Montessori dilemma March 31, 2009

I’ve been a proud Montessori parent close to three years now. But each time I gain new insights on why a certain part of the Montessori curriculum has been designed the way it is, I can’t help but be amazed at the breakthroughs in child development that Dr. Maria Montessori uncovered so many decades ago.
It is not so uncommon to find many of Dr. Montessori’s innovations being incorporated in traditional and even other progressive schools today. This may be one reason why Montessori curriculum may not seem very impressive to some folks. It is important to remember however, that every single detail in the Montessori curriculum had a reason and a purpose and was integrated very closely with everything else that the curriculum offers. Due to this reason, picking parts of her curriculum and pedagogies and connecting them to other non-Montessori methods of teaching may not have the same intended effects as within a Montessori setting.

One of the common reasons that I have encountered among parents as to why their children are not in a Montessori school, is because they feel that Montessori schools are very unstructured. In a Montessori classroom, they encounter (or they have heard of) many young children spending a good part of the day involved in washing dishes/tables or scrubbing the floor and other practical life activities. I had earlier read about how this is a part of the effort to develop the whole child and not just have the child indulge in academic activities the whole day. I was quite happy with this reason for having my daughter scrub tables until I found out about how such activities can be even more beneficial, after I read Dr. Angeline Lillard’s book – Montessori, The Science behind the Genius.
In her book Dr. Lilliard has put together evidence from rigorous research in psychology to prove many of the principles of Montessori education. From her book I gathered that there is evidence to prove that “movement stimulates cognition” or “action stimulates thought”. It is pretty obvious that thought stirs up action in us. That’s what we encounter everyday – we think of something and act on it. But the other way around is true too. Research has shown that even the youngest children – the infants – showed better mental development if they were more action oriented. For example, in a research study, children who learned to crawl earlier than their peers were cognitively more advanced than their peers. Hence, as Dr. Lilliard describes in her book, when children wash tables, it is not so much that the table becomes clean, but that the child is involved in a purposeful activity employing her hands in service of her mind. Such practical life activities help the children in improving concentration, in educating their movements to be geared towards a purpose and in learning to carry out steps in sequence, among other obvious benefits like learning to care for their environment.
I’m a pretty happy parent now, not only did my daughter learn how to scrub tables – which is pretty useful skill to have to help her mom around in the house – but through that activity, her cognitive development benefitted too which finally culminated in her school work as she grew older.

Another common reason that I hear from parents as to why they don’t want Montessori education for their child is, that it is too academically oriented. Wow! First of all I’m amazed that Montessori education can give the impression that it is developing children to be the least academically oriented (by having the children scrub tables the whole day!) and also the impression that the curriculum is too academic. It is understandable why many non-Montessori parents think that the curriculum is too academic. Although it has not been proven scientifically, it has generally been observed that children who go through a Montessori curriculum turn out to be more advanced academically compared to their peers in traditional schools (yes, in spite of spending a good part of the day scrubbing tables). Dr. Montessori believed that children are lot more capable than what traditional school perceives them to be. She felt that the environment and the pedagogies with which traditional schools taught children was dumbing them down. All Dr. Montessori did was to create a curriculum to develop the child to her full potential. By giving freedom (within limits) to the children to choose the activities they indulge in each day, children pick activities that interest them. And believe it or not, they become interested in academics on their own. And add to the formula, a wealth of stimulating materials that engage both their body and mind and a well-trained Montessori teacher. It’s hard to see how they cannot develop to their full potential.

I’m just glad that I came to the realization that my daughter should go to a Montessori school, soon enough. Once you start experiencing the benefits of Montessori education, you tend to get addicted to it.
Being involved in the field of education myself, I’m planning to spend the next few weeks reading more about Montessori education and how it connects to my experiences with my Montessori child. I hope to write more about it as thoughts flow.

