Part Five: MINDS OF THE FUTURE
CHAPTER 13: New Brains: New Schools?
If we wish to remain a literate culture, someone is going to have to take the responsibility for teaching children at all socioeconomic levels how to talk, listen, and think. If we want high school graduates who can analyze, solve problems, and create new solutions, adults will have to devote the time to showing them how. And they had better get at it before the neural foundations for verbal expression, sustained attention, and analytic thought end up as piles of shavings under the workbench of plasticity.
It appears that schools will have to assume a larger share of this responsibility. Students from all walks of life now come with brains poorly adapted for the mental habits that teachers have traditionally assumed. In the past, deep wells of language and mental persistence had already been filled for most children by experiences at home; an educational priming of the pump made learning flow with relative ease. Now teachers must fill the gaps before attempting to draw "skills" from brains that lack the underlying cognitive and linguistic base.
We care deeply about the "smartness" of our children, but our culture lacks patience with the slow, time-consuming handwork by which intellects are woven. The quiet spaces of childhood have been disrupted by media assault and instant sensory gratification. Children have been yoked to hectic adult schedules and assailed by societal anxieties. Many have been deprived of time to play and the opportunity to pursue mental challenges that, though deemed trivial by distracted adults, are the real building blocks of intellect. Thus schools must lead the way, acknowledging children's developmental needs as they guide them firmly into personal involvement with the important skills and ideas that will empower them for the future.
WHAT DOESN'T WORK
Schools, preschools, and day-care centers cannot slow the pace of adult life, alter changing family patterns, or eliminate media influences. Nor can they ignore these realities or the resulting differences in students. Kids today are no less intelligent than those of former years, but they don't fit the same academic molds. In many respects, children now come to school with more potential and a wider experiential background than children of a previous generation. At some level, the rapid pace of their lives may even prove to be adaptive for the constant scene changes of a new knowledge explosion. Yet this gloss of sophistication has been applied at the expense of important mental skills -- and arguably, their underlying brain organization.
Comments on "Competency"
As I hope became obvious in earlier chapters, the simple cry "Make them learn" soon runs afoul of the developmental reality that brains learn in different ways and on different schedules. In olden days, those who did not fit the pattern dropped out and got good jobs in factories, shops, or on farms. Now these options have diminished. If we want almost everyone to achieve solid levels of academic competency, we must accept the need to diversify instruction for learners with different styles and timetables for mastery. Such sensitivity does not imply that some are "inferior" or that they cannot learn; it simply acknowledges that just as all adults should not be expected to enjoy and master sculpture, journalism, baseball, or eye surgery with equal facility, all children will not learn math or rope-climbing with comparable ease.
"Competency" is deceptive. When children must resort to memorizing "tricks" to pass tests (on material they don't understand), they soon "forget." Difficulties compound themselves as children who lack basic concepts of addition and subtraction are drilled to mouth algebraic formulae, or as they uncomprehendingly "read" the words from books or neatly copy "reports" from encyclopedias -- without making mental contact with the content. Children who come from different linguistic and educational backgrounds are particularly at risk in this sort of curriculum.
Shallowly conceived "standards" also tend to fragment learning into inconsequential bits. Dr. Arthur Costa, who says he has "been through three back-to-basics movements" in his career as an educator, notes ruefully:
What was educationally significant and hard to measure has been replaced by what is educationally insignificant and easy to measure. So now we measure how well we've taught what isn't worth learning! [1]
Costa's personal vision of a school as "a home for the mind" is woefully different from current realities. He is convinced that we need change, and that education for workers of the future must emphasize more general thinking and problem-solving abilities along with the basic skills.
People in an age of rapidly changing technology will have to keep on learning even after they graduate, but the outlook in the United States is not bright, he warns.
"We're facing a critical time in history. For our nation to survive we have to realize that what's coming up is the smallest work force we've had in a long time; we've had a big population dip and our industries have a much smaller pool of talent. The small group is one of the most undertrained with the largest number of dropouts. At the same time, industry has the greatest demand for problem-solvers and thinkers, entrepreneurs and craftsmen, creative people whose products are so excellent and whose thinking is so forward that we can match the other countries for survival."
