Young Children Think Like Scientists

Scientists analyze statistical patterns in data, they do experiments, and they learn from other scientists. Growing research indicates that young children learn about the world around them in similar ways…”

Have you ever watched a young child absorbed in play for an extended period of time? I love to secretly watch my toddler as he plays by himself. It’s not easy to catch him in that mode when he forgets you’re there, and focuses intensely on what’s he’s doing. In my opinion, he’s always played in a rather quirky way—very engineer-like. He has a long attention span for a kid, and will focus on what he’s doing intensely for fairly long periods of time. It always seemed like he was trying to figure things out, more than entertain himself. In other words, watching him play always reminded me more of watching a scientist at work, than anything.

Apparently, I’m not the only one who’s ever wondered about this aspect of play. Alison Gopnick, who studies childhood learning and development at the University of California at Berkeley, recently published a study on this very topic.

According to Gopnick’s research, a lot of what looks like play (to adults) is actually a child’s experimentation. She claims that what children are doing during play is a bunch of “experiments” that give them the information they need to figure out how things work. (In other words, children are engaged in hands-on learning when they’re “playing”). I call this, “testing the laws of physics”. Perhaps when kids go through that annoying stage where they like to throw everything on the floor, they’re just testing a hypothesis about gravity.

The difficult thing sometimes for parents is knowing when to jump in and “help” and when to back off and let children do their own problem solving. As an adult, it can be very hard to resist the urge to show a child how to do something. “Being shown how to do something has advantages, for both young children and for scientists, as well as disadvantages.” On one hand, there’s occasions when children genuinely want you to show them how to do something. However, parents (and teachers) often err on the side of jumping in too soon, and providing too much instruction. Often it’s better to let a child try to work something out for herself, than to automatically assume she needs help. “Being taught something instead of exploring it for oneself discourages exploration…” (Gopnick).

Gopnick's findings come at a time when the focus in early childhood education seems to an increasing emphasis on increasing the time spent on direct instruction of academic skills in reading and math. If you’ve been in a kindergarten classroom since NCLB, you’ve probably noticed that it’s almost indistinguishable from a first grade classroom. Kids now receive way more formal reading and math instruction in kindergarten than they used to.

As well intentioned as this may be, it directly flies in the face of what is known about how very young children learn. The urge to capitalize on the period when children undergo amazing cognitive growth is understandable, but the effectiveness of increasing formal academic instruction at the expense of allowing children to develop in a more typical and age-appropriate way: through direct experiences, imaginative play, experimentation, and exploring the world around them.

Unstructured play and daily life provide an experiential base that children need to have in place before they can fully benefit from more abstract academic instruction (Basically it builds a “context” for everything that will follow). The push to make preschool more structured and academic (more school-like) forgets that experiential hands-on learning is the major avenue of learning for children and is how children learn how to engage in critical thinking. Kids learn a great deal from watching and interacting in the world, and this is very difficult to replicate in basal reading series.

The Preschool Laboratory: Young Children Think Like Scientists, Wynne Parry, LiveScience.com, 27 September 2012

http://www.livescience.com/23522-young-children-think-like-scientists.html

Corporal punishment Part II

I don’t live in a state where corporal punishment is allowed in schools, so I can only speculate what kind of circumstances might trigger this sort of punishment. I didn’t grow up with it, and I’ve never worked in a school where it was permissible. However, as a classroom teacher, it’s not difficult to imagine scenarios where students might choose to misbehave, though, so let’s see what school discipline would look like if I suddenly had this new tool at my disposal.

From what I hear, it’s not a punishment that’s typically administered at the classroom level. (While the possibility exists that some teacher somewhere is physically punishing his or her own students physically, you never hear about this without also hearing the words “angry parents” and “was fired”.) The teacher who wants to use it, then usually has to refer the student to some other party, usually an administrator (presumably the vice principal). It’s often used in lieu of suspension from school.

What kinds of student behaviors might invite the use of corporal punishment? Let’s think of what real students do in the classroom. Based on the last school year, the categories of student behaviors that I recall dealing with were students talking at inappropriate times, students falling asleep in class, other off-task behaviors, tardiness, inappropriate comments, and aggressive behavior.

