Writer, filmmaker, observer of nameless things. Off-leash learning for all.
Joined November 2010
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Carol Black retweeted
What a strange thing we do to our young people in this culture and time.
We make them spend several years learning things which they often have no interest in, which they have not chosen and which they will in many cases never use again. We tell them that these things are vitally important.
Then we sit them in rows and make them write about the things they can remember for an intense few hours. We compare what they have written down with everyone else of the same age, and then we rank them.
We make them wait a couple of months and then we tell some that they are the successes, and others that they are the failures. We encourage them to hang their self-worth on how they performed. Newspapers publish pictures of the delighted, whilst the disappointed hide their heads in shame.
We tell them that these results will determine the rest of their lives – and then we set up systems that make this true. We provide fewer opportunities for those who did not succeed. Those who did well can take their pick of courses, whilst those who did not are made to take the same tests again and again, just to hammer it home.
We make sure that young people spend the majority of their adolescence focused on exams and pressure. Every summer, they sit in rows and try to remember. Each year, they’re told that their whole future rests on this.
Many of them inevitably cave in under the pressure. They become anxious and depressed. They show signs of burnout by the age of 16. They lose their spark, and just go through the motions. Some of them retreat altogether.
Then we pathologise them, say that they need mental health treatment or to become more resilient. We send them for therapy or give them medication. We say that they are the problem, whilst the system carries on unchanged.
What if instead we stopped to think about what we are doing to our young people?
Adolescence is a time of opportunity and vulnerability. It’s a one-off stage of life. What if we asked ourselves, should our young people really spend these years on a conveyor belt of high stakes exams?
Imagine we allowed ourselves to look beyond this time and place, and to see just how strange this really is. What would we offer our young people then?
I'm sorry, that's not possible, the science of learning has determined that all people learn in the same way.
Carol Black retweeted
My son(14) took on the project of building his own custom PC. For 2 months, he did nothing but research and plan. I felt like I saw this in real time. Build day was awesome!
I would also add – a child intently and freely following their curiosity is expertly managing cognitive load -- building on existing schemas, pruning out unnecessary details and elaborating others, branching out in related directions so all new information is interconnected.
Is the work of developmental psychologists and developmental neuroscientists irrelevant for schools, because they are only talking about learning which is hardwired (or biologically primary, as Geary would say)? Does the science indicate that cognitive load theory is ‘the science of learning’ and any other evidence on learning can be ignored in school?
No, and here’s why not.
Cognitive load theory is a a theory of information processing. It is a model which suggests how information can be processed and retained in the brain. It is mostly based on experimental studies with adults, learning lists of information. There are, as far as I know, almost no studies on younger children and very few in areas outside maths and science with teenagers.
Learning - and particularly children’s learning - is about an awful lot more than information processing. For a start, an information processing model is silent on motivation. All information is equal, according to the model. It doesn’t matter what you put in. Whereas when it comes to real life learning, motivation is fundamental, particularly for children. A child learns about something which interests them with alacrity, whilst if you try to teach them about something which has no interest to them it is like wading through treacle.
The developmental psychology research into children’s learning indicates that learning is an interactive process, where children are driven by their desire to participate in the world. They form hypotheses and use the information they already know. This is not just about learning things which are ‘hard wired’. Very little is hard wired into human brains. Human brains are born with enormous flexibility, able to adapt to different environments and cultures. This is one of the things which makes humans different to other animals.
Developmental psychology is about how children learn when they are in environments which enable them to use their strengths - environments like good early years classrooms. Early years teachers share content, and children acquire knowledge and skills. Including a lot of new information which is culturally specific and could not be ‘hard wired’ in.
There is no research which shows that children’s learning changes in quality at age five, and that they are no longer able to learn in this way. In fact, quite the opposite, there is a lot of evidence that children find formal learning at five very difficult and that it causes many of them to become distressed and to show this through their behaviour. That’s because they are not just information processors. They are young humans who need to move their bodies, who find it hard to concentrate and whose strengths do not lie in sitting still and listening.
Children are learning how to manage themselves in the world, and this will be fundamentally important to their future - but isn’t captured by cognitive load theory. Cognitive load theory is silent on how to get children to stay still long enough and listen - and that’s because cognitive load theory is not a theory of education or child development. It’s a theory of information processing. As a theory of education, it lacks complexity, and it has nothing to say about child development and motivation. That’s because it’s a cognitive model, and it doesn’t set out to cover all those different aspects of learning.