Because of the ever-shrinking pool of talent, industries are being forced to economize, Costa continues.
''To do so they're cutting out middle management. This means that blue-collar workers will have to know how to think for themselves so industry won't have to hire management to solve problems for them. We're at a time of great competition for creativity and thinking -- we've got to develop these skills in all our students. To do so we need a massive reorientation of what public education is about." [2]
No responsible critic denies that students -- and their teachers -- need to be held accountable for what is being learned. Tests are important, not only for determining the depth at which material is taught, but also in showing students what kinds of thought processes are important (e.g., simply memorizing facts vs. having to connect them together in higher-level thinking). In countries where thought and intellectual depth are esteemed, examinations consist mainly of having the students generate ideas, usually in writing, about the topic at hand. Someone recently observed that Europeans examine, while Americans only test. Examinations, in this sense, require students to have not only a thorough understanding of the facts but also a more general grasp of the subject and its important ideas as well as the ability to integrate and express them. It also means that someone has to read and grade the papers.
In the United States, the content of everything from English to algebra is currently being trivialized by machine-scored, multiple-choice tests. Why be surprised if students can't reason effectively -- or if they emulate their elders in looking for the easy way out? Of course, if I have 150 English students every day . . .
"But the Japanese Seem to Be Doing Something Right"
Despite the apparent success of Japanese public education in extruding a dutiful and well-trained work force, aping a misconceived model of that country's system won't work in America. Nor will the rigid traditions believed to characterize Japanese secondary schools impart the innovation and mental flexibility Americans claim to prize.
Japanese and American schooling are predicated on different philosophical views of the individual in relationship to the society. They also have differing traditions regarding the purpose of schooling itself, particularly the balance between conformity and original thinking. While it would certainly be a step in the right direction to accord comparable respect (and expectations) to teachers and to the intellectual enterprise in general, we must recognize that Japanese pedagogy is designed for children from a very different tradition of upbringing.
In that country, mothers assume that their primary role is to provide a full-time training ground for their child. Children are expected to sail from home into school on an unbroken flow of expectations and support -- not so much in terms of subject matter, as in the attitudes and mental habits for school success. Moreover, according to one careful observer, Japanese elementary schools (unlike those for older students) do not trade in the rote-level, robotic classroom scenes we imagine. Instead, their well-trained teachers (getting into this highly esteemed profession is a competitive business for which only the best are chosen) plan active, exploratory learning and take time to set the conceptual foundations in place. Whereas American second graders may spend thirty minutes on two or three pages of addition and subtraction equations, the Japanese are reported to be more likely, at this level, to use the same amount of time in examining two or three problems in depth, focusing on the reasoning process necessary to solve them. [3]
Ignoring the Reality ... and Missing the Vision
While lessons can certainly be learned from the Japanese, our schools cannot succeed unless they are supported in confronting the reality of the children they are trying to teach. They cannot change society, but they can stand firm as advocates, not enemies, of mental growth. American children should learn to work hard, in fact considerably harder than most are working now. But they need to work on important, meaningful learning at which they can succeed.
Classrooms where students are enticed into involvement with content along with essential skills, where they experience each day the satisfaction of intellectual accomplishment gained by personal effort -- such classrooms are a strong antidote to the anxieties and fragmentation that beset children in today's world. If schools direct their planning toward this goal, they have a much better chance to shore up shaky intellectual foundations while also infusing children with the ego-protective properties of well-earned success.
Is this simply more visionary claptrap? How can such lofty goals be accomplished in a practical classroom world? The first step is to take the pains to start where the children are. Another is to write the habits of mind, oral language usage, and thoughtful experience with important ideas into the curriculum along with reading, writing, math, history, and science. Instead of simply insisting that teachers stamp on the three R's in shallow transfer patterns, we must search for new ways to enrich young brains with the real "basics" -- language and thought.
