MULTIPLE INTELLIGENCES: NEW HORIZONS. By Howard Gardner. Perseus Books Group, 2006. 300 pages.
Working on a daily basis with children who have been diagnosed with deficits—problem learners—I’m attracted to educational theory which holds that individuals are amalgams of unique characteristics. Strengths as well as weaknesses.
My conception of Howard Gardner’s theory of multiple intelligences played into that attraction. School is in large part based on psychometrically determined intelligence quotients and the ability to apply intelligence to written language and mathematics. Stretching that view a bit might allow kids who are academically unsuccessful to see that they have capabilities that can be realized with effort, and allow society to make use of unrecognized potential.
After reading Multiple Intelligences: New Horizons, I find my conception was fairly accurate, but I remain confused about how to translate theory into practice. I’m also more skeptical about the theory itself, while still agreeing with Gardner that we need "to nurture all of the varied human intelligences."
It’s interesting that Gardner has been surprised by his audience. He originally formulated his theory in 1983 as "a psychologist who thought he was addressing his fellow psychologists." However, he did not find a warm welcome among his colleagues, to whom Frames of Mind "seemed somewhat exotic." Among those whom Gardner, perhaps with a hint of derision, labels "psychometricians," "the book aroused antipathy."
However, the book was a huge hit with another constituency. "For reasons that I do not fully understand," writes a baffled Gardner, "the theory of multiple intelligences spoke immediately to educators—loudly and quite clearly."
The dichotomic reception of Frames of Mind set off warning signals in my mind to approach the theory of multiple intelligences with caution. I came to Multiple Intelligences: New Horizons after reading Daniel Willingham’s excellent Why Don’t Students Like School? The cognitive psychologist’s critical view of Gardner’s work increased my wariness.
The presentation of Multiple Intelligences didn’t help. It’s not an updated edition of Frames of Mind, but a poorly organized mish-mash of collected essays, some written with co-authors, and randomly ordered reflections on a theory by its creator a quarter of a century down the road.
Readers looking for an outline of that theory need go no further in this book than its first chapter, twenty-five pages aptly titled "In a Nutshell." Or, with even more brevity, you could note that Gardner posits seven intelligences: musical, bodily-kinesthetic, logical-mathematical, linguistic, spatial, intrapersonal and interpersonal. Maybe an eighth, too—a naturalist intelligence.
Most readers, I would think, come to this book with that outline more or less already in place.
Gardner does contextualize his work and its effect over the years, and acknowledges an impediment to more widespread acceptance of his ideas—a lack of supporting clinical evidence for multiple intelligences.
While it’s hard to argue with his plea that "psychologists should spend less time ranking people and more time trying to help them," it leaves a question unanswered. How?
Good teachers have long recognized that different students learn in different ways. I’m not really sure that determining which intelligences are in which classrooms will make for an improved version of tailoring instruction to varying needs and abilities, even to the moment.
To be fair, Gardner does address the issue of application in the second part of this book where he discusses the Project Spectrum elementary school program, learning through projects, the Arts PROPEL high school program, and using broader, more inclusive forms of assessment. The problem is that the information is sketchy. Gardner repeatedly reminds readers of the positive reaction to his theory among educators, rather than tell them exactly how educators can put theory into practice.
A chapter called “Multiple Entry Points Toward Disciplinary Understanding” offers an interesting and helpful way of framing instruction—narrational, logical, quantitative, foundational, aesthetic, experiential, or collaborative. Likewise, while considering Project Spectrum, Gardner includes a questionnaire which puts forward useful criteria for determining a child’s learning style through observation.
But is connecting learning styles to teaching really have much to do with intelligences as separate categories? Gardner says no, that "style and intelligence are really fundamentally different constructs." Ironic, given that I found the questionnaire and entry point framework the most practical takeaway from Multiple Intelligences: New Horizons.
Gardner tackles those "new horizons" in a final section that I thought was pretty much fluff. A chapter on multiple intelligence theory and the workplace seemed downright goofy.
The ostensible goal of this book is to introduce Gardner’s theory and to explain its application. It fails on both counts.
___________________________________________________________________
COMMENT FROM JULIE AT ALL EARS ON GOODREADS 3-20-11:
So interesting that he didn't think that educators would be a primary target for this info!
COMMENT FROM CLIF ON GOODREADS 3-21-11:
What obsesses me about education is - how to trigger motivation. I did very poorly in school because I simply wasn't interested in the subject matter. On my own initiative, however, I was fascinated with meteorology and avidly read and re-read books on weather, something not even covered in (elementary) school.
As it turned out, I couldn't go into the field professionally because I had (and this gets to multiple intelligence) absolutely NO aptitude for math. I am entirely a word, not a figure, person!
But regardless of what aspect of intelligence one may have - triggering the desire to use it is key. How do we do that? And why is it that I am insatiably eager to learn in subjects that interest me? If we could turn that on with a switch in students!
MY RESPONSE:
Julie, not only did Gardner fail to see that it was obvious that the people most invested in realizing kids’ intelligence would be the most significant audience for his theory, he still seems somewhat befuddled by his rock-star status in the educational community. I think his myopia tells us more than we’d like to know about him.
Clif, one reason why I am critical of Gardner’s work is that I believe it’s more important to look at what good teachers do than to look at psychological categories of intelligence, especially when the evidence base underlying that categorization is inchoate.
Good teachers go with core curriculum, but empathize with their scholars-in-training. They are aware there are different cognitive styles and personalities in their classrooms and adjust accordingly.
People who remember a favorite teacher often say that the reason the teacher was so great was that the teacher “motivated” them to learn. Of course, motivation is really internal; no one can turn it on but you. What good teachers do is connect curriculum to their students’ lives. They also really know the material, and are really enthusiastic about teaching it.
I would wager that some of your difficulty in engaging with school subject matter was caused as much by the way it was taught as by the content itself.
Almost all children are curious and creative. They love to play. They love to meet challenges if they believe they can improve. There’s a lot there education can tap into. Instead, it is often the case that all those qualities are stomped out of kids as soon as school starts.
Besides that, meteorology should be covered in elementary school!
Showing posts with label Recent News. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Recent News. Show all posts
Sunday, March 20, 2011
Sunday, February 27, 2011
RECENT NEWS: MY REVIEW OF "WHY DON'T STUDENTS LIKE SCHOOL?"
WHY DON'T STUDENTS LIKE SCHOOL? A COGNITIVE SCIENTIST ANSWERS QUESTIONS ABOUT HOW THE MIND WORKS AND WHAT IT MEANS FOR THE CLASSROOM. By Daniel Willingham. Jossey-Bass, 2010 (paperback). 258 pages.
The titular question might appear an opening to a rant against our educational system. Rest assured that Daniel Willingham is hardly scribbling out some angry screed. He’s thoughtful, and avoids polemic.
In fact, I hope I’m not oversimplifying when I say his basic answer is that students don’t like school because it’s hard.
If that sounds awfully facile, be aware that Willingham goes on to a knottier problem: What can we do about it?
What Willingham is really writing about is not student anathema, but how our brains work, especially in the areas of understanding and memory, and how that connects to teaching students. A harder concept to translate into a catchy title.
School is hard because "we are not naturally good thinkers." That doesn’t mean we don’t have amazing brains. Evolution has equipped us to take in what’s around us and react accordingly. In typically down-to-earth and insightful language, Willingham uses a striking contrast to clear up the paradox:
"Tasks that you take for granted—for example, walking on a rocky shore where the footing is uncertain—are much more difficult than playing top-level chess. No computer can do it."
Humans do, however, have more difficulty when consciously processing available information to solve problems or create new ideas—thinking. "The mind is not designed for thinking," Willingham writes. Thinking takes time. Thinking requires work. Thinking means not being sure.
So our brains default to not thinking when possible, even when we are performing complex actions—like walking on a rocky shore. Once we know how to chop an onion, drive a car, or read a book, we no longer waste time or effort considering how we are doing those things, or question whether we are doing them correctly.
Willingham repeatedly returns to a major stumbling block on the road to true reasoning and reflection—working memory. This is a short and easy-to-read book with lots of great practical advice for teachers, but its most valuable contribution to my own thinking was really helping me better understand what working memory is, and how its limitations affect learning and cognition.
In a way, working memory is consciousness itself. It is what you are thinking about now. Working memory allows you to blend what’s coming in through your senses with what you already know so that you can answer questions and put together thoughts.
Willingham cites current research that pretty definitively concludes working memory is limited—very limited—and more or less fixed—there is little evidence that you can improve it.
What you can do is cheat it. If the "lack of space in working memory is a fundamental bottleneck of human cognition," the trick is to enfold richer content into the limited number of items that small space can hold.
There are two ways to do this. One is to increase factual knowledge. That’s extremely counter-intuitive—learn more to learn more. Here’s how John Medina put it in his Brain Rules: "It’s like saying that if you carry two heavy backpacks on a hike instead of one, you will accomplish your journey more quickly…."
But it’s true. Willingham uses the same kind of model as Medina, dividing his work into nine "cognitive principles." One is, "Factual knowledge precedes skill." Another is, "We understand new things in the context of things we already know."
When a student can easily access factual knowledge from long-term memory, he can "chunk" information. He has a clear idea of context. The items that he’s manipulating in working memory are broader and deeper. As I’m reading a discussion of eukaryotic cells and life regulation in Antonio Damasio’s "Self Comes to Mind," I’m extremely grateful I just reviewed cell structure with a seventh grade kid with whom I’m working.
Walking on Willingham’s rocky shore is a demonstration of the other way to get around the working memory logjam. Performing automatically means a student doesn’t have to use working memory to think about that performance.
