A review by emiged
Helping Children Succeed: What Works and Why by Paul Tough
3.0
"If we want to improve a child's grit or resilience or self-control, it turns out that the place to begin is not with the child himself. What we need to change first, it seems, is his environment." (13)
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"When we hear the word environment, we often think first of a child's physical environment. And adverse physical surroundings do play a role in children's development, especially when they are literally toxic, as when children are exposed to lead in their drinking water or carbon monoxide in the are they breathe. But one of the most important findings of this new cohort of researchers is that for most children, the environmental factors that matter most have less to do with the buildings they live in than with the relationships they experience - they way the adults in their lives interact with them, especially in times of stress.
"The first and most essential environment where children develop their emotional and psychological and cognitive capacities is the home - and, more specifically, the family. Beginning in infancy, children rely on responses from their parents to make sense of the world. Researchers at the Center on the Developing Child at Harvard University have labeled these 'serve and return' interactions. Infants make a sound or look at an object - that's the serve - and parents return the serve by sharing the child's attention and responding to his babbles and cries with gestures, facial expressions, and speech: 'Yes, that's your doggy!' 'Do you see the fan?' 'Oh dear, are you sad?' These rudimentary interactions between parents and babies, which can often feel to parents nonsensical and repetitive, are for the infants full of valuable information about what the world is going to be like. More than any other experiences infants have, they trigger the development and strengthening of neural connections in the brain between the regions that control emotion, cognition, language, and memory." (17)
**********
"A second crucial role parents play early on is as external regulators of their children's stress, in both good ways and bad. Research has shown that when parents behave harshly or unpredictably - especially at moments when their children are upset - the children are less likely over time to develop the ability to manage strong emotions and more likely to respond ineffectively to stressful situations. By contrast, parents who are able to help their children handle stressful moments and calm themselves down after a tantrum or a scare often have a profoundly positive effect on the children's long-term ability to manage stress. Infancy and early childhood are naturally full of crying jags and meltdowns, and each one is, for the child, a learning opportunity (even if that's hard to believe, in the moment, for the child's parents). When a child's caregivers respond to her jangled emotions in a sensitive and measured way, she is more likely to learn that she herself has the capacity to manage and cope with her feelings, even intense and unpleasant ones. That understanding, which is not primarily an intellectual understanding but instead is etched deep into the child's psyche, will prove immensely valuable when the next stressful situation comes along - or even in the face of a crisis years in the future." (18)
**********
"Moments of failure, Farrington believed, are the time when students are most susceptible to messages, both positive and negative, about their potential. If they hear the message that a failure is a final verdict on their ability, they may well give up and pull back from school. But if instead they get the message that a failure is a temporary stumble, or even a valuable opportunity to learn and improve, then that setback is more likely to propel them to invest more of themselves in their education. Farrington believed that these narratives about failure were especially resonant among students from low-income families, who were more likely to be anxious or insecure about the possibility of failing in an academic context." (75)
**********
"The experience of persisting through an intellectual challenge and succeeding despite the struggle is a profound one for schoolchildren - as profound, it seems, as serve-and-return is for the infant brain. It produces feelings of both competence and autonomy - two of Deci and Ryan's three big intrinsic motivations. And yet most of our schools, especially schools educating poor kids, operate in ways that steer children away from those experiences.
"In 2007, Robert Pianta of the University of Virginia published in the results of a large-scale survey of American public schools that he and a team of researchers had undertaken, observing regular instruction over the course of an entire school day in 737 typical fifth-grade classrooms across the United States, as well as hundreds of additional first- and third-grade classrooms. Pianta's researchers found that in almost every school they observed, the instruction students received was repetitive and undemanding, limited mostly to the endless practice of basic skills. cooperative learning and small-group instruction - the central pedagogical strategies of groups like Turnaround and schools like Polaris and WHEELS - were rare, taking up less than 5 percent of classroom time, and so were opportunities for students to practice or develop analytic skills like critical thinking, deep reading, or complex problem-solving. Instead, students spent most of their time hearing lectures on basic skills from teachers or practicing those basic skills on worksheets. The average fifth-grade student received five times as much instruction in basic skills as instruction focused on problem-solving or reasoning, Pianta and his coauthors reported; in first and third grades, the ratio was ten to one.