I do not propose, in one chapter, to outline a total new plan for restructuring American education. As must be clear by now, my main suggestions concern teaching and learning. To fill gray areas in kids' gray matter, however, structural as well as curricular changes are in order. Let me first skim over a few ideas that have been proposed in the name of the former before moving on to a consideration of some new (or rekindled) ideas about what we might start dishing out in the way of mental fare.
SOME OF THE NITTY-GRITTY
Changing the Way Schools Are Structured: Only Part of a Solution
The growing recognition that our schools are out of step with changing social patterns has inspired some rethinking about the way they are structured. Alternatives now on the table include adding early-childhood centers to the public schools, adapting the school calendar and/or length of the school day to schedules of working parents, and allowing students to stay with the same teacher for more than one year, as is done in some European countries, in hopes of gaining the sort of close relationship with an adult increasingly missing at home. These proposals all have potential merit -- and potential problems. If what children get in school is ineffective or even damaging, simply adding more of the same will only exacerbate the problems.
Broader forms of restructuring, in which schools work closely with other social agencies, are also being proposed. Such teamwork appears to be necessary as increased needs for emotional and social support of even middle-class students drain instructional resources. Allan Shedlin, director of New York's Elementary School Center, feels strongly that schools should assume a more central role as "locus of advocacy" for all children. While not everyone agrees that they will be up to this task, most concur that some kind of coordination will be necessary. As we now stand, fragmentation of school time, facilities, and staff with nonacademic courses already threatens their basic role as academic institutions. Academic learning may well suffer when schools are compelled to add such extras as required courses in career, health, and nutrition education at all grade levels, as well as badly needed expedients such as group counseling for children with unsettled emotional environments at home (e.g., a course for children of divorce entitled "Who Gets Me for Christmas?").
It is indeed hard, perhaps even impossible, to teach well if students' nutritional or emotional agendas preempt their mental energy. But teachers' major obligation to students' emotional needs must remain to create classrooms and curricula where children are mentally as well as physically safe. This includes structuring academic demands so that students have a realistic chance of earning success as a buffer against other emotional stresses. Offering attainable academic goals and good teaching to reach them is the school's primary role in social service.
Changing the Way Children Are Taught
One potentially promising trend in this regard is a greater use of "collaborative learning" techniques, where more emphasis is placed on the types of cooperation and communication that will be needed in an "information age." [4] Inclusion of cooperation along with competition may have several effects: (1) making classrooms more success-oriented; (2) counteracting some of the social isolation experienced by children without old-fashioned "neighborhood" play experiences; (3) building oral language skills by teaching structured ways of talking together about what is being learned. Changes of this sort will not salvage academic learning, however, unless curricular goals are broadened to emphasize language and thinking skills. Since brains are shaped in classrooms as well as in homes, we cannot afford to overlook these growing needs during the hours children spend in school.
How Good Are the Teachers?
Another problem is how to stock classrooms with teachers who can -- and do -- read, write, and reason. Although none of the ideas to follow are revolutionary in scope, they all call for good teachers whose own intellects can be trusted, or at least developed. We cannot depend on workbooks and kits chosen because they are "teacher-proof" (a questionable, but all-too-common "attribute"). Such materials, by necessity, include little, if any, writing and reasoning.
It is beyond the scope of this book to solve the problem of where to find this band of angels who can simultaneously control twenty-five or thirty kids (someone very accurately compared it to trying to keep thirty corks under water all at the same time), inculcate the essential skills into a generation of unprepared brains, and also stimulate high-level reasoning and reflection. I would suggest, on the basis of school visits in many parts of the country, that many fine teachers are already in place. But they need encouragement, perhaps some additional training in language development and questioning strategies, and most often, smaller classes in order to do the job we demand of them.
Even (perhaps especially) elementary school teachers must be well grounded in the liberal arts and sciences as well as in the specific tools of their profession. They cannot expand minds to meet the demands of the next century if their own perspectives are foreshortened by pedagogical nonsense in place of substantive coursework. In my opinion, any teacher in a subject requiring students to read and write should be required to demonstrate the personal ability to read and reason intelligently, write coherently, and provide satisfactory models of oral language. The college years are not too late to effect changes in the habits of a human brain; it is certainly worth the considerable time and effort it would take to induce the ability to think in everyone to whom we delegate the charge of teaching it to our children.
