Bird Brain

Yesterday, a pair of crows drove our dog crazy by play fighting outside our living room window. At first I thought it was an actual fight, and maybe it was (I have no idea what was in their hearts) but after awhile it was hard to see it as anything other than a bit of rough housing, especially when they finished by flying off together, wingtip to wingtip to perch side-by-side on a tree branch where they proceeded to casually preen their feathers.

Crows, they tell us, are one of the animal kingdom's most intelligent creatures, certainly at the top of the heap when it comes to birds. They belong to a family of birds called corvids that includes ravens, rooks, and jays. Scientists use things like their ability to solve problems, make tools, and their ability to anticipate future events as evidence of this intelligence. Crows even seem to possess a "theory of mind," which is to say they consider other individuals' states of mind. They actually make customized tools. They  understand causality, can reason, count up to five and it's said they remember individual human faces, so if you're mean to a crow, they'll know to avoid or dive bomb you when next you meet. They're so smart they outperform apes in some tests of intelligence. This has lead some scientists to assert that crows are second only to humans.

These are all criteria we use to determine human intelligence as well, so we're probably prejudiced when it comes to assessing this trait in other species. Naturally, we more highly value evidence of the kind of intelligence humans possess while dismissing, say, a canine's olfactory intelligence as less significant. Tool use, for instance, may well be a marker for this thing we call intelligence, but what if it isn't? 

Scientists in Australia have recently found that tool making does not correlated to larger brains in the avian world, brain size being another characteristic that we associate with high intelligence. Instead, they've determined that the best predictor of larger brains in birds is their tendency to play. The more a bird plays, and the more sophisticated their play, the larger their brains tend to be. Birds that don't play have relatively small brains. Birds that engage in solo play have slightly larger brains. Those that play with objects like sticks have even larger brains, but the largest bird brains of all are those found in those who play with one another.

Cause or effect? I have no idea. All this really tells us is that birds who play together have the biggest brains of all. It could be that those with bigger brains tend to play or it could be that playing causes brains to get big. We also don't know if this can be applied to humans, although we do know that humans have the highest brain-to-body weight ratio in the animal kingdom and we likewise tend to believe that we wear the crown of intelligence. We also, as a species, have a longer period of "childhood" than any other species, and childhood, in most animals, is associated with play. At the very least we can say that brain size and play are closely related, yet we tend, as a society, to dismiss play as "useless." Our schools, in particular, do this as we increasingly minimize recess while increasing instructional time. Indeed, much of what teachers are expected to do in the early years is suppress play (which is pretty much the entirety of "classroom management"), despite the evidence that growing brains either need play or need to play. Either way we are systematically depriving our children's brains.

At the end of the day, I'm skeptical of anyone who claims to understand intelligence, even as it's an endlessly fascinating subject of speculation. More often than not, they are using a highly selective collection of data points, ones that are easy to measure, while disregarding anything inconvenient, and call it "intelligence." That's what I.Q. tests do, for instance. Brain size is one of those things that are easy to measure and, of course, no matter how intelligent a crow is, its brain is the size of a walnut, while a dog's is the size of a tangerine . . . And what of other kinds of intelligence?

Maybe intelligence is the wrong prism through which to look at these things. Whether or not play has anything to do with intelligence is a moot point from where I sit (although it looks like it definitely could be). The link between the lack of childhood play and its negative impact on emotional development is a strong one. A lack of play in humans leads to an increased propensity toward anxiety, depression, and problems of attention and self control. Even if all-work-no-play models of schooling do somehow increase intelligence, at what cost? Most of us would chose to be less intelligent and mentally healthy over brilliant and miserable any day. I'm far more concerned with mentally healthy children than intelligent ones, but if this research on bird brains tells us what it seems to be telling us, then there is really only one choice: let the children play.

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In this brand new 6-week course, you will learn how to break the cycle of control, command, punishments, and rewards that have characterized the childhoods of so many of us. If you're ready to transform your classroom management skills so that you are truly supporting every child to get their needs met, and in turn transform challenging behaviors, then please consider joining the inaugural cohort for Controlled Chaos: Teacher Tom's Guide to Play-Based Classroom Management. Registration closes today at midnight, so act fast if this sounds like something you can use. To learn more and to register, click here.

I put a lot of time and effort into this blog. If you'd like to support me please consider a small contribution to the cause. Thank you!

Like Lilies, Play is a Perfection that is Not Improved by Gilding

In his classic book A Sand County Almanac, Aldo Leopold, the man sometimes credited as the father of modern wildlife ecology, wrote, "It is the part of wisdom never to revisit a wilderness, for the more golden the lily, the more certain that someone has gilded it."

He was writing specifically about natural places, but he could have been talking about just about any perfect thing with which we humans come into contract. In our efforts to improve upon Mother Nature, Leopold bemoaned our urge to build roads into perfect places in order to make them more accessible; to manage the plants and animals in order to create a more desirable "balance"; to construct facilities to make the experience of wilderness more convenient. We gild natural places with fences and signs and bear-proof trash cans only to find that our love is suffocating. We can't seem to resist the urge, as Shakespeare put it, "(t)o gild refined gold, to paint the lily, to throw a perfume on the violet, to smooth the rice, or add another hue unto the rainbow . . ."

