Less-Structured Time Correlates to Kids’ Success

 

Research found that young children who spend more time engaging in more open-ended, free-flowing activities display higher levels of executive functioning, and vice versa.

 

Parents, drop your planners—a new psychological study released Tuesday found that children with less-structured time are likely to show more “self-directed executive functioning,” otherwise known as the “cognitive processes that regulate thought and action in support of goal-oriented behaviour.”

Doctoral and undergraduate researchers at University of Colorado, Boulder, followed 70 children ranging from six to seven years old, measuring their activities. A pre-determined classification system categorized activities as physical or non-physical, structured and unstructured.

The resulting study, published in the journal Frontiers in Psychology, was led by Yuko Munakata, a professor in the psychology and neuroscience department at the university. Munakata measured self-directed executive functioning using a verbal fluency test, “a standard measure on how well people can organize direct actions on their own,” she said.

The test asked children to name as elements in a particular category, like animals, as they could. “An organized person will group the animals together, listing farm animals, then move on to the next grouping,” Munakata said. “An unorganized person will say ‘cat, dog, mouse’,” providing a disconnected list of animals, inhibiting further recollection.

The results indicated that children who spend more time engaging in less-structured activities display higher levels of executive functioning. The converse also proved true: Children in more structured activities displayed lower executive functioning abilities.

“Executive function is extremely important for children,” Munakata told EurekAlert!. “It helps them in all kinds of ways throughout their daily lives, from flexibly switching between different activities rather than getting stuck on one thing, to stopping themselves from yelling when angry, to delaying gratification. Executive function during childhood also predicts important outcomes, like academic performance, health, wealth and criminality, years and even decades later.”

Munakata added a disclaimer that the study merely proves correlation, not causation. “Right now we don’t know if kids self-directed executive functioning are shaping their time, or if their activities are shaping self-directed executive functioning.”

Causation is the next piece of the puzzle, and will undoubtedly be the focus of a future longitudinal study. Until then, parents looking for the perfect balance for their kids have something else to chew on.

 

Turning homework into an effective learning opportunity

     

 

Homework is a complex issue with many factors affecting its success or failure. To begin with, homework is usually loaded with negative connotations. How can we turn homework into an effective language learning opportunity?

 

It is important to consider the teaching and learning context when we examine the homework issue:

• How many contact hours a week do these students have? Do they really need to extend exposure and practice beyond classroom time? How often?
• Are these students voluntarily attending English classes, or are these compulsory classes within their education system? What is their motivation to learn English?
• How much time do they have for homework assignments?
• Is homework your decision as a teacher or are you required to assign homework regularly?
• Is there a chance that students do not do the homework themselves?
• Are you going to check homework later? Will it be necessary the next class?

Here are a few considerations and suggestions:

1. Make sure the homework is tied to what has been done in class. A clear connection as to why it’s important to do this assignment is essential.
2. Make sure the students can solve this task autonomously.
3. Tasks that are not advisable to be done in the classroom should be best assigned as homework. Some of these tasks can be: writing tasks, personalised tasks, extensive reading tasks, research tasks, other tasks that take up too much time individually.
4. Tasks that can easily be replicated or copied from another student are not good choices for homework.
5. Tasks that need certain technology that you might not have available in the classroom are best assigned as homework: watching a video to be discussed later during class time.
6. If you have to assign homework regularly, balance the type of homework and time needed to complete it. Long homework tasks are tedious…though sometimes necessary.
7. Take advantage of technology to set up speaking homework: record yourself reading or speaking with a voice recording tool on mobile phones, record a video of your family as you explain who they are, record a video tour of your house.
8. Flip the classroom. Have students watch videos about new topics, grammar explanations, discussion triggers, etc. Then you can use class time more effectively to discuss what they have watched.
9. Assign personalised/differentiated tasks to address particular tricky areas for students.
10. Assign listening homework! Let them choose a video to watch, something they are interested in, and have them report on what they watched the next class.

I am not very fond of homework unless it is really necessary. Above all I try to make homework fun!

The role of homework in a child's learning

    

 

Homework… should we or shouldn’t we assign homework to students? What are the benefits and what are the drawbacks? Are we really helping our learners develop their language skills or are we merely complicating their lives? Here are my favourite four arguments for and against giving learners homework:

The case for #1: Class time isn’t enough and learners need extra practice

Homework should, above all else, serve to review and build upon what has been learned in class, or to offer further practice of something that was new and particularly tricky. With this in mind, make sure that whatever homework you assign can be completed by learners independently and with relative ease.

Homework that gives the student an opportunity to further practice what he or she has just learned in class to further fix the concepts in their mind can be extremely worthwhile. Ideally, it should be something that is useful but that might have been boring had it been done in class (such as a gap fill exercise).

KEY QUESTIONS:

• Does this build on what you did in class?
• Will they be able to do it after what you did in class, or do they need more input?
• Is it something that would, realistically, have been a waste of class time, in terms of not maximizing their contact with you as their teacher?

The case against #1: People need a life

If you teach adults, it’s almost entirely likely that they will have a work life and a social life outside of your classroom. Are you really doing them a favour by eating into this time with your demands that they do extra study?

If you teach young learners, these children need unstructured play time to become social creatures more than they need homework from you. Homework can have a negative influence on learning experiences.

Adults in particular will feel guilty about not doing the work you’ve assigned… or resentment about having to do it when they should be getting on with something else. This will affect how they feel about your class and not in a good way. Children will also be negatively affected by the addition of homework.

IF YOU REALLY MUST…

• Find out how much time your learners have to do homework and assign work accordingly.

The case for #2: Homework helps learners remember the things they’ve learned in class

Homework can do a great job of reinforcing the content of lessons, and provides a valuable opportunity for extra practice… before they have a chance to forget everything! Basically, homework should always supplement and mentally click that ‘I remember’ button, so don’t assign new material because there’s a big chance that A) they will not understand it, and B) they will become frustrated with the tasks, as well as being less open to discussing the work in class later on. This point is particularly important with classes that you see infrequently, as they have many chances to forget what you did in the last class!

KEY QUESTIONS:

• Is this a useful reminder and revision of a tricky new language point?
• Does it present new concepts?
• Does it go over something you did in class but in a slightly different way?

The case against #2: Let’s face it, you don’t really know what you’re doing

As qualified as you might be and with as much knowledge of teaching pedagogy as you might have, do you honestly believe you know exactly what you’re doing when you assign homework? What objectives are you aiming to cover? How will this further your learners’ ability to do whatever it is you’ve done in class? Granted, a lot of coursebooks have workbooks which are largely intended for self study, but you nevertheless have to be careful that there is a definite purpose behind what you’re assigning.