An example Willingham uses is practicing times tables as a yonng man. When he transferred to a new school, his math teacher insisted that Willingham would do better if he memorized the multiplication facts. Coming from a school that placed more emphasis on conceptual understanding than rote memorization, Willingham at first resented the requirement. He soon realized how much automaticity helped.
It’s another counterintuitive principle, its paradoxical nature beautifully summed up by a marvelous quote from the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead: "It is a profoundly erroneous truism…that we should cultivate the habit of thinking of what we are doing. The precise opposite is the case. Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them."
Unfortunately, automaticity only comes effortlessly with tasks such as breathing. Willingham’s cognitive principle here is, "Proficiency requires practice." So teachers have to think hard about what their students most need to practice. They should also consider that spacing practice—rather than cramming—is more effective.
It’s clear that Willingham regards working memory as a universal. Indeed, he cites studies connecting working memory to intelligence. This viewpoint is quite different from the outlook of Howard Gardner, and Multiple Intelligence theory. Willingham is somewhat abashed to find himself in this counterpoint position.
Nevertheless, despite feeling "like a bit of a Grinch" in stating it, another one if his cognitive principles is, "Children are more alike than different in terms of learning." He makes a critical qualification, however—that he is not making a claim "that all children are alike, nor that teachers should treat children as interchangeable."
But more important than tailoring content to individuals is teachers really getting to a deep understanding of that content. Activating previous knowledge and making sure that knowledge is there will help advance proficiency and comprehensive mastery.
So will thinking "of to-be-learned material as answers." Begin with a thorough examination of the questions.
No matter where children’s interests lie, no matter what their talents or "intelligences," I do believe that well-rounded general knowledge should be a goal of education (as does Gardner). It makes sense to me that we can also generalize about the ways students might acquire such knowledge.
Gardner’s skepticism about "horizontal faculties," like working memory, might result in teachers using valuable time evaluating different learning styles that would better be spent in effectively presenting content to groups with at least some homogeneity.
Educators, parents and students looking for some good tips on how to do that will find Why Don’t Students Like School? a most worthwhile resource.
Highly recommended.
The titular question might appear an opening to a rant against our educational system. Rest assured that Daniel Willingham is hardly scribbling out some angry screed. He’s thoughtful, and avoids polemic.
In fact, I hope I’m not oversimplifying when I say his basic answer is that students don’t like school because it’s hard.
If that sounds awfully facile, be aware that Willingham goes on to a knottier problem: What can we do about it?
What Willingham is really writing about is not student anathema, but how our brains work, especially in the areas of understanding and memory, and how that connects to teaching students. A harder concept to translate into a catchy title.
School is hard because "we are not naturally good thinkers." That doesn’t mean we don’t have amazing brains. Evolution has equipped us to take in what’s around us and react accordingly. In typically down-to-earth and insightful language, Willingham uses a striking contrast to clear up the paradox:
"Tasks that you take for granted—for example, walking on a rocky shore where the footing is uncertain—are much more difficult than playing top-level chess. No computer can do it."
Humans do, however, have more difficulty when consciously processing available information to solve problems or create new ideas—thinking. "The mind is not designed for thinking," Willingham writes. Thinking takes time. Thinking requires work. Thinking means not being sure.
So our brains default to not thinking when possible, even when we are performing complex actions—like walking on a rocky shore. Once we know how to chop an onion, drive a car, or read a book, we no longer waste time or effort considering how we are doing those things, or question whether we are doing them correctly.
Willingham repeatedly returns to a major stumbling block on the road to true reasoning and reflection—working memory. This is a short and easy-to-read book with lots of great practical advice for teachers, but its most valuable contribution to my own thinking was really helping me better understand what working memory is, and how its limitations affect learning and cognition.
In a way, working memory is consciousness itself. It is what you are thinking about now. Working memory allows you to blend what’s coming in through your senses with what you already know so that you can answer questions and put together thoughts.
Willingham cites current research that pretty definitively concludes working memory is limited—very limited—and more or less fixed—there is little evidence that you can improve it.
What you can do is cheat it. If the "lack of space in working memory is a fundamental bottleneck of human cognition," the trick is to enfold richer content into the limited number of items that small space can hold.
There are two ways to do this. One is to increase factual knowledge. That’s extremely counter-intuitive—learn more to learn more. Here’s how John Medina put it in his Brain Rules: "It’s like saying that if you carry two heavy backpacks on a hike instead of one, you will accomplish your journey more quickly…."
But it’s true. Willingham uses the same kind of model as Medina, dividing his work into nine "cognitive principles." One is, "Factual knowledge precedes skill." Another is, "We understand new things in the context of things we already know."
When a student can easily access factual knowledge from long-term memory, he can "chunk" information. He has a clear idea of context. The items that he’s manipulating in working memory are broader and deeper. As I’m reading a discussion of eukaryotic cells and life regulation in Antonio Damasio’s "Self Comes to Mind," I’m extremely grateful I just reviewed cell structure with a seventh grade kid with whom I’m working.
Walking on Willingham’s rocky shore is a demonstration of the other way to get around the working memory logjam. Performing automatically means a student doesn’t have to use working memory to think about that performance.
An example Willingham uses is practicing times tables as a yonng man. When he transferred to a new school, his math teacher insisted that Willingham would do better if he memorized the multiplication facts. Coming from a school that placed more emphasis on conceptual understanding than rote memorization, Willingham at first resented the requirement. He soon realized how much automaticity helped.
It’s another counterintuitive principle, its paradoxical nature beautifully summed up by a marvelous quote from the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead: "It is a profoundly erroneous truism…that we should cultivate the habit of thinking of what we are doing. The precise opposite is the case. Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them."
Unfortunately, automaticity only comes effortlessly with tasks such as breathing. Willingham’s cognitive principle here is, "Proficiency requires practice." So teachers have to think hard about what their students most need to practice. They should also consider that spacing practice—rather than cramming—is more effective.
It’s clear that Willingham regards working memory as a universal. Indeed, he cites studies connecting working memory to intelligence. This viewpoint is quite different from the outlook of Howard Gardner, and Multiple Intelligence theory. Willingham is somewhat abashed to find himself in this counterpoint position.
Nevertheless, despite feeling "like a bit of a Grinch" in stating it, another one if his cognitive principles is, "Children are more alike than different in terms of learning." He makes a critical qualification, however—that he is not making a claim "that all children are alike, nor that teachers should treat children as interchangeable."
But more important than tailoring content to individuals is teachers really getting to a deep understanding of that content. Activating previous knowledge and making sure that knowledge is there will help advance proficiency and comprehensive mastery.
So will thinking "of to-be-learned material as answers." Begin with a thorough examination of the questions.
No matter where children’s interests lie, no matter what their talents or "intelligences," I do believe that well-rounded general knowledge should be a goal of education (as does Gardner). It makes sense to me that we can also generalize about the ways students might acquire such knowledge.
Gardner’s skepticism about "horizontal faculties," like working memory, might result in teachers using valuable time evaluating different learning styles that would better be spent in effectively presenting content to groups with at least some homogeneity.
Educators, parents and students looking for some good tips on how to do that will find Why Don’t Students Like School? a most worthwhile resource.
Highly recommended.
Tuesday, January 18, 2011
RECENT NEWS: MY REVIEW OF "THE SHALLOWS"
THE SHALLOWS: WHAT THE INTERNET IS DOING TO OUR BRAINS. By Nicholas G. Carr. W.W. Norton & Company, 2010. 256 pages.
In the summer of 2008, the Atlantic published a piece by Nicholas Carr that tore through American literary culture. In an all too ironic twist, "Is Google Making Us Stupid?: What the Internet is doing to our brains" became an internet hit.
The twist was that even though Carr warned that the way we take in printed (or pixilated) words was changing how we processed those words, probably for the worse, scads of folks seemed to be processing his words in the old-fashioned way.
Citing research, he said internet users are "hopping from one source to another and rarely returning to any source they’d already visited," and that they "typically read no more than one or two pages of an article or book." But at least some internet users were clicking on his article and staying there for its 4,000 plus words, as evidenced by liberal quoting from the piece in thoughtful debates not only on blogs but also in print.
Soon, the essay had been included in several anthologies. And Carr expanded it into The Shallows: What The Internet Is Doing to Our Brains. Presumably he expects, or at least hopes, that readers will persevere through its 200 plus pages. Book consumers, still around, if in shrinking numbers, did buy it. The Shallows has sold steadily since its release this summer.
There’s a reason. It resonates. Many of us feel that the internet has taken away as much as it has given. We can identify with the dilemma Carr faces. On the one hand, he is grateful: "Research that once required days in the stacks or periodical rooms of libraries can now be done in minutes." But after "reading and writing e-mails, scanning headlines and blog posts, following Facebook updates, watching video streams, downloading music, or just tripping lightly from link to link to link to link," he begins to feel "what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation."
"The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle."
Has deep reading ever been natural? Thoughtful, reflective immersion in printed words has always taken effort. First we have to spend a great deal of time learning how to decode the symbols, a process that a significant number of intelligent children have tremendous difficulties mastering. Once that process becomes automatic, we still have to find a space free from distraction and the discipline to fully engage with abstract ideas. Not easy things for the human animal, even in pre-computer times.
Carr himself acknowledges that unlike language, "reading and writing are unnatural acts."
There is no doubt that the increased time we human animals are spending moving our eyeballs on screens and our digits on clickers and keys is changing our brains, and thus will change the way we do those unnatural acts. An essential property of the brain is its malleability, and Carr limns the startingly recent developments in neuroscience that have overthrown the long-held view of the brain as a static organ.