Even the best teachers, however, can't do the foundation-building job alone. Many complain they now have to teach the parents as well as the children. Let us digress briefly to consider some issues surrounding this important division of responsibility.
The Changing Balance Between School and Home: Whose Responsibility?
If schools are to do a proper job, they cannot, with existing resources, also shoulder the major burden of their charges' personal, social, and emotional development. Yet school administrators and teachers are increasingly pressured to take on jobs they see as parental ones. Some assert quite vehemently that they are tired of spending so much time "parenting the parents"; even well-heeled professionals need frequent reminders of their responsibilities to their children. "I had to start sending notes home on Fridays asking parents to monitor the violent TV programs these kids were watching," went a typical comment from a kindergarten teacher in a middle class suburb. "I don't mind writing notes about a child's school progress, but do I also have to tell them how to be parents?"
"I wish I could sit down with every parent in America and emphasize how important they are to their children's education," stated Mary Hatwood Futrell, speaking for thousands of teachers nationwide. [5] Yet even filling a child's basic emotional needs is increasingly difficult for many families. Youngsters who have been caught in changing family patterns (e.g., divorce, single parenthood) have needs that may be difficult to meet. All children need consistent and realistic follow-through on standards for school achievement, but in the press of contemporary life, such consistency gets easily lost. Although many parents express concern about their children's progress, teachers also have trouble getting them to follow up on academic expectations at home. One of the reasons may be that parents feel alienated from the school.
Child psychiatrist Dr. James Comer, recounting his growing-up years in the 1940s, compares the informal neighborhood contacts between teachers and parents with the fragmented environments that now polarize parents and schools. ''The positive relationship between my parents and school staff -- and the probability of a weekly report [in a casual conversation in the store, or on the street) -- made it difficult for me to do anything short of live up to the expressed expectations." Comer argues that too many children today are deprived of the "sense of trust, belonging, and place" so essential to learning. [6]
Helping Parents Parent
Parents themselves are pressured, tired, and unsure of how much they should interfere with schoolwork. Many complain that the only time they are wanted in school is when their child develops a problem. Dr. Futrell suggests that educators must start taking the initiative in inviting parents into school under more positive circumstances. Blaming parents and denying the reality of different lifestyles does not change social realities. Administrators who have accepted the facts and reached out by scheduling academic and social events at convenient times and encouraging working parents to attend (e.g., family potluck suppers, book fairs, etc.) have been gratified by the response. Others who had the funds to hire local psychologists to offer short courses in parent education have also reported positive results.
The principal of a nationally recognized elementary school in urban East Cleveland personally holds regular meetings with parents to discuss practical ways in which they can help their children do better in school. He says he has obtained excellent results from using a computerized dialing device that calls everyone with a child in the class to remind them of the meeting. Since the machine started recording the number of anyone who hangs up on his message, he reports that attendance has improved even more!
Broader efforts than schools can provide are needed, however, to teach parents about the needs of young children. Even middle class families may be able to profit by such courses as Dr. Burton White's "Missouri New Parents as Teachers Project (NPAT)." Emphasizing language development, social abilities, small and large muscle, vision, and hearing skills for a large group of children from birth through the first three years of life, Dr. White's curriculum for successful parenting places first priority on "the quality and quantity of adult input into the [child's] stream of experience." White advocates that a parent or grandparent be on hand virtually all the time during the first six to eight months of the child's life to provide "prompt response" to the child's needs or attempts to interact.
Children with parents in White's program consistently score significantly higher on measures of intelligence, achievement, auditory comprehension, and verbal ability than a comparable group whose parents were not enrolled. [7] Although other specialists insist a well-trained surrogate can provide equally responsive care, the initial success of this program appears to make a case for more realistic parental-leave policies.
