Natural growth versus Concerted cultivation July 28, 2009

I’ve been reading the book “Outliers” by Malcom Gladwell. In one of the chapters, he contrasts two parenting philosophies – natural growth v/s concerted cultivation.

Research has shown that some parents follow the philosophy of natural growth. They think of their responsibility for their children as one where they have to care for their children but let them grow and develop on their own. They are not involved in intensive scheduling in the lives of their children. These children spend a large amount of their time making up games on their own with other kids. The second kind of philosophy is of concerted cultivation. Here the parents are heavily involved in their children’s free time, shuttling them from one activity to the next, quizzing them about their teachers and coaches and peers. The parents also talk things through with their children, reasoning with them.

Gladwell talks about how research says that there is nothing to show that one philosophy is better than the other. The children who experience the natural growth philosophy are more often than not, better behaved, less whiny, more creative in making use of their own time and have a well-developed sense of independence. Where as the children who are heavily scheduled and experience the concerted cultivation philosophy are exposed to a constantly shifting set of experiences. They learn teamwork and how to cope in highly structured settings. Depending on the different environments that they are exposed to, they are taught how to interact comfortably with adults and to speak up when they need to.

With my daughter, I’ve found that I feel the urge to strike a balance between both these philosophies. Since she attends a Montessori school, I feel pretty comfortable that she is getting the freedom to explore her personal interests and hence experience natural growth,  for a significant amount of time within the school setting. At the same time, the structure within the Montessori environment, gives her a good space to  collaborate with her peers on different tasks, interact with the adults to express her needs and pursue academic activities – in short, experience concerted cultivation. She gets off school at 3.00 p.m every day. After school hours, I do take her for after-school classes at least 3 days in a week during the school year. These are pretty structured settings where she has to learn/practice new skills. Alternatively, we also have playdates with other kids quite often where she usually has an unstrcutured setting. At home, again we have a mix of both – unstructured time and structured activities.

I still remember what my professor at my graduate school (of Education) once said – “Children need to get used to boredom”.  When they grow up to be adults, they need to be able to figure out how to make use of their own time. They need to be able to independently figure out their interests and pursue them. What my professor said really struck a chord in me. Since then, I’ve tried to control my urge to engage her in too many structured activities. Even then, I find that my daughter comes to me once in a while and says, – “Now, what do I do? How do I spend my time now?”. I find myself struggling to give her an answer. Sometimes, I try and find an activity that she can do. But most times, her asking me that question is an indication for me that she hasn’t learnt to manage her time on her own . Hence I shoo her off to find something to do. After all, mommies need their own time too – especially time for reading . The best times are when, she decides that she wants to read a book sitting next to her dear mommy. Those are the times when I feel that all my dreams have come true. Mother and daughter sitting cuddled next to each other and reading their own books while the whole world passes by .

Homework for summer June 12, 2009

Summer is a time to enjoy time off from school and nourish the soul with life-enriching experiences. It is a time to spend more time with family and friends than at school, more time outdoors than indoors, more time amidst nature than disconnected from it. I have been looking forward to spending long, bright summer days with my daughter.

In the US, many children get almost three months off from school during summer. I read a statistic recently which said that counting all the vacations, holidays, weekends and the number of hours in a school day, children in America spend only 14% of their time in the year attending school. They spend close to 33% of their time sleeping and the rest 53% at their home and communities. This statistic made me wonder about what I could do to help my daughter be in touch with some of her schoolwork during summer. Going back to school for first grade in September and realizing that she has forgotten many concepts that were fragile in her mind and having to re-learn all of them again would not be a good thing, not just for her academic progress but also for her self-esteem.

Montessori children spend a large part of their school day doing “real” work and practicing their academic skills. As a result, most children in the lower grades don’t get any home work from school. Moreover, Montessori children learn many concepts through real life experiences and play. Hence I knew that it was imperative to use every day life experiences and play to enrich her learning during summer, so that her joy of learning is not compromised. At the same time, I also knew that there were some things that she needed to learn which can only be done through repetition and practice. For example, in order to progress in math, it is very important that the basic math skills and operations become second nature for her. For this, she needs to develop mental math skills. As she starts to write more elaborate stories and experiences in her journals, her handwriting needs to become more refined. She is a prolific reader, but it is also important to make sure that she is comprehending more and more of what she reads and building her vocabulary by understanding the meaning words that she reads.