Cognitive load theory is not the only theory of learning that matters, nor is it the dominant theory of children’s learning. Children aren’t just novice-adults, any more than they are information processors.
Ignoring child development and the way in which children learn best will inevitably lead to more unhappy children and less effective learning.
Curiosity focuses the brain so it is alert, at ease, nimble, open, and constantly making permanent changes in long-term memory. They are mapping their world, and they don't forget the things they learn this way.
Literally everyone knows people who learned to read without being taught.
A legitimate 'science of learning' would explore that and try to understand under what circumstances it happens.
Or... you could just claim it can't happen. 🙈🙉
The problem with the "science of learning" is that it's not responsible science.
You can create narrowly constrained experiments to prove many things that all fall apart in a larger context.
Respecting that fact is a core value for serious scientists.
‘They Just Don’t Care’
I’m seeing lots of posts bemoaning that the Year 11s just don’t seem to care about their upcoming GCSEs. They aren’t motivated or worried about their speaking exams starting in two weeks time and nothing seems to make a difference.
This is exactly what would be predicted by the science of motivation. Motivation can come from the inside or the outside (or a mixture of the two). Standard schooling works on a principle of controlling children’s motivation. From the moment that children start school, adults are working to motivate them through rewards, sanctions, grades and approvals. They tell children that what they want to do is less important than what adults want them to do. They make them learn things which have no purpose to them, because they will be ‘important later on’.
This changes the purpose of learning. Young children learn because they want to find out and they are driven to explore the world. They ask questions because they are curious and want to participate. It’s hard to stop young children learning, and their learning is very individualised and frequently messy.
Adults try to make this linear, to make them follow a formal process. This isn’t how children naturally learn, and so they have to be controlled in order to do what is required. When we take away their choices and instead give them stickers and certificates to make them do what we want, then we turn learning into an exercise in compliance.
Now they aren’t learning because they want to find out, they are learning because they are being told that they have to. They don’t read because they love stories, they read because they have to do 15 minutes every night to tick it off. They are helpful because they might get an Achievement Point, or a 'Caught Being Kind' sticker.
The research shows that over time, this will damage their internal drive to learn and this is exactly what we see. They don’t ask why any more, they ask what will be on the test. They don’t choose a topic because they are interested, they choose whatever they think will be easiest. And over time, the stickers and stars lose their sparkle. It’s easy to control a five-year-old with a sticker, but 15-year-olds will laugh in your face.
When we focus on the cognitive science of learning, it’s easy to miss that the science of motivation is as important. Experimental studies on how adults learn often don’t even address this issue, because adults have some level of choice in what they do and that is assumed.
For children and teenagers, it’s different. They often have no choice at all. What they want to learn doesn’t matter. Understanding the science of learning is futile if the learner doesn’t want to know. Cognitive science doesn’t apply to forced learning. What the learner thinks, matters.
It’s easy to blame teenagers, or their parents, or even the pandemic. It’s deeply frustrating when you are trying to help people who just don’t care. But what if this is actually the predictable result of our education system?
We ignore the science of motivation and our young people pay the price.
Yes, it's true, treating children like human beings may not improve their achievement. It may only improve their ability to live like human beings. But who cares about that.
What I can’t understand is how is it that everyone doesn’t see this?
A number of parents are telling me that their primary school is ranking their children against each other. Sometimes for behaviour, their points projected onto the class whiteboard in ‘resting’ mode. Sometimes for times tables, where they are not only ranked against each other but the whole class is ranked against other classes.
Sometimes the ranking isn’t about numbers, it’s about how many clothes you put on your monster - get more points and you’re given better clothes. This seems more ‘fun’ but it’s no different. All the monsters are visible, the kids know exactly who has done best.
It seems that this has become very easy to do with technology, and so more schools are doing it. They think public competition will motivate children to do better.
For some, maybe it does. For others, it’s damaging.
What it does is make it very obvious to everyone who is struggling and who isn’t. It’s a public shaming of those at the bottom, who are often those with special needs or who have other difficulties in their lives. And it’s anxiety provoking for many. Those at the top worry about losing their spot and about no longer being seen to be ‘good at maths’. Those at the bottom are told to ‘try harder’ even when they are trying their best and quickly become despondent.
Sometimes the ranking uses reaction times - doing your times tables super-fast is what gets the most points, so those who need more processing time quickly start to panic. Some start to freeze when they are asked questions, which is never going to be helpful for doing maths.