While our society, as a whole, needs to be reminded of the critical nature of the infant and toddler years, some critics claim that programs like White's lead to too much pressure for early academic skills ("superbabying"). Parent educators must be cautious about implying to parents, particularly well-educated, "fast track" ones, that their main job is to "teach" school at home. Even in an information age, homes still need to provide personal guidance, love, and security. Worried parents need to be reassured that having children talk and participate with them in household and play activities is probably their most truly "educational" role. A spokesman for an important international educational association recently summed it up:
If children are to become responsible members of society, they must not only be exposed to adults involved in meaningful and demanding tasks, but they must themselves begin to participate in such activities early in life. We need to involve children in undertaking genuine responsibilities that will give them a sense of purpose, dignity, and worth. [8]
Most parents have a natural instinct to "scaffold" their children's learning, but those who are sure of themselves and comfortable in their relationship with their child do a better job of it. [9] Parents need support systems; to the degree that schools must take on this extra job of providing them, they will need extra resources.
When children enter school, we have a chance to recast the die of early experience. The brain continues to grow and change throughout the school years. Even if the job is partially bungled in preschool years, much learning potential may be rescued. To do so, however, requires involving each child in meaningful, manageable experiences with language, listening, thinking, problem-solving, imagining, and creating.
LANGUAGE, LISTENING, AND LITERACY
Literacy and many other types of problem-solving demand more extended exposure to good uses of language than most children are now experiencing.
Tools of Language Meaning
Sorting Out the Sounds
We all know these children can't listen, but we seem to be operating on the theory that they're just like us and they ought to be able to, instead of building up programs to teach them how. -- Anna Jones, head, Charles River School, Massachusetts
One reason for declining reading and spelling abilities is that children now come to school with insufficiently developed abilities to listen to the sounds in words. Before reading instruction begins, teachers should be trained to determine a child's level of "phonological awareness," the ability to identify, remember, and sequence the sounds in words. Without this ability, common forms of "phonics" instruction are inefficient and may even be damaging, yet children do not necessarily "pick up" these skills without certain types of listening experiences.
Children who have missed out during the sensitive period for auditory discrimination especially need concentrated training in these skills. Although lack of early experience may still result in gaps, a good training program can probably make up at least some of the lost ground.
Home and classroom activities promoting pure listening and sequencing of sounds should be a major part of pre-reading training. Such simple games as "Pig Latin" or rhyming words give children a chance to manipulate the sounds at the beginning, middle, and end of words. Unfortunately, structured oral training by itself is not a focus in most reading programs (which use workbooks and/or worksheets). When it is, new studies suggest it may be very effective. In one such program first graders did not even get reading textbooks until January. Doing exercises in pure sound awareness in a format designed by Dr. Patricia Lindamood, these students rapidly overtook and passed children in control groups when they finally got their reading books. According to Dr. Lindamood, schools in Idaho, California, Michigan, and Florida have had similar results. The Michigan program reduced intake to special-education classes by 60-75%. Even high-risk students in first through third grades achieved significantly better reading comprehension and spelling scores than a matched group of controls. [10] Dr. Lindamood adds, by the way, that approximately 20% of teachers need remedial training in the same auditory skills. [11]
Two researchers in Syracuse, New York, tried out a seven-week program of similar training in "phoneme segmentation" with a group of kindergarten nonreaders. Their scores on a word-reading test were then compared with comparable groups who received either traditional "phonics" training or no special intervention. At the end of the seven weeks those in the auditory training group significantly outscored both other groups. The authors of this study, who are working on ways in which kindergarten teachers can be taught to use these techniques, recommend that training "to focus the child's attention on the internal sound structure of the word" be included in every beginning reading program. [12]
If Sesame Street producers really want to teach children the foundations of reading, they should take all the pictures off the screen for a while and get the kids to listen to the sounds. Skills of phonological awareness are the entry point to reading. Once children have "cracked the code," however, they need other language skills to move forward with comprehension.
"Somebody Just Needs to Teach These Kids Grammar!"