My daughter loves to learn new things, be it  a new sport, new song, new concept about the world around her – you name it and she will have a million different questions about the things around her. But if it was left to herself she’ll probably not spend time practicing and refining some of the skills that she has newly learned. Her teacher had informed me that her favorite thing is to try new things. She would rather not spend time repeating what she had already worked on.

So, my thinking was that I should help her realize the value of practice and the importance of learning something really well, when it comes to academic skills. I popped the question to her about spending an hour a day during the summer doing “homework”. She knows what “homework” is – it means doing school work at home. To my surprise, she was thrilled with the idea. So, on the last day of her school, we visited a store nearby which sells many curriculum materials to schools in our area. We browsed the shop and I let her choose journals, workbooks and hands-on math materials that she could work on during summer.

The next day (yesterday) I marked a few pages in the different workbooks and journals that she could work on. She seemed very proud to be working on these. She wouldn’t move on to anything else until she finished her “homework”.  Today, before I could come back from the gym in the morning, she had woken up, picked up her journals and workbooks, chosen her homework and started to work on them. When I went to talk to her in her room, she even complained that I was “disturbing her” and not allowing her to “concentrate” on her work.

I’m not certain how long this motivation to do her “homework” regularly will continue. I’m sure that as the summer progresses, I’ll have to find ways to re-motivate her. As is the case with her fascination to try new things, this many be just one of her new fads which may wear off after a little while. But so far, I’m very happy with how happy she is, to be doing her “homework”.

The book itself is the reward!! April 27, 2009

We recently attended a live theater performance of “Charolette’s Web”. And luckily, we were in the midst of reading the same book by E.B.White (see my earlier blog for a few notes on that). I knew that having read at least a part of the book would definitely help my daughter enjoy and comprehend the live theater performance better. But I was curious to see how she would react after the theater performance of Charolette’s Web – whether she would continue reading the book with as much interest as before now that she knew the story.
The night after the show, we were about to sit down to read and as though she had read my mind, she said – “Amma, now that we have seen the play, should we still read the book?”.
Ha!! Luckily I already had an answer prepared for her. I had identified a few incidents in the book that had failed to make it to the stage performance. These were incidents that we both had found really funny while reading the book. Without winking an eye, I reminded her of those incidents in the book. She was surprised at first that the theater performance had failed to incorporate them. She then started to remember more incidents in the book that failed to appear in the performance. After a while, I popped the question to her – “Do you still want to read the book?”. “Yes!!” was the resounding answer from her. We have continued to read the book with a lot of interest every night.

I would like to bring out two important points from this anecdote.
First, the joy and benefits of reading a book is so different from watching a theater performance or a movie. While I don’t mean to discount the merits of watching these performances on stage or on a movie screen, I want to specially emphasize the merits of reading a book here. This is because, performances – especially movies- engage any child instantaneously and there is no special effort that needs to be expended in order to motivate children to watch movies. But it is not the same for books. Getting children interested in reading books – especially the classics – takes a quite a bit of effort.
Most movies or stage performances based on popular books interpret the books in their own way and present it to the audience. This leaves little scope for the children to critically think about the stories presented to them on stage or in the movies. Whereas, a good book offers lots of opportunities for critical thinking. Moreover, by not having a live visual to comprehend what the book is talking about, the children have to entirely rely on the language in the book in order to understand the plot or characterizations. This automatically increases the language processing capabilities in children.

Second, I would also like to point out some interesting findings from research studies in the context of the anecdote that I described above. Research studies show that “getting children interested in reading is even more important to their eventual success as readers than in helping them with early reading skills”. And research studies have also shown that enticing a child to do something that you want using the promise of rewards will eventually lead to reduced interest for the activity in the child. So, for example, I could have offered her some sort of a extrinsic motivation or a reward for continuing to read the book after we attended the stage performance. I could have said – “Since I’m going to return the book back to the library soon and we don’t know when we can get it back, lets finish the book” or “How about we finish reading the book and you can have a treat then”. All this would have done was to transfer her focus from the book to either returning it to the library asap or dreaming of the treat that she could have after she finishes reading. Eventually, this would have reduced her interest in the book itself. Luckily I didn’t use either of these extrinsic motivators. Since I had an answer ready, I used it to tap her inner motivation to read the book and it worked like a charm!! This doesn’t mean to say that I can be such a “genius” every time I’m faced with such a situation. There have been many instances when I have regretted my responses to her negotiating questions. But I do believe in the importance of persevering and practicing this skill and I am only getting better at it.