IF YOU REALLY MUST…

• Consult your learners and ask them what they see as an appropriate follow-up task for them to do at home to supplement what you have done in class.

The case for #3: Homework can help learners make more rapid progress in their language acquisition

Homework can provide valuable practice of the skills learned in the classroom. We know that we are pushed for time and that each lesson is valuable contact time. We don’t want to be going into too much detail or doing too many tasks on one language point, regardless of whether or not the learners need it. At some point, you need to provide ways for that practice to take place in the learners’ own time, so you can get on with new stuff next lesson!

KEY QUESTIONS:

• Does it compliment what you’ve done in class in a useful way?
• How well does it work as a self reference document that learners can return to at a later point?

The case against #3: Homework doesn’t lead to better performance

Too much homework can be a bad thing. Research indicates there is a weak link between achievement and homework, particularly in young learners. Furthermore, countries that assign more homework don’t outperform those with less homework. Countries such as America and the UK have relatively high levels of homework in schools and yet don’t show a correlation with high performance. Japan is one country that has taken the opposite route, having instituted no homework policies at younger levels to allow family time and personal interests. Finland, one of the most successful nations in terms of international tests, limits high school homework to half an hour per night. While a small amount of well thought out homework can be beneficial, assigning excessive amounts of homework is at best counterproductive.

IF YOU REALLY MUST…

• A good tactic, particularly for teachers of young learners, is to assign homework for improving study skills, rather than learning.
• Assign homework that is uncomplicated and short, which involves families or friends, and which above all engages learner interests.

The case for #4: Homework can allow learners to use materials and other sources of information that are not always available in the class room

Some of us have the luxury of computers and projectors in class, others do not. Some exercises that are on the net work best as self study materials anyway. Think about the resource you want learners to use and in particular whether it is more suited to classroom use or for personal study. Furthermore, assigning research tasks that require learners to go out into the wider world and independently find resources that link to what you did in class can be a useful and motivating activity.

KEY QUESTIONS:

• Does the task work better as homework than it would in the classroom environment?
• How can you get learners to find a resource that develops on what you did in class?

The case against #4: They don’t really need it

People are constantly learning in the 21st Century and traditional homework should become obsolete within the next decade. Thanks to technology, learning is now a constant in our lives. With access to applications, software programs, as well as educational websites such as the Khan Academy, learning is an ongoing process. So much of what learners can access is through the medium of English that it is unlikely that they can spend many days of their lives without acquiring some knowledge of the language from their everyday environment.

IF YOU REALLY MUST…

• Instead of assigning homework, utilise the technological tools that your learners use in their everyday lives. Get them doing something in English with their phones or on Facebook.

Summing up

I’m not the world’s biggest fan of homework, but used correctly it can be a good teaching tool. To use it effectively, you have to ensure that it is benefiting your learners and that the exercises you give them are not merely busy work.

Students benefit from learning that intelligence is not fixed

Teaching students that intelligence can grow and blossom  with effort – rather than being a fixed trait they’re just born with – is gaining traction in progressive education circles. And new research from Stanford is helping to build the case that nurturing a “growth mindset” can help many kids understand their true potential.

The new research involves larger, more rigorous field trials that provide some of the first evidence that the social psychology strategy can be effective when implemented in schools on a wide scale. Even a one-time, 30-minute online intervention can spur academic gains for many students, particularly those with poor grades. The premise is that these positive effects can stick over years, leading for example to higher graduation rates; but long-term data is still needed to confirm that.

In fact, well-designed tests of simple and relatively inexpensive growth-mindset interventions had surprisingly shown improvements in students’ grades over weeks or months. For instance, promising results from a famous experiment have led psychology researchers Carol Dweck and Lisa Blackwell to start up Mindset Works, a company that offers a computer-based program called Brainology.

However, all the original intervention studies were small and left some educators and policymakers unconvinced. “Some folks, I think, are skeptical just because the effects are big and because they come from something that’s so small,” said Stanford behavioral scientist David Paunesku. “And I think it’s fair that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.” There were doubts, too, whether the classroom-based growth-mindset techniques would work if broadly put into practice without intensive training or supervision from the experts who developed them.

“There’s so much more good that could come if we could effectively communicate to teachers and train teachers how to do this in day-to-day classroom practices.”

To address those issues, Dweck, Paunesku and associates started the Stanford Project for Education Research That Scales (PERTS) with the goal of conducting large-scale randomized, controlled trials of distilled mindset interventions that were briefer and could be easily delivered by internet. The program, which is directed by Paunesku, collaborates with schools in testing various experimental psychology strategies for shifting the ways students think about their education, so as to motivate them to work hard.

A Light Touch Leads to Meaningful Change

In one intervention trial that was part of his Ph.D. dissertation, Paunesku worked with colleagues to enlist 1,594 students at 13 U.S. high schools, including 519 under-performing teens with the lowest GPAs. In spring semester 2012, the kids all logged online for a 30-minute, no-frills slideshow presentation (which they were only told was part of a general study of how and why students learn).
Half the group watched a lesson explaining the basic anatomy of the brain, but the other half received a growth-mindset “treatment”: They read an article that described scientific research findings about the brain’s malleability and explained that, just as people can get stronger by working out their muscles, anyone who works out their brain through learning can get smarter. The presentation also noted it could be helpful to try different studying strategies. Then, the teens were asked to summarize what they’d learned by composing a note of advice to a hypothetical struggling student.

For example, as one student wrote, “The more you practice or study the more you learn. Your brain has neurons inside that grow whenever you learn something new. Even though you may struggle in a certain subject the neurons in your brain are making new connections and your brain is getting stronger and smarter. … Struggling in school is absolutely normal and we may feel and call ourselves ‘dumb’ during these times. If you practice using better ways to study and learn you will get smarter and might struggle less.”

By the end of spring term, encouraging changes were afoot, particularly in the students struggling with low GPAs: the proportion who earned satisfactory grades rose to 49 percent from 43 percent the previous semester, a relative gain of 14 percent. Students in the control condition, however, showed a slight downward slide. A 14 percent improvement might not sound like much, but it represents that many more kids who lifted themselves above poor or failing grades, Paunesku said. “Hopefully, that will put these kids on a different trajectory where they would be more likely to actually graduate high school,” he said. Students who don’t perform well early in the school year usually end up doing worse and worse and are at risk of dropping out.