In 1968, using microelectrodes to probe monkeys’ brains after he had severed nerves in their hands, a young Michael Merzernich was incredulous to find an "astounding reorganization." After an initial period of confusion, the brains had rewired themselves so that the monkeys could get back to business as usual.
Merzernich’s work was dismissed, or ignored, because as he put it, "nobody would believe that neuroplasticity was occurring on this scale." As scientists’ ability to monitor brain function rapidly improved with more and more advanced technology, nearly everybody would believe that our brains are, in Merzenich’s words, "massively plastic."
So plastic that brain scans of experienced London cabdrivers show the part of their brain associated with environmental mapping is much larger than normal.
Not everyone becomes, or wants to be, a London cabdriver. Literacy, however, is a desired attribute in nearly all cultures, and necessary for a comfortable level of survival in nearly all societies. That’s a very recent phenomenon.
For widespread literacy you first need an alphabet, then typographical conventions that let you know when words and thoughts begin and end, then recognized formats for presenting stories, observations and commentaries, and finally efficient ways to produce and deliver that content to wide swaths of the public. We’ve only reached that point in the last few hundred years.
Carr excels at presenting the history behind that achievement, and making a case for its staggering effect. Without what he calls "the literary ethic," no Locke, no Nietzche, no Einstein. No Enlightenment. No Scientific Revolution. For that matter, no computers. The ability to produce and consume print has altered all of our brains in ways far more profound than the enlarged posterior hippocampus of a veteran London cabdriver.
Now, Carr alerts us, the even more rapid development of computer interface is even more drastically changing what we are. It’s more than shallower content. The reason the content is shallower is due to the very nature of the medium, which is multisensory and hyper-fast. "Producers are chopping up their products," Carr writes, "to fit the shorter attention spans of online consumers, as well as to raise their profiles on search engines."
Changing the message came after changing the medium. Hello, Marshall McLuhan. Stop whining about the onslaught of superfluous celebrity news, vapid e-mails, obtuse polemic and ubiquitous pornography, Carr tells us. Deliciously quoting McLuhan, he notes that "the content of a medium is just 'the juicy piece of meat carried by the burglar to distract the watchdog of the mind.'"
The real danger is not reading cruddy prose. The new way in which we read could diminish thoughtfulness itself. Because the "juggler’s brain" used in surfing the internet is intent on attending to multiple and disparate links, we are using all of our limited working memory space. We can’t draw on long-term memory, much less add to it; we can’t supply context.
Scary. If long-term memory is absent, what is left? A true tabula rasa? I agree with Carr when he states, "The depth of our intelligence hinges on our ability to transfer information from working memory to long-term memory and weave it into conceptual schema." A human brain is not analogous to a computer. The brain, a marvel of messiness, can’t outsource memory. But it can do what computers cannot: compare and evaluate, reflect and synthesize. Think. Really, it’s true. A computer cannot think.
Working with children has taught me the importance of background. A kid can’t learn a new concept until he’s got some context. He constructs knowledge on previous knowledge. The concern over the threat to cognition from the online environment is particularly salient when we’re talking about children. This is where I applaud Carr for sounding the alarm.
Carr finds Google founder Sergey Brin’s view that if you "had an artificial brain that was smarter than your brain, you’d be better off," upsetting because it is based on a "pinched concept of the human mind." It’s a view of a future that’s far from the liberating of human potential, and closer to the early twentieth century "scientific management" principles of Frederick Winslow Taylor, champion of assembly-line efficiency, the man who said, "In the past man has been first; in the future the system must be first."
I would like to think that we have the opportunity and the ability to go beyond the Industrial Age. I hope that my internet explorations won’t turn me into "a human HAL." That in our awareness of danger we can avoid it.
Throughout human history, what Carr terms "intellectual technologies" have changed the very shape of that history. "Instrumentalists" believe that it was the users who were key; "determinists" believe it was the tools themselves. Carr places himself in the determinist camp: "It strains belief to argue that we 'chose' to use maps and clocks."
I would like to think that the truth is somewhere in between. Maps and clocks forever changed us; so will the internet. But we do have control over when and how we use maps, clocks and the internet, and the power not to erase everything that went before them.
A significant number of people did read Carr’s original essay. A significant number of people have read The Shallows. There might even be a number of people reading War and Peace at this very moment.
Not everyone agrees with the Rhodes scholar Carr cites as declaring, "Sitting down and going through a book cover to cover just doesn’t make sense." Otherwise there would be no Goodreads, and I’d be typing this review only for myself.
Deep reading has always meant mental work, and there have always been people who don’t want to do that. Lots of people. Sometimes I don’t want to. But there remain people who, like David Ulin (The Lost Art of Reading), can say, "It's harder than it used to be, but still, I read."
The Shallows is provocative, informative, clearly and beautifully written. It’s also disturbing and depressing. Read it without giving up.
In the summer of 2008, the Atlantic published a piece by Nicholas Carr that tore through American literary culture. In an all too ironic twist, "Is Google Making Us Stupid?: What the Internet is doing to our brains" became an internet hit.
The twist was that even though Carr warned that the way we take in printed (or pixilated) words was changing how we processed those words, probably for the worse, scads of folks seemed to be processing his words in the old-fashioned way.
Citing research, he said internet users are "hopping from one source to another and rarely returning to any source they’d already visited," and that they "typically read no more than one or two pages of an article or book." But at least some internet users were clicking on his article and staying there for its 4,000 plus words, as evidenced by liberal quoting from the piece in thoughtful debates not only on blogs but also in print.
Soon, the essay had been included in several anthologies. And Carr expanded it into The Shallows: What The Internet Is Doing to Our Brains. Presumably he expects, or at least hopes, that readers will persevere through its 200 plus pages. Book consumers, still around, if in shrinking numbers, did buy it. The Shallows has sold steadily since its release this summer.
There’s a reason. It resonates. Many of us feel that the internet has taken away as much as it has given. We can identify with the dilemma Carr faces. On the one hand, he is grateful: "Research that once required days in the stacks or periodical rooms of libraries can now be done in minutes." But after "reading and writing e-mails, scanning headlines and blog posts, following Facebook updates, watching video streams, downloading music, or just tripping lightly from link to link to link to link," he begins to feel "what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation."
"The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle."
Has deep reading ever been natural? Thoughtful, reflective immersion in printed words has always taken effort. First we have to spend a great deal of time learning how to decode the symbols, a process that a significant number of intelligent children have tremendous difficulties mastering. Once that process becomes automatic, we still have to find a space free from distraction and the discipline to fully engage with abstract ideas. Not easy things for the human animal, even in pre-computer times.
Carr himself acknowledges that unlike language, "reading and writing are unnatural acts."
There is no doubt that the increased time we human animals are spending moving our eyeballs on screens and our digits on clickers and keys is changing our brains, and thus will change the way we do those unnatural acts. An essential property of the brain is its malleability, and Carr limns the startingly recent developments in neuroscience that have overthrown the long-held view of the brain as a static organ.
In 1968, using microelectrodes to probe monkeys’ brains after he had severed nerves in their hands, a young Michael Merzernich was incredulous to find an "astounding reorganization." After an initial period of confusion, the brains had rewired themselves so that the monkeys could get back to business as usual.
Merzernich’s work was dismissed, or ignored, because as he put it, "nobody would believe that neuroplasticity was occurring on this scale." As scientists’ ability to monitor brain function rapidly improved with more and more advanced technology, nearly everybody would believe that our brains are, in Merzenich’s words, "massively plastic."
So plastic that brain scans of experienced London cabdrivers show the part of their brain associated with environmental mapping is much larger than normal.
Not everyone becomes, or wants to be, a London cabdriver. Literacy, however, is a desired attribute in nearly all cultures, and necessary for a comfortable level of survival in nearly all societies. That’s a very recent phenomenon.
For widespread literacy you first need an alphabet, then typographical conventions that let you know when words and thoughts begin and end, then recognized formats for presenting stories, observations and commentaries, and finally efficient ways to produce and deliver that content to wide swaths of the public. We’ve only reached that point in the last few hundred years.
Carr excels at presenting the history behind that achievement, and making a case for its staggering effect. Without what he calls "the literary ethic," no Locke, no Nietzche, no Einstein. No Enlightenment. No Scientific Revolution. For that matter, no computers. The ability to produce and consume print has altered all of our brains in ways far more profound than the enlarged posterior hippocampus of a veteran London cabdriver.
Now, Carr alerts us, the even more rapid development of computer interface is even more drastically changing what we are. It’s more than shallower content. The reason the content is shallower is due to the very nature of the medium, which is multisensory and hyper-fast. "Producers are chopping up their products," Carr writes, "to fit the shorter attention spans of online consumers, as well as to raise their profiles on search engines."
Changing the message came after changing the medium. Hello, Marshall McLuhan. Stop whining about the onslaught of superfluous celebrity news, vapid e-mails, obtuse polemic and ubiquitous pornography, Carr tells us. Deliciously quoting McLuhan, he notes that "the content of a medium is just 'the juicy piece of meat carried by the burglar to distract the watchdog of the mind.'"
The real danger is not reading cruddy prose. The new way in which we read could diminish thoughtfulness itself. Because the "juggler’s brain" used in surfing the internet is intent on attending to multiple and disparate links, we are using all of our limited working memory space. We can’t draw on long-term memory, much less add to it; we can’t supply context.
Scary. If long-term memory is absent, what is left? A true tabula rasa? I agree with Carr when he states, "The depth of our intelligence hinges on our ability to transfer information from working memory to long-term memory and weave it into conceptual schema." A human brain is not analogous to a computer. The brain, a marvel of messiness, can’t outsource memory. But it can do what computers cannot: compare and evaluate, reflect and synthesize. Think. Really, it’s true. A computer cannot think.
