This is the final post of a three part series on the Tools of the Mind approach to help children master self-control and cognitive skills. Here’s part I: The background Here’s part II: The research
There are of course more than 6 lessons we can learn from the Tools of the Mind program. It should inspire us all to push the boundaries and test the limits of what we traditionally think children are capable of. The following are 6 lessons I learned by reading and writing about the program.
1). Learning is important, but play is not far behind: There’s been quite the debate over whether to have preschoolers spend their time doing preacademic work or let them explore the world and, in the process, learn social skills etc. via fun and play.
The favor has been toward the preacademic approach, in which children are taught various lessons in areas like prewriting and premath for the purpose of making them ready for the world that awaits them post-preschool. It not only make sense to prepare children for the road ahead, but there has also been significant research indicating that children who are behind their peers at the age of five are not likely to catch up thereafter. The research also indicates that intervention via teaching prewriting and premath skills at the preschool age makes a big difference in helping those children overcome the difference in their level of ability.
The tides, however, have started to shift over the past decade or so. All the lecturing and testing of youngsters have gotten many educators and child-psychologists in a tizzy. Hiring coaches for three and four year olds to help get them into elite preschools does away with the most significant goals of early childhood education, they exclaim. To sum up their concern, the prestigious group Alliance for Childhood released a report in which they state, “kindergarten has ceased to be a garden of delight and has become a place of stress and distress.”
The solution these educators and psychologists offer is to allow children in nursery and kindergarten ample time to engage in play. This, they claim, will result in happier and less stressed out preschoolers. They have plenty of time still to learn how to write, add, and subtract.
2). To benefit from play, make it planned and structured, not free: There is, of course, place for children to just go wild, expend energy, and just have some good old fun. Remember childhood? What the Tools program introduces is planned and structured play.
This does not make us parents, teachers, and therapists the play police; rather, it gives us the job of coaching. It is our job to create opportunities for children to grow and learn from play. This may happen by us presenting challenging activities and skill-building games while standing by to assist in the process.
For example, having children engage in pretend play and requiring them to stay with their roles for the duration of the playtime, instead of giving up when challenges arise, fosters problem solving skills they will carry over into real life. In this example, the educator would be there coaching the child to not give up, perhaps offer solutions to overcome the difficulty, or act as a mediator between playmates. Which brings us to the next lesson.
3). Pretend play is the child’s textbook: Ok, well, you might not see two preschoolers play pretend, one being a professor solving a geometric equation, but pretend play is the primary and most effective means by which children learn the following: Social skills, emotional control and flexibility, creativity, resilience, and discipline.
Pretend play is a setting best designed for children to learn those skills. By pretending to be a doctor, seeing “patients,” checking them, and “prescribing medication,” the child learns how to interacts with her peers, how to empathize, and, if there are other “patients” waiting to be seen, concepts of time management and organization. To repeat, these lessons are best instilled when an adult coaches the child with appropriate challenges and guides her towards the beneficial solutions.
We can instruct children what to do, and we can tell them unity is good and fighting is wrong. However, even if they listen to us, understand the rules, and even remember them, it doesn’t come close to how practicing by playing ingrains those skills like a footstep in wet cement.
4). Kids CAN learn self-regulation, impulse control, and other executive functioning skills: This is perhaps the most exciting lesson of all. Over the years there have been several psychologists who studied executive functioning in children. They set out to assess whether there are any methods to teach children these skills and have them carry over what they learn to real life situations. The results were not promising.
Children showed improved working memory skills, sustained attention, and impulse control in the clinical setting, but when it came to real life situations such as the classroom or home they were back to their original skill level.
This led the researchers to believe that just as children are born with certain temperaments and specific personalities, these skills are also set in stone when a child is born and it cannot be altered with intervention.
The Tools program, however, proved years of research wrong. The difference being that Tools children spend hours each day immersed in executive functioning skill training. (I apologize for making it sound like boot camp.) By actively practicing those skills in a variety of settings and scenarios, they incorporate what they learn into their daily routines. However, children the other research looked at, who only received a session or two a week focusing on improving the same skills, were never given the opportunity to carry over what they were taught into real-life situations.
5). Throw out the batteries and pull that plug: The curious among us might often wonder: What did children do before batteries were created? Can you imagine the deprivation? There were no remote controlled Hummers, no Tickle Me Elmo, not even Baby Einstein!
I am in no way qualified to comment on the history of toys and play. I’m not a historian, nor have I conducted a thorough review and comparison of the play that was and the play that is.
However, there is a lesson to learn from the Tools program. The work of passive play is done by batteries and plugs. Those doing the “hard work of play,” Duracel and General Electric, might learn how to control their impulses and interact socially with peers, but the child will at the most be entertained.
Active play is powered by real, organic young energy. It requires curiosity. It fosters creativity. It teaches problem solving. It’s as cheap as the rawest of materials a child can tinker with; batteries need not be included.
6). Children do not necessarily have to be “slaves of their environments:” The term in quotes, coined by Lev Vygotsky, or something to its effect can nowadays be heard quite often. It is true that young children have very short attention spans, which makes it difficult for adults who wish to interact with them to keep up. Impulse control is not exactly the three-year-old’s strong suit.
What we can learn from Tools though is that with the right approach we can help children master their environment rather than be enslaved by it. They can learn how to ignore distraction, be aware of their impulses so they can control them, and they can learn how to use a mistake as a teachable moment, rather than a frustratable moment.
The post ran a bit long, yet I have just scratched the surface. I am hoping to dedicate posts to topics on the benefits of pretend play, ideas on using raw materials in play, and specific ideas on how to structure and plan activities and games to help children learn self regulation and other related skills.
Having read about Tools of the Mind, what are your impressions? Did I leave anything out? Do you have any ideas on using play to improve children’s cognition or function? Please let me know and I will include it a future post.
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