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I stumbled on a site that I really love.  The site www.kidCourses.com  is totally free!  Creator Jessika Sobanski and I spoke this evening.  She describes the idea:

“We were happy to offer online courses and blog content to motivate children to be life long-learners, express their creativity, spread positivity, and just plain have fun. Our biggest hit is Mathlibs, which has been around for about a decade. Children (grades 3-5) get to make their own silly math questions and can also learn from colorful, interactive lessons. Our previously live ABC Signs course is now online. We have over 120 real American Sign Language signs incorporated into fun and catchy ABC rhymes. We hope that our lessons and blog content will bring fun learning experiences to children this summer.”

Don’t let the summer slide set you back.  Try www.kidCourses.com with your kids and let us know what you think.  The MathLibs are way cool!

http://kidcourses.com/mathlibs/

Part one of this story focused on boredom and humiliation/fear of humiliation as obstacles to learning. My experience of boredom and fear of humiliation in my K-12 education was a driver for me to start looking closely at learning. Here, I present the findings from my doctoral research. As a student, I never understood why nobody seemed to care about how we felt about the teaching. Seems that nobody thought to ask us. Respect goes a long way with kids. In fact, I have found that expressing my genuine curiosity about how and what a child thinks usually promotes learning. When I do it, I’m showing them respect. I found an excellent essay on this topic here http://bit.ly/cvqBwy .

For those interested in the methodology of the study, I’m happy to answer questions at [email protected]

I interviewed 12 co-researchers who went through a 30 session treatment with me. All of them had struggled in school. All made significant progress shown by a range of measures including pre/post testing. I’ll use quotes from the interviews when possible so the learners can speak for themselves. From our interviews, I discovered 3 major themes:
1. Self-Enhancement Through Play.
This was by far the most common theme. It was common to hear the word “fun” paired with a statement about valuable learning. From an 11-year-old girl with reading problems: “I felt like I wasn’t smart. I wasn’t reading high-level books. I was reading lower level books….[Here] I’m learning while I move, like I’ doing hands on moving around and touching things. Just more fun and active.”
The learner was solving problems in those sessions. The problems encouraged a specific type of thinking. Learners experienced the sessions as play, and play is fun. In the book, “A Theory of Fun”, Raph Koster tells us what is fun is “exercising our brains” and that all games are edutainment. http://www.theoryoffun.com/ What do you think about that definition?

2. Experiencing Freedom
In the program I used, tasks allowed the learner to think and solve problems in his/her own way. We set out to create habits of thought. “A lot of time you get to do your own thing. You don’t have to follow rules.” “I got to find my own way of finding out and remembering…[I]t wasn’t like you have to follow this pattern.” One little girl said, “You didn’t teach me anything, really…everything else [i.e., the games] taught me.” What was really happening was that she was experimenting with her thinking. Another teen said, “[Y]ou didn’t teach me anything. I want to say you helped me but you didn’t teach me anything.” What an excellent compliment!

3. Enhanced Sense of Self-Competence
A 16-year-old boy whom I will never forget illustrates this theme. Initially, his expectations for himself were low. “I didn’t think I could be taught very well–my mind was like, when I walked in I was like, well, I don’t see how this is gonna help.” By the end of our sessions, a shift occurred and Steven’s potential became realized. “I experience[d] how to put that [thinking] into my schoolwork. I didn’t realize my learning capability.” I kept in touch with Steven for a few years after. He continued to do fine work in school.
Some of my co-researchers had ADD/ADHD, LD, or dyslexia diagnoses. It’s important to say that not all learners at my clinic improved. But, certainly most did. For my research, I selected the learners who showed improvement on a range of measures. After years of doing this work, it became clear that this was about more than learning. Learning isn’t just about school It is about life. We use our brains in all the things we love. Many children improved in athletics. Steve, for example: “I’d have to say –I’m playing lacrosse right now–if you put me back to December or any of those, I wasn’t half as good. I didn’t pay attention period to the game. Now its like I’m so into it, my reaction time is a lot better. I’m a lot quicker. Some improved in music. Loren: “I play cello a lot better now.” One adult no longer got lost and can now read a map. One girl, after improving her reading, went from “worst to first” playing the recorder.
I began to think about how we could make these experiences available to everyone. I eventually began developing video games. I noticed that game developers–the good ones, think like psychologists. Lately, there is an interest in play, video games, and learning. You can check out this article for a good discussion http://bit.ly/buy6oE. I like to focus on making games that are really fun and that target the types of thinking that helps kids become confident, happy, and free to think creatively. Freedom and creative/playful thinking leave little room for boredom and humiliation.

I want to share with you the findings of my doctoral research published in 2003. I studied a program created by my mentor, J.P. Das of University of Alberta. This program, called PREP, helps train cognitive (thinking) processes. I wanted to know not only the effects on learning, but “What was the learner’s experience” of the program. How did they feel and think about what they were doing in our treatment sessions? What I found surprised me.