Even the lilies we purchase to decorate our homes have been gilded in their way, cultivated to produce over-sized blooms that come in a gaudy rainbow of colors never seen in nature. Not long ago, I found myself among wild growing lilies, pure white with yellow-tipped stamen and instantly felt the difference. These were the flowers that have inspired culture, art, and literature before they were made tawdry in our efforts to one-up Mother Nature.

We've done the same with children's play, which is to say the natural urge to educate ourselves. For some 300,000 years or so, our species, Homo sapiens, has evolved an extraordinary intelligence through the processes of curiosity-driven exploration, discovery, experiment, cooperation, and invention. Play stands among the perfect things, yet alongside that has emerged this human urge to gild the lily.

We see this gilding in the advent of modern playgrounds and the proliferation of manufactured toys. We see it whenever someone touts an innovation by labelling it "play with a purpose" (which renders it not-play) or by asserting, "They won't even know they are learning" (as if children must be tricked into it). We see it in our classroom management methods which seek to replace the sacred urge to play with rules and curricula that require the application of external motivations like grades, punishments, and rewards. In my new course Controlled Chaos: Teacher Tom's Guide to Classroom Management, we will explore alternatives that avoid the temptation to gild. (See below.)

Play is enough, especially in the early years. Everyone knows that this is when we are at our most capable as learners, when our brains and bodies are as facile as they will ever be. "They are like sponges" we enthuse and we are right, but it only works properly when self-motivation is the engine, which is to say, when we are playing. Play has evolved as a perfect mechanism for learning, yet sadly, too many of us cannot leave it alone: it's a lily we are too ready to gild.

When we build roads into a wilderness, we begin the process of rendering it less wild and therefore less perfect. Our intentions may be good, but a gilded lily will never live up to the ones that grow in natural places. Play is another perfection that is not improved by gilding.

When we resist the urge to gild and instead stand aside as our children play, we see a perfection in our imperfect world, and if we would keep it, we must resist the urge to gild it.

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In this brand new 6-week course, you will learn how to break the cycle of control, command, punishments, and rewards that have characterized the childhoods of so many of us. If you're ready to transform your classroom management skills so that you are truly supporting every child to get their needs met, and in turn transform challenging behaviors, then please consider joining the inaugural cohort for Controlled Chaos: Teacher Tom's Guide to Play-Based Classroom Management. To learn more and to register, click here.

I put a lot of time and effort into this blog. If you'd like to support me please consider a small contribution to the cause. Thank you!

The Fundamental Freedom

I once taught a girl named Laura who would sit with the rest of us on the rug during circle time, but when she spoke, she popped to her feet to pace back and forth. She had fresh, thoughtful contributions to make to our group discussions, but clearly needed to move as she said them. She did this when she was two, then three, then four, then five. This was a cooperative preschool, which meant her mother was often in class with us. At first, her mother tried to persuade Laura to conform, but I asked her to back off, so no one told Laura not to pace as she talked.

Naturally, some of the other kids tried it out. Indeed, we went through a spell during which it was a fad. Whenever someone spoke at circle time, they did so on their feet in imitation of Laura. But for most of her three years at Woodland Park, she was a lone pacer, a habit that was not remarked upon one way or another. It was just what Laura did when she had something important to say.

Then she went to kindergarten where she was made to sit at her desk. A few weeks into the school year, Laura's mother wrote me, asking for advice. It seemed that Laura had gone mute at school. Her teachers thought there was something wrong with her. She sometimes spoke on the playground as she played, but never indoors and rarely to adults. I reminded Laura's mother about the pacing. "I thought of that," she said, "but her teacher won't let her stand up during desk time." Apparently, the teacher was afraid that if she accommodated Laura, she would have to let all the kids pace around, and that, in her mind, represented chaos. I other words, she knew that at least some of the children would benefit from moving around as they learned, but classroom management was more important than learning.

Most young children, most of the time, don't have much say in their lives. This isn't a good feeling. No one likes to feel powerless. I wouldn't put myself in a preschooler's shoes for anything. I would hate having someone dictate when I go to bed and when I wake up. I would bridle at being told what to eat, what to wear, and how I'm going to be spending my days. I would rebel against being forced to go places I didn't want to go, especially if I was made to go there every day, like a job I couldn't quit, and be made to do things I found meaningless, tedious, or plain old stupid. I would cry if I were confined indoors on a sunny day, or made to ask permission to even use the toilet.

Of course, I'm looking at this through the filter of having been an an adult for four decades, but that doesn't mean that children don't crave control over their own lives. Why do you think it is that so many parenting battles are over things like bed time, food, and toileting? These are things over which children do have control. You can't make another person sleep. You can't make another person eat. And you can't make another person poop. Exhaustion, hunger, and tummy aches are the prices many children are willing to pay for even these small, small scraps of freedom. In their way, they are freedom fighters.

Adults have power over children. Most of us wield it benevolently, although we can all be dictators at times and we know, sadly, that there are far too many children living under the thumbs of adult tyrants. But no matter how gentle we are, our young children don't have a great deal of say in their own lives. This, more than anything else is why I value play-based education. Yes, it lays the foundation for future learning, it grows the brain, it is how humans have evolved to educate themselves, and there is mountains of research conducted over centuries to support this, but from where I sit, all of that is secondary when set beside freedom.