"And while the Science authors found instruction to be basic and repetitive even in American schools with a mostly middle-class or upper-middle-class student population, they found that the situation was considerably worse in schools that enrolled a lot of low-income children. Students in schools populated mostly by middle-class-and-above children were about equally likely to find themselves in a classroom with engaged and interesting instruction (47 percent of students) as in one with basic, repetitive instruction (53 percent of students). But students in schools serving mostly low-income children were almost all (91 percent) in classrooms marked by basic, uninteresting teaching.
"It's important to note that this approach to education, so widespread in the United States, is not inevitable. In other countries, classroom teaching can look quite different. In the 1990s, a researcher named James Stigler coordinated a vast international project that involved videotaping the classrooms of hundreds of randomly selected eighth-grade math teachers in the United States, Germany, and Japan. Stigler, who summarized his research in a 1999 book that he coauthored with James Hiebert titled The Teaching Gap, found that math classes in Japan almost always followed a very different script from math classes in the United States.
"In Japan, teachers would introduce a new mathematical method -let's say, adding fractions with different denominators, like 3/5 + 1/2 - by presenting the students with a problem they'd never seen before and instructing them to figure it out on their own. Students would stare at the problem for a while, scratch their heads, sometimes wince in pain, and then come up with an answer that was usually wrong.
"Next would come a series of discussions, in small groups and in the class as a whole, in which students compared and contrasted their solutions, arguing and lobbying for different approaches. The teacher would guide the discussion in a way that led, eventually, to a new element of math understanding (in this case, the principle of finding the lowest common denominator). Often the correct solution would be proposed not by the teacher but by one of the students. The whole process was sometimes bewildering and occasionally frustrating for students, but that was kind of the point. By the end of class, confusion and frustration gave way to the satisfaction of a new depth of comprehension, not delivered in whole cloth by an omniscient adult, but constructed from the group up, in part through a dialogue among the students.
"In American classrooms, by contrast, Stigler found that a unit on adding fractions with unlike denominators would usually begin with the teacher writing on an overhead projector a reliable formula to solve the problem, which students would be expected to copy down, memorize, and use for each subsequent problem. The teacher would then complete, on the overhead projector, a couple of sample problems while the students watcher, listened, and copied the problems down in their workbooks. The teacher would then give the students series of exercises to complete on their own that looked very similar to the sample problems the teacher had just demonstrated. Students would absorb these new procedures, Stiger and Hiebert wrote in The Teaching Gap, by 'practicing them many times, with later exercises being slightly more difficult than earlier ones.' The guiding principle for American teachers seemed to be that 'practice should be relatively error-free, with high levels of success at each point. Confusion and frustration, in this tradition American view, should be minimized.'
"Stigler's researchers logged hundreds of hours of videotape, which allowed them to assign some hard numbers to these cultural tendencies. In Japan, 41 percent of students' time in math class was still spent on basic practice - churning through one problem after another - but 44 percent was devoted to more creative stuff: inventing new procedures or adapting familiar procedures to unfamiliar material. In the American classrooms, by contrast, 96 percent of students' time was spent on repetitive practice, and less than 1 percent was spent puzzling through new approaches.
"This dominant American instructional strategy may save students from those uncomfortable feelings of confusion and struggle that Japanese students must endure - but it also denies them the character-building opportunities..." (100-103)
**********
"Now that we know this, what do we do?
"Let me propose three answers."
"First, we need to change our policies. Consistently creating what Pamela Cantor has called 'fortified environments' for poor children will mean fundamentally rethinking and remaking many of our entrenched institutions and practice: how we provide aid to low-income parents; how we create, fund, and manage systems of early-childhood care and education; how we train our teachers; how we discipline our students and assess their learning; and how we run our schools. These are essentially questions of public policy, and if real solutions are going to be found to the problems of disadvantaged children, these questions will need to be addressed, in a creative and committed way, by public officials at all levels - by school superintendents, school-board members, mayors, governors, and cabinet secretaries - as well as by individual citizens, community groups, and philanthropists across the country...
"Second, we need to change our practices. The project of creating better environments for children growing up in adversity is, at bottom, the work on individuals. Which means that the teachers, mentors, social workers, coaches, and parents who spend their days working with low-income children don't need to wait for large-scale policy changes to be enacted in order to take actions today and tomorrow and the next day that will help those children succeed...the trajectory that children's lives follow can sometimes be redirected by things that might at first seem, to the adults in their lives, to be small and insignificant. The tone of a parent's voice. The words a teacher writes on a Post-it note. The way a math class is organized. The extra time that a mentor or a coach takes to listen to a child facing a challenge. Those personal actions can create powerful changes, and those individual changes can resonate on a national scale.
"Finally, we need to change our way of thinking. When you spend time reading through the kind of intervention studies that I've written about here, it's easy to get caught up in the specifics of the date: sample sizes, standard deviations, regression analyses. And that data certainly matters. But i also find it useful, every once in a while, to think about the individual people who conducted these studies: the doctors or psychologists or social workers who went in to an orphanage in Russia or an impoverished neighborhood in Jamaica or a high school in Chicago or a living room in Queens and said, in essence, I want to help. I think we can do better.
"As much as we draw on the data that those researchers have produced, I think we can also draw on their example. The premise underlying their work is that if there are children suffering in your community - or your nation - there is something you can do to help We all still have a lot to learn about how best to deliver that help, which means that we need to continue and indeed expand upon the work those researchers are doing. But at the same time, we don't need to know exactly what to do in order to know that we need to do something." (112-114)
***********
"When we hear the word environment, we often think first of a child's physical environment. And adverse physical surroundings do play a role in children's development, especially when they are literally toxic, as when children are exposed to lead in their drinking water or carbon monoxide in the are they breathe. But one of the most important findings of this new cohort of researchers is that for most children, the environmental factors that matter most have less to do with the buildings they live in than with the relationships they experience - they way the adults in their lives interact with them, especially in times of stress.
"The first and most essential environment where children develop their emotional and psychological and cognitive capacities is the home - and, more specifically, the family. Beginning in infancy, children rely on responses from their parents to make sense of the world. Researchers at the Center on the Developing Child at Harvard University have labeled these 'serve and return' interactions. Infants make a sound or look at an object - that's the serve - and parents return the serve by sharing the child's attention and responding to his babbles and cries with gestures, facial expressions, and speech: 'Yes, that's your doggy!' 'Do you see the fan?' 'Oh dear, are you sad?' These rudimentary interactions between parents and babies, which can often feel to parents nonsensical and repetitive, are for the infants full of valuable information about what the world is going to be like. More than any other experiences infants have, they trigger the development and strengthening of neural connections in the brain between the regions that control emotion, cognition, language, and memory." (17)
**********
"A second crucial role parents play early on is as external regulators of their children's stress, in both good ways and bad. Research has shown that when parents behave harshly or unpredictably - especially at moments when their children are upset - the children are less likely over time to develop the ability to manage strong emotions and more likely to respond ineffectively to stressful situations. By contrast, parents who are able to help their children handle stressful moments and calm themselves down after a tantrum or a scare often have a profoundly positive effect on the children's long-term ability to manage stress. Infancy and early childhood are naturally full of crying jags and meltdowns, and each one is, for the child, a learning opportunity (even if that's hard to believe, in the moment, for the child's parents). When a child's caregivers respond to her jangled emotions in a sensitive and measured way, she is more likely to learn that she herself has the capacity to manage and cope with her feelings, even intense and unpleasant ones. That understanding, which is not primarily an intellectual understanding but instead is etched deep into the child's psyche, will prove immensely valuable when the next stressful situation comes along - or even in the face of a crisis years in the future." (18)
