Hunger is the Best Sauce

We spent our holiday weekend in a nearby mountain village with a group of friends. On Friday evening we met at one person's home for food and drink. We then met the following morning for the charming local parade where we likewise gathered around food and drink. Later that evening, we met again for a grill feast. And on Sunday morning, we wrapped up the festivities with a group brunch.

Russian author Leo Tolstoy is among those philosophers who considered it to be a kind of secular sin to eat without appetite, which is what I've been doing for the past few day. I mean, the food was amazing all around, but there were moments when I found myself chewing for reasons that had nothing to do with hunger. For instance, I finished my hamburger out of a misguided sense of courtesy toward my host. I had a second desert because, well, two people had brought special desserts. I didn't drink that Bloody Mary because of thirst.

And the wages of my "sins" is an overstuffed, bleary-headed lethargy which will last until I once more feel the pangs hunger. Indeed, this morning as I write this, I'm, for the first time in days, feeling the beginnings of appetite. It's a feeling that I'm going to allow to grow for a bit. I might even wait until I'm ravenous because I know that a corollary to Tolstoy's framework is that hunger is the best sauce.

We talk a lot about curiosity in the world of play-based learning. I've often described it as a manifestation of our drive to educate ourselves. There is survival, which causes us to find food, procreate, and avoid danger, but beyond that, curiosity is what motivates us to bridge the gap between what we know and what we'd like to know. Psychologist George Loewenstein sees curiosity as an unpleasant state that compels us to take action, in the same way that thirst and hunger drive us. And like with thirst and hunger, once our curiosity is satisfied, we feel, however briefly, sated.

"Everything is explained now," said musician Tom Waits in an interview. "We live in an age when you say casually to somebody, 'What's the story on that?' and they can run to the computer and tell you within five seconds. That's fine, but sometimes I'd just as soon continue wondering. We have a deficit of wonder right now." 

It's one of the greatest challenges of our information age. Just as most of us can instantly satisfy our barest inklings of hunger, we can now do the same with our curiosity. From an evolutionary perspective, thirst and hunger are about the motivation to take action to seek out food and water. When it's always at the tip of our tongue, however, we lose our motivation. We then find ourselves eating and drinking for reasons that have nothing to do with, you know, eating and drinking. The same goes for curiosity: it's the motivation to get our questions answered.

Normal schools are set up as correct answer factories, serving children endless information with no regard for the natural process of curiosity and wonder. Since our internal drive to learn, our curiosity, is sidelined, our schools must then devise complex systems of external motivations (grades, competition, punishments, rewards, and pleased adult) to get incurious children to do the work. And that's what learning becomes in this context: work. 

No where in modern schooling do we allow the time and space for curiosity to grow. Indeed, children who display actual curiosity, who actually wonder, are generally shushed and re-directed. