Rules of engagement in a museum May 9, 2009

My daughter and I visit many different kinds of museums regularly. Museums are not only great places where families can spend enjoyable time together, they are also spaces where a lot of informal learning occurs for both children and adults.

I’ve noted down below some basic rules that I follow in order to make museum visits as effective as possible. The rules are as follows: Plan before, Give Freedom, Ask Questions, Be Generous, Find connections, Follow-up. More details are given below.

Plan before:

This is the first rule of thumb. A little planning on what you will do at the museum, goes a long way in making the visit as enjoyable and effective as possible. And what is more important is to involve the children in the planning. This makes the children feel empowered and in control of the visit.

If it is a museum that we have been to many times, I ask my daughter as to which exhibits she would want to see that day . She usually lists some of the exhibits that she has already been to and enjoyed in the past. Visiting the same exhibits multiple times is a good thing. There is always something new to learn within the same exhibit.

I also find out if there are any new exhibits that have come up recently or if there is anything new in the museum  related to what she is learning at school or is reading about. Telling her about any such exhibits immediately sparks an interest in her and she looks forward to seeing them with a sense of anticipation.

If we are visiting a museum for the first time, we browse the website of the museum together and check out the various exhibits that we can expect to find there. We talk about them a little and  she makes her preferences known about what she wants to see.

Give Freedom:

While in the museum, give the child a lot of freedom and choice.

I usually have my daughter lead me through the exhibits. If she is not sure about where to go, we talk about the different choices and options using the brochures, and I have her choose from them.   Again, this makes her feel a sense of ownership about her own interests.

I feel that a large part of our job as adults would be to find out what engages the children in the museums. A child may be interested in some topics more than others and hence may tend to engage in exhibits related to them more. Other times, some exhibits are way beyond the child’s level of understanding of the concept (in short it may not fall under their Zone of Proximal Development).

As adults, we need to trust them to know what they want to learn, even if the children don’t explicitly spell it out.

Ask Questions:

The key to effective learning in museums is encouraging the children to critically think about what they are seeing and also ask as many good questions as possible to the adults around them.

Exhibits in some museums are very interactive. I usually let my daughter try experiencing the exhibit on her own. If she is having trouble with it, I help her out. During the course of the experience, I ask her questions related to what, why, when, where and how of whatever is happening in front of her at the exhibit. If she is not able to comprehend it, I try asking the question in different ways before I give her the answer.

One of the ways I encourage her to ask questions is to lead her to a docent near the exhibit. I start asking the docent questions of my own. This way I can role model to her to ask any questions she may have. Once I ask the docent a couple of questions of my own, I usually turn to my daughter and ask her whether she has any questions of her own. Most of the times she has some question or the other that she asks the docent.

Many museums, especially art museums have several non-interactive exhibits. One effective method that I use to make art museums interactive for my daughter is to ask her questions about the pictures that she is seeing. What do you see, what do you think the girl is doing in the picture, why is she doing it, what do u think is happening in the background, do you like the colors in the picture, why and so on. These questions help her engage in the exhibits much better.

Be generous:

Be generous with time at each exhibit. Give children the time to explore each exhibit as much as they would like. Remember the biggest reason for the visit to the museum – so that the children enjoy and learn. And if they are enjoying the experience at one exhibit, why put an end to it.

It’s better to have them explore one exhibit thoroughly instead of breezing through many exhibits for short periods of time.  Exploring something thoroughly is when the deepest learning happens.

Find connections:

Try to find connections in the exhibits to what the child may be doing or reading at his/her school or at home. If you don’t know whether there is a connection, ask the child whether she already knows anything about what she is seeing. If the answer is yes, ask her what she has learned about it.

Sometimes, these connections can be found at the periphery of the exhibit. For example, when we visited a Frog exhibit at a science museum recently, we were treated to sights of many different varieties of live frogs, found in many different parts of the world. As we were enjoying these, outside each glass case, I found a map of the continent where that particular variety of frog was found.  Since I knew that my daughter was studying the different countries within each continents, we spent some time looking at each map to identify the countries where the frogs were found.

Follow-up:

To maximize the effectiveness of the museum visit, try and follow-up with some activities at home soon after the museum visit. I usually try and get some books from the library related to what we experienced at the museum. If you can find any activity kits at the museum store related to your child’s experiences and if you are in a mood to buy something for your child, that’s another option.

The above are just some of the rules that one could follow, based on my experiences with my daughter. I would love to know if there are others based on your experiences.