Montessori education incorporates both these principles – following the child’s interests and not using extrinsic rewards . Dr. Montessori believed that a child’s personal interests could be connected to every part of the academic curriculum and, that the hands-on materials that she provided as a part of the curriculum could be designed in such a way that they evoked interest for them in a child. Dr. Montessori also strived very hard to design the curriculum and pedagogies in such a way that all extrinsic rewards like grades, toys etc were removed from the child’s environment. She found that when children engaged themselves in the Montessori classroom, they didn’t need to be offered these rewards in order to do the work. They engaged in their work naturally.

I’m sure my daughter’s Montessori school has played a big role in keeping many of her interests active – reading being one of them. But I also do believe that the parents at home shouldn’t heavily conflict with these philosophies, so that the child’s interests stay alive and active!!

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.

The Joy of Learning…. July 16, 2007

What would it take to induce the “joy of learning” in a child? A Montessori teacher would say – freedom to explore the world, zero rewards for learning, exposure to many different experiences and so on. Having been a Montessori parent of a three year old, during the past 1 year, I cannot agree with it more. Ever since I have gotten to know the philosophy of Montessori education through my daughter’s school, I’ve tried to incorporate it as much as possible into my parenting. The constant persuading and “lectures” on Montessori philosophy that I give to my husband has left him more exhausted and less enthusiastic. Nevertheless I seem to be having some success in influencing him.
To demonstrate what the joy-of-learning can do to a child, here are a few personal experiences that I have had with my daughter.
During swim classes I have never had to persuade my daughter to follow the instructions given by the swim-teacher. She is always eager to be the first one to try anything that the teacher demonstrates in-spite of the looks of anxiety on her peers’ faces. I see some of their parents trying to persuade them to swim by offering rewards like chocolate etc but my daughter has never asked me once as to why SHE doesn’t get a reward for swimming. She has told me time and again how much she enjoys learning to swim.
Another distinct example I can think of is her piano class that I take her to every week. She is in love with these classes and sometimes initiates practice sessions on her own at home. Sure it is hard on her fingers but recently I have seen her trying with determination to get the notes right for the new lessons. Since these piano classes are not Montessori based, her teacher gives the students reward stamps for practicing every day. As a Montessori parent, I have tried to shield her from the so-called “benefits” of reward stamps. I simply play it down and tell her that she should practice to make herself happy and not for the reward stamps. She seems to be happy with that explanation and doesn’t mind getting any number of stamps as long as she feels good during the music class.
Her love for listening-to-stories from books has seamlessly flowed into love for learning-to-read and she is now a beginning reader. While I did research some learning-to-read techniques and used it on her, I have to say that I have never had to ask her to learn how to read. She always initiated these learning-to-read sessions on her own.

Having said all this, I do want to confess that everything has not always been this easy. I wish I had known Montessori principles lot earlier. I probably could have gotten her to develop better eating habits. Most of our meal times are filled with some sort of disarray and we reach a point where we start bribing her for eating vegetables or fruits or some essential staple.
But again, I do know for a fact that Montessori teachers have a lot – a lot of patience, which is why they are Montessori teachers. I recall an instance when I went to pick up my daughter from her school one day. As soon as she saw me, she ran to her teacher and asked her for a snack. Knowing that she will take a while to eat her snack, I told my daughter that there were lots of snacks waiting for her in the car. Then her teacher turned to me and said something like “If you can wait one moment, she would like a home snack from the shelf here. This will hardly take any time” And sure it did, a whole 15 minutes to go back to my car.

So what would it take to induce the “joy of learning” in a child – A LOT OF PATIENCE in addition to all the other things that I listed above. While I’m pretty sure I don’t have the kind of patience to become a Montessori teacher, I’m hoping that someday I’ll get the patience to become a true Montessori parent.