Working with children has taught me the importance of background. A kid can’t learn a new concept until he’s got some context. He constructs knowledge on previous knowledge. The concern over the threat to cognition from the online environment is particularly salient when we’re talking about children. This is where I applaud Carr for sounding the alarm.
Carr finds Google founder Sergey Brin’s view that if you "had an artificial brain that was smarter than your brain, you’d be better off," upsetting because it is based on a "pinched concept of the human mind." It’s a view of a future that’s far from the liberating of human potential, and closer to the early twentieth century "scientific management" principles of Frederick Winslow Taylor, champion of assembly-line efficiency, the man who said, "In the past man has been first; in the future the system must be first."
I would like to think that we have the opportunity and the ability to go beyond the Industrial Age. I hope that my internet explorations won’t turn me into "a human HAL." That in our awareness of danger we can avoid it.
Throughout human history, what Carr terms "intellectual technologies" have changed the very shape of that history. "Instrumentalists" believe that it was the users who were key; "determinists" believe it was the tools themselves. Carr places himself in the determinist camp: "It strains belief to argue that we 'chose' to use maps and clocks."
I would like to think that the truth is somewhere in between. Maps and clocks forever changed us; so will the internet. But we do have control over when and how we use maps, clocks and the internet, and the power not to erase everything that went before them.
A significant number of people did read Carr’s original essay. A significant number of people have read The Shallows. There might even be a number of people reading War and Peace at this very moment.
Not everyone agrees with the Rhodes scholar Carr cites as declaring, "Sitting down and going through a book cover to cover just doesn’t make sense." Otherwise there would be no Goodreads, and I’d be typing this review only for myself.
Deep reading has always meant mental work, and there have always been people who don’t want to do that. Lots of people. Sometimes I don’t want to. But there remain people who, like David Ulin (The Lost Art of Reading), can say, "It's harder than it used to be, but still, I read."
The Shallows is provocative, informative, clearly and beautifully written. It’s also disturbing and depressing. Read it without giving up.
Saturday, October 23, 2010
RECENT NEWS: MODEL READING FOR CHILDREN, AND FOR YOURSELF
Common sense tells you that it’s going to be easier to sell reading to children if they have parents who are avid readers. Research does, too.
Rick Riordan, whose novels have motivated large numbers of kids to pick up books, recently wrote a short essay on the Wall Street Journal blog Speakeasy, where he opined that “all children can become lifelong readers.” He listed four essential ways to make that happen. Number one? “Model reading at home.”
That means not only reading books to your children, but reading books to yourself. “If the parents are too busy to read,” wrote Riordan, “it’s a safe bet the children will feel the same way.”
Sounds so true, but what Riordan is asking parents to do is something that can be difficult for adults today. And it’s not only because we are busy.
Think of the places where people used to read a magazine, or pull a paperback out of a purse or a backpack. In doctor’s offices and on public transportation, in laundromats and coffee shops, more and more of the people who are reading are doing so on handheld devices and laptops.
Looking at a screen is an activity we don’t need to model. Onscreen entertainment is intrinsically exciting. We don’t have to persuade children to like candy, either.
Of course, kids could be reading online, just as adults do. But that’s hard to monitor, and there is a good argument being made, in books like Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains, that the kind of reading we do on computers is a radically new kind of reading, and it is changing our very malleable gray matter. Think of the effect on younger brains, so much more plastic.
Maryanne Wolf, an expert on dyslexia and the author of Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain, co-wrote an article in Educational Leadership a year ago, in which she and Mirit Barzallai express their concern over the possibility that digital learning is having a negative effect on children’s literacy.
They are afraid that students are not acquiring the tools necessary for "slower, more time-consuming cognitive processes" so critical to "deep reading.” Those tools “propel comprehension” and “include inferential and deductive reasoning, analogical skills, critical analysis, reflection, and insight.”
“The expert reader needs milliseconds to execute these processes," note Wolf and Barzallai. “The young brain needs years to develop them.”
Wolf and Barzallai argue that the very skills that we need online, such as evaluating the credibility of sources, are ones that are hard to learn online. It’s a medium that is inherently distractible.
Books, however, require the kind of focus that nurtures deep reading. The page is simply the page, demanding complete attention. With nothing for readers “outside the text,” they are forced to “grapple with the text and apply their earlier knowledge as they question, analyze, and probe.”
If there is a great value in insisting that kids devote time to reading old-fashioned text, there are also benefits for their elders. David Ulin, former book editor of The Los Angeles Times, has just written The Lost Art of Reading, about his own battles to counteract the distractions of screen time. In an identically titled earlier piece in The Times, Ulin admitted his own susceptibility “to the tumult of the culture, the sound and fury signifying nothing.”
“These days,” Ulin wrote, “after spending hours reading e-mails and fielding phone calls in the office, tracking stories across countless websites, I find it difficult to quiet down. I pick up a book and read a paragraph; then my mind wanders and I check my e-mail, drift onto the Internet, pace the house before returning to the page.”
I think he’s touched on something to which most of us can relate. And I think most of us also identify with the accompanying sense of uncomfortable jitteriness Ulin feels: “the encroachment of the buzz, the sense that there is something out there that merits my attention, when in fact it's mostly just a series of disconnected riffs and fragments that add up to the anxiety of the age.”
By making the effort to read books, Ulin believes, we can find respite from that anxiety. Such reading, “by drawing us back from the present…restores time to us in a fundamental way.” It’s “an act of resistance in a landscape of distraction, a matter of engagement in a society that seems to want nothing more than for us to disengage.”
So, returning to Rick Riordan’s number one way to insure that our children become lifelong readers, let’s look at deep reading, the sort of reading we do with books, as something that is not only good for kids, but good for us, for our community, and for the larger society.
To help children read, help yourself. Think about what you want to read, go to the library or a bookstore, get books, and put them where they are as accessible as your digital devices. And then, although it won’t always be easy, follow Ulin’s advice and “try to make a place for silence.”
Show your kids the rewards you can find in the quiet act of contemplative reading found with a good book.
Rick Riordan, whose novels have motivated large numbers of kids to pick up books, recently wrote a short essay on the Wall Street Journal blog Speakeasy, where he opined that “all children can become lifelong readers.” He listed four essential ways to make that happen. Number one? “Model reading at home.”
That means not only reading books to your children, but reading books to yourself. “If the parents are too busy to read,” wrote Riordan, “it’s a safe bet the children will feel the same way.”
Sounds so true, but what Riordan is asking parents to do is something that can be difficult for adults today. And it’s not only because we are busy.
Think of the places where people used to read a magazine, or pull a paperback out of a purse or a backpack. In doctor’s offices and on public transportation, in laundromats and coffee shops, more and more of the people who are reading are doing so on handheld devices and laptops.
Looking at a screen is an activity we don’t need to model. Onscreen entertainment is intrinsically exciting. We don’t have to persuade children to like candy, either.
Of course, kids could be reading online, just as adults do. But that’s hard to monitor, and there is a good argument being made, in books like Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains, that the kind of reading we do on computers is a radically new kind of reading, and it is changing our very malleable gray matter. Think of the effect on younger brains, so much more plastic.
Maryanne Wolf, an expert on dyslexia and the author of Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain, co-wrote an article in Educational Leadership a year ago, in which she and Mirit Barzallai express their concern over the possibility that digital learning is having a negative effect on children’s literacy.
They are afraid that students are not acquiring the tools necessary for "slower, more time-consuming cognitive processes" so critical to "deep reading.” Those tools “propel comprehension” and “include inferential and deductive reasoning, analogical skills, critical analysis, reflection, and insight.”
“The expert reader needs milliseconds to execute these processes," note Wolf and Barzallai. “The young brain needs years to develop them.”
Wolf and Barzallai argue that the very skills that we need online, such as evaluating the credibility of sources, are ones that are hard to learn online. It’s a medium that is inherently distractible.
Books, however, require the kind of focus that nurtures deep reading. The page is simply the page, demanding complete attention. With nothing for readers “outside the text,” they are forced to “grapple with the text and apply their earlier knowledge as they question, analyze, and probe.”
If there is a great value in insisting that kids devote time to reading old-fashioned text, there are also benefits for their elders. David Ulin, former book editor of The Los Angeles Times, has just written The Lost Art of Reading, about his own battles to counteract the distractions of screen time. In an identically titled earlier piece in The Times, Ulin admitted his own susceptibility “to the tumult of the culture, the sound and fury signifying nothing.”
“These days,” Ulin wrote, “after spending hours reading e-mails and fielding phone calls in the office, tracking stories across countless websites, I find it difficult to quiet down. I pick up a book and read a paragraph; then my mind wanders and I check my e-mail, drift onto the Internet, pace the house before returning to the page.”
I think he’s touched on something to which most of us can relate. And I think most of us also identify with the accompanying sense of uncomfortable jitteriness Ulin feels: “the encroachment of the buzz, the sense that there is something out there that merits my attention, when in fact it's mostly just a series of disconnected riffs and fragments that add up to the anxiety of the age.”
By making the effort to read books, Ulin believes, we can find respite from that anxiety. Such reading, “by drawing us back from the present…restores time to us in a fundamental way.” It’s “an act of resistance in a landscape of distraction, a matter of engagement in a society that seems to want nothing more than for us to disengage.”
So, returning to Rick Riordan’s number one way to insure that our children become lifelong readers, let’s look at deep reading, the sort of reading we do with books, as something that is not only good for kids, but good for us, for our community, and for the larger society.