Multiple intelligences March 23, 2009

I feel a very personal connection to the concept of multiple intelligences proposed by Dr. Howard Gardner. Be it the matter of what intelligences I have been taught during my childhood and adult years or the question of how I can make the teaching of a variety of intelligences accessible to my daughter or my thoughts about how education could be made better for all children if the adults (teachers, parents, school administrators etc) understood the importance of this concept, this theory of multiple intelligences opens up a whole world of questions, ideas, opinions, views and sentiments for me.

Although I was familiar with this concept in general when I was doing my Masters in Education (I audited Dr. Gardner’s class at Harvard), it was not until recently that I actually got to read his book, Frames of Mind – The Theory of Multiple Intelligences. His theory is based on partial evidence from the domains of science that deal with how the mind works – neurobiology and neuropsychology. This partial evidence is why it still exists as a theory and has not been proven completely. But personally I find this theory to be quite aligned with my life experiences.
Dr. Gardner seeks to disprove the notion that intelligence in a human being can be completely measured by common standardized tests like the IQ test. In his own words, “the score of intelligence tests does predict ones ability to handle school subjects though it foretells little of success in later life”. He proposes that there are seven different kinds of intelligences that are physically autonomous of each other in every human’s brain – linguistic, musical, logical-mathematical, spacial, bodily-kinesthetic, intrapersonal and interpersonal intelligences. Physical autonomy of each of these intelligences means that the capacities that make up each of these intelligences are localized in different areas of the brain. For example, the capacities that make up musical intelligence are pitch (or melody) and rhythm. There is evidence that shows that “the mechanisms by which pitch is apprehended and stored are different from the mechanisms that process other sounds, particularly those of languages”. It has also been shown that any injury to areas in the left hemisphere of the brain which normally process many of the linguistic capabilities of the person, leaves the musical capabilities which is normally housed in the right hemisphere mostly intact. Dr. Gardner, in his book, goes on to describe the evidence he has uncovered to underscore the seven independent intelligences that exist in every human being.

Being a computer engineer by training, I cannot help but provide an analogy of this concept to a computer system. We can imagine each of these “raw” human intelligences as similar to independent components of a computer system, which serve different functions in a computer. So just like how there different computer components like networking , storage, video processing, audio processing and so on, you would have these 7 different kinds of intelligences in a human brain. Within a computer system, different computer applications would require accessing different computer components. For example, an application that displays streaming video onto the computer screen would make use of many components of the computer system – for example, the networking device to receive the streaming data and the video/audio components to decode the data into meaningful video and audio. Similarly, a human act of playing the violin for example would access the musical intelligence to get the correct rhythm and melody, bodily-kinesthetic intelligence to move the fingers appropriately to the music and linguistic intelligence to read the musical notes on paper.

This analogy is very simplistic because what matters is how pronounced these intelligences are in a human brain to deliver the different functions the human intends to perform. While all of us have developed every one of the seven intelligences to some extent or the other, some people develop some of these intelligences very well and some not so well. There is very little evidence today to prove that these intelligences can be transferred genetically. How well a normal human develops a particular set of intelligences depends largely on how conducive their environment has been to it’s development during their growing up years. So for example, a child may have grown up amidst a musical culture and if he/she has received the suitable quality and quantity of training, the musical intelligence and the other relevant intelligences required to master a particular type of music or an instrument would be developed appropriately in the brain so that the child would grow up to be a good musician.

After reading Dr. Gardner’s book, several questions have stuck in mind. Some among them are as follows:
As an individual, to what extent do I possess each of these intelligences? What intelligences are important for me to lead my life based on the choices that I’ve made? How do I develop those needed intelligences further so that I can be more successful in all the different roles that I play in my life?
As a parent, to what extent should I make each of these intelligences accessible to my daughter? It should definitely be based on her interests but do I know enough about her interests or about these intelligences to make a judicious decision? Should I make all these intelligences accessible in roughly similar amounts and she makes a decision later in her life on what domain she wants to pursue based on her interests? If yes, how do I make that happen?
As an advocate for children, what should be my message to adults in the lives of other children about how they could go about dealing with this myriad of possibilities, opportunities and complexities in bringing up children to be responsible and successful citizens of this world.