I find it hard to believe that the first three types of student behavior would be likely candidates for corporal punishment (since they don’t normally lead to suspension). It seems rather absurd: “Vanessa, if you don’t stop talking to Jaime, you’re going to get paddled.” “Jason, if you fall asleep one more time, you’re going to get paddled.” “Lisa, if I catch you texting one more time, you’re going to get paddled.” “Darren, that’s the third time you’ve been late to class this week. You’re going straight to the principal’s office for a paddling.” Okay, so maybe the falling asleep one DOES kind of make sense, but we’ll assume for the sake of the argument that the reason why Jason is falling asleep in class is because he tends to makes poor choices: he’s been staying up too late at night texting his friends and playing video games, not because he has a behavior problem, per se.

Now let’s look at the last two: inappropriate comments, and aggressive behavior. By inappropriate comments, I mean those times when in the middle of class, a student blurts out something completely random and totally inappropriate: some kind of racist/sexist comment, makes some kind of off color joke, or something of the like. It derails you for a moment because you’re like “huh?” and wondering there the heck THAT came from. When you look at that scenario, physical punishment doesn’t make any sense because it’s a very in-the-moment kind of situation. (Remember, you don’t get to run over and whack the kid with a dictionary, ladies and gentlemen. Corporal punishment is usually a third party institution. By the time you send the kid down to the office, it’s long over. So in that case, a scathing verbal response is really the best thing you can do.)

So that leaves us with aggressive student behavior. I’m defining this as any aggressive behavior verbal or physical directed towards another person (or property). This is the category of behaviors that is most likely to lead to school removal (suspensions). Let’s assume then the school has decided to use corporal punishment as a punishment option for dealing with aggressive behavior in students. It first glance, this kind of makes sense, until you realize that it would work about as well as throwing gasoline on a fire since the use of physical discipline tends to increase aggressive behavior, not decrease it.

Who are aggressive students anyway, and what kinds of things are likely to lead to aggression? Ignoring the average kid (who may get into a fight at school once during their school career), let’s focus on the kind of student who is likely to exhibit aggressive behaviors regularly enough for it to be a bona fide discipline problem.

Speaking from my own experience, it’s pretty rare for a student to display aggressive behavior in a classroom setting. This sort of thing usually happens outside of the classroom during less structured times like lunch/recess/passing periods/dismissal. In fact, it’s so rare, that when you see a recurring pattern with aggression, it’s usually because you have an unusual student—one who is NOT typical. As a teacher, I can only think of a few occasions last year when a kid displayed aggressive behavior in my classroom, and both of the individuals in question were students who had “behavior labels” and came with the paperwork to back it up (they were kids who had documented behavioral disorders/known psychiatric conditions). Usually they were safely removed from the room, and did not harm anyone.

What I’ve noticed, is that students who have chronic issues around aggressive behavior often also have either IEPs (or 504 plans). What this means, then, that you have a student who is atypical. With these kinds of students, due to the nature of their issues, they are unlikely to make good candidates for a program of corporal punishment. With these kinds of students, if corporal punishment was effective in controlling their behavior, their issues would have been resolved long before adolescence. Why? For one, by the time these students are teens, odds are pretty good that the people in their lives have tried a number of different approaches in trying to solve their behavior problems (including meds). You can be pretty sure that corporal punishment has already been tried and discarded as the results were less than stellar. Then there’s IDEA legislation that governs discipline of students with disabilities, which almost always means corporal punishment is a no-go. So legally you can’t use corporal punishment on the population that is most likely to exhibit aggressive behavior in a school setting.

So who’s left?

Average kids. Average kids 80-90% of your classroom, are the kids who do the usual stuff: 80-90% of the time there isn’t a problem. If there is a problem, it’s usually something minor such as talking in class, sleeping, texting under a desk, flirting with someone across the room, taking a 20 minute “restroom break”. Not major league problems, just the average stuff teachers deal with on their own in the classroom. The principal rarely gets involved.