"The main thing that's wrong with these kids is that somebody ought to teach them grammar!" opined my (highly literate) seat partner on a recent flight. He is right, of course. Understanding the syntax, or grammar, of the language is critical for reading comprehension, for writing, and for many types of reasoning. Nowadays, however, teaching grammar is not as simple as it was when this man was in school and his teachers and people on the radio (and in the early days of TV) tried to speak intelligently and expected him to follow suit.
When overwhelming numbers of students grow up with adult and media models (the distinction is not unintentional) who immerse them in misplaced ideas ("Having trapped the killer, gunshots rang out"); confusion of subject and object ("Him and myself agreed ... "); mangled time sequence ("She had went ... "); and stumbling modifiers ("Tastes good like it should"), a time-consuming rebuilding job is called for. It is hardly fair to expect teachers to single-handedly "cure" the casualties of a frontal assault on proper usage!
The resulting desperation to get "grammar" into kids has resulted in its being taught (just taught, not usually learned, by the way) badly. Most students regard this subject as if it were some sort of great, green, greasy monster waiting to gobble them up. They usually hate their grammar lessons so much that a sure guarantee of good deportment in most classrooms is to threaten students with a grammar worksheet if they don't behave.
Antagonism added to ignorance bodes poorly for survival of the logical structure of language, but one can hardly blame the children for detesting something that has been taught so poorly. Because preadolescent brains do not cope well with abstract rule systems, grammar is best learned initially through exposure to oral language and/or reading good books.
Children naturally start learning grammar (syntax) from the moment they are born; even in a linguistically depleted culture most five-year-olds are quite accomplished users of its basic rules. As we have seen, however, the brain will not generate refinements and extensions of this knowledge unless the culture follows up with the appropriate types of stimulation.
Meaningful real-life experience, however, is quite different from the teaching and testing of abstract rules that has become a stultifying commonplace in American classrooms. For example, children in elementary, or even middle school, who can say, write, read, and understand "The sunset was beautiful," and who can differentiate between a "naming word" and a "describing word" should not spend valuable time memorizing and being tested on "A predicate adjective is always preceded by a linking verb." They should, instead, spend a great deal of time listening to and generating -- orally and in writing -- the richness of nouns, verb tenses, sentence expansions, sentence combinations, dependent clauses, and all the other shades of complexity that will take them beyond the media's sandbox syntax.
Abstract rule systems for grammar and usage should be taught when most students are in high school. Then, if previously prepared, they may even enjoy the challenges of this kind of abstract, logical reasoning. Only, however, if the circuits are not already too cluttered up by bungled rule-teaching.
One ninth-grade student who came to me last year for help with grammar was hopelessly confused about the simplest parts of speech. Although she was intelligent and could, at her current age, have mastered this material in a week, she had been a victim of meaningless "grammar" drills since second grade. As Michelle and I struggled on the simple difference between adjectives and adverbs, I often wished I could take a neurological vacuum cleaner and just suck out all those mixed-up synapses that kept getting in our way. It took us six months to dispose of the underbrush, but finally one day the light dawned. "This is easy!" she exclaimed. It is, when brains are primed for the learning and the student has a reason to use it with real literary models.
Immersing children in good language from books and tapes, modeling patterns for their own speech and writing, and letting them enjoy their proficiency in using words to manipulate ideas are valid ways to embed "grammar" in growing brains. Working with them on their own writing is especially important. No amount of worksheets or rule learning will ever make up for deficits resulting from lack of experience with the structure of real, meaningful sentences.
The Oral Tradition
It is folly to ignore the importance of oral storytelling, oral history, and public speaking in a world that will communicate increasingly without the mediation of print. These skills build language competence in grammar, memory, attention, and visualization, among many other abilities. At least equally important, they can be used to tap the richness of cultural traditions outside the "mainstream" -- and the talents of many children. Is it unreasonable to suggest that elementary teachers -- and perhaps others, as well -- take a course in storytelling? Many insist this training has made a big difference in their effectiveness in the classroom.
What's Wrong With Memorizing?