Fostering other kinds of academic mindsets may help as well. The same study also tested a “sense-of-purpose” psychology intervention (in a separate 30-minute online session) designed to get the teens to link their schoolwork to a meaningful broader purpose – such as preparing for future goals that “make a positive impact on the world.” That motivational strategy was roughly as effective as the growth-mindset training, Paunesku said. (Combining the two didn’t add up to a bigger benefit.)

“The hypothesis would then be that later on, when the students take the AP classes or when they just encounter a more challenging concept or when they go off to college, that having these more adaptive academic mindsets will serve them well,” he said. To determine whether that’s true, the PERTS researchers would have to track the high schoolers’ performance over longer time-frames; for instance, they’ll be doing two-year follow-ups in some other growth-mindset studies targeting community college students. But such longitudinal work is difficult and costly.

Other not-yet-published, large-scale trials from PERTS and affiliated researchers such as University of Texas (UT) psychologist David Yeager are likewise finding modest boosts in achievement from growth-mindset messages tailored to other learners – ranging from students doing Khan Academy math problems online (who were exposed to single sentences such as, “If you make a mistake, it’s an opportunity to get smarter!” to incoming UT Austin freshmen who log into a 30-minute online intervention.

Bringing Growth Mindsets into Schools

Designing online interventions that are quick is critical for wide-scale testing and uptake, Paunesku said, because schools might be hesitant to relinquish class time for them. The PERTS growth-mindset session is much shorter than Mindset Works’ Brainology curriculum for middle students, which entails weekly lessons over 5 to 16 weeks and costs $20 per student for a group of 20 or more. Paunesku and his colleagues are now updating their no-frills interventions with a higher production quality and more engaging content. If further research confirms effectiveness and enough funding support is available, they’d like to make the materials freely accessible to schools, he said.

But Paunesku cautions that “academic mindset interventions are not magic bullets.” There may be many reasons why half of the low-performing kids who received the growth-mindset lesson still failed to earn satisfactory grades. Some may not have found the online presentation persuasive enough, he said, if they grew up repeatedly hearing “fixed” mindset attitudes – such as, “some people are just bad at math” – from parents and peers. And even if students adopt a more adaptive mindset, other obstacles may still loom: A child might have trouble focusing in class because he’s hungry or anxious about being bullied, or he may not get enough support from his parents with homework.

Effective Study Habits

The importance of learning effectively cannot be over-emphasised. People who learn effectively not only achieve great academic results, they also achieve great success in their personal and work life. It is therefore no surprise that much effort has been put into learning about how people learn and retain knowledge.

 

 

One of the methods we did much research on is 'learning styles'. Learning styles theory proposes that each person has a preferred way of learning, and focusing on that preferred way is the most effective and efficient way of retaining knowledge. The most common learning styles theory is based on visual, auditory and kinesthetic/tactile learning. This school of thought says that people learn best when they can see the information (visual), hear the information (auditory), or when they can touch or do hands-on activities (kinesthetic/tactile).

 

However, research has increasingly shown that many people do not always have a dominant learning style. Learners learn best by using a blend of different learning styles. At the same time, the type of knowledge has an impact of what sort of learning style they prefer as well. In other words, we cannot just do a quiz to find our preferred learning style and base all our learning on that particular style.

 

What is effective and has been proven in our own lessons, is that the best results in learning comes from doing two things: a variety of learning activities that target different learning styles and providing cognitively challenging activities based on well defined learning objectives.

 

In other words, do not just focus on making your child complete repetitive written assignments or workbook after workbook. Instead, make them learn using a variety of different activities. These can include using videos, doing research, completing projects, playing games and other hands-on activities. All these different activities target different learning styles and will help your child in learning well.

 

At the same time, challenge your child cognitively by using increasingly difficult and varying types of thinking. What do we mean by difficult and varying types of thinking? There are basically a few different types of thinking. The easier ones include remember (memorising knowledge), understand (comprehending knowledge) and apply (using the knowledge). The difficult types of thinking include analyse (breaking down the knowledge to understand it), evaluate (judging the knowledge) and create (build new knowledge). As you can imagine, the more your child needs to think critically about the knowledge, the more likely he is able to learn.

 

Let's use the learning of vocabulary as an example to illustrate how all these theories can be applied:

 

Traditionally, learning vocabulary typically involves writing down the word(s), checking the dictionary and writing down the definition. Sometimes, your child will construct a sentence. This basically makes him go through the process of remember, understand and then apply – the easy types of thinking. It also only targets the visual learning style (your child can see the word on his sheet of paper).

 

However, a parent can help to improve this rather boring and probably rather inefficient learning experience by using some of the strategies outlined below:

 

Encourage your child to think about the word and get him to illustrate the word or words. He should try to use different mediums, like writing on the glass doors, or using chalk or re-arranging magnetic letters on a whiteboard. By doing all of these, you are encouraging your child to analyse what is the meaning of the word(s) and then create a piece of art by drawing the word. At the same time, because your child is using different mediums to illustrate the word, he gets to learn it in a kinesthetic/tactile learning style as well as a visual one.

 

Additional activities your child can do is to get them to write lyrics or a rap about the vocabulary word(s). Your child can then insert them into their favourite song or melody and record it as a video. You can help put some images that are related to the word(s) in the video using a simple video editing tool. It might sound difficult, but it is actually not too hard, and you can actually view many examples of these type of videos on youtube. Again, this means that your child has to analyse the word(s) and create new information (the song or rap). The fact that the end result is on a video means that your child learns using the visual and auditory learning style.

 

Finally, you might also consider getting your child to think about how to explain the word to you in the form of a charade. This will really force your child to analyse the word(s) and think of how to express the word to you in physical manner. This definitely helps kinesthetic/tactile learners.

 

In summary, try to experiment with different activities to help your child learn. One reason why many students do not do well in school is because they have only been exposed to the traditional learning ways. But unfortunately, the traditional way is not the best way they learn. When we try to teach our students using alternate ways, variation of activities and cognitively challenging our students, we can see vast improvements.

 

 

Motivating People to Learn

1. What's the best way to motivate people to learn?

Generally, we are motivated by two different reasons. We either do some things for what we call extrinsic reasons. Namely, you work for forty hours a week so you can get a paycheck at the end. And you don't really like the job much but you want the paycheck to do things with that you will enjoy. So that's extrinsic because the reward comes after the activity from the outside.

Now, flow is a type of intrinsic motivation, that is, there you do what you're doing primarily because you like what you're doing. If you learn only for external, extrinsic reasons, you will probably forget it as soon as you are no longer forced to remember what you want to do. Nor will you be motivated to learn for its own sake. Whereas if you are intrinsically motivated, you're going to keep learning as you move up and so you are in this lifelong learning mode, which would be the ideal.