Of all the freedoms we have, the freedom to think is the most fundamental, yet for most children, school is a place where they are told not just what to think about, but when they are to think about it, and also how they are to think about it. Original thoughts are wrong answers. They are punished when they rebel. 

Laura is not the first child to discover that school traditionally sets classroom management above thinking. Compliance comes first. Thinking, which is what we call the process of learning, is discouraged in favor of sitting quietly. When children are free to learn, it's always the thinking that comes first.

It's been a few years since I've spoken with her mother, but last I heard, as a third grader, Laura had finally started to figure out how to think, speak, and sit simultaneously. She was a "pretty good student," according to her mother, but, "she hates every minute of it." Laura still remembered preschool, however. "It was a golden era," her mother said. It's not the first time I'd heard that. And Laura is far from the first child who has learned to hate school. This is what standard "classroom management" systems teach most children. (In my new course, Controlled Chaos: Teacher Tom's Guide to Classroom Management, we will take a deep dive into alternatives that place the freedom to move and to think at the center. See below.)

Thinking and learning is what we naturally do with freedom. We are driven to it. It brings us joy. I see it in every child, every day, as they play together in preschool. Without the freedom to pace, the freedom to think, what kind of education is it?

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In this brand new 6-week course, you will learn how to break the cycle of control, command, punishments, and rewards that have characterized the childhoods of so many of us. If you're ready to transform your classroom management skills so that you are truly supporting every child to get their needs met, and in turn transform challenging behaviors, then please consider joining the inaugural cohort for Controlled Chaos: Teacher Tom's Guide to Play-Based Classroom Management. To learn more and to register, click here.

I put a lot of time and effort into this blog. If you'd like to support me please consider a small contribution to the cause. Thank you!

The Problem With Memory

I've been married to my wife Jennifer for 38 years and during that time we've shared a lot of experiences, side-by-side, the difference in our relative perspectives only a matter of degrees, yet we still regularly find ourself disagreeing about what we saw, heard, touched, tasted, or smelled. Often, it's a simple matter of whether someone was wearing a red or green shirt, but other times our memories differ about matters of great moment. Indeed, there are some things that I remember with clarity, moments in which something significant happened, that she hardly remembers at all, and vice versa.

The older I've gotten, the less certain I've become about the objective accuracy of my memories. Or rather, I find myself questioning the concept of object accuracy altogether. Yes, something in the past happened, but it only exists for me as the form it imprints upon my brain. But not even that. Researchers have discovered that we are constantly making and re-making our memories. Each time we recall something, they tell us, it becomes altered in some way. The more we recall something, the more we tend to change it until our memories very often only have a passing resemblance to what actually, objectively, happened.

This is a recognized phenomenon in law, for instance, as eye witnesses can credibly report seeing the same thing in different ways. It's why contemporaneous comments or writing about an event is often accepted as stronger evidence than oral testimony, under the assumption that one was created closer in time to the actual, objective events.

We tend to think of memories as a kind of recording of what happened, but in reality, what we "remember" is actually something our brains have constructed, and continue to construct even long after the arrow of time has swept us off into the future. As educator Eleanor Duckworth writes, "(W)e cannot assume that an experience whose meaning seems clear to us will have the same meaning for someone else."

This is why we don't all think, for instance, that The Catcher in the Rye is a great novel. For many, it's work of genius, perhaps the great American novel, while for others it's a real yawner. Our brains do not record events, but rather shape and interpret them from the very start. For instance, if an English teacher has forced me to read Salinger's novel (which happened thrice during my years of formal education) my brain will store the experience completely differently than when I choose to read it of my own accord. 

This is the big challenge for most teachers, those charged with the task of somehow working through a standardized curriculum. The expectation is that if we expose all the children to the same experience they will learn the same thing. We cannot assume this, not about children, not about anyone. Perhaps some will have the experience we expect, but most won't. They can, however, learn to create the illusion that they have had the "right" experience by getting the "right" answers on a test, which is the real lesson of school for most children. Oh, they are all learning something, but what that is specifically is different for each child and is most certainly not the lesson intended by the teacher or the curriculum.

Even before the pandemic, polling found that teaching is one of the most stressful occupations in the U.S., tied only with nursing. (You can find the 2013 poll here, although you will have to download it to read it.) And it has only, of course, gotten worse during the past year. In my decades in the classroom, I had my moments, but by and large I didn't find it particularly stressful, and I attribute that in large measure to the fact that I was never charged with implementing a standardized curriculum. Our play-based program is based on the concept of allowing the curriculum to emerge from the children themselves rather than imposing it on them. The result is that I don't have to pretend the children are learning what I'm teaching. I don't have to spend my energies on such nonsense as "classroom management," which is the equivalent of trying to push water uphill or herd cats. Add to that the fact that teachers are expected to also keep children perfectly safe, serve as therapists, mitigate the impact of a pandemic, and heal the wounds of bigotry and poverty, and it's easy to see why we, as a profession, are so stressed out.