An encounter with a government school classroom in India March 23, 2009

When I visited India in August, I had an opportunity to visit a government run school in a village at the outskirts of Bangalore and observe a multi-grade (I and II) classroom in action. I had decided to observe the classroom to get a first hand experience on what kind of pedagogies the teachers use to motivate and help the children learn. As I sat down to observe, I really didn’t have any expectations on what would happen in the classroom. I was pleasantly surprised by a few strategies that the teacher used to teach the children but was very disappointed by many of the happenings in the classroom. In this blog, I describe some of my key observations in this classroom. While this blog is not a reflection of all the government classrooms in the state and the country, I feel that there are significant number of schools where the teachers teach this way or even worse. But I would imagine that there are definitely government school teachers who have developed sophisticated methods of teaching due to their own motivation and interest. I did encounter one such teacher in another government run school, which I’ll describe in my next blog post but this teacher whom I’m going to talk about now was clearly not one of them.

There were about 40 students in the classroom, half of them in each grade I and II. All the children sat on the floor, most of the times even without a floor mat. Everyone wished me good morning. I wished them too and went to the corner of the classroom and sat on the floor. To me it seemed like the most comfortable way to sit but the teacher in the classroom was adamant that I sit on a chair and offered me one.
Although I assured the teacher that I was just here to observe the classroom for my own interest and research purposes, the teacher didn’t seem convinced with my explanation. She perhaps thought that I was a government official who wanted to make sure that the classrooms were running smoothly. Because, all through the next hour and a half, she put in extra effort to make sure that the children appeared to be learning.

Following are some activities that she did with the 2nd graders

She started with a lesson on the place-value of different digits in a number . As she wrote a number on the blackboard, the children were asked to speak out the value in the tens place and the value in the units place (all in Kannada). For example, if the teacher wrote 23, the children said “2 in tens place, 3 in units place 23”. When she wrote 65, they said “6 in tens place, 5 in units place 65”. They had to use the same phrase every time to describe the place value and only change the numbers.
Next the teacher started a role play activity, where the children stood in two different lines. As she announced a two-digit number, the child at the front of the line on the left said the digit in the tens place and the child at the front of the line on the right said the digit in the units place.
The next activity was with the sticks. When the teacher announced a two digit number, the children had to separate the number in the tens place and units place and put that many sticks in two different containers. All through this activity, the teacher worked with each child individually at the level that he/she understood the concept.

Some observations from the above activities were as follows:

I liked the fact that the teacher conducted multiple activities to teach the same concept. Also, in some of the activities, the teacher “tried” to teach every child at his/her own level of understanding of the concept.
The teacher was only interested in showing off that her children knew what she had taught them. She created a very performance oriented atmosphere rather than a learner centered atmosphere.
One of the boys who knew the concepts very well, kept helping the other children in the background to answer the questions that the teacher asked them. As a result of this, even when the children didn’t understand the concept, they answered the questions through the prompts from this boy.
When a child was asked a question in one of the activities, and he/she didn’t know the answer, the teacher shouted the same question to the child two or three times as though that would elicit the correct answer from him/her.
One of the children seemed very depressed and wouldn’t answer the teacher’s question. The teacher, instead of finding a way to engage her, shouted at her and started to work with another child.
Although it appeared as though the teacher was teaching the concept through many different activities, finally there was a lot of rote learning that was incorporated even into these activities. For example, the children had to use the same phrases each time, to describe the place value of the digits – i.e “2 in tens place, 3 in units place 23”. It was not clear whether the children understood what this phrase really meant. For example, After chanting this phrase, when some of the children were asked a question “What is in the tens place?”, the children couldn’t answer it.
Some activities were not well thought out. For example, in the activity with the sticks, the children could easily confuse the number of sticks to represent the whole two digit number. For example, for number 23, they can confuse 5 sticks to represent the number 23.
When the teacher was working with one kid individually, many of the other kids seemed quite disengaged with the activity.

After the work with the II graders, the teacher decided to work with the I graders. In order to keep the II graders engaged during that time, she asked her favorite II grader (“the boy who knew all the answers”) to lead the class. She asked him to tell a two digit number to each child and he/she had to write the number on the blackboard. After that, the child had to say the place value of each digit.

The teacher then started to work with the I graders. She had the children sit in a circle. The idea was to work with each child individually at the level that he/she understood numbers, while the other children observed.
First she called out a few children one by one and had them place 1 to 10 in the correct order.
She then asked a few children as to which number is greater than which?
She had a few children place the numbers in the reverse order.
She then had a few children do this activity – place any number between 1 to 10 in the middle. She then asked the child to place the number that comes before and after 3 in their correct spots.
The teacher had some of the children do 1 digit addition.