To help children read, help yourself. Think about what you want to read, go to the library or a bookstore, get books, and put them where they are as accessible as your digital devices. And then, although it won’t always be easy, follow Ulin’s advice and “try to make a place for silence.”
Show your kids the rewards you can find in the quiet act of contemplative reading found with a good book.
Monday, August 23, 2010
RECENT NEWS: ARE YOU READY?
You can feel it in the quality of the air and light. Summer is ending. Children go back to school. Are you ready?
How well prepared children will be depends in large part on how they spent their summers. If those long days became a dead zone for learning, it will take that much longer to gear up. Students who have been reading and thinking will be far better prepared for the rigors of the educational system.
If we are concerned with the ongoing nature of learning, though, we need to not only connect the school year to summer vacation, but to go the other way. There is an element of learning during summertime that is applicable to the classroom: fun.
Adults often put more effort into making learning engaging and entertaining when kids are on vacation. Summer camps, family trips, and reading choices are opportunities for broadening knowledge and deepening understanding that children enjoy.
As children enter the classrooms, we should keep these sorts of creative learning experiences in mind.
There surely has to be a link between enjoying education and educational success. What makes learning an enticing prospect? What makes kids successful in school? Can we connect answer those two questions and then connect the answers?
One way is to use a framework for thinking about tutoring suggested by Stanford professor Mark Lepper. He puts forth five C’s as guidelines: control, challenge, confidence, curiosity and contextualize.
If students have some control over learning, they will be more invested in the process. During the summer, that comes with reading what you want and being given a say in camp and vacation agendas. There are many areas in education where kids can choose. Books and projects come to mind immediately.
Challenging learners can be difficult. The trick is finding at a level that is attainable. I often use the metaphor of the high jump. If a coach raises the bar a foot she’s probably not going to see the effort an inch might produce.
Another way the high jump works as a metaphor is that feedback is immediate and concretely measured. Kids love to see their progress charted in a way they understand. Doing so sends a message that the most important competition is against yourself.
Being willing to challenge yourself means having confidence. If you think you can jump over the bar, and don’t make it the first time, you’re going to try again. We need to recognize and acknowledge what kids have accomplished, and let them know that their efforts will lead to improvement.
Confidence empowers curiosity. In Po Bronson and Ashley Merryweather’s excellent essay on creativity in Newsweek, they point out, “Preschool children, on average, ask their parents about 100 questions a day.” However, by middle school “they’ve pretty much stopped asking.”
“They didn’t stop asking questions because they lost interest,” Bronson and Merryweather write. “It’s the other way around. They lost interest because they stopped asking questions.”
If educators and parents tap into children’s natural curiosity, those children will learn more. We should look for ways to present information that are novel and a little mysterious, and allow students to solve mysteries on their own.
Finally, we should seek out connections that make what students learn relevant to their lives. If kids can contextualize information by seeing how it connects to their lives and their communities, they will retain and understand it better.
But contextualizing goes beyond the personal. Kids need to connect to the big picture. What led up to new information? What is coming after? What else can you look at or listen to that will enrich your understanding?
In his easy-to-read primer on the science of cognition, Brain Rules, John Medina notes “a counter-intuitive property” of learning: “Extra information given at the moment of learning makes learning better.”
Control, challenge, confidence, curiosity, contextualize. By being aware of the sorts of methods that help students to learn, parents can offer a solid support system as the school year begins, and be better advocates for their children.
Which brings me to a last piece of advice. Don’t wait until the first parent-teacher conference to communicate with teachers. Getting in on the ground floor will not only let teachers know about your child’s strengths and weaknesses, it will help you to know about the teachers, so you can help your child develop good relationships.
One constant I have found since I started working with kids is that the first parent-teacher conferences can bring unpleasant surprises. Symptoms of low motivation and a lack of success—failure to hand in homework and poor test performance—are more problematic if they have become entrenched.
'
Parents should make sure their children have well-structured times and places for doing school work, and should be checking in with their children on a regular basis. But they should also check in, if only briefly, with teachers, to insure accountability and transparency.
Learning is a team effort. Kids who know that they have a team they can depend on are kids who will be more dependable, and eventually, more independent.
Create a good environment for learning. From the start, make sure to get feedback on how effective it is. You will be on the way to a great school year.
How well prepared children will be depends in large part on how they spent their summers. If those long days became a dead zone for learning, it will take that much longer to gear up. Students who have been reading and thinking will be far better prepared for the rigors of the educational system.
If we are concerned with the ongoing nature of learning, though, we need to not only connect the school year to summer vacation, but to go the other way. There is an element of learning during summertime that is applicable to the classroom: fun.
Adults often put more effort into making learning engaging and entertaining when kids are on vacation. Summer camps, family trips, and reading choices are opportunities for broadening knowledge and deepening understanding that children enjoy.
As children enter the classrooms, we should keep these sorts of creative learning experiences in mind.
There surely has to be a link between enjoying education and educational success. What makes learning an enticing prospect? What makes kids successful in school? Can we connect answer those two questions and then connect the answers?
One way is to use a framework for thinking about tutoring suggested by Stanford professor Mark Lepper. He puts forth five C’s as guidelines: control, challenge, confidence, curiosity and contextualize.
If students have some control over learning, they will be more invested in the process. During the summer, that comes with reading what you want and being given a say in camp and vacation agendas. There are many areas in education where kids can choose. Books and projects come to mind immediately.
Challenging learners can be difficult. The trick is finding at a level that is attainable. I often use the metaphor of the high jump. If a coach raises the bar a foot she’s probably not going to see the effort an inch might produce.
Another way the high jump works as a metaphor is that feedback is immediate and concretely measured. Kids love to see their progress charted in a way they understand. Doing so sends a message that the most important competition is against yourself.
Being willing to challenge yourself means having confidence. If you think you can jump over the bar, and don’t make it the first time, you’re going to try again. We need to recognize and acknowledge what kids have accomplished, and let them know that their efforts will lead to improvement.
Confidence empowers curiosity. In Po Bronson and Ashley Merryweather’s excellent essay on creativity in Newsweek, they point out, “Preschool children, on average, ask their parents about 100 questions a day.” However, by middle school “they’ve pretty much stopped asking.”
“They didn’t stop asking questions because they lost interest,” Bronson and Merryweather write. “It’s the other way around. They lost interest because they stopped asking questions.”
If educators and parents tap into children’s natural curiosity, those children will learn more. We should look for ways to present information that are novel and a little mysterious, and allow students to solve mysteries on their own.
Finally, we should seek out connections that make what students learn relevant to their lives. If kids can contextualize information by seeing how it connects to their lives and their communities, they will retain and understand it better.
But contextualizing goes beyond the personal. Kids need to connect to the big picture. What led up to new information? What is coming after? What else can you look at or listen to that will enrich your understanding?
In his easy-to-read primer on the science of cognition, Brain Rules, John Medina notes “a counter-intuitive property” of learning: “Extra information given at the moment of learning makes learning better.”
Control, challenge, confidence, curiosity, contextualize. By being aware of the sorts of methods that help students to learn, parents can offer a solid support system as the school year begins, and be better advocates for their children.
Which brings me to a last piece of advice. Don’t wait until the first parent-teacher conference to communicate with teachers. Getting in on the ground floor will not only let teachers know about your child’s strengths and weaknesses, it will help you to know about the teachers, so you can help your child develop good relationships.
One constant I have found since I started working with kids is that the first parent-teacher conferences can bring unpleasant surprises. Symptoms of low motivation and a lack of success—failure to hand in homework and poor test performance—are more problematic if they have become entrenched.
'
Parents should make sure their children have well-structured times and places for doing school work, and should be checking in with their children on a regular basis. But they should also check in, if only briefly, with teachers, to insure accountability and transparency.
Learning is a team effort. Kids who know that they have a team they can depend on are kids who will be more dependable, and eventually, more independent.
Create a good environment for learning. From the start, make sure to get feedback on how effective it is. You will be on the way to a great school year.
Sunday, December 13, 2009
RECENT NEWS: THE CASE FOR LISTENING
Discussing strategies to use with a struggling reader with whom we both worked, a resource specialist at a local school told me that she let a struggling reader listen to audio books, but insisted (and asked his parents to enforce that insistence) that he also get the text version and always follow along.
Julie Moncton, one of the owners of the fabulous All Ears Audio Books in San Jose, wrote to tell me about parents coming in, “kids in tow,” saying, “'I need an audio book for my son. He has problems with reading. Nope—no audio book for my other kids. They read just fine.”
Sometimes it seems that audio books get no respect, despite the fact that they have been a fairly successful branch of the publishing industry. Many adults I know who stress the importance of children learning to read do much, if not all, of their own “reading” listening to audio books.
Personally, I used to classify myself as a non-audio book person. I told myself I just couldn’t get into them. It was difficult for me to maintain orientation, so much easier on the page, where you can backtrack or pause without all that effort.
Then my sister pointed out that using audio books had increased her listening and focusing skills. Maybe, I realized, the problem wasn’t audio books, it was me. Putting effort and purpose into listening, I have begun to reap benefits, just as I do from reading text.
In my work with kids, I've seen audio books open up new worlds, not to mention develop skills that are applicable to all sorts of learning. The reasons that we have for reading text—enjoyment, edification, and gaining knowledge—are just as valid for listening to it. And there is an added benefit: the deep, inherited pleasure that comes from having someone tell you a story.
Many educators don’t place enough value on audio books (or for that matter, reading aloud to kids beyond the third grade), and view them solely as an aid for readers having difficulty with the process. Really, audio books are another, equally important, avenue for content. The kind of “literacy” involved should be respected in its own right, independent from the skills involved with decoding off the page.
Kids who enjoy listening to a book should be able to enjoy it. Kids who have trouble with decoding and fluency should have access to content to which they might not otherwise have access. Not being able to read does not mean you are unintelligent.
In a presentation by John Ratey, author of Spark: The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain, he suggested that we stop paying so much attention to the right/left brain paradigm and start thinking about a front/back model.
I find such a model particularly valuable when thinking about reading. To make a simple distinction, the back brain is where sensory input is processed. The front brain is where we set goals and monitor ourselves as we move toward them, where we evaluate our performance and regulate our reaction to that evaluation.
The front brain is what makes humans different than most of the rest of the animal kingdom. It’s bigger, better, and inchoate until rather late in our lives. The fact that it is not fully organized until well into adulthood is probably a good explanation of why car insurance is more expensive for teenagers than it is for me.
If the front brain is functioning well, higher order cognition is deliberate and measured. To think in profound and sophisticated ways, we need to take the time to reflect on incoming information. The tortoise will beat the hare.
Compare that to the back brain, where speed is a far more valuable commodity. The back brain gets us the information, the raw data we use for our thinking. The reader who automatically processes words, whose back brain instantly recognizes letter and word shapes and the symbol to sound and etymological principles underneath, will not have to waste front brain time monitoring the critical task of literacy called decoding, and can use the saved mental energy for critical thinking. Advantage: hare.
It seems clear that back brain weakness, a lack of automaticity in processing sensory input, doesn’t tell us anything about the front brain. Poor readers can be great thinkers. For that matter, great readers can be poor thinkers. So why should poor readers be denied content that matches their front brain capabilities?
If you can’t automatically process written language, but can automatically process oral language, why should you be denied access to that language? And please, I’m not advocating that we give up on teaching reading skills, so tremendously important.
I work with an eight-year-old girl whose reading of low level material can be halting and laborious. Yet she has listened to Rick Riordan’s Percy Jackson series, and avidly discusses the books, aimed at nine to twelve-year-olds, with full understanding, making connections to Greek mythology and following her curiosity to find out more.
Let’s show some respect for the audio book as its own medium. And let’s show some respect for kids who demonstrate their intelligence as they interact with that medium.
In a piece on NPR extolling the virtues of audio books, children’s author Neil Gaiman contended that critic Harold Bloom’s argument—“deep reading really demands the inner ear as well as the outer ear”—was “astonishingly unconvincing.” Gaiman countered that “you can have a close and perfectly valid relationship with the text when you hear it.”
Let's show some respect for that relationship.
Julie Moncton, one of the owners of the fabulous All Ears Audio Books in San Jose, wrote to tell me about parents coming in, “kids in tow,” saying, “'I need an audio book for my son. He has problems with reading. Nope—no audio book for my other kids. They read just fine.”
Sometimes it seems that audio books get no respect, despite the fact that they have been a fairly successful branch of the publishing industry. Many adults I know who stress the importance of children learning to read do much, if not all, of their own “reading” listening to audio books.
Personally, I used to classify myself as a non-audio book person. I told myself I just couldn’t get into them. It was difficult for me to maintain orientation, so much easier on the page, where you can backtrack or pause without all that effort.
Then my sister pointed out that using audio books had increased her listening and focusing skills. Maybe, I realized, the problem wasn’t audio books, it was me. Putting effort and purpose into listening, I have begun to reap benefits, just as I do from reading text.
In my work with kids, I've seen audio books open up new worlds, not to mention develop skills that are applicable to all sorts of learning. The reasons that we have for reading text—enjoyment, edification, and gaining knowledge—are just as valid for listening to it. And there is an added benefit: the deep, inherited pleasure that comes from having someone tell you a story.
Many educators don’t place enough value on audio books (or for that matter, reading aloud to kids beyond the third grade), and view them solely as an aid for readers having difficulty with the process. Really, audio books are another, equally important, avenue for content. The kind of “literacy” involved should be respected in its own right, independent from the skills involved with decoding off the page.
Kids who enjoy listening to a book should be able to enjoy it. Kids who have trouble with decoding and fluency should have access to content to which they might not otherwise have access. Not being able to read does not mean you are unintelligent.
In a presentation by John Ratey, author of Spark: The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain, he suggested that we stop paying so much attention to the right/left brain paradigm and start thinking about a front/back model.
I find such a model particularly valuable when thinking about reading. To make a simple distinction, the back brain is where sensory input is processed. The front brain is where we set goals and monitor ourselves as we move toward them, where we evaluate our performance and regulate our reaction to that evaluation.
The front brain is what makes humans different than most of the rest of the animal kingdom. It’s bigger, better, and inchoate until rather late in our lives. The fact that it is not fully organized until well into adulthood is probably a good explanation of why car insurance is more expensive for teenagers than it is for me.
If the front brain is functioning well, higher order cognition is deliberate and measured. To think in profound and sophisticated ways, we need to take the time to reflect on incoming information. The tortoise will beat the hare.
Compare that to the back brain, where speed is a far more valuable commodity. The back brain gets us the information, the raw data we use for our thinking. The reader who automatically processes words, whose back brain instantly recognizes letter and word shapes and the symbol to sound and etymological principles underneath, will not have to waste front brain time monitoring the critical task of literacy called decoding, and can use the saved mental energy for critical thinking. Advantage: hare.
It seems clear that back brain weakness, a lack of automaticity in processing sensory input, doesn’t tell us anything about the front brain. Poor readers can be great thinkers. For that matter, great readers can be poor thinkers. So why should poor readers be denied content that matches their front brain capabilities?
If you can’t automatically process written language, but can automatically process oral language, why should you be denied access to that language? And please, I’m not advocating that we give up on teaching reading skills, so tremendously important.
I work with an eight-year-old girl whose reading of low level material can be halting and laborious. Yet she has listened to Rick Riordan’s Percy Jackson series, and avidly discusses the books, aimed at nine to twelve-year-olds, with full understanding, making connections to Greek mythology and following her curiosity to find out more.
Let’s show some respect for the audio book as its own medium. And let’s show some respect for kids who demonstrate their intelligence as they interact with that medium.
In a piece on NPR extolling the virtues of audio books, children’s author Neil Gaiman contended that critic Harold Bloom’s argument—“deep reading really demands the inner ear as well as the outer ear”—was “astonishingly unconvincing.” Gaiman countered that “you can have a close and perfectly valid relationship with the text when you hear it.”
Let's show some respect for that relationship.
Thursday, December 10, 2009
Friday, November 13, 2009
RECENT NEWS: CHILDREN AS EXPLORERS
Many years ago, parents smoked and drank in front of their children. People were sympathetic when mothers and fathers spanked unruly children. No one wore seat belts in moving automobiles or safety helmets when riding bikes. Elements of risk, danger and abuse were permitted in child-rearing that are unacceptable today. It’s good that society is showing more concern with its most important mandate: to protect our young.
But we’ve lost something. In an article in The New York Review of Books that previewed his latest work, Manhood for Amateurs, Michael Chabon puts it this way: “The land ruled by children, to which a kid might exile himself for at least some portion of every day from the neighboring kingdom of adulthood, has in large part been taken over, co-opted, colonized, and finally absorbed by the neighbors.”
My parents were not only used to their children being out of the house in undisclosed locations, they sometimes ordered us to get there as quickly as possible. Of course, there were boundaries within which we were to stay (boundaries we might ignore), but there were parts of every day where children determined the activities and established the rules.
We knew our surroundings in an intimate and concrete way—all the hiding places, dark and scary places, comforting and familiar places, who was mean, who was nice, who was neat, who was messy. Well before school lessons about history and geography, we had our own internal schema for those subjects, and our own set of regulations for behavior and social interaction.
Today, it’s harder for kids to learn those things on their own. Chabon mentions the example of a nine-year-old girl in his neighborhood who lives three doors down from a nine-year-old boy. Both of them have lived in the neighborhood their entire lives. Yet they had never met.
This summer, I struck up a conversation with a mother sitting next to me at a presentation on assistive technology. She talked about her son in middle school and a “free night” parents had organized at a community center. She had been surprised at the kids' confusion about what to do, and once that was decided, how to organize things. She complained they were too used to structured activities supervised by adults.
I have been surprised by children who can show me where California is on a map of the United States, but are baffled when I ask them where the bay is. The San Francisco Bay is immediately in front of my office building. Kids who might know the name of their city and street seem unaware they live on a peninsula with a ridge of small mountains running down its center, next to an ocean.
I wish I had a solution, a way for children to escape what Chabon calls the “door-to-door, all-encompassing escort service that we adults have contrived,” that left adults feeling that they have been responsible, that children are safe. It’s a touchy area, as seen by all the controversy surrounding New York Sun columnist Lenore Skenazy’s decision last year to let her nine-year-old ride the subway on his own. Children seen walking alone have prompted adults to call the police.
“If children are not permitted,” says Chabon, “to be adventurers and explorers as children, what will become of the world of adventure, of stories, of literature itself?”
But we’ve lost something. In an article in The New York Review of Books that previewed his latest work, Manhood for Amateurs, Michael Chabon puts it this way: “The land ruled by children, to which a kid might exile himself for at least some portion of every day from the neighboring kingdom of adulthood, has in large part been taken over, co-opted, colonized, and finally absorbed by the neighbors.”
My parents were not only used to their children being out of the house in undisclosed locations, they sometimes ordered us to get there as quickly as possible. Of course, there were boundaries within which we were to stay (boundaries we might ignore), but there were parts of every day where children determined the activities and established the rules.
We knew our surroundings in an intimate and concrete way—all the hiding places, dark and scary places, comforting and familiar places, who was mean, who was nice, who was neat, who was messy. Well before school lessons about history and geography, we had our own internal schema for those subjects, and our own set of regulations for behavior and social interaction.