It's all an impossible task, at least the way we now have it set up. And if teachers are unduly stressed, the same must be true of our children. I'm blessed to have worked my entire career in places that don't expect me to do the impossible. When the random benchmarks of standardized curriculum are removed, when we acknowledge that learning is for each child a unique and personal experience, when we stop trying to herd the cats, we find our natural role as important adults in children's lives, which is to care for them, keep them safe enough, and to support them emotionally and intellectually when they need it. That's why most of us, especially in the early years, got into this profession in the first place. 

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In this brand new 6-week course, you will learn how to break the cycle of control, command, punishments, and rewards that have characterized the childhoods of so many of us. If you're ready to transform your classroom management skills so that you are truly supporting every child to get their needs met, and in turn transform challenging behaviors, then please consider joining the inaugural cohort for Controlled Chaos: Teacher Tom's Guide to Play-Based Classroom Management. To learn more and to register, click here.

I put a lot of time and effort into this blog. If you'd like to support me please consider a small contribution to the cause. Thank you!

Classroom Management Based on Love, Not Power

"You need power only when you want to do something harmful, otherwise love is enough to get everything done." ~Charlie Chaplin

As a younger teacher, I spent a lot of time reading about the education of young children. That's how I came to learn about such child-centered models as Reggio Emilia, Montessori, Waldorf (Steiner), and democratic free schools. It's how I came to know the foundational ideas of Dewey, Piaget, and Vygotsky, and more contemporary thinkers like like Bev Bos, John Holt, and Mister Rogers. But to get to those ideas I had to reject most of what of passes in our profession as "best practices."

"The opposite of Love is not hate, but power." ~C.S. Lewis

What I've come to reject is the idea of adult-centered learning. What I've rejected is the idea that adults must somehow control children in order for them to learn. What I've rejected are approaches that place adult power over children at the center instead of love for children. 

"They fear love because it creates a world they can't control." ~George Orwell

Any model that starts with a curriculum devised by adults "for their own good" is about power over children, not love.

Any model that values tidiness and order under the rubric of "classroom management" is about power instead of love.

Any model that assumes that children will learn little of importance without "teaching" is about power.

"In order to get power and retain it, it is necessary to love power; but love of power is not connected with goodness, but with qualities which are the opposite of goodness, such as pride, cunning, and cruelty." ~Leo Tolstoy

You know you are reading about power when the sentences begin with "Have the children (do this or that) . . ." or "Get the children to . . ." or "Tell the children . . ." These are statements of command, the hallmark of every method that relies upon power.

"When love rules power disappears. When power rules love disappears." ~Paulo Coelho

Methods based upon power can be identified by their rigid schedules, both daily and developmental, in which everyone must constantly worry about "falling behind."

Power predominates in places where adults seek to prepare children for some future life rather than allowing them to live the life they are living.

"Where love rules, there is no will to power; and where power predominates, there love is lacking. The one is the shadow of the other." ~Carl Jung

Love does not dictate; love does not manage; love does not need tricks and tips for manipulating children. Love is about connection. It is about relationships. It is about listening. It is about acceptance. It is about this unique and beautiful person. As Mister Rogers wrote, "To love someone is to strive to accept that person exactly the way he or she is, right here and now." That is where child-centered learning begins. Love does not prepare children for life because to love someone is to know that they are already, right here and now, living.

"Love is the opposite of power. That's why we fear it so much." ~Gregory David Roberts

In my new course -- Controlled Chaos: Teacher Tom's Guide to Classroom Management -- we will explore what happens when we place children at the center of their own learning, listening to them, understanding them, and loving them. When we do this, when classroom management is based on love, we are creating a bulwark against power. Through a curriculum based upon love we set children free to think, which is, in the end, the only place real learning happens and where, frankly, the spark of revolution is possible. In a world that values power over love, that can be a frightening thing.

"When the power of love overcomes the love of power the world will know peace." ~Jimi Hendrix

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In this brand new 6-week course, you will learn how to break the cycle of control, command, punishments, and rewards that have characterized the childhoods of so many of us. If you're ready to transform your classroom management skills so that you are truly supporting every child to get their needs met, and in turn transform challenging behaviors, then please consider joining the inaugural cohort for Controlled Chaos: Teacher Tom's Guide to Play-Based Classroom Management. To learn more and to register, click here.

I put a lot of time and effort into this blog. If you'd like to support me please consider a small contribution to the cause. Thank you!

Fruit Grown in the Soil of Obedience

Six-year-old Kaia was arrested because she got in a power struggle with a teacher over wearing sunglasses inside.

Eight-year-old Evelyn was arrested because she wanted to wear a cow hoodie in class.

Seven-year-old Malachi was arrested after a shoving match with another child who had teased him about one of his drawings.

The low-end estimate is that we arrest 130 children between 5 and 9 every year, although the number is probably much higher. Black children make up 43 percent of those arrested even though they only comprise 15 percent of kids in that age range. I don't have data on this, but I expect that autistic children, or children who are otherwise neuro-atypical, are also over-represented in those arrests.

There is never a reason to arrest a child. Ever. Even if they bring a gun to school. Even if they make threats. The criminal justice system will do nothing but harm. 

Kaia's grandmother says that since the arrest she has been watching her granddaughter die "bit by bit, day after day." All of these children have suffered from post-traumatic syndrome, been in therapy, and are fearful of both school and the police. 

I don't blame the teachers. I don't blame the police officers. I blame all of us, you and me included.