**********
"Moments of failure, Farrington believed, are the time when students are most susceptible to messages, both positive and negative, about their potential. If they hear the message that a failure is a final verdict on their ability, they may well give up and pull back from school. But if instead they get the message that a failure is a temporary stumble, or even a valuable opportunity to learn and improve, then that setback is more likely to propel them to invest more of themselves in their education. Farrington believed that these narratives about failure were especially resonant among students from low-income families, who were more likely to be anxious or insecure about the possibility of failing in an academic context." (75)
**********
"The experience of persisting through an intellectual challenge and succeeding despite the struggle is a profound one for schoolchildren - as profound, it seems, as serve-and-return is for the infant brain. It produces feelings of both competence and autonomy - two of Deci and Ryan's three big intrinsic motivations. And yet most of our schools, especially schools educating poor kids, operate in ways that steer children away from those experiences.
"In 2007, Robert Pianta of the University of Virginia published in the results of a large-scale survey of American public schools that he and a team of researchers had undertaken, observing regular instruction over the course of an entire school day in 737 typical fifth-grade classrooms across the United States, as well as hundreds of additional first- and third-grade classrooms. Pianta's researchers found that in almost every school they observed, the instruction students received was repetitive and undemanding, limited mostly to the endless practice of basic skills. cooperative learning and small-group instruction - the central pedagogical strategies of groups like Turnaround and schools like Polaris and WHEELS - were rare, taking up less than 5 percent of classroom time, and so were opportunities for students to practice or develop analytic skills like critical thinking, deep reading, or complex problem-solving. Instead, students spent most of their time hearing lectures on basic skills from teachers or practicing those basic skills on worksheets. The average fifth-grade student received five times as much instruction in basic skills as instruction focused on problem-solving or reasoning, Pianta and his coauthors reported; in first and third grades, the ratio was ten to one.
"And while the Science authors found instruction to be basic and repetitive even in American schools with a mostly middle-class or upper-middle-class student population, they found that the situation was considerably worse in schools that enrolled a lot of low-income children. Students in schools populated mostly by middle-class-and-above children were about equally likely to find themselves in a classroom with engaged and interesting instruction (47 percent of students) as in one with basic, repetitive instruction (53 percent of students). But students in schools serving mostly low-income children were almost all (91 percent) in classrooms marked by basic, uninteresting teaching.
"It's important to note that this approach to education, so widespread in the United States, is not inevitable. In other countries, classroom teaching can look quite different. In the 1990s, a researcher named James Stigler coordinated a vast international project that involved videotaping the classrooms of hundreds of randomly selected eighth-grade math teachers in the United States, Germany, and Japan. Stigler, who summarized his research in a 1999 book that he coauthored with James Hiebert titled The Teaching Gap, found that math classes in Japan almost always followed a very different script from math classes in the United States.
"In Japan, teachers would introduce a new mathematical method -let's say, adding fractions with different denominators, like 3/5 + 1/2 - by presenting the students with a problem they'd never seen before and instructing them to figure it out on their own. Students would stare at the problem for a while, scratch their heads, sometimes wince in pain, and then come up with an answer that was usually wrong.
"Next would come a series of discussions, in small groups and in the class as a whole, in which students compared and contrasted their solutions, arguing and lobbying for different approaches. The teacher would guide the discussion in a way that led, eventually, to a new element of math understanding (in this case, the principle of finding the lowest common denominator). Often the correct solution would be proposed not by the teacher but by one of the students. The whole process was sometimes bewildering and occasionally frustrating for students, but that was kind of the point. By the end of class, confusion and frustration gave way to the satisfaction of a new depth of comprehension, not delivered in whole cloth by an omniscient adult, but constructed from the group up, in part through a dialogue among the students.