2. What is "the flow experience" and what does it have to do with motivation?

The flow experience is when a person is completely involved in what he or she is doing, when the concentration is very high, when the person knows moment by moment what the next steps should be, like if you are playing tennis, you know where you want the ball to go, if you are playing a musical instrument you know what notes you want to play, every millisecond, almost. And you get feedback to what you're doing. That is, if you're playing music, you can hear whether what you are trying to do is coming out right or in tennis you see where the ball goes and so on. So there's concentration, clear goals, feedback, there is the feeling that what you can do is more or less in balance with what needs to be done, that is, challenges and skills are pretty much in balance.

When these characteristics are present a person wants to do whatever made him or her feel like this, it becomes almost addictive and you're trying to repeat that feeling and that seems to explain why people are willing to do things for no good reason -- there is no money, no recognition -- just because this experience is so rewarding and that's the flow experience.
 

3. What kinds of school activities are most (or least) likely to promote flow?

If you think of where kids have most flow in school, it's mostly in extracurricular activities like band, music, athletics, newspaper. In addition, if you look at academic classes, they would report flow especially when they work on team projects. That's the most enjoyable part of school. Next comes working on your own on a project and you can go down and the lowest one [in promoting flow] is listening to a lecture and audio/visual. Anything that involves them, that has goals where they can try to achieve, solve a problem, or do something it's going to be much more likely to produce flow.
 

4. Can you describe a school that has succeeded in promoting flow?

The Key Learning Community in Indianapolis is one school which have tried very self-consciously  to include flow into their teaching methods and very successfully. Essentially, they do it in two different ways. One is that they have a space that is called the "Flow Room" where students can spend at least an hour a week to explore new materials and they don't have to do anything except get involved with whatever they are interested in doing. And this is one of the favourite spaces in the school for kids.

But more importantly, every teacher, whether they teach German or music or mathematics, is aware of how important it is for the kid to experience flow while learning because that would make them want to learn more. Teachers are trying to translate their own subject matter into ways the kid can become really involved immediately and they get clear goals and feedback and they get the challenge matched to their ability. That makes everyday learning hopefully much more motivating to the child so that they will look forward to the lesson rather than be afraid or bored by it.
 

5. Any especially innovative practices at The Key Learning Community?

One thing that the Key School did from the beginning was to hire a video technician and a video camera and they interviewed and videotaped every child at the beginning of the school year, asking them why they wanted to go school, what they hoped to achieve at the end of that year. And for the rest of the year, whatever project the kid was involved in got on the same tape. At the end of the year, the child could have a documentary of what he wanted to accomplish and what actually did happen.

I think psychologically, it's a very important thing because you are putting the responsibility for learning on the child. They are responsible for what they're going to learn.
 

6. What lessons can be learned from the success of The Key Learning Community?

 

The neat thing is that the eight teachers who started the Key schools were not really special in any way. They were typical, good, public school teachers who just were so tired of battling against inefficiency of the regular schools that they banded together to start something new. They were able to pull something out that is very rare, namely, they created an environment where kids love to learn, where you walk into school and you see them laughing and happy in a way that you rarely see them in school and involved in their serious stuff, they're doing very, very interesting projects.

 

So it's possible, but you need to have that kind of focus, single-minded determination that these eight people have because otherwise, it won't happen by itself. And throwing money at it is not necessarily going to help either, unless you give money to people who have that determination already.

 

7. What can parents do to help kids engage in "flow" at home?

 

What the parents can do is: first, support; second, challenge. Almost all kids who are in flow frequently have parents who have very high expectations of them and they trust that their kids can do that. And they give them the opportunities. For instance, we find that kids who are in flow often at home, have a place where they feel private, where they can be by themselves. And at first we thought, "Oh, well the rich kids have that." No. Rich kids have no more chance to have privacy than poor kids. It's not having a big place, it's just having a place where you feel, "Okay, here I can do what I want to do." It may be a basement, a corner of the basement, whatever.

 

Having a TV in a kid's bedroom is one of the worst things because then they end up taking the easy way and when they're bored they turn on the TV, etcetera.

 

8. What do you see as the major challenge for public education?

 

You see in the past, you learned to become a hunter or a farmer, which is what all our ancestors for millions of years were. They learned by doing in a real setting, where they felt that, "Hey, what I do is important." I mean, you take an Inuit kid of two years old, they get a bow and arrow and they shoot birds -- sitting birds at first. But then they end up shooting seals and polar bears, but it's a kind of graduated involvement with real life and we haven't found how to do that.

It's not surprising in a way because, I mean, how you get the kid to understand what a financial investment advisor does or a rocket engineer. It's really difficult to gradually introduce them. So we find abstract ways of doing it by reading about the principles of physics or finance or whatever. But that's so boring to most kids that they don't feel they are doing real stuff. And so the question of how to get kids involved in their own learning and their own development early enough instead of trying to do it this kind of abstract way seems to be the major challenge.

 

Innovative Education - Encouraging 'What if' mentality

"What if" thinking can open the door to a world of opportunities. Just ask Rich Lehrer. A science teacher for 24 years, he's always looking for ways to make learning more meaningful for his students. But it wasn't until the last few years that he started asking questions that have led to more authentic experiences: What if we invite students to solve real problems? What if the classroom doesn't have walls? What if learning activities don't always end with letter grades?

Those questions were percolating when Lehrer chanced upon a colleague's Facebook post about the Robohand. It's a mechanical prosthetic hand made with a 3D printer using open-source software. Lehrer immediately thought of his three-year-old son, Max, born with a condition that inhibited the growth of fingers on the child's right hand. "My first thought was, oh man, I'd like to build that for Max. About 10 seconds later," Lehrer recalls, "I had another thought: What if my kids could help me build that for Max?"

Watch students create the Robohand and Max use it for the first time.



That was the start of a year-long journey into the kind of learning for which there are no textbooks or tests. It's just the kind of story worth thinking about as we head into summer and have more room to take learning outside the traditional school mold.

An Invitation to Innovate

Lehrer teaches at Brookwood School in Massachusetts. The K-8 school has an active club program and a willingness to entertain faculty initiatives in areas such as project-based learning, global education, and innovative uses of technology. Lehrer decided to leverage informal learning time as an opportunity for interested students to tackle the challenge of building Max a Robohand.

When Lehrer pitched the idea to students, he made it clear that they would be heading into uncharted territory. The teacher had done some preliminary research and connected with Richard Van As, a South African who is one of the developers of the Robohand. Van As generously offered to fabricate a prosthetic hand for the child himself, but Lehrer decided to "keep that offer in my back pocket. I think he was surprised when I explained that I wanted to build this with my students." Lehrer was a little worried when Van As told him it would require "being crafty." That's not a description anyone has ever called the science teacher.