Kathy was pregnant. I have to tell you that so she doesn’t kill me.

First, let’s talk a bit about school. I’m not here to school bash. We have politicized education so badly that it is difficult to say anything about it without raising defenses. There are a lot of stakeholders including parents, publishing companies, school staff, politicians, etc. The most important stakeholder is the child. If this is true, then we should always re-evaluate and re-examine our practices. We should listen to one another. That approach may lead to progress.

I know that school shaped me. No doubt about it. How could it not? The things I loved about school were the social things. Friendships and sports were great. I had some teachers I will never forget. Three of them, in fact. For some reason, though, I just can’t forget how boring it was. The two major negative forces I met were 1) Boredom and 2) Humiliation. Let’s take them one at a time.

Boredom: When adults schedule a speaker they look for informative and entertaining people. This seems true for all the adult groups I know of, e.g., business presentations, PTA/PTO, etc. It only makes sense. A knowledgeable bore doesn’t get a lot of invitations to return. Having suffered many a boring class, it has always been common sense, in my opinion, that we shouldn’t ask children to do what we are unwilling to do ourselves. In fact, children have even more difficulty than adults withstanding boredom (they are developing attention), so developmentally appropriate practices hold us to an even higher standard for stimulation. Also, adults have many more years in the world. They have a better frame of reference than do children. For example, I can connect with a history lesson on Ronald Reagan because I lived during his presidency. A child brings little relevant experience to the lesson.

I just got a reminder of how boring my 11 year old child finds school. Tonight was Griffin’s open house. The students wrote letters to their parents and taped them on their desks. Clearly, the theme of Griffin’s letter was boredom. He went down the list: Math is O.K., Social Studies is really boring. Media Studies is the worst. How can that be? Social Studies? Are children not curious about the world around them? Media Studies? Please. My kid has his nose in media all day long. He is absolutely curious about media. He isn’t buying what they are selling at school. I’m disappointed. I want him to love these subjects.

Here is a thought. What if we allow kids to work on real projects? (Notice I said, “allow”. The adult is still guiding the experience). By “project”, I don’t mean doing a collage or writing a research paper on an unselected topic. I mean let learners solve “real” problems and have “real” debates. And by real, I mean problems that matter to kids. Let’s make the content, at least initially, relevant to the child. In Griffin’s case, we could start with examining the media that are relevant to kids. Couldn’t we consider the iPod Touch to look at the history of technology, social meaning, psychology (effects of the technology), applications, etc.? Author Marjie Knudsen (http://summertimepress.com/) sent me this today: http://bit.ly/cZEMwy. Take a look at it.

Did you check it out? Children built those devices! But what did they learn? Think it through. Ask yoursef, “What did it take for them to go from concept to delivery? What did the child do creatively? What problems did the learner solve? What prior knowledge, e.g., mathematics, literacy skills, etc., did the learner apply? In order to even begin walking this new path, we would have to look at the fundamental attitudes we have about children.

Recently, Thomas Friedman http://nyti.ms/cUyIMO wrote a piece stating that the problem lies in parents and that we should demand more out of our children. I have a lot to say about this, but I’m running over my limit. For now, I’ll say that I couldn’t disagree more. I wouldn’t even know how to approach it. Do I demand that he not be bored? Do I demand that he fake curiosity about the content? Would adults respond to this as a management style? For example, how would you like to find out that your heart surgeon was completely uninterested in his studies and is practicing medicine because his superiors demanded he do it? Do we really want that? What is the underlying attitude here?

Here is the worst of it. Children who do not respond to lecture/textbook education sometimes feel that they are not smart. What a shame. School isn’t too hard for them. They could learn the material. It is just boring. Now the learner can’t get better because he/she feels disenfranchised.

Humiliation and Fear of Humiliation

Imagine that you were a poor reader. Now imagine that you are waiting your turn to read aloud. I remember this happening and I even remember the words that this poor girl missed. I was in 3rd or 4th grade. It was science. The words were “digest” and “saliva”. She said “dig-its” and “slava”. We roared with laughter. She laughed along nervously. Students joked about it after school. If I remember it, I wonder if she remembers it.

People tend to behave according to our expectations. If we give kids the message that they are threats or potential problems, they are more likely to behave in a problematic way. I behaved best for the teachers who showed me respect. I wonder how much of the bad behavior we hear about in school is a defense against humiliation. Getting yelled at is humiliating. Being corrected for mistakes publicly is humiliating. Posted grades are humiliating for the low scorers. Being bullied by peers is humiliating. Being rejected by peers is humiliating. The year I published my dissertation, the Dallas Morning News published this: http://www.nospank.net/n-k42.htm

In Part 2 of this post, I will share the findings from the research. The children in this study were my co-researchers. They tell us how they want to learn and how we can get there. Hint: boredom or humiliation have nothing to do with it. See you next time.