in downtown Passaic, had eighteen classrooms. Seven on one floor were set aside as a Tools preschool; as a control, the other eleven would teach the district’s regular preschool plan. Both teachers and students were randomly assigned to classrooms, and the teachers were instructed not to exchange ideas about curriculum between the two programs. At the end of the first year, the Tools scores were markedly higher on seven out of eight measures, including vocabulary and IQ.
But it was the kids’ behavior ratings that really sold the school’s principal on the program. From the teachers in the regular classrooms, the principal got reports of extremely disruptive behavior almost every day—preschool students kicking a teacher, biting another student, cursing, or throwing a chair. But those kinds of reports never came from the Tools classes.
The controlled experiment was supposed to last two years, but at the end of the first year the principal insisted all the classrooms switch to Tools. She decided it was unethical to deprive half the school of a curriculum that was obviously superior.
This wasn’t the only time that Tools was a victim of its own success. Testing of the Tools program ended early in two other places as well: Elgin, Illinois, and Midland, Texas. The grant money funding the research was available to study children at-risk; after a year, the children no longer scored low enough to be deemed “at-risk,” so the grant money to continue the analysis was no longer available. Bodrova is quick to credit the work of those schools’ faculty, but added, “When it keeps happening enough times, you start to think that it may be our program that makes the difference. It’s the irony of doing interventions in the real world: being too successful to study if it’s successful.”
Word about Tools continued to spread, and once teachers actually saw the program in action they became believers. Rutgers’ Hornbeck was eventually so convinced by her own findings that she signed on to be part of the Tools team, regularly training teachers in the program. After two teachers from Neptune, New Jersey, visited the Passaic school, they were so excited that they, too, implemented Tools techniques in a new preschool they were creating in Neptune.
Sally Millaway was the principal of that Neptune school. After success with the program on the preschool level, she convinced the superintendent to try it in one class at her next post, an elementary school. When word leaked out that Millaway’s school would be instituting a Tools kindergarten, the school district began getting letters from parents who wanted their children to be allowed to switch into the Tools program.
During that first year of kindergarten, Millaway had the sense it was working. But the true test would come in the standardized achievement exams all New Jersey kindergartners would take in April. A month later, Millaway got the first set of results over the fax machine. “It was unbelievable,” she said. “When I saw the numbers, I laughed out loud. It was ridiculous, beyond our imaginings.”
The average reading scores for the school district translated into the 65th percentile on the national spectrum. The Tools kindergartners (on average) had jumped more than 20 ticks higher, to the 86th percentile. The kids who tested as gifted almost all came from the Tools classes.
So why does this curriculum work so well? There are many interrelated factors, but let’s start with the most distinctive element of Tools—the written play plans and the lengthy play period that ensues.
In every preschool in the country, kids have played firehouse. But usually, after ten minutes, the scenario breaks down. Holding a pretend fire hose on a pretend fire is a singular activity, and it grows old; needing stimulation, children are distracted by what other kids are doing and peel off into new games. Play has a joyful randomness, but it’s not sustained. In Tools classrooms, by staging different areas of the room as the variety of settings, and by asking kids to commit to their role for the hour, the play is far more complicated and interactive. The children in the house call 911; the operator rings a bell; the firefighters leap from their bunks; the trucks arrive to rescue the family. This is considered mature, multidimensional, sustained play.
This notion of being able to sustain one’s own interest is considered a core building block in Tools. Parents usually think of urging their child to pay attention, to be obedient to a teacher. They recognize that a child can’t learn unless she has the ability to avoid distractions. Tools emphasizes the flip-side—kids won’t be distracted because they’re so consumed in the activities they’ve chosen. By acting the roles they’ve adopted in their play plans, the kids are thoroughly in the moment.
In one famous Russian study from the 1950s, children were told to stand still as long as they could—they lasted two minutes. Then a second group of children were told to pretend they were soldiers on guard who had to stand still at their posts—they lasted eleven minutes.
“The advantage of little kids,” explained Bodrova, “is they don’t yet know that they aren’t good at something. When you ask a child to copy something on the board the teacher has written, he might think, ‘I can’t write as good as the teacher,’ so then he doesn’t want to do it. But hand a notepad to the child who is pretending to be a waiter in a pizza parlor. Johnny ordered cheese pizza, you ordered pepperoni. They don’t know if they can write it or not—they just know that they have to do something to remember the pizza orders. They end up doing more writing than if you asked them to write a story.”
It’s well recognized that kids today get to play less. As pressure for academic achievement has mounted, schools around the country have cut back on recess to devote more time to the classroom. This, in turn, created a backlash; experts and social commentators opined that playtime was too valuable to cut. Their arguments were straightforward: the brain needs a break, kids need to blow off energy, cutting recess increases obesity, and it’s during recess that children learn social skills. Tools suggests a different benefit entirely—that during playtime, children learn basic developmental building blocks necessary for later academic success, and in fact they develop these building blocks better while playing than while in a traditional class.
Take, for example, symbolic thought. Almost everything a classroom demands a child learn requires grasping the connection between reality and symbolic, abstract representation: letters of the alphabet are symbols for sounds and speech; the map on the wall is a symb
ol of the world; the calendar is a symbol to measure the passage of time. Words on paper—such as the word “TREE”—look to the eye nothing at all like an actual tree.
Young children learn abstract thinking through play, where a desk and some chairs become a fire engine. More importantly, when play has interacting components, as in Tools, the child’s brain learns how one symbol combines with multiple other symbols, akin to high-order abstract thinking. A child masters the intellectual process of holding multiple thoughts in his head and stacking them together.
Consider high-order thinking like self-reflection, an internal dialogue within one’s own mind, where opposing alternatives are weighed and carefully considered. This thought-conversation is the opposite of impulsive reaction, where actions are made without forethought. All adults can think through ideas in their heads, to differing abilities. But do kids have the same internal voice of contemplation and discussion? If so, when do they develop it? Tools is designed to encourage the early development of this Socratic consciousness, so that kids don’t just react impulsively in class, and they can willfully avoid distraction.
Tools does this by encouraging that voice in the head, private speech, by first teaching kids to do it out loud—they talk themselves through their activities. When the kids are learning the capital C, they all say in unison, “Start at the top and go around” as they start to print. No one ever stops the kids from saying it out loud, but after a few minutes, the Greek chorus ends. In its place is a low murmur. A couple minutes later, a few kids are still saying it out loud—but most of the children are saying it in their heads. A few kids don’t even realize it, but they’ve kept silently mouthing the instructions to themselves.