Ten students signed on for the Robohand Club and got to work. Although students weren't the inventors of the Robohand, they had to think like innovators to solve a range of problems. For starters, they had to put their networking skills to work. They identified three big needs: find a 3D printer, find a source of thermoplastic material to make a mold of Max's hand, and find the metal hardware components that would turn printed "fingers," bungees, and other components into a functioning, mechanical hand. "There was a time when we had none of those things, and no idea where to get them," the teacher admits. "We were constantly brainstorming, who can help us?"
Plenty of people, it turns out, were interested in helping. The head of maintenance at their school proved to be an invaluable asset in helping them understand how to make the hardware work. A renowned hand surgeon from Boston Children's Hospital, Dr. Peter Waters, introduced them to a supplier of pediatric orthotic products. Boston Brace donated hundreds of dollars' worth of thermoplastic material for the project.

The search for a 3D printer brought them into contact with Arjun Bhatnagar, a high school senior at The Governor's Academy who became an important contributor to the project. Lehrer had called the high school science department to ask about getting access to their 3D printer. "The science teacher explained that the printer was located in the art department, and the person who knows the most about running it is a student. Even the 3D printing turned out to be hugely educational," Lehrer says.
After Skyping with the Brookwood students to talk through the technical requirements, Arjun printed off some sample pieces. "When I walked in one day and saw these little fingers all arranged," Lehrer says, "I just about lost it. This project was becoming so personal."

Months after they embarked on their journey, students finally had all the components for a prototype ready to assemble. Lehrer spent his spring break rewriting the Robohand assembly manual into language better suited for eighth-graders. They scheduled an extended work session for a Friday afternoon in April, including Arjun and Max. "It turned into a big sanding session because we realized the pieces didn't quite fit. But that day got us realizing, this was going to work," Lehrer says. It took another work session, plus more troubleshooting, before they had a device ready for Max to try out.

With the whole team watching, Max used the prosthesis to pick up a block. "On the video, you can hear my kids cheering and me laughing my head off," Lehrer says. "I know we'll all remember that moment for a long, long time."

 

What If . . .

In hindsight, Lehrer can see how the club structure offered a range of benefits for this unusual project. He didn't have to map the project to learning goals or think about grading. "I didn't need to do assessments for these kids. Not that rubrics aren't important," he adds, "but there are times when you want kids to just take an idea and soar. What these students have learned is so clear to them. Their level of reflection is like nothing I've ever seen."

For example, a student name Simon "enjoyed figuring out ways to get around the problems." Sometimes big problems don't need complicated solutions. Basic technology can do a lot. For Emma, a memorable part of the process "was when we had to figure out how to make the hand more comfortable and easy for Max to use. I felt like I was really helping someone, and it was one of the best feelings I've ever had." Christian offered this reflection: "One of the bigger things I will take away from this is that, regardless of all the teachers saying, 'You can make a change,' and 'There are still plenty of opportunities to change the world,' that actually is true."

The club schedule -- meeting just once weekly for 30 minutes -- also turned out to be an advantage. "That gave kids time to digest things, and it gave ideas time to percolate. When we all came back together a week later," Lehrer says, "it felt fresh. This fractal of time has produced an incredible learning experience. It's been a place for the true magic of project-based learning."

Interest from the club project has spilled into Lehrer's regular classroom. "We've had the most incredible conversations about new technologies, genetic issues, fetal development. Students have all these questions even if they weren't part of the project," Lehrer says. He keeps the prototype hand -- still in the troubleshooting phase-out on the counter to spark curiosity and inspire more questions.

For the upcoming school year, Brookwood students will have access to their own 3D printers. One was purchased after a video of the Robohand project was shared at a parent auction. A parent donated a second printer to encourage maker projects in the elementary grades. Will next year's students continue working to make improvements to the prosthesis? That's up to them, Lehrer insists, but his goal is to encourage them to use 3D printers "for real things, not trinkets."

A project with such personal significance has caused Lehrer to reflect on his own evolution as a teacher. "This wasn't just an assignment. This is real life," he says. "I'm in different territory here, and it feels a little risky." If he had seen the video [about the Robohand] three years ago, he adds, "I might have thought to show it to my students. But there's no way I would have thought about involving them to build it. It wouldn't have been on my radar."

As for Max, the Robohand has given the bright-eyed preschooler "an inroad to talk about his hand and the big kids who made it for him. Will it be life-changing for him? We'll have to take our cues from him," Lehrer says. "But already, we can see that it's helping Max to see his hand, himself, and his potential differently."

When Lehrer has occasions to talk about empowering learners, he says, "I just hold up this hand. I explain that it was built by an adult with little technical training, a tech-savvy high school senior, and a bunch of eighth-graders. If anyone's thinking we can't do real things with kids, I'm telling you you're wrong."

Teachers are Learning Designers

I believe that great teachers are "learning designers" who seek to create a space where all students are empowered to learn. I was further inspired to rearticulate this idea when I saw this video from Sir Ken Robinson:


What really struck me is that great teachers create the conditions for success, just as gardeners do. You can't make a flower grow, but you can design and improve the condition for that flow of naturally occurring events. It's the same for the students. Teachers have the power and the duty to create the best conditions for students to flourish.

Empower Yourself

For so long, teachers have been disempowered to design. With prescribed curriculum, overly strict pacing guides and the like, teachers have been given little to no opportunity to innovate and design for learning. Personally, this was and is my favourite part about teaching -- the opportunity to design and be creative, to design learning that meets the needs of the students to try new things -- and perhaps the opportunity to fail. Great learning models and structures have the space for teachers to design for their students while still remaining within the framework. Whether it's a driving question for a project, a mini-task or an assessment, teachers still have -- and must have -- the space that empowers them to design. If we want our students to be empowered, then we must model this empowerment to be a learning designer. If you haven't designed or been given the space to, this will be difficult. Look for spaces that can challenge your design thinking about what a learning space can be.

Stop Blaming Kids

There is one pitfall in Sir Ken Robinson's metaphor of teachers as gardeners and students as fruit. If you misunderstand this metaphor, you might think that it puts a heavier onus on students. It does not. If your students, like plants, are struggling to grow, perhaps it isn't them. Most likely it's the conditions that are being created for students. Now of course, there are many conditions creating opportunity for growth that may be beyond our control. However, there is always something that teachers can do or design to create the seeds for growth. Look for opportunities to design rather than fearing roadblocks.