Ranking focuses everyone on points rather than learning. Parents tell me that their children say they know they are stupid, because everyone else is doing better. There’s no way for parents to deny this, it’s literally written in the whiteboard. They can tell them that other things matter too, but that’s not what they see at school. Removing a child from the ranking doesn’t solve the problem, because everyone can see that they aren’t there and they’ll ask why.
Is anyone doing the risk assessments of the effect of this on the most vulnerable? When you rank a class of children, someone is always going to be at the bottom. Often the same, most vulnerable kids. There’s no way for them all to succeed.
If you do this often, some kids are being told again and again that they are the losers. In front of the whole class.
We know from the research that whether children see themselves as capable has a significant effect on their later attainment – even when they weren’t as capable to start with.
What children learn about themselves matters. When you’re always the loser, you learn to think about yourself as a failure. And that often stays with you for life.
Why would we do that to our kids?
Carol Black retweeted
Should we listen to distressed children? One of the comments levelled at me over the last few days is that the views of the children I see don’t count, because they have mental health problems and therefore by definition their emotional reactions are excessive. My job, goes the argument, is to help them see that they are engaging in thinking errors and therefore to reduce their anxiety so they can return to school and everything can carry on as before.
This is exactly the reason why I am speaking up. I’m concerned that by defining the distress of young people as a mental health problem, we make the assumption that they are irrational. We locate the problem in them. We assume that they are wrong to feel the way they do. No matter how developmentally inappropriate the requirements of a school might be. No matter how controlling a school environment is. No matter how many more tests are introduced. The child’s reactions have been effectively neutralised, turned into something which must be treated. That’s what I have been asked to do as a psychologist. Fix the child, so they return to school without complaining and stop waking up at night worrying or being disruptive.
It doesn’t work like that. Mental health doesn’t exist in a vacuum. If you’re in an environment which causes you serious ongoing stress and you have no power to change that or ability to leave, then you are going to feel anxious or depressed. Many adults experience this in unhealthy work environments. Psychology can’t and shouldn’t try to make natural emotional responses go away. Our emotions are important. Distress doesn’t always mean there’s something wrong with a person. It can mean that the environment isn’t working for them, and something needs to change.
We treat children’s distress as the problem, and I’m saying what if in fact they are pointing out a problem - and the rest of us aren’t listening?
(Illustration by @_MissingTheMark)
Research finds verbal abuse can be as harmful as physical or sexual abuse:
Periodic reminder that children understand poor grades as having exactly these meanings:
"Asked what the most hurtful and upsetting words they experienced were, children cited “you’re useless”, “you’re stupid” and “you can’t do anything right”."
@TG2Chat
theguardian.com/society/2023…
Periodic reminder that children understand poor grades as having exactly these meanings:
"Asked what the most hurtful and upsetting words they experienced were, children cited “you’re useless”, “you’re stupid” and “you can’t do anything right”."
@TG2Chat
theguardian.com/society/2023…
Proud to be a Twitter follower of UK education experts @SwailesRuth, @Sue_Cowley, and @Dr_Pam_Jarvis.
Being monitored by DfE will go down in history as a badge of honor right up there with being on the Nixon enemies list. theguardian.com/education/20…
"Swailes insists that none of those who have been monitored will be silenced. “They tried to ruin me, but they have only made me more vocal. Every so often I tag them and say: ‘You can add this to my file’.”
theguardian.com/education/20…
California Assembly passes "Piqui's Law," named for 5-year-old Piqui Andressian, murdered by his estranged father after his mother Ana Estevez had warned the family court he was in danger.
Family courts must put child safety first. These deaths are preventable.
PIQUIS LAW PASSES unanimously in the full floor vote in California Assembly, 72-0.
Powerful words today from CA lawmakers. Congratulations to Ana @piquismomma and everyone who worked so hard both behind the scenes and publicly.
Next, we go back to the Senate and then Governor.
“The courts are simply not recognizing the dangers of domestic violence & child abuse... they can pretty much do whatever they want & not be held accountable... Children in family court are essentially treated like marital property, not as human beings." latimes.com/california/story…
Carol Black retweeted
Capitalism and individualism have so thoroughly commodified our relationships that a BABY is seen as an isolating force tearing people apart rather than a cause for community care. Migrant families don’t think this way, everyone just takes care of everyone thecut.com/article/adult-fri…