"In American classrooms, by contrast, Stigler found that a unit on adding fractions with unlike denominators would usually begin with the teacher writing on an overhead projector a reliable formula to solve the problem, which students would be expected to copy down, memorize, and use for each subsequent problem. The teacher would then complete, on the overhead projector, a couple of sample problems while the students watcher, listened, and copied the problems down in their workbooks. The teacher would then give the students series of exercises to complete on their own that looked very similar to the sample problems the teacher had just demonstrated. Students would absorb these new procedures, Stiger and Hiebert wrote in The Teaching Gap, by 'practicing them many times, with later exercises being slightly more difficult than earlier ones.' The guiding principle for American teachers seemed to be that 'practice should be relatively error-free, with high levels of success at each point. Confusion and frustration, in this tradition American view, should be minimized.'
"Stigler's researchers logged hundreds of hours of videotape, which allowed them to assign some hard numbers to these cultural tendencies. In Japan, 41 percent of students' time in math class was still spent on basic practice - churning through one problem after another - but 44 percent was devoted to more creative stuff: inventing new procedures or adapting familiar procedures to unfamiliar material. In the American classrooms, by contrast, 96 percent of students' time was spent on repetitive practice, and less than 1 percent was spent puzzling through new approaches.
"This dominant American instructional strategy may save students from those uncomfortable feelings of confusion and struggle that Japanese students must endure - but it also denies them the character-building opportunities..." (100-103)
**********
"Now that we know this, what do we do?
"Let me propose three answers."
"First, we need to change our policies. Consistently creating what Pamela Cantor has called 'fortified environments' for poor children will mean fundamentally rethinking and remaking many of our entrenched institutions and practice: how we provide aid to low-income parents; how we create, fund, and manage systems of early-childhood care and education; how we train our teachers; how we discipline our students and assess their learning; and how we run our schools. These are essentially questions of public policy, and if real solutions are going to be found to the problems of disadvantaged children, these questions will need to be addressed, in a creative and committed way, by public officials at all levels - by school superintendents, school-board members, mayors, governors, and cabinet secretaries - as well as by individual citizens, community groups, and philanthropists across the country...
"Second, we need to change our practices. The project of creating better environments for children growing up in adversity is, at bottom, the work on individuals. Which means that the teachers, mentors, social workers, coaches, and parents who spend their days working with low-income children don't need to wait for large-scale policy changes to be enacted in order to take actions today and tomorrow and the next day that will help those children succeed...the trajectory that children's lives follow can sometimes be redirected by things that might at first seem, to the adults in their lives, to be small and insignificant. The tone of a parent's voice. The words a teacher writes on a Post-it note. The way a math class is organized. The extra time that a mentor or a coach takes to listen to a child facing a challenge. Those personal actions can create powerful changes, and those individual changes can resonate on a national scale.
"Finally, we need to change our way of thinking. When you spend time reading through the kind of intervention studies that I've written about here, it's easy to get caught up in the specifics of the date: sample sizes, standard deviations, regression analyses. And that data certainly matters. But i also find it useful, every once in a while, to think about the individual people who conducted these studies: the doctors or psychologists or social workers who went in to an orphanage in Russia or an impoverished neighborhood in Jamaica or a high school in Chicago or a living room in Queens and said, in essence, I want to help. I think we can do better.
"As much as we draw on the data that those researchers have produced, I think we can also draw on their example. The premise underlying their work is that if there are children suffering in your community - or your nation - there is something you can do to help We all still have a lot to learn about how best to deliver that help, which means that we need to continue and indeed expand upon the work those researchers are doing. But at the same time, we don't need to know exactly what to do in order to know that we need to do something." (112-114)