I personally believe, although I cannot cite any brain research to prove it, that helping students at all grade levels memorize some pieces of good writing -- narrative, expository, and poetic -- on a regular basis would provide good practice for language, listening, and attention. I do not mean reverting to a rote-level curriculum, but simply taking a little time each week to celebrate the sounds of literate thought. Memorizing can be done as a homework exercise so that not much classroom time is consumed.
Teaching Students to Listen
At the same time, schools must get into the business of teaching children to listen effectively because no one else seems to be doing it. Teachers cannot assume their students are attending to what they hear, because most are not. Unless we want to put on a three-dimensional, living-color dog-and-pony show every time we teach a lesson, listening training will have to start the minute they toddle into the school system.
Teaching kids to listen will probably consume a good bit of classroom time, but it will be time well spent. Good teaching of any of the basic learning and thinking processes slows down our relentless march through subject matter. But how much time is consumed by repeating directions, dealing with students who didn't do the homework because they didn't "hear" the assignment, and re-teaching material that was not mastered because they did not understand what they heard -- either from the teacher or from the author who spoke to them from the textbook?
A recent article in an influential educational journal advocated structured training in listening as a new part of the curriculum, teaching children "to participate in structured experiences that cause them to question, to sort, to organize, to evaluate, and to choose," so they may become "connoisseurs and rational consumers of auditory input." [13]
Programs have been designed to improve listening skills; although many of these were originally targeted for students with learning disabilities, they are now appropriate for almost everyone. Instead of adding still more worksheets, however, why not use daily lessons more effectively to accomplish the same purpose? Teachers continually tell me they have to repeat all directions at least three times; one reported she ends up giving separate directions to everyone in the class. And we wonder why students don't listen? Teachers should band together and agree to start -- from the earliest grades -- making reception of spoken language a priority. Examples:
"I am going to give two directions. I want you to listen carefully and then I will ask one of you to repeat them before we go on."
"I will start with a three-minute minilecture on the topic we will be studying in science class today. Listen carefully and then write down a summary of what you remember. I will not repeat anything. You can read your summaries out loud and compare what you remembered."
"Today we are going to play a game in which you work in teams to give each other directions and see if the other person can listen carefully enough to follow them."
Some children's learning styles make processing information through auditory channels more difficult, but research has shown that they, particularly, need practice in these skills. Adults who are sensitive to individual differences do not embarrass youngsters who have difficulty, but they continue to work toward high standards of attention.
Particularly important for today's students is making space for them to talk and listen effectively to each other. With more TV viewing, many youngsters lack skills for interacting positively with peers. Yet most teachers, sadly, do little to help the students learn to talk or listen. The classroom conversational ball gets tossed from teacher to student, then back to teacher, then back to another student, etc.
Teacher: "John, who was the main character of this story?"
John: "Samuel Adams."
Teacher: "Right. Ayesha, when was Samuel Adams born?"
Etc.
Meanwhile, the rest of the class is free to tune out until they hear their own names called. Alternate questioning techniques get all the students involved in group discussions where everyone asks and answers questions and discusses opinions and ideas within a structured format.
Teacher: "I want each of you to work with a partner and take fifteen minutes to list all the facts you can find in the text about Samuel Adams. Then we will compare your lists to classify important ideas and details. Then 1will show you how to make some sample outlines to guide you in planning the one-page biography you have been assigned for tonight's homework." (This teacher slips in a lesson on categorization skills as the students determine the major and subordinate categories for the outlines.)
Do students start bouncing off walls if given this sort of freedom? Not if teachers are trained in establishing firm rules and classroom structures and if they take the time to teach the rules of constructive interaction. Even young children, in fact, can become very actively and productively engaged in this type of lesson. Professional journals and trade books feature more and more such ideas. Paradoxically, students in schools with the most rigid discipline may have the most difficulty with the self-discipline necessary for this type of interaction, so it helps to have teachers from the earliest grades trained to make active, constructive student participation -- not robotic reception -- an inevitable part of classroom life.
If parents want to help, they can first of all insist on careful listening at home. They can also repudiate the fiction that children learn best when they are silent -- and support teachers who encourage active, but self-controlled, participation.