The Best Thing You Can Do to Help Your Child Succeed at School

Every good parent wonders how they can best help their child achieve at school. Obviously, we can ensure our child is attending a first-rate school that provides excellent teachers. That’s not always possible, and even if we do manage it, the school and the teacher are only one part of the story. How can we as parents do our bit at home? What is the best thing you can do to help your child succeed at school?

The number one thing you can do at home is provide a knowledge-rich environment. Talk to your children. Have dinner together and let them hear you use ‘big words’ as you talk with your wife. Read aloud to them. Seems simple right? Yet so many children are short-changed in this area. It is more common for ‘families’ to eat dinner separately staring at screens, and few children are read to past their toddler years, but this has educational ramifications.

Really? Yes, really. The number one reason children from lower socio-economic homes fare worse in school is because they lack the vocabulary and knowledge that children from more wealthy homes have. These children go to school with a vocabulary that is hundreds and sometimes thousands of words fewer than children from more wealthy families. This gap tends to widen over time in the wrong sorts of schools. Since vocabulary size is the most important indicator of reading ability and comprehension, these children will find it more difficult to pick up knowledge at school. But let’s not just assume this is a problem for children from poorer homes. More and more busy two-parent working families are spending less time with each other.

I believe that providing knowledge is so important to success, that if you read to your children for an hour a day, taught and encouraged them to read every day for a few hours (ensuring the quality of books being read), provided them with basic numeracy skills while avoiding unnecessary screen time throughout the first six years of school, your child could miss school entirely, and enter the intermediate years in no way lacking. If you are not well educated yourself, become acquainted with your local library, and assign your child reading tasks every week. This is essentially what neurosurgeon Dr Ben Carson’s mother did, despite being unable to read herself. He links his future success as a neuro-surgeon to his mother’s strict reading regime of two books per week.

Discussion Paper – Coronavirus Implications

A discussion paper, released some weeks ago by think-tank Koi Tū: Centre for Informed Futures was highlighted in an article on the Stuff website. Of particular interest to me was the section on education.

The report muses about implications for education:-

Does the pandemic change thinking around primary and secondary education? Will this experience irreversibly change the nature of learning – changes that were likely inevitable in future decades? There are opportunities here to shift more to teaching skills such as critical thinking and emotional self-regulation, move towards precision education and create leadership and export opportunities. Schools need to focus on transportable and generic skills so that pupils can later navigate a more fluid labour market. Is there a place for technology teaching streams as in Germany and Switzerland? Could this be a circuit breaker that allows for a substantial change in pedagogy?

A couple of comments.

Firstly, we should always be wary of the impulse to assume that an event will irreversibly change anything. Yes, events do have an impact on history and can cause change. But there are a number of fundamental things that never change. The nature of humans for instance. And because the nature of humans is immutable, the nature of learning is not likely to be something that changes. If our brains function in much the same way as they always have, any one event is not going to significantly alter the way humans learn.

This criticism applies to the common misconception that the 21st century changes everything. It doesn’t.

Secondly, the report suggests that we should focus on teaching skills that enable students to navigate a more fluid labour market. In recent posts, we have shown that this is a myth based on a misunderstanding of what skill is. What schools need to do, is provide students with a knowledge-rich education. This is a fundamental building block for skill.

Unfortunately, these two myths, that one event or time period changes learning completely, and that our modern world requires the teaching of skills are widely believed and foisted upon the educational landscape. But they are having an unfortunate effect on our young people. If you are a parent, I encourage you to look for a school that does not buy into these myths. Give your children the gift of a content-rich education. Skill and ability to navigate an ever-changing world will follow.

Seven Myths About Education – Part 7

Over the last month or so we have been slowly reviewing Daisy Christodoulou’s Seven Myths About Education. A note that has sounded time and again is the importance of knowledge. We see this again today as we investigate the final myth she highlights: that teaching knowledge is indoctrination.

Teaching Knowledge is Indoctrination?

This myth seems to arise from postmodernism. In the 1960s and 1970s, a number  of theorists claimed that what we often think of as objective facts cannot be agreed to exist. Rather, they argued, we construct reality as societies and cultures. These ‘realities’ are buttressed by institutional power, which preserves these facts. Thus, according to these theorists, teaching knowledge is not neutral, but can be a form of oppression by those who hold societal power, and therefore undemocratic. These theorists argue that the traditional curriculum “reproduces hegemonic values and therefore reproduces social and class inequalities.” Therefore, this approach should be abandoned.

So the response of some educational theorists is to avoid the imposition of external content on pupils, and instead work with the knowledge and experiences that they already have. We see this all over the educational landscape today. One example from recent times is a New Zealand educational leader suggesting a boy in the deep south of our country is better off knowing about muttonbirds than how many continents we have. Indeed, our New Zealand Curriculum is deliberately broad and eschews set knowledge so local communities can ensure their particular needs are addressed and themes relevant to students’ experience can be explored.

Why is this a myth?

So what is wrong with this? Surely Christodoulou is not supporting inequality and oppression? Of course not, but she points out that if we are concerned about democracy and equality, we should be concerned about the teaching of knowledge in schools. If we do not provide a knowledge-rich education in schools we will further exacerbate the undemocratic and unequal features of our society. Why? By only teaching pupils using the knowledge they bring to the classroom, and focussing on their experiences, we automatically disadvantage those who bring less to the classroom. These are the children of those who are not highly educated themselves.