Following were some of my observations during these activities with the I graders:
Like with the II graders, the teacher shouted at the children if they were not able to get the answer, as though that would help them get the answer immediately.
One of the children was intentionally left out of the activity. Other children kept saying that he hasn’t had a turn but the teacher seemed to intentionally ignore their pleas.This led me to think that the teacher left him out because the child may not have been able to shown any progress. Then the child himself requested that he wanted to do the activity. The teacher then facilitated an activity for him.
The teachers worked with the children on the activities with the assumption that all children understood the concepts at the level that she thought they understood them. But it was clear that their learning was very fragile because they required a lot of prompting and help by the teacher. In some cases, the teacher herself walked the child through each of the steps of the activity, in effect performing the whole activity for the child. This led to a situation where the child thought that he/she had accomplished the activity when in truth it was the teacher who had done the activity for him/her. This could lead to false confidence in them.

General observation: It is not that the children are not motivated to learn or don’t enjoy learning. For, when the teacher shifted from math to nursery rhymes, the children suddenly cheered up. Almost all the children including I and II graders sang the rhymes happily with full body actions. But again, the nursery rhyme activity was all rote learning based. It is important to remember that the children didn’t know how to speak english but they sang the nursery rhymes quite well. Many of the body actions didn’t match the words. Also many words were not pronounced correctly. But they did have fun!

These observations raised many questions within me:
Is it that rote learning has become a way of life for these children? Is it that they have begun to implicitly assume that they really don’t need to “understand” the concept but all they need to do is to appear to understand the concept? This is what a performance centered environment (as opposed to a learning centered environment) leads to. How do we change a teaching culture that has remained for decades, which doesn’t encourage the children to think on their own? How do we change a whole system of education that is based on a culture of rote learning and examinations?

Prema Clarke, a prominent researcher in the field of education offers many strategies to combat this culture in her book “Teaching and Learning: Culture of Pedagogy”. While nationally, several innovative policies and strategies are being put in place to improve the pedagogies of teachers, she notes that “None of the curriculum documents consider the educational ground reality. There is a huge disconnect between prescriptive accounts of good education and the system’s capacities to realize such goals.” From my observations in the government school classroom, I could make a lot of connections with what Clarke talks about. I could clearly see many of the implicit cultural models of the teachers that she talks about in her book. Following are some examples of these connections that I saw.
the teacher’s behavior as an authority figure in the classroom,
teachers’ excessive focus on rightness of the answer as opposed to a focus on exploring the misconceptions of the students (eg: she shouted at the children when they didn’t give the children when they didn’t give the correnct answer),
the teacher giving excessive freedom to the “boy who knew all the answers” to prompt the other children with the answers without any concern for whether other children learnt the concept or not.
the teacher’s focus on imparting knowledge (through rote learning) rather than skills, and the performance oriented atmosphere in the classroom which reflects the constant focus on the examinations in India

Following is what Prema Clarke recommends to improve the teaching in the classrooms:

Teacher training today is viewed as a way to impart technical skill only. It is not viewed from the behaviorist angle which should be incorporated into teacher training. Clarke argues that teacher training should take into account the teachers’ implicit cultural models and the broader cultural framework.
She talks about the need to focus on teacher thinking research and the importance of addressing the beliefs that underlie teachers’ world views. She feels that the training in technical skills is less effective if the underlying beliefs and world views that construct these skills are not understood and developed.
For what really matters is that “the children learn” and not “appear that they have learned”!!

Towards better education March 23, 2008

A question, I’m sure many of us have asked ourselves is “Should children’s education be merely about imparting knowledge or should the children be taught essential skills including how to acquire knowledge?”.
During the 20th century, it was common practice for schools (at least in India) to follow a didactic method of teaching, which usually meant that the children were expected to sit in a classroom listening to teachers. They were expected to absorb the information/knowledge that the teacher taught and reproduce them in the exams. The exams mainly tested the students on how well they had “accumulated” the knowledge imparted by the teachers and the textbooks. Even my own schooling during the 20th century was this way.
But as I entered the workplace of the 21st century, I found myself lacking many skills that were needed to succeed in the workplace. I needed to think critically about issues, solve problems creatively, articulate my thoughts well and so on. Luckily my parents had taught me how to persevere. This allowed me to work hard and learn the skills that were needed to succeed in the workplace. But I’ve always wondered, what if I had an opportunity to acquire these skills during my school years instead of later on during my work life. Isn’t it one of the jobs of the schools to prepare children to be successful in the work place?
A couple of other important things that I wish that my schooling had taught me are life skills and how to respond to societal issues. My schooling absolutely didn’t prepare me to strike a good work-life balance. All that was important during my schooling years was passing exams which gave me the notion that doing well in the exams was the only thing needed to do well in life. Likewise, my schooling didn’t help me understand the issues in the society around me and how I can play a positive role in solving these issues. I feel that there was an excessive focus on “me” and my personal benefit.
This brings us to the question whether the schools today are addressing these issues? With the advent of new-age technologies, it is easy to search for new information/knowledge at the wink of an eye. Hence, a person who has merely accumulated information/knowledge in the schools is pretty much obsolete. Children need to be taught higher order skills as mentioned in the previous paragraphs. Similarly, with the modern day stresses, attaining a decent work-life balance is one of the most important things, as is caring for the society and the environment. Even with the ever increasing awareness of all these issues, why is rote learning so prevalent in schools (at least in India)? Why are only a handful of schools paying importance to the higher order skills that need to be taught? Why are we not learning from the wide range of issues that we face today as a society and seeking to educating our children to face these issues in a meaningful way? What will it take to break this cycle of ignorance on our part?

"The Colors of Us" October 26, 2007

Last month, I bought a book for my daughter “The Colors of Us”, written and illustrated by Karen Katz. Oh, what a beauty!! I have never bought any book that explains a concept so simply and so beautifully. For people reading this review, I’m going to keep the story and the theme in this book a suspense, so that you buy this book and enjoy it. But I’m going to narrate a few “after-effects” of reading this book.

My daughter comes up to me one day and asks me to spread out my palms. She keenly observes the front and back of my right palm and says, “Amma, your skin is the color of french toast”. She then holds out her palms and says “Mine and pappa’s skin are the color of cinnamon”. I say, “Wow, isn’t that wonderful”. Then she goes, “Amma, in my class, everyone’s skin is of different colors”. She goes on recollect the colors of each friend’s skin – the colors of butterscotch, cinnamon and chocolate cake. We sit and talk about the colors of everyone’s skin color in our extended family too. That day, I simply cannot hold my happiness within myself. I’ve always wanted my daughter to naturally imbibe the concept of diversity. For her to talk so naturally about the differences in skin colors meant two things to me – it not only meant that she didn’t judge other people by their color but ironically, it also meant that she didn’t feel that she was any different from the others.

Diversity is a hard concept to explain and practice. If you explicitly explain this concept to a child, it may backfire and prompt them to start observing the skin color differences between various people. “The Colors of Us” explains this concept in very a subtle fashion and yet makes the story enjoyable for the kids. I would recommend this book to anyone who has a pre-schooler!!

The music of childhood October 2, 2007

I picked her up from school and we came home. It had been a long day at work though I had spent only five hours there. Seeing her face eased my tensions a little. We settled down at home – she had her snack and her usual quota of TV, during which time I finished cooking dinner. I thought about the next couple of hours when I would spend time playing with her. She had been going for piano lessons during the past 8 months and I wondered how I could convince her to squeeze in about 10 minutes of piano lesson practice – I mean, real practice and not just playing around with the keyboard. She was falling behind some compared to her peers in the class but her teacher had assured me that she was doing quite fine considering that she was at least a year younger then the rest of the class. However, knowing how she always played with the keyboard during practice sessions, it was obvious that she would lag behind further if something didn’t change. Most of all, I was concerned that she would get upset that she was not able to play as well as her peers. After all she is only four years old. At that age, it is normal to get upset without realizing that you yourself are responsible for it.
I heard her calling me from her room. She said, she wanted to practice her piano lessons. I didn’t “trust” what she said, but we sat down anyway. To my surprise, she turned the page to the song which she was having trouble with – “ The Little Birch Tree”. She started playing it and went back and forth between the lines she could play well and the ones she couldn’t. I was quite impressed with her perseverance to get the song right and commented that she was doing well. She said, “Amma, I want to learn this song so that I don’t fall behind in class”. Knowing this was something I had said to her before, I thought that she might just be repeating what I had said. So, I asked her why she didn’t want to fall behind. She then reasoned “Because I love music so much”.
For her to say this and persevere in her practice was huge for me!! If there is one thing that I’ve tried my best to do – although I’ve resorted to these tactics a few times – is to not force her or bribe her to practice her piano lessons. I have always wanted the motivation for learning music to come from within her. This takes a lot of patience especially if you badly want your child to learn something. Today, I can say that I’m finding some signs of success in my strategies. As a parent who did a Masters in Education but never went to a classroom to teach, I needed some form of approval for my pedagogies. Now, I’m beginning to get some feedback through the actions of my daughter.

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?