Revise and Reflect

As mentioned earlier, if students are struggling, it's a great opportunity to revise and reflect on the learning design. Review the teaching model by evaluating the following areas:

• Are more voice and choice or self-directed learning needed?
• Should there be some differentiation?
• Perhaps there could have been more formative assessments?

These are just some of the questions I ponder when students are not successful, but there are a whole lot more.  Related to this, don't be afraid to fail. Consider it "failing forward," and continue designing amazing learning experiences for students. Also consider using protocols to help you reflect on your work in a safe space with other teachers.

Hence, teachers should be empowered to become learning designers for all students. We need to look for these opportunities to design, but we also need to reflect on the current learning designs in our classrooms. Just as our world and our students are always changing, so must our designs for learning!

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Education System must evolve with needs change

The Singapore education system must be transformed to ensure students to have the relevant skills to keep up with changes in the economy, starting from giving children a strong foundation in literacy and numeracy to ensuring students have a good grounding in maths and technology skills as they move through the education system, said Education Minister Heng Swee Keat.
This goes with helping students build skills in problem solving and applying knowledge and, when they enter the workforce, employers must play their part to foster learning at the workplace, he said.

Mr Heng was speaking to the media after a five-day study trip to Norway and the Netherlands, where he noted that the eurozone crisis had affected employability and that the availability of jobs in Singapore should not be taken for granted.

“While education must continue to develop a person, we also have a responsibility to ensure it allows young people to access jobs,” he said.

The need for “skills transformation”, he said, was the “biggest takeaway” from his visits to schools in the two countries. “This skills transformation will involve many stakeholders, starting from schools to give our children a strong foundation in literacy and numeracy, throughout our system to give them a good grounding in STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics), moving on to help them build skills in problem solving (and) in applying knowledge,” he said.

Citing practices in the Norwegian and Dutch education systems, Mr Heng said that without a “rigorous foundation” of numeracy and literacy, students cannot learn new skills and pick up new jobs later in life.



In Singapore’s schools, this foundation has been strengthened, such as through an emphasis on bilingualism even in the kindergartens and learning support programmes for languages and maths in primary and secondary schools. “Whether the current level of literacy is sufficient, we will continue to assess and do more,” he said.

This could mean enhancing literacy programmes at the Institutes of Technical Education (ITEs). “Because, otherwise, our young people, when they go to ITE, (they) don’t have a strong foundation (and) find it hard to learn new skills for the future if they don’t have the literacy skills,” he said.
Singapore’s current participation in the Organisation for Economic Coopera-tion and Development’s study on skill levels among adults would further help diagnose gaps for the Government to possibly move into, he added.

A strong foundation in basic STEM skills is also needed. Although not everyone is strong in these areas, Singapore needs a “significant percentage” of students to take on rigorous STEM subjects, said Mr Heng.

Good Education Begins At Home

 

Primary One registration has started on July 3. A lot of parents are very nervous because they want their children to get into their preferred school. Many believe a good school can lay the foundation for their children and inculcate good values. They do volunteer work years in advance and some mimic the actions of Meng Mu, the mother of Confucian sage Mencius, by moving nearer to their preferred school.

Unfortunately, not all get into their chosen school. What is the alternative? Most people tend to forget that the most important education begins at home. Regardless of how great a school is, a teacher can only do so much when there are 40 students in a class. A lot of the groundwork needs to be established at home.

Here are eight things you can do at home which beat going to the best Primary School in Singapore.

1. Teach him the "right" values.

Indeed, schools like Pei Chun teach values such as courtesy, justice, honesty and honour. But do you realise you can do that at home too? Moreover, as a parent, you have a bigger influence on your child and that would be more effective. What kind of "values" should we instil in them? Values are fluid. It used to be "unethical" for women to be wearing sleeveless clothes. There are some principles that may be always useful. We should get our child to be open-minded. As the world continually changes, he must be flexible enough to adapt to the fast transformations.

Academically, it always helps to think out of the box. If Eratosthenes was close-minded, we may still think the world is flat. In life, it is essential to be tolerant so we could live in a world without prejudice. Also teach your child to be generous and adventurous. Carpe Diem- life is too short to worry unnecessarily or to be stingy with people we care about. We should all work to achieve our full potential.

2. Answer all his questions.

A teacher, even from the best school, will not have the time for all the questions a child has as he has his own curriculum. A child has a zillion questions everyday- you, on the other hand, can satisfy his inquisitiveness. Don't stop him from questioning. If we don't know the answer, don't be shy to say you don't. Show him it's OK to ask questions and it's OK to not know the answers. Look for the answers and reply him later. It's great for a kid to be curious and that's a superb way to get him excited about learning. Quench his thirst for knowledge and he will be wanting more.

3. Give him all the attention he needs.

The biggest difference between education in school and at home is that you are able to get him all the attention he needs. With your focus on him, you can mould him into the best person in the world and provide early intervention if you notice any issues. Studies have shown children who receive individualised attention from parents are the least likely to engage in delinquent activities.

4. Let him know the world doesn't revolve around him.

Do you remember all those socially inadequate and obnoxious people you met at work or in school? You definitely won't want your child to turn out like those people. While you are giving him the most attention, it's important to teach him the humble fact that the world doesn't revolve around him. A compassionate and modest child may get further in life because he's well-liked and genuinely a great person to hang out with. School teachers are seldom able to provide such insights and perspectives you can as a mother/father.

5. Get him outdoors.

Schools may have PE classes or excursions, but time is limited. As parents, you have the liberty to bring them outdoors to learn. A child absorbs the most when he's having fun. He can apply in real life from what he learns in school.

6. Read with him daily.

Schools in Singapore has a reading programme where they let children read papers/articles/books for half an hour a day. At home, he has much more time to delve into his favourite books. You have the liberty to bring him to the library, help him cultivate the habit of loving books instead of just doing it as an exercise.

7. Languages.

The "famous" schools can help your son/daughter with his/her language, some parents say. It really begins at home. Children are most impacted by their parents, not their teachers. If you speak proper English or Chinese to them, they pick it up from you. And remember, you have been conversing with them from Day 1. The real foundation starts from the time they were babies.

8. Just get him a tutor.

Unconvinced by all the above points and insist that a school can do a better job? Well, if you can't get into the "best school", there's really no use crying over spilled milk. And if you don't agree home education works better and prefer a third party, then engage a tutor.

Children needs passion to learn

There is lots of talk about the science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) pipeline and all of its leaks. My personal mission is to fill the STEM pipeline with so many children that it bursts. To do this, STEM must be taught in an inspiring way. To keep children engaged, we need to bring passion for learning back into the classroom.