Today, it’s harder for kids to learn those things on their own. Chabon mentions the example of a nine-year-old girl in his neighborhood who lives three doors down from a nine-year-old boy. Both of them have lived in the neighborhood their entire lives. Yet they had never met.
This summer, I struck up a conversation with a mother sitting next to me at a presentation on assistive technology. She talked about her son in middle school and a “free night” parents had organized at a community center. She had been surprised at the kids' confusion about what to do, and once that was decided, how to organize things. She complained they were too used to structured activities supervised by adults.
I have been surprised by children who can show me where California is on a map of the United States, but are baffled when I ask them where the bay is. The San Francisco Bay is immediately in front of my office building. Kids who might know the name of their city and street seem unaware they live on a peninsula with a ridge of small mountains running down its center, next to an ocean.
I wish I had a solution, a way for children to escape what Chabon calls the “door-to-door, all-encompassing escort service that we adults have contrived,” that left adults feeling that they have been responsible, that children are safe. It’s a touchy area, as seen by all the controversy surrounding New York Sun columnist Lenore Skenazy’s decision last year to let her nine-year-old ride the subway on his own. Children seen walking alone have prompted adults to call the police.
“If children are not permitted,” says Chabon, “to be adventurers and explorers as children, what will become of the world of adventure, of stories, of literature itself?”
Tuesday, October 6, 2009
CONTROLLING EMOTION, CONTROLLING THOUGHT
One morning recently, I listened to a humorous report on NPR’s Morning Edition that asked, “Does Getting Angry Make You Angrier?”
Two things struck me immediately. The first was that, as funny as it was to hear about “Sarah’s Smash Shack,” a business that gives people an opportunity to work out their frustrations by breaking plates, this is behavior that we routinely discourage in children.
With good reason, we tell kids that acting on their emotions in a destructive manner is “inappropriate” and “unacceptable.” The process of controlling your reactions and feelings when events are disappointing or frustrating is unformed in babies, and society inculcates self-regulation as they grow.
While there is undoubtedly value in recognizing the source of anger, if we don’t rein that anger in we are not setting the best example for young people, something I will try to remember the next time I’m driving and someone abruptly cuts in front of me.
In addition, we are not helping ourselves by indulging in anger. Indeed, the NPR report noted that “decades of research on cathartic anger—the theory that actively expressing your anger can reduce or relieve the feeling…very clearly shows the opposite is true.”
The second thing that struck me about this report was a connection I made to brain research done by such pioneers as Antonio Damasio. These studies are showing that what we think of as “reason” is, like all our thinking, based in the limbic system of our brains. Emotional thought is the driver of all thought.
Surely learning to regulate emotion is the key to what we need to be learners—the ability to focus and thus engage in deeper and more reflective thinking.
Something Sylvia Bunge, a psychology professor at Cal Berkeley, talked about during a lecture titled “How We Control Our Thoughts & Actions: Implications for the Classroom” at a Learning and the Brain Conference still sticks with me over a year later. When presented with questions where they had to pick one of two responses, the children who did better in her study were those who slowed down and took a moment to reflect before choosing.
This counterintuitive principle—for most of us doing better is doing it faster—is often difficult for children to understand. And it is rooted in controlling impulsive action prompted by emotion.
Getting kids to think about this and ways they can take charge of their feelings is one way to help them go further and regulate their thought processes. Controlling our own emotions and talking about how we are doing that is another way. As the NPR report put it, “The key is to speak out your anger without getting emotional about it.”
Read more about emotional intelligence in a recent Boston Globe article, "The other kind of smart." There's also a fantastic article in a recent New Yorker about self-control.
Two things struck me immediately. The first was that, as funny as it was to hear about “Sarah’s Smash Shack,” a business that gives people an opportunity to work out their frustrations by breaking plates, this is behavior that we routinely discourage in children.
With good reason, we tell kids that acting on their emotions in a destructive manner is “inappropriate” and “unacceptable.” The process of controlling your reactions and feelings when events are disappointing or frustrating is unformed in babies, and society inculcates self-regulation as they grow.
While there is undoubtedly value in recognizing the source of anger, if we don’t rein that anger in we are not setting the best example for young people, something I will try to remember the next time I’m driving and someone abruptly cuts in front of me.
In addition, we are not helping ourselves by indulging in anger. Indeed, the NPR report noted that “decades of research on cathartic anger—the theory that actively expressing your anger can reduce or relieve the feeling…very clearly shows the opposite is true.”
The second thing that struck me about this report was a connection I made to brain research done by such pioneers as Antonio Damasio. These studies are showing that what we think of as “reason” is, like all our thinking, based in the limbic system of our brains. Emotional thought is the driver of all thought.
Surely learning to regulate emotion is the key to what we need to be learners—the ability to focus and thus engage in deeper and more reflective thinking.
Something Sylvia Bunge, a psychology professor at Cal Berkeley, talked about during a lecture titled “How We Control Our Thoughts & Actions: Implications for the Classroom” at a Learning and the Brain Conference still sticks with me over a year later. When presented with questions where they had to pick one of two responses, the children who did better in her study were those who slowed down and took a moment to reflect before choosing.
This counterintuitive principle—for most of us doing better is doing it faster—is often difficult for children to understand. And it is rooted in controlling impulsive action prompted by emotion.
Getting kids to think about this and ways they can take charge of their feelings is one way to help them go further and regulate their thought processes. Controlling our own emotions and talking about how we are doing that is another way. As the NPR report put it, “The key is to speak out your anger without getting emotional about it.”
Read more about emotional intelligence in a recent Boston Globe article, "The other kind of smart." There's also a fantastic article in a recent New Yorker about self-control.
Tuesday, April 14, 2009
RECENT NEWS: FINDING A ZONE OF SUCCESS
A recent “diversion” on NPR’s morning news show humorously recounted Pittsburgh school officials’ decision to reinstate the grade of “zero.”
The city’s schools had eliminated that black mark for incomplete assignments, instead giving students the benefit of the doubt with grades of 50 percent averaged into their report cards. Students figured out they could game the system and more easily get away with not handing in their work.
The new policy was rejected.
Grade inflation might, indeed, have adverse effects. In a New York Times article, some college professors noted that their students, products of such a trend, expected B’s for just showing up.
A study done at UC Irvine offered further evidence. Discussing the study, researcher Ellen Greenberger commented on “an increased sense of entitlement” among her students.
Over-praising can devalue praise and make it ineffective. This is the thrust of important recent work done by Carol Dweck, author of Mindset: The New Psychology of Success.
I’ll come down firmly on being honest with students when they do not measure up to expectations. It’s a moot point at any rate. It’s pretty obvious to most children when they are not doing well, even if someone is telling them, “Good job!”
But I also believe that part of the responsibility for setting expectations for children falls on educators and parents. We’re all individuals and learn in different ways and at different speeds. And none of us is motivated by constant failure.
The challenge is finding where the challenge is. If we want someone who can jump over a two-foot high bar to jump five feet, it’s probably not going to work if we immediately raise the bar to five feet. If we raise the bar a few inches, practice, raise it a few more inches, practice some more, and so on, we are much more likely to get results, and perhaps reach the goal.
Finding what the great psychologist Lev Vygotsky called the “zone of proximal development,” that place where we challenge the learner just the right amount, is not always easy, but effective education is a collaborative effort, and the teacher should be working at least as hard as the student.
In her landmark work, Children’s Minds, another psychologist whom I greatly admire, Margaret Donaldson wrote: “There can be no doubt that if we decide we cannot cope with a particular kind of challenge we tend to give up and avoid it.”
Nothing is sadder than a child who views herself as "dumb," a child who has given up.
Yes, there should be consequences for lack of effort. No, persistence and effort should not result in constant failure. Young learners need to see they can make progress, and we need to find the work that will demonstrate that.
The city’s schools had eliminated that black mark for incomplete assignments, instead giving students the benefit of the doubt with grades of 50 percent averaged into their report cards. Students figured out they could game the system and more easily get away with not handing in their work.
The new policy was rejected.
Grade inflation might, indeed, have adverse effects. In a New York Times article, some college professors noted that their students, products of such a trend, expected B’s for just showing up.
A study done at UC Irvine offered further evidence. Discussing the study, researcher Ellen Greenberger commented on “an increased sense of entitlement” among her students.
Over-praising can devalue praise and make it ineffective. This is the thrust of important recent work done by Carol Dweck, author of Mindset: The New Psychology of Success.
I’ll come down firmly on being honest with students when they do not measure up to expectations. It’s a moot point at any rate. It’s pretty obvious to most children when they are not doing well, even if someone is telling them, “Good job!”
But I also believe that part of the responsibility for setting expectations for children falls on educators and parents. We’re all individuals and learn in different ways and at different speeds. And none of us is motivated by constant failure.
The challenge is finding where the challenge is. If we want someone who can jump over a two-foot high bar to jump five feet, it’s probably not going to work if we immediately raise the bar to five feet. If we raise the bar a few inches, practice, raise it a few more inches, practice some more, and so on, we are much more likely to get results, and perhaps reach the goal.
Finding what the great psychologist Lev Vygotsky called the “zone of proximal development,” that place where we challenge the learner just the right amount, is not always easy, but effective education is a collaborative effort, and the teacher should be working at least as hard as the student.
In her landmark work, Children’s Minds, another psychologist whom I greatly admire, Margaret Donaldson wrote: “There can be no doubt that if we decide we cannot cope with a particular kind of challenge we tend to give up and avoid it.”
Nothing is sadder than a child who views herself as "dumb," a child who has given up.