We live in a society that enshrines words like "freedom" and "liberty," but our institutions, like schools and the police, are focused, like lasers, on compliance, especially when it comes to children, especially when it comes to Black children. Especially when it comes to children who perceive the world differently. 

Who cares if a child wears sunglasses or a cow hoodie? But of course it wasn't about those things. It's about children who stood their ground, who opted for freedom or liberty over obedience. In other words, they behaved as our myths about ourselves as a nation would have them behave. And for that, the adults in their lives felt they must crush them. 

And I blame myself. I don't work in those schools. Indeed, I've spent more than a decade here as a critic. I'm not a cop. I have never called the cops, even when I arrived to find transients sleeping inside the school or on the playground. Even when one of them threatened me with a stick studded with rusty nails. I didn't call the cops because I feared what they would do in the name of compliance. I have marched in the streets against the excesses of the police. Yet I still blame myself because I live in a society that explicitly values obedience over freedom. 

We are so sick with this that we arrest five-year-old because they feel more comfortable wearing sunglasses indoors.

We are so sick that Kaia's teacher insists that she would never have a child arrested, yet her own student was arrested. We are so sick that the officer who handcuffed Kaia objected that she was a "baby," yet this baby was arrested.

French philosopher Voltaire once said, "Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities."

Arresting young children, handcuffing them, forcing them into squad cars, booking them, taking mugshots -- all of it -- is an atrocity. And our culture of obedience, of compliance at all costs, even when it's just about sunglasses, cow hoodies, or even a shoving match, is the absurdity that we believe.

I'm certain that some people reading here have already manufactured, in their minds, a way to blame these children or their parents for the arrests. I'm sure that some have thought, "maybe they had it coming" or that sometimes the only thing that works is the companion absurdity of "tough love."

Most of us, I hope, are outraged by the idea of arresting "babies." It's an easy, extreme thing over which to be outraged, but we should be equally outraged over children being required to ask permission to use the toilet or compelled to walk in straight lines through the hallways or to sit quietly in their seats while a teacher drones on about irrelevant things. We should be equally outraged by the assembly line mechanisms by which we process our children, standardizing them through tests and ranking them by grades. We should be equally outraged by a culture that cuts down all the tall poppies, hammers down the nails that stick up, and values classroom management over anything else.

In my brand new 6-week course -- Controlled Chaos: Teacher Tom's Guide to Classroom Management -- we will dive deeply into what we can do in our own classrooms to focus more on freedom and less on knee-jerk compliance.

But how will we ever teach the children if they don't first learn to obey? That is the absurd question that leads to atrocity. Arresting children is the fruit that grows from the soil of obedience.

Freedom, liberty, autonomy: that is what must come first. It must be the highest value if we are to ever become self-governing people. This is what history, science, and experience have to teach us. It will only be when we, as a society, can learn see children as free people that we will finally understand what it means to be free ourselves. Until then, I'm afraid, we will be doomed to commit atrocities in the name of absurdities.

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In this brand new 6-week course, you will learn how to break the cycle of control, command, punishments, and rewards that have characterized the childhoods of so many of us. If you're ready to transform your classroom management skills so that you are truly supporting every child to get their needs met, and in turn transform challenging behaviors, then please consider joining the inaugural cohort for Controlled Chaos: Teacher Tom's Guide to Play-Based Classroom Management. To learn more and to register, click here.

I put a lot of time and effort into this blog. If you'd like to support me please consider a small contribution to the cause. Thank you!

"Everybody's Had to Fight to be Free"

Everybody's had to fight to be free. ~Tom Petty

The American labor organizer, folk singer, storyteller and poet Utah Phillips once said, "The state can't give you free speech, and the state can't take it away. You're born with it, like your eyes, like your ears. Freedom is something you assume, then you wait for someone to try to take it away. The degree to which you resist is the degree to which you are free."

I've often thought that freedom might be the central concern in what we do as early childhood educators. It could also be the central concern in what we do as parents or, indeed, in any of our relationships with other living things. 

Evolution demands that we care for our babies for a decade or more, otherwise they are unlikely to survive, which in turn means our species would be unlikely to survive. In this way, we are very unlike other species, most of which can measure their requirement to care for their young in terms of months, weeks, or even days. 

Because our young need us for so long, it's easy to fall into the error of treating these relatively helpless humans as ours to control. We tell ourselves that it's for their own good, and perhaps it is, but for me it remains a concern because, ultimately, my hope for every child is that they not only assume their own freedom, but likewise know to resist those who would exert power over them. This is a real problem for those of us who value freedom considering that for many children, perhaps even most, they will have been under the control of adults for the first two decades of their lives.

In some cases, like with authoritarian style adults, this control is explicit, but even those of us who opt for more authoritative or permissive approaches, still, at the end of the day, find that we must, at least from time to time, "for their own good," excerpt control over the children in our lives. We do it in the name of safety, such as when we forbid them from playing in traffic. We do it in the name of justice, civil society, morality, and courtesy, such as when we don't allow them to hit other children. We exert this power over them, we tell ourselves, in service to our responsibility as important adults in their lives.