Passion is hot. It is a force that sells movies and margarine and everything in between. It is a force the can move mountains, inspire art and make the weak strong. We need to bring passion back into learning, in teaching and all around. Passion motivates. It makes a way out of no way. It allows students to overcome hardships to achieve a goal that is meaningful to them.

From the book, Save Our Science, I learned about the alphabet soup of instructional strategies out there, with the common theme of enticing and engaging learning. Let's name a few of these pedagogies: there is inquiry-based, project-based, design-based and problem-based learning, for example. Each of these methods has a central theme buried under all that jargon. If we were to compare the learning process to fishing, we want to draw students in (with the worm) and keep them engaged (with the hook). These pedagogies provide the motivation and the momentum using different approaches. You can hook a student's attention if they get their hands dirty (inquiry-based learning); have learning interactions with other students (project- and problem-based learning); or need to perform a specific task (problem- and design-based learning). All these methods are ways -- with their direct discovery, problem-solving, hands-on learning and collaborative methods -- used to keep the embers of passion for learning alive. A love of learning is a key skill for the 21st century. 

The Power of Passion

There are two ways to get a child passionate about something:

1. Find out what each child is innately passionate about.
2. Be an instructor that exudes passion for the topic, and infect your students with that excitement.

Only a few of us have benefited from the first option, but all of us can benefit from the second one. That is the power of passion.

Figure 1. Passion for learning is the key pedagogy to prepare for 21st century challenges.
Credit: Ainissa Ramirez

I've witnessed this in my own journey. I met a graduate student working in a very esoteric (read: boring) scientific field that uses magnetism to determine the properties of atoms. It was a foreign technique that was equivalent to watching paint dry, but she gave an enthusiastic presentation. I later asked her how she got involved with this topic. She replied that she had a professor who loved this field, and his passion was contagious. His legacy was a group of students who loved this topic, too. That is the power of passion; it can make what was once dull now desirable.

Now, we must be careful when we talk about passion and making topics interesting. Lots of instructors and teachers feel that they are passionate about what they teach. They will launch into a lesson from the deep end of the pool. Too often professors, teachers and instructors who have been teaching a subject for some time cannot engage a beginner, because they have forgotten how life was before knowing what they know. In teaching, you must have a beginner's mind. And you must ask, "How does this look to someone if they are seeing this for the first time?" Help your students into the shallow end of the pool and bring them to the deeper end. Teach with passion and with patience.

Vulnerability and the Inner Geek

Show students why you love the topic. Be vulnerable and show them the human side of knowing this new thing. To teach well, teachers must go back to the stage of vulnerability and put themselves in the shoes of a student who is learning the material for the first time. Students respond to vulnerability. It shows that you are "with them."

Now, I must be clear: vulnerability does not mean a loss of power. We must decouple that in our minds -- being vulnerable can be a source of power. (I would suggest you read the work of Brené Brown for proof). We are all from an age where knowing is related to our self-worth. No one can know everything! So we've got to have a new posture with knowledge, especially in this age where the rate of information creation is exponential. In this age of Google, the human element still has a market on engagement; there isn't an algorithm for passion (yet).

Be a passion-based teacher. Take on a new learning posture with your students by presenting a story behind the topic you are teaching, or by showing its beauty, or by delighting in the topic. Get in touch with your inner geek. When you do that, you give students permission to do the same. Remember that the word pedagogy comes from the Greek root, which means "to lead the child."

Everyone is a geek for something; everyone has passion for something. Make that something learning. Infect your students with passion, and they'll never be able to contain it again. Release your passion!

Homework, Sleep, and the Student Brain

In today's highly learned society where much emphasis is placed on academic performance, the amount of homework, academic burden and stress experienced by school students has become a primary concern of every parent. At some point, it has become every parent's wish that their school-going child(ren) would go to bed earlier as well as find time to pursue their own passions -- or maybe even choose to relax. In fact, the main message behind this concern is actually for the child(ren) to: "Get a life." But, what exactly has prevented our students from "getting a life?" One answer is HOMEWORK.

Favourable Working Conditions

As a educationist as well as a concerned parent, I support the idea of homework. However, I also recognised that homework, whether good or bad, takes time and often cuts into each student's sleep, family dinner, or freedom to follow passions outside of school. For too many students, homework is too often about compliance and "not losing points" rather than about learning.

Most schools have a philosophy about homework that is challenged by each parent's experience doing homework in their yesteryears when they were in school. Parents' common misconception is that the teachers and schools giving more homework are more challenging and therefore better teachers and schools. This is a false assumption. The amount of homework your son or daughter does each night should not be a source of pride for the quality of a school. In fact, I would suggest a different metric when evaluating your child's homework. Are you able to stay up with your son or daughter until he or she finishes those assignments? If the answer is no, then too much homework is being assigned, and you both need more of the sleep that is crucial to memory consolidation.

I have always believed that if school is each student's "job," then our students working hours 'would be the sum of the hours of the school day, school-sponsored activities and homework. This would certainly be a risky strategy for changing how schools and teachers think about homework, but it certainly would gain attention. So how can we change things?

The Scientific Approach

In the study "What Great Homework Looks Like" from the journal Think Differently and Deeply, which connects research in how the brain learns to the instructional practice of teachers, we see moderate advantages of no more than two hours of homework for high school students. For younger students, the correlation is even smaller. Homework does teach other important, non-cognitive skills such as time management, sustained attention, and rule following, but let us not mask that as learning the content and skills that most assignments are supposed to teach.

Homework can be a powerful learning tool -- if designed and assigned correctly. I say "learning," because good homework should be an independent moment for each student or groups of students through virtual collaboration. It should be challenging and engaging enough to allow for deliberate practice of essential content and skills, but not so hard that parents are asked to recall what they learned in high school. All that usually leads to is family stress.

But even when good homework is assigned, it is the student's approach that is critical. A scientific approach to tackling their homework can actually lead to deepened learning in less time. The biggest contributor to the length of a student's homework is task switching. Too often, students jump between their work on an assignment and the lure of social media. But I have found it hard to convince students of the cost associated with such task switching. Imagine a student writing an essay for his English class or completing an experiment for their Science project. In the middle of the work, their phone announces a new text message. This is a moment of truth for the student. Should they address that text before or after they finish their assignment?

Delayed Gratification

When a student chooses to check their text, respond and then possibly take an extended dive into social media, they lose a percentage of the learning that has already happened. As a result, when they return to the essay or Science project, they need to retrace their learning in order to catch up to where they were. This jump, between homework and social media, is actually extending the time a student spends on an assignment. It was found that social media is better used as a reward for finishing an assignment. Delaying gratification is an important non-cognitive skill and one that research has shown enhances life outcomes.