In fact, a good democracy requires that every citizen “have knowledge and understanding of the world beyond their immediate experience, equality requires that there should be no great gaps in the understanding between people or social classes.” Teaching knowledge is not elitist. It’s not classist, and it’s not racist. As Robert Tressel (a trade unionist) said, “What we call civilisation – the accumulation of knowledge…is the fruit of thousands of years of human thought and toil…not the result of the labour of the ancestors of any separate class of people…and therefore it is by right the common heritage of all.” So let’s not leave any child to their own limited local knowledge and experience. Let’s give them the gift of this heritage.

Seven Myths About Education – Part 6

This is my penultimate post on Daisy Christodoulou’s book, Seven Myths About Education. In the previous post, we highlighted the myth that teachers should be teaching transferable skills. Today Christodoulou slaughters another sacred cow in myth 6.

Myth 6: Projects and Activities are the Best Way to Learn

There is a movement in education which frowns upon the compartmentalization of knowledge into subjects and a consequent push for more project-based learning. This has lead to what is called enquiry pedagogy. The goal is to produce more autonomous learners, and the means is project-based learning where ‘real-life’ type projects are given to students. Sounds great. Students are given opportunities to play experts in role play.

Why is this a myth?

First of all, there is a huge difference between experts and novices. Experts have a huge body of background knowledge that is stored in long-term memory. This is available to be called upon when necessary as we have discussed in earlier posts. This body of knowledge in an expert leads to a qualitative difference in thinking between experts and novices. Children do not have this extensive background knowledge, so functioning as an expert in a ‘real-life’ project is an unattainable goal. Christodoulou strongly argues that it is not even a realistic or legitimate aim for secondary school to produce experts, and it is a mistake to look at what experts do and think that is how we produce experts.

So does this mean we don’t believe education is about producing problem-solvers? Of course not. We do want to produce children who are able to solve real-world problems. But how we go about doing this is the key question. Does project-based learning or activities facilitate or hinder our goal? Again, for Christodoulou, the answer is rich knowledge-based instruction. We don’t produce experts by getting them to act as problem-solving experts by doing real-world projects. We set children on the way to being experts by giving them the gift of knowledge.

Christodoulou uses the analogy of training in football to help the reader understand her point. One does not chuck children into 11 a side games. Yes, children play soccer games, but in training, the whole game is broken down into smaller activities like dribbling and tackling, which are practised. This transfers over to the realm of say English. More practice controlling sentences leads to better writing.

An example of what not to do is given in the chapter. Christodoulou mentions the vital importance of getting pupils thinking about the right things. So, for instance, if a teacher were to teach a unit on the Underground Railroad, an activity of backing cookies (perhaps a type of food eaten on the Underground Railroad) would be a failure as a lesson, as it is not an effective way of getting deeper thinking about the Underground Railroad.

The Poison in this Myth

The most iniquitous aspect of this myth is the way it further disadvantages the already disadvantaged. Projects require background knowledge. “Pupils who will do the least badly at such projects are those who have gained background knowledge elsewhere.” This will typically be children from wealthier backgrounds. If we care about aiding students from ‘disadvantaged backgrounds’, the best action we can take, is to give them the requisite knowledge they need.

Seven Myths About Education – Part 1

Recently I have been reviewing my notes on Seven Myths About Education by Daisy Christodoulou, a book I read a few years ago. Christodoulou is an educational thinker in the UK, who attempts to explode some of the common myths in the educational landscape of today. Myth one is “Facts Prevent Understanding”.

Myth 1: Facts Prevent Understanding

For those of you who aren’t involved in education, you probably read something like this and think, “Who on earth would believe that?” For those of us involved in education, we are perhaps more familiar with some of the thinking of educational ‘experts’. Rousseau, for instance, argued that experience alone should be the way scholars should learn. One cynically wonders what lessons his five children whom he deposited at a foundling hospital after their births learnt by their experiences. John Dewey, a hero of education to many, suggested that friction and waste would be the result of a child who is forced into a receptive and absorbing attitude, while the more modern educator and philosopher Paulo Freire argued that the banking deposit concept of education (depositing knowledge in the minds of children) is a misguided system.

So too, many in education today argue that teaching kids facts is a problem. Rather they argue that we need to be teaching understanding and a deeper level of thinking to children. As is often the case, an element of this sounds plausible. We all know that knowledge is not enough. We don’t want our children to be robots who can spit out random facts. Rather, we want them to be able to use their knowledge; to develop higher-order thinking. We would rank highly the ability to analyse and evaluate for instance.

Christodolou points to research that highlights the fundamental importance of knowledge acquisition in education. It seems that research into human thinking demonstrates the importance of long-term memory for cognition. The more information that a child has stored in their long term memory, the more they can overcome the difficulties of cognitive overload in their working memory. Simply put, the more facts a child has possession of, the easier it is for them to work with more complex problems.

A classic case of this is learning the multiplication tables. A child who has not got these ‘down pat’ will struggle to perform division of mixed numbers. Too much of their working memory is being devoted to figuring out the particular times table they need so that there is not enough ‘thinking space’ left to convert the mixed numbers to improper fractions and then change the division sign to a multiplication sign and change the last fraction to its reciprocal. A child with the multiplication tables committed to long term memory is ready to deal with this new complexity.

Creativity, problem-solving and ability to analyse and evaluate are skills that are reliant on large bodies of knowledge securely committed to memory. Dan Willingham, Professor of Psychology at the University of Virginia argues that the data from the last 30 years of research leads to the conclusion that thinking well requires knowing facts. He writes,

“The very processes that teachers care about most – critical thinking processes such as reasoning and problem solving – are intimately intertwined with factual knowledge that is stored in long-term memory.”

This research is a timely reminder to educators to keep the main thing the main thing. We need to pass on a solid body of knowledge to our children. This is foundational in the development of critical thinking. Knowledge is the tool our children need to think.