But the slope is a slippery one. Too many of us, when we step back and really focus on the central concern of freedom, find that at least some of what we do isn't for their own good, but rather our own. In my new course Controlled Chaos: Teacher Tom's Guide to Classroom Management, we explore what passes for "classroom management," and much of it falls into this category: the sitting and silence and walking in straight lines. As a preschool teacher, I felt it was incumbent upon me to know the difference between my actual responsibility to care for children, to keep them safe, to keep them clothed, fed, and sheltered, and the control I exerted for my own ends.

It's not easy knowing where this line is and it is likely different for every relationship we have with a young human. Finding the line is, for me, an ongoing dialog between myself and the children, both individually and collectively. One way I have of locating that line is when a child, or children, resist. Too often, our instinct is to double down when they fight to be free, to view it as a challenge to our authority. But if we are taking our responsibility seriously, if we are truly seeking to raise free humans, and I hope we are, it is incumbent upon us to listen to their resistance as important communication, and reconsider what we are doing and why we are doing it.

******

In this brand new 6-week course, you will learn how to break the cycle of control, command, punishments, and rewards that have characterized the childhoods of so many of us. If you're ready to transform your classroom management skills so that you are truly supporting every child to get their needs met, and in turn transform challenging behaviors, then please consider joining the inaugural cohort for Controlled Chaos: Teacher Tom's Guide to Play-Based Classroom Management. To learn more and to register, click here.

I put a lot of time and effort into this blog. If you'd like to support me please consider a small contribution to the cause. Thank you!

This is What Classroom Management Looks Like in a Play-Based Setting

The boy had shed his jacket onto the floor, leaving it in a heap right in the middle of the room. Under normal circumstances I would have said something like, "Your coat is on the floor; it belongs on a hook," then waited for him to think things through. But this was his first day and he was only two, so I instead picked it up with the intention of hanging it for him.

He rushed at me, screaming something that didn't sound like Nooooooo! but clearly meant it. He snatched his coat from my hands. "I do it!"

I said, "The hooks are over there." It took some doing, but he finally managed it. 

Later that morning, he was playing with a small wooden ball that escaped him and rolled under some shelves. I happened to be sitting right there so I automatically reached for the ball, but again he stopped me, "I do it!" And he did.

When he sat down for a snack, the adult who was there tried to help him wash his hands, but he refused. "I do it!" When she tried to serve him carrot sticks and grapes, he put them back on the serving platter one at a time, saying, yet again, "I do it!" This is what "classroom management" looks like in a play-based program. (If you're interested in learning more, see the link at the bottom of this post to my brand new course, Controlled Chaos: Teacher Tom's Guide to Classroom Management).

He was firm with us, if a bit fussy, as if he was accustomed to adults putting up a fight. His mother had laughed that he was a "willful" child, rolling her eyes as if to say "Good luck!" Of course, she wasn't talking about his willfulness manifesting as it had so far at school, a boy clearly wanting to do it for himself. She was talking about those times when it resulted in digging in his heels about things like baths or leaving the playground.

But it's the same instinct. As unpleasant and annoying as it might be for us adults, willfulness in a child tells us that they are willing to take responsibility for their own lives. It's the kind of thing that we aren't always good at recognizing in young children. Indeed, standard classroom management systems and parenting books are full of tips and advice on how to motivate children to do exactly that: take responsibility for themselves, for cleaning their rooms, for learning their lessons, for controlling their emotions. Sadly, we've become so addicted to the behaviorist ideas of rewards and punishments that even the best of us, like a bad habit, resort to them.

"If you get in the car, I'll give you a cookie." "If you don't get in the car, you won't get a cookie." 

The problem is that all the research done on these sorts of external motivators is that they simply don't work (see Alfie Kohn's Punished by Rewards). Oh sure, if the carrot is sweet enough or the stick painful enough, a child can be made to do almost anything, but if it is to work a second or third or fourth time, it will require increasingly sweet rewards and increasingly painful punishments. Not only that, but the entire process sucks any sense of joy or satisfaction right out of the activity itself until the only reason the child, or anyone, continues behaving in a certain way is to receive the reward or to avoid the punishment. 

This explains why so many older kids don't see a problem with cheating. If the goal is a good grade (external motivation), then copying a friend's homework makes sense, while if learning (intrinsic motivation) is the goal, then copying someone else's work is counterproductive. On the flip side, the consequence of getting caught cheating isn't a bad conscience (the natural consequence), but rather that the adults in your life will take away something about which you are intrinsically motivated, like recess or hanging out with your friends at the mall.

Study after study has shown that rewards and punishments have a negative effect on self-motivation. Even previously pleasurable things, things we do willingly, can be ruined by the introduction of rewards and punishments. 

Like with many things, our schools have it backwards. They tend to operate under the misguided theory that children need to first be extrinsically motivated, and only then, as time goes by will they develop intrinsic motivation. This is completely unsupported by any science. It is the same method Pavlov used to make his dogs salivate.

At the same time adults, both educators and parents, tend to set ourselves up as the arbiters of what a child should be doing or learning. Had I commanded that two-year-old boy, "Hang up your coat," I'm quite confident that he would have responded "willfully," perhaps reluctantly hanging up his coat because I was an authority figure, but more likely, knowing the boy, he would have refused altogether, whining, sulking, or shrieking.