Yes, there should be consequences for lack of effort. No, persistence and effort should not result in constant failure. Young learners need to see they can make progress, and we need to find the work that will demonstrate that.
Wednesday, March 4, 2009
RECENT NEWS: LEARNING FROM SUCCESS
This is a piece I did last year for The Reading Clinic's newsletter. I decided to post it on my blog as it directly connects to a recent post at lars4learning.com.
It seems obvious that success motivates children. However, most of us have been frustrated by a child who does not learn from her mistakes. If only she tried to understand, we say. Can't she see she just made the same mistake a minute ago?
A recent study at Leiden University in the Netherlands offers an intriguing glimpse into young children's seeming inability to learn from mistakes. The study, summarized in Science Daily, used fMRIs to see how the brains of eight-year-olds, twelve-year-olds and adults responded to positive and negative feedback when learning a computer task. Surprisingly, there were great differences. Eight-year-olds reacted far more strongly to positive feedback, adults to negative feedback, while twelve-year-olds reacted to both types of feedback.
Why? While not ready to list definite causes, Dr. Eveline Crone, the developmental psychologist leading the study, had an intriguing hypothesis:
"The information that you have not done something well is more complicated than the information that you have done something well. Learning from mistakes is more complex than carrying on in the same way as before. You have to ask yourself what precisely went wrong and how it was possible."
If children have not reached a developmental stage where they learn from their mistakes, we have to question error handling that repeatedly points out those mistakes. We have to learn to be more positive in our approach. Here are a few techniques I use.
Look for what is right, not what is wrong.
For example, if a child is reading the word "foul," and says "fool," you could tell him that he was right about the first and last sounds in the word, and then ask what the middle sound would be. If you look hard enough, you can find something that a student is doing correctly.
Analyze success.
Because we care so much about kids, we want to help them see why they are not doing well. But we often forget to examine what's happening when they are doing well. When a child writes a great paragraph or aces a science test, help her to figure out and talk about how she did it. When you praise her work, be concrete and specific, and let her know exactly what was good.
Measure progress, not mastery.
We should keep long-range goals in mind, but we should show children when they advance toward that goal. Charting progress on a bar graph for the number of pages read daily (or any area where you think a child can make advances) is a good way to do this. We have children chart their reading rate, and even reluctant readers like the activity. Encourage children to compete against themselves instead of others. Reward improvement rather than excellence. Everyone can do better.
Using positive reinforcement is a strategy that teachers and parents already employ, and that educators like Rick Lavoie endorse, because they know it works. Now the Leiden University study provides scientific evidence that this strategy is developmentally appropriate for younger children.
It seems obvious that success motivates children. However, most of us have been frustrated by a child who does not learn from her mistakes. If only she tried to understand, we say. Can't she see she just made the same mistake a minute ago?
A recent study at Leiden University in the Netherlands offers an intriguing glimpse into young children's seeming inability to learn from mistakes. The study, summarized in Science Daily, used fMRIs to see how the brains of eight-year-olds, twelve-year-olds and adults responded to positive and negative feedback when learning a computer task. Surprisingly, there were great differences. Eight-year-olds reacted far more strongly to positive feedback, adults to negative feedback, while twelve-year-olds reacted to both types of feedback.
Why? While not ready to list definite causes, Dr. Eveline Crone, the developmental psychologist leading the study, had an intriguing hypothesis:
"The information that you have not done something well is more complicated than the information that you have done something well. Learning from mistakes is more complex than carrying on in the same way as before. You have to ask yourself what precisely went wrong and how it was possible."
If children have not reached a developmental stage where they learn from their mistakes, we have to question error handling that repeatedly points out those mistakes. We have to learn to be more positive in our approach. Here are a few techniques I use.
Look for what is right, not what is wrong.
For example, if a child is reading the word "foul," and says "fool," you could tell him that he was right about the first and last sounds in the word, and then ask what the middle sound would be. If you look hard enough, you can find something that a student is doing correctly.
Analyze success.
Because we care so much about kids, we want to help them see why they are not doing well. But we often forget to examine what's happening when they are doing well. When a child writes a great paragraph or aces a science test, help her to figure out and talk about how she did it. When you praise her work, be concrete and specific, and let her know exactly what was good.
Measure progress, not mastery.
We should keep long-range goals in mind, but we should show children when they advance toward that goal. Charting progress on a bar graph for the number of pages read daily (or any area where you think a child can make advances) is a good way to do this. We have children chart their reading rate, and even reluctant readers like the activity. Encourage children to compete against themselves instead of others. Reward improvement rather than excellence. Everyone can do better.
Using positive reinforcement is a strategy that teachers and parents already employ, and that educators like Rick Lavoie endorse, because they know it works. Now the Leiden University study provides scientific evidence that this strategy is developmentally appropriate for younger children.
RECENT NEWS: READING IN THE DIGITAL AGE
A story from January 31 in Science News concerning American research into the possible negative effects of digital technology on critical thinking and analysis piggybacks nicely onto my last Recent News piece on a Norwegian study that reached nearly the same conclusions.
In Norway, Anne Mangen, a psychologist at the Center for Reading Research at the University of Stavanger, said "there is generally little reflection around digital teaching material" and that, "The whole field is characterized by an easy acceptance...."
Discussing work done in our country, Patricia Greenfield, UCLA distinguished professor of psychology and director of the Children's Digital Media Center, Los Angeles, states, "Wiring classrooms for Internet access does not enhance learning."
Both of these experts are quick to emphasize that they are not proscribing the use of digital media. "By using more visual media, students will process information better," Greenfield notes.
A study at University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee confirms this. When a Psych 101 course replaced traditional lecture format with an on-line curriculum, student achievement improved.
What both Mangen and Greenfield are advocating is more encouragement of what we might call "analog" reading, and recognition of the advantages and disadvantages of different media.
"The digital hypertext technology and its use of multimedia," Mangen notes, "are not open to the experience of a fictional universe where the experience consists of creating your own mental images. The reader gets distracted by the opportunities for doing something else."
As someone who spends way too much time on the internet, I can identify.
Greenfield points out that "visual media are real-time media that do not allow time for reflection, analysis or imagination." Furthermore, she says, "Studies show that reading develops imagination, induction, reflection and critical thinking, as well as vocabulary. Reading for pleasure is the key to developing these skills. Students today have more visual literacy and less print literacy. Many students do not read for pleasure and have not for decades."
Children, it appears, need text on the printed page as well as the screen. A three-year-old can recognize the difference between the two and draw a different sort of pleasure from a book than from the family computer.
This is an issue that Maryanne Wolf addresses in her fabulous and very readable book, Proust and the Squid. Wolf will be speaking about this very subject at an International Dyslexia Association event in Palo Alto on March 14. Her lecture is titled "The Evolving Reading Brain and the Digital Age: A Tale of Caution and Optimism for Parents and Teachers."
In Norway, Anne Mangen, a psychologist at the Center for Reading Research at the University of Stavanger, said "there is generally little reflection around digital teaching material" and that, "The whole field is characterized by an easy acceptance...."
Discussing work done in our country, Patricia Greenfield, UCLA distinguished professor of psychology and director of the Children's Digital Media Center, Los Angeles, states, "Wiring classrooms for Internet access does not enhance learning."
Both of these experts are quick to emphasize that they are not proscribing the use of digital media. "By using more visual media, students will process information better," Greenfield notes.
A study at University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee confirms this. When a Psych 101 course replaced traditional lecture format with an on-line curriculum, student achievement improved.
What both Mangen and Greenfield are advocating is more encouragement of what we might call "analog" reading, and recognition of the advantages and disadvantages of different media.
"The digital hypertext technology and its use of multimedia," Mangen notes, "are not open to the experience of a fictional universe where the experience consists of creating your own mental images. The reader gets distracted by the opportunities for doing something else."
As someone who spends way too much time on the internet, I can identify.
Greenfield points out that "visual media are real-time media that do not allow time for reflection, analysis or imagination." Furthermore, she says, "Studies show that reading develops imagination, induction, reflection and critical thinking, as well as vocabulary. Reading for pleasure is the key to developing these skills. Students today have more visual literacy and less print literacy. Many students do not read for pleasure and have not for decades."
Children, it appears, need text on the printed page as well as the screen. A three-year-old can recognize the difference between the two and draw a different sort of pleasure from a book than from the family computer.
This is an issue that Maryanne Wolf addresses in her fabulous and very readable book, Proust and the Squid. Wolf will be speaking about this very subject at an International Dyslexia Association event in Palo Alto on March 14. Her lecture is titled "The Evolving Reading Brain and the Digital Age: A Tale of Caution and Optimism for Parents and Teachers."
Friday, January 23, 2009
RECENT NEWS: OLD STYLE BOOK READING MAY BE BETTER
A fascinating story in Science Daily in December summarizes the findings of a professor from the Center for Reading Research at the University of Stavanger in Norway. Anne Mangen feels that educators should take a closer look at digital teaching aids, and their effect on cognition, memory, and attention. "Learning requires time and mental exertion and the new media do not provide for that," she says. Reading from a book, on the other hand, gives the reader more opportunity for reflection. Mangen calls for a "more nuanced view on the potentials and limitations of all technologies – even of the book" and warns against "a tendency to reduce a complex field to a question about being for or against."
Wednesday, January 21, 2009
RECENT NEWS: BASICS FOR PRE-SCHOOLERS?
The National Early Literacy Panel's review of early-reading research, covered in Education Weekly, gives credence to a sometimes controversial theory: emphasizing basic alphabetic skills with pre-schoolers helps develop readers. Critics worry that educators may use the study as a justification for overloading small children with structured lessons to develop those basic skills.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
