Creating Natural Habitats For Learning

Psychologist Kurt Lewin, often recognized as the founder of social psychology and one of the most cited psychologists of the 20th century, developed what is known as Lewin's Equation: B = ƒ(P,E), in which our behavior (B) is a function of our personality (P) in the environment (E). In other words, behavior is the result of the interaction between our inner selves and the outer world. It's not a difficult concept to understand, indeed, it seems self-evident, but putting into an equation does, for me at least, crystalize and simplify an important dynamic. And it also highlights why so many of our efforts to change or influence our own behaviors, or the behaviors of others, so often fail.

Weight loss diets, for instance, often focus on transforming our relationship with food by somehow training ourselves, our personality (in the broadest sense of the word), to view food or eating in a new, healthier way and through that develop new food habits. When a child exhibits challenging behaviors such as hitting classmates, a typical response is to employ some combination of positive and negative reinforcements, sometimes in the form of rewards and punishments, in order to create new behavioral responses, or habits, to certain stimuli. These are both examples of addressing the P factor of Lewin's Equation: personality, or our inner selves.

Personality, of course, is not a fixed thing. It can and does change, but the arc of that change in humans is typically long, and to shorten it, which is what we try to do with these diets and reinforcements, is notoriously difficult. This usually requires us to call on will-power, which is to say regularly and consciously overriding the habits and instincts that cause us to behave in certain ways. It's hard enough when we're self-motivated to change ourselves, but neigh impossible when we are trying to change personality by proxy, as happens when adults are trying to modify the behavior of a child. Rewiring personality is a very difficult task for us habit-forming humans.

Usually, it's far easier to change E, the environment, which is to say changing what a person sees, hears, smells, tastes, and touches on a daily basis. Indeed, whereas change in P involves lots of time and effort, changes in E can have an almost instantaneous impact on B.

For instance, we've all known children who bounce off the walls indoors, but who drop to their knees to study motes the moment they get outside. We've all known children who become "different people" when exposed to noisy, chaotic environments versus hushed, controlled ones. We ourselves find our behaviors altered, often in dramatic ways, when we find ourselves, say, at a cocktail party or in a confined space or on the penthouse floor of a skyscraper. 

Loris Malaguzzi, the founder of the Reggio Emilia approach to early childhood learning, postulated that each child has three teachers, adults, other children, and the environment. As early childhood educators and parents of young children, we tend to focus on the role of the adult teacher. Likewise, we know that it's important for the children in our care to have relationships with other children. However, that "third teacher," E, the environment, often gets short shrift. No where is this more evident that in cookie cutter classrooms and playgrounds, out of the box spaces that force children, no matter their personalities, to conform, and this has, obviously, a significant impact on behavior, including the what and how children learn. A poor learning environment can mean that the adults spend too much of their time and energy on managing behavior rather than focusing on what we should be doing, which is observing and supporting the children as they go about the business of following their own learning instinct, their curiosity, through play.

If this sounds like something you want to explore, please consider enrolling in my new 6-week course, Creating Natural Habitats for Learning, where we will be taking a deep-dive into both the theory and day-to-day practicalities of transforming our classrooms, playgrounds, and homes into environments that work with children, and ourselves, in the spirit of a "third teacher." We will be exploring both indoor and outdoor environments, as well as aspects of environment that are often neglected, with an eye toward making our spaces the kind of flexible, open-ended natural learning habitats in which all children can thrive. Not to mention freeing the adults up to be the kind of educators we've always wanted to be. I would love for you to join us!

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Registration is now open for my brand new course: a 6-week deep dive into transforming your classroom, home, or playground into the kind of learning environment in which young children thrive. This course is for educators  parents, and directors. Start the new school year with a new and improved "third teacher" I hope you join me! To register and learn more, click here.

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