Once in a blue moon, one of these average kids will have an “off” day. He or she will come to school and behave in a way that’s not typical. Usually the reason is that something happened in this child’s world that has left them feeling vulnerable/scared/angry/threatened. They are unable to let go of it to focus on reading/math etc. So they react unexpectedly. They lash out at someone. They yell. They throw things. They break things. They attack another student (possibly the perpetrator). If you, the teacher, can get them to talk about it, and figure out how to solve the problem, the odds are very good that this sort of thing will never happen again for the rest of the year…or possibly ever.

Or you could deal with this by sending them straight to the office. It might “solve the problem” in the immediate sense, but what would that teach them, exactly? It wouldn’t teach them how to constructively deal with their problems, that’s for sure. It wouldn’t encourage them to talk to someone before things got bad. And it wouldn’t help you work with the student again in the future.

So once again, corporal punishment makes little sense. It may give you instant gratification in the “stop doing that right now” sense. But it doesn’t teach the child what behavior is desired—what TO DO in the future. So from this perspective, you could say that it’s not particularly effective. However, I will go one step further and say that corporal punishment, particularly with adolescent students, is probably harmful.

“There has been little research done on the effect of using corporal punishment in schools, but social scientists say there's no reason to believe the results would be any better than when parents hit kids.” (If you think about it, it would be hard to study corporal punishment because it is rarely adopted where it has been absent. The only thing you can do is compare outcomes between two different systems, you can’t study it directly, like say when a district changes from one reading program to a new reading program. You have no way of comparing the before and after. You basically have to compare apples and oranges and attempt to draw a conclusion based on that.)

Aside from being relatively ineffective as a teaching tool (and schools ARE in the business of teaching—if you’re looking for something else, try prison), corporal punishment is likely more harmful than not.

First of all, you are not the student’s parent, therefore you don’t enjoy the same kind of relationship. A parent who spanks their child enjoys a very different relationship afterward than a stranger sitting in an office does.

Secondly, corporal punishment is not a discipline method that’s typically used with adolescents, and for a good reason. Adolescents, being much larger than toddlers, are able to fight back. Even if they choose not to, it’s no secret that they COULD, and you don’t want to encourage that.

Teens, unlike small children are capable of listening to reason.

Adolescents are at a stage where they need to learn how to control themselves. External regulation (management of one’s behavior by an outside party needs to give way to internal management—controlling oneself). Students who don’t learn how to control themselves from within typically have poor outcomes in the adult world.

Corporal punishment teaches the lesson that the power is maintained through physical dominance. This is not a particularly helpful worldview in the modern world, where we’ve largely discarded this method of conflict resolution in favor of more rational pursuits. There are a lot of other options for how to discipline adolescents that are more effective, age appropriate, as well as nonviolent. Why Spanking High-School Students Is Dangerous
Stephanie Pappas, LiveScience.com, 26 September 2012
http://www.livescience.com/23496-spanking-high-school-students-texas-policy.html

Corporal punishment in schools Part I

As bizarre as it seems sometimes, corporal punishment is still legal in public schools in nearly half of US States (19 states as of 2006). Really? Why? I must confess that spanking, paddling, and corporal punishment in a school discipline context have never made much sense to me (then again, I don’t feel they make any more sense in the parenting sphere either, but that’s MY opinion, such as it is).

Whether you are in favor of spanking your own children, or not, is one thing, but spanking other people’s children just invites controversy. For example, two parents Texas complained that their daughters had been paddled by male faculty hard enough to leave welts and bruises. This sort of thing just INVITES lawsuits because let’s face it, it’s creepy. What’s NOT creepy about an adult male paddling pubescent females hard enough to leave marks? Aside from meeting the textbook definition of child abuse (as it’s defined in a number of states), it comes eerily close to assault/sexual assault territory. As a school district, I would NOT want to have my faculty going THERE. It blows my mind that in many states, this kind of bizarreness is allowed to continue.

It’s hard to imagine a convincing rationale for using corporal punishment in a public school setting, especially when you are working with adolescents (as opposed to small children). It just doesn’t make any sense logically, given that there are numerous other options for meeting your disciplinary objectives, all of which, would presumably be more effective (and less harmful) than spanking.

For some reason, though, 19 states still allow it. We’ll assume that in these 19 states, that not all schools choose to use it, but it’s a legal option for those who wish to do so. Let’s explore the topic a bit more then in part two.