This book definitely raised lot more questions in my mind than it gave me answers. But I like questions. It only means that I can do what I love to do – explore more, read more and experience more so that I can find answers to my prior questions and evoke more questions in my mind.

ZPD and your child May 17, 2007

Have you every heard of the term “The Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD)”? I first came across this term about a couple of years ago and since then it has shaped every teaching-learning interaction with my daughter. It is a simple concept and you may already be using with your child without knowing that it is ZPD.

Let me first start with the definition of this term. A famous Russian psychologist Lev Vygotsky (1978) maintained “The zone of proximal development is the distance between the actual developmental level as determined by independent problem solving and the level of potential development as determined through problem solving under adult guidance, or in collaboration with more capable peers”. He went on to explain that “The zone of proximal development embodies a concept of readiness to learn that emphasizes upper levels of competence. These upper boundaries are not immutable, however, but constantly changing with the learner’s increasing independent competence. What a child can perform today with assistance she will be able to perform tomorrow independently, thus preparing her for entry into a new and more demanding collaboration. These functions could be called the “buds,” rather than the fruits of development. The actual developmental level characterizes mental development retrospectively, while the zone of proximal development characterizes mental development prospectively.”

Following is an example that illustrates this concept. Let’s say that you wish to teach your 2 year old child how to solve a jig-saw puzzle. Let’s also say that until that moment, your child has never seen a jig-saw puzzle or done any other activity that resembles a jig-saw. Suppose you place a 20 piece jig-saw puzzle in front of the child and start teaching how to solve the puzzle. You may find that the child reacts with relative disinterest to this activity after a short period of curiosity. Even after repeated attempts you may not be able to get your child to become interested in solving this puzzle. This could be because the activity is not within the ZPD of the child i.e the child is not able to comprehend the complexity of the puzzle.
What would probably easier for the child is to comprehend a 2 or 4 piece jig-saw puzzle. Additionally, if the puzzle has thick large pieces, it would be easier for the child to hold it with his/her delicate hands. With some help from the parents/adults, the 2 year old may be able to solve the puzzle. This means that a 2 to 4 piece puzzle which has thick pieces is within the ZPD of the child because he or she is able to solve the puzzle with assistance from a adult. After a few days of taking assistance, the child may be able to solve the puzzle without any help from the adult. Then, it may be prudent to give the child a 6 to 8 piece puzzle because it now falls within the child’s ZPD. The child may need some assistance again from the adult and may gradually start doing it independently. Gradually, the number of pieces can be increased and the thickness of the pieces can be decreased.

In order to determine the complexity of the activity to present to my daughter, I generally use my instinct. Sometimes I figure it out by trial and error. If my daughter is showing disinterest in the activity even after repeated re-tries or she is not able come close to solving the activity after repeated attempts, I scaffold her learning by presenting easier activities that help her learn the tougher one.

Have you had similar experiences while teaching your child something? What are your experiences related to ZPD?

What do we parents need to know so that our children can learn.. March 20, 2007

The face of education is changing. Research has uncovered how the human brain learns and in turn what the best methods are to teach children. Many of us parents didn’t get the kind of education that our children are receiving today – instead we were taught to accumulate facts through rote learning. Then, as adults, when we started working, we realized that this education was not very useful for the kind of skills that our jobs demanded from us.

Knowing that we as parents didn’t receive this progressive education, how do we facilitate our children’s acquisition of the right skills and attitudes that are conducive to their well-being in the future? How do we as parents learn what is important for our children to learn? What opportunities do we provide them to facilitate the right kind of learning? What kind of teaching methods do we use?

You may ask – why do we parents need to care about all these? Isn’t this the job of the schools? But the fact of the matter is that, many parents try to routinely facilitate their children’s learning at home so that their children can do well . These parent-initiated learning experiences have an effect on their child’s cognitive development. Children spend only a part of the day at school. What happens during the rest of the day matters significantly in the children’s cognitive, emotional and social development.

What have your experiences been related to helping your children learn? What do you thing is important for them to learn? How do you help them learn?