In school, the goal is to reduce the barriers for each student to meet his or her peak potential without lowering the bar. Good, purposeful homework should be part of any student's learning journey. But it takes teachers to design better homework (which can include no homework at all on some nights), parents to not see hours of homework as a measure of school quality, and students to reflect on their current homework strategies while applying new, research-backed ones. Together, we can all get more sleep -- and that, research shows, is very good for all of our brains and for each student's learning.

 

Parental care and encouragement is vital for kids

       

It Could be Your Fault That Your Son is Stupid

Recently, I met-up with a friend who has a five year-old son. Throughout the coffee session, she told me how her son was "stupid", "slow" and "will probably end up taking all the foundation subjects in primary school" in front of the child! At one point, she turned to her son and said to him, "Too bad you didn't inherit your father's smart genes. You will have a tough time growing up if you keep learning so slowly."

I was appalled by the negativity. I am never an advocate of pessimism. I like to be surrounded by positive energy and believe this self-fulfilling prophecy is self-defeating. I am not a fan of people who tell me they can't complete a task even before trying.

A self-fulfilling prophecy refers to a belief turning into reality because we are behaving like it's true. It is important for us to have trust in our children. It is just as crucial for us to educate our children to be optimistic. We should mould them into adults who would believe in themselves and not someone who gives up before even trying.



You are a mirror to your children

You create their self-image, according to Dorothy Briggs in her book "Your Child's Self Esteem". Since you are the person they trust the most, your child will believe you wholeheartedly if you tell him he can't make it in life or that he's incapable and stupid. Only when he's older, would he challenge what you say. But the damage is already done.

Similarly, if you keep telling your child he's great and has abilities, he would believe that and outperform his counterparts. That's how important your role is. You should be encouraging and always believe in him. I am not asking you to overdo the praises. That would result in a child with a bloated ego or a delusion of grandeur. Just have faith in the child and don't be a wet blanket all the time.

Researchers at Iowa State University did a study in 2006 with 115 parents and their seventh grade children. The parents answered questions on how much they think their children drink and their children filled in a survey at the start of the experiment about their recent consumption of alcohol. A year later, the children did another survey to state their recent alcohol intake. The results showed that if both parents had overestimated their children's use of alcohol at the start, their child would end up drinking more, even if they didn't initially.

As seen from the experiment, don't doubt your children from the start. That would propel him to conform to your expectations. Always have confidence in your children and believe they are capable of excellence. Tel them to aim higher than what they can achieve. That's what I always tell my son.
Imagine this: I am on a treadmill. I aim to run 2km. I may stop and walk when I reach 1.6km. If I had aimed for 3km, I may have run continuously for 2.6km before stopping.

In the same vein, if you aim for 60 marks for the exams, you may work hard and eventually just get 55. If your goal is 90, even if you get 70 in the end, it's higher than the 60 marks you initially wanted.
My friend's son may really be slower than his peers. With my friend's constant reminder that he is incapable of excelling, he will not perform his full potential. He won't try his hardest, thinking it wouldn't matter with his "stupidity." If my friend had constantly encouraged him, he would have the confidence to overcome all odds.



As Paulo Coelho said in the Alchemist, it is precisely the possibility of realizing a dream that makes life interesting. Motivate your children to always reach for the moon, because even if you miss, you land among the stars.

 

Praising effort is better than praising ability

According to Claudia Mueller and Carol Dweck's research in 1998, praising ability or intelligence can have a negative impact on a child's motivation.

Praises such as “You’re a natural artist," “You must be very smart” or “You’ve got the clever genes” focus on inherent talent. Children praised this way are more likely to view that ability is innate. They are less likely to try hard, since a challenge is either doable easily, or cannot be done. They are also less likely to take up challenges, since failure would mean they are not “smart”.

This results in a fixed mindset, according to Dwek in her book “Mindset: The New Psychology of Success”. A fixed mindset is one where we think we can do something only because of our innate ability, while a growth mindset is one where we believe a person can do anything if he puts his heart to it, the Stanford professor of psychology said in her book.

People with fixed mindsets have the need to look smart. Since success or failure is so tightly tied to their identity, they tend to develop an irrational fear of failure and take fewer risks. Children with fixed mindsets may do well in previous exams, but then lack the courage and motivation to try the harder questions, which will eventually hamper their development.

People with growth mindsets believe that success is a result of effort rather than just raw talent. So, these people work hard to constantly grow and improve. Failures are taken well, because they understand that it is inevitable with any endeavour. Setbacks are treated as learning opportunities. Since success and failure are seen as separate from their identities, people with the growth mindset tend to embrace challenges.

I have seen people who haven’t done well in their childhood become very successful professionals or businessmen because they have growth mindsets. Thomas Edison who was labelled dumb by his school teachers, went on to be the world's greatest inventors and founded General Electric. Closer to home, Benny Se Teo was a former convict who went on to start a chain of five restaurants.

Another example can be seen in class. Children with fixed mindsets tend not to ask questions. They nod along, pretending to understand the material for fear of looking dumb. Children with growth mindsets, on the other hand, do not hesitate to ask when they don’t understand. Sometimes they are not even aware how smart or dumb asking the question makes them look.

This is why I believe praise should be based on effort and the process. Research suggests the following three ways to be most effective in enhancing a flexible mindset for our children.

1. Praise the effort, not the talent. Focus on the process, not the child. When your child does well in an exam, by all means, show that you’re happy and acknowledge the achievements, but avoid using phrases such as “you’re so smart.”

Instead, say something more descriptive like “You’ve studied really hard for this and I’m happy you did well!” If the attempt was a failure (like a really bad painting), instead of saying “You don’t have the talent for this” give suggestions on improvements, such as “That was a good effort. Perhaps we can study how other painters paint faces?”

2. Be specific. When your kid builds a really good paper plane, don’t just say, “Wow, nice plane.” You can make observations on how your kid was carefully folding the paper, how precise the folds are, how sharp he made the angles and even how the plane is balanced in flight. The specific feedback not only tells the kid that you appreciate the thought that went into the plane, but also that it’s not just the end result that matters.

3. Be genuine. False praise is damaging. Kids know when you’re sincere. They may think you feel sorry for them or that you’re trying to manipulate them. So avoid frequent and effusive praise. Similarly, don’t praise low-challenge activities, failures or mistakes. It’s much better to point out where the mistakes are or how they can improve on their failures.



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