So what are we to do? Well, first of all, we need to stop bossing kids around so much. Researchers have found that some 80 percent of the sentences adults say to children are commands and no one responds well to being told what to do, no matter what our age. 

Secondly, we can learn to trust a child's intrinsic motivations. This isn't an easy thing in standard schools because, obviously, each child is going to be motivated in different ways, about different things, and on different schedules, while teachers are expected to march all the kids through the same things on the same schedule. If we are going to do what the science tells us, however, we will create interesting and varied environments for children in which they have the freedom to manipulate, explore, discover, and invent, in the company of others or all alone, at their own pace.

We will drop grading and testing, those carrots and sticks that put so much focus deficits, and replace them with something like Learning Stories, in which educators observe the children, then write the story of what the child is doing and learning. These stories would be written to the children themselves, and their families, creating a record of the child's intrinsically motivated learning journey, a truly useful "permanent record" that is entirely focused on the strengths of each child. Because, as my friend and proponent of Learning Stories Wendy Lee told me, "What we focus on grows."

When would teachers have time to write these Learning Stories? Removing direct instruction, grading, lesson planning, and classroom management from an educator's responsibilities should leave plenty of time to focus on the actual learning.

None of this means a child will no longer be willful. Indeed, it frees all children to be powerfully, happily willful, which is to say, it frees them to take responsibility for their own lives, and that, in the end, is the purpose of all true education. 

"I do it!"

******

In this brand new 6-week course, you will learn how to break the cycle of control, command, punishments, and rewards that have characterized the childhoods of so many of us. If you're ready to transform your classroom management skills so that you are truly supporting every child to get their needs met, and in turn transform challenging behaviors, then please consider joining the inaugural cohort for Controlled Chaos: Teacher Tom's Guide to Play-Based Classroom Management. To learn more and to register, click here.

I put a lot of time and effort into this blog. If you'd like to support me please consider a small contribution to the cause. Thank you!

"The Entire Purpose of the Brain is to Make Efficient Movement from Experience"

Neuroscientist Patrick House asserts that "the entire purpose of the brain is to make efficient movement from experience."

Another prominent neuroscientist, Antonio Damasio claims that the thing we call consciousness (or mind) emerged from the so-called universal emotions like fear, anger, sadness, happiness, disgust, and surprise which are the triggers for action, or movement, related to survival.

"Movement is so fundamental to life that its absence defines death," writes psychotherapist and advanced student of Thich Nhat Hanh, Christine Caldwell.

Young children move -- a lot. They run when adults feel that walking should suffice. They squirm when adults expect stillness. They jump and shout and swing and balance and shake their heads and giggle even when we threaten them with punishment. Indeed, the term "classroom management" is all about preventing or at least controlling the movement of children. Yet if the scientists are correct, movement is the fundamental principle behind everything that makes us human. 

Plants are intelligent. We can tell by their behavior, which is to say their movement: they know to sprout, to turn toward the light, to find water and minerals with their roots, to release noxious chemicals when attacked by pests. The reason we tend to dismiss their intelligence as inferior to human intelligence, however, is that we believe, perhaps rightly so, that plants do not share our capacity to know that they are intelligent. That is the blessing and curse of being human. We possess minds that allow us to at least approach the question of why we are doing the things we do. Our minds, which evolved from our emotions, which in turn evolved from the necessity to move in order to survive, are capable of knowing that what we are doing is intelligent . . . Or stupid, stupid, stupid as the case may be.

In school, we likewise judge the intelligence of children by their actions. Specifically, we judge them by their ability to provide pre-approved answers to our questions or to demonstrate proficiency in some pre-approved activity like reading or ciphering or recalling the dates of this or that historical event. In preschool we might judge their intelligence by how they grip a crayon or help themselves to a glass of water without spilling. And all of this judgement is undertaken within the confines of what we have arbitrarily determined to be the proper behavior, action, movement in our artificially created environments. And we correct, criticize, and punish when a child's behavior, actions, or movements do not fit our definition of proper.

In my brand new 6-week course -- Controlled Chaos: Teacher Tom's Guide to Classroom Management -- we will be examining what school could be like if "classroom management" actually followed the science and accommodated our natural need to move.

At the end of the day, it's hard not to look at what we do to and with children in the name of education as adults attempting to manipulate and compel children to move or not move according to programs we've pre-set for them. If the scientists are correct, our minds have evolved as a way of determining how we should move or act according to experience. When a child has a tantrum or runs around the classroom or can't sit for circle time or hits a classmate, we are seeing evidence of their intelligence. And as intelligent adults perhaps our first instinct should not be to control their behavior, but rather to take their intelligence seriously. When we do, we ask ourselves: What is it about this place that causes this intelligent child to move in this way? And if we are to value that child's intelligence we will take action to change the environment or our expectations or our ideas about classroom management.

******

In this brand new 6-week course, you will learn how to break the cycle of control, command, punishments, and rewards that have characterized the childhoods of so many of us. If you're ready to transform your classroom management skills so that you are truly supporting every child to get their needs met, and in turn transform challenging behaviors, then please consider joining the inaugural cohort for Controlled Chaos: Teacher Tom's Guide to Play-Based Classroom Management. To learn more and to register, click here.

I put a lot of time and effort into this blog. If you'd like to support me please consider a small contribution to the cause. Thank you!

That's a Lot to Lose in the Name of Arbitrary Adult Control

Jean Piaget in his office

The conventional wisdom is that an uncluttered classroom is best for young learners. I regularly see photos labeled as "classroom don'ts" with scads of posters and other art on the walls, things dangling from the ceilings, and materials stuffed willy-nilly on shelves. These busy, messy spaces, we're told, are full of distractions, making it difficult to concentrate. They are visually over-stimulating, whereas a cleaner, tidier space, with it's bare walls and organized shelves, calms children, which is, according to this theory, the proper mindset for learning. Indeed, research indicates that a tidy space may promote such desirable traits as healthy eating and generosity. People in tidy spaces are, likewise, more likely to follow rules, adhere to expectations, and to make "conventional" choices, which would, I presume, make them better at, say, passing a test.

"If a cluttered desk is a sign of a cluttered mind, of what, then, is an empty desk a sign?" ~Albert Einstein

Research also indicates that a messy space promotes creative thinking and stimulates new ideas. "Disorderly environments seem to inspire breaking free of tradition, which can produce fresh insights," according Kathleen Vohs, the University of Minnesota psychological researcher who studies these things. "Orderly environments, in contrast, encourage convention and playing it safe."

So I can understand why educators concerned with such things as "classroom management" and marching children through a curriculum would value a spit-spot classroom.

Steve Jobs' home office

I can also understand why educators might want the visual of a tidy space as a way to appeal to parents considering where to send their children to school: order is very appealing in the abstract.

But it seems that what we lose is creativity and independent thought. And, indeed, as we will be discussing in my brand new 6-week course -- Controlled Chaos: Teacher Tom's Guide to Classroom Management -- that's a lot to lose in the name of arbitrary adult control.

I'm certain that some people are reading this with arguments in their heads one way or another, because, naturally, we all have our personal preferences. My own home tends to be very tidy ( . . . as far as you know, because I tidy up for company!) I suppose I consider my natural state, as far as space goes, as right on the edge. What I do with the next hour will often determine whether it's neat as a pin or a pig pen. I've seen a kind of ebb and flow. It almost feels like I need to occasionally clear the canvas, so to speak, before I can launch into my "real work." And then for weeks, the laundry situation is a mess, my counters are bestrewn, and my table tops are home to disorderly stacks.

Albert Einstein's desk. Ralph Morse/Time

The notion of space is a fascinating thing to consider. For most of human existence, we spent the bulk of our waking ours in unconfined space, with the sky as our ceiling, but we've always also created interior spaces in which to secure ourselves. Today, most of us spend most of our lives indoors and this goes for children as well. Indoor space is fundamentally different than outdoor space: one is finite, the other infinite. We feel we can control our indoor spaces, whereas, beyond the confines of our gardens, the outdoors is a place where we have no choice but to give up control: the sun rises on the evil and on the good; the rains fall on the just and the unjust. There is a feeling of freedom that one can attain outdoors that is more elusive when we're confined. We breath easier, we set aside our urge to control. We can't organize the trees or tidy the clouds. Being outdoors allows us to more easily just let go, which, is the best mental state for creativity.

Interior order is a more attainable thing, or so we think. We seek to control as much as we seek to be free. Both urges live within us. When someone sets themselves free indoors the way one might outdoors, we often talk about it as "giving up," a phrase that can be uttered in joy or in despair, and I suppose messiness can mean either of those things. Our interior spaces are like that. They often reveal our mental state. And changing the nature of our interior spaces can, quite often, trigger changes in our mental state and vice versa.

Is this really a good learning environment?

But these considerations are about spaces we can control. Piaget made his own office messy. I clutter up my own home. Classrooms, however, are shared spaces, much in the way that Mother Nature is a shared space. We release control outdoors, at least in part, because it's simply too vast to consider controlling, there are too many variables, too many agendas, so we "let go" which is a nicer way of saying "give up." When I see a tidy classroom, I see a single hand of a control and it doesn't belong to the children. I worry because I see space designed for and by "management." Not only that, but I know that the children who spend their days in that space are not free to manipulate the environment toward their own ends.

My goal is always creative thinking and new ideas. That is what learning is in my book. And toward that end, I've always preferred classrooms that are creations of all of us, not just "management." This means, "letting go" and embracing the notion of "tidy enough." This is the natural state of a world in which children have agency. It is the environment of creative thinking and new ideas.

It's tempting to fall back on the common wisdom of "finding a balance," but I think that's bunk. Balance is too often just a version of "both sider-ism," a dull compromise that leaves everyone dissatisfied. No, I think of my classroom space more in terms of ebb and flow in which the canvas is periodically cleaned. 

Our spaces shape us and we shape them in a back and forth between our urge to control and our need to be free.

******

In this brand new 6-week course, you will learn how to break the cycle of control, command, punishments, and rewards that have characterized the childhoods of so many of us. If you're ready to transform your classroom management skills so that you are truly supporting every child to get their needs met, and in turn transform challenging behaviors, then please consider joining the inaugural cohort for Controlled Chaos: Teacher Tom's Guide to Play-Based Classroom Management. To learn more and to register, click here.

I put a lot of time and effort into this blog. If you'd like to support me please consider a small contribution to the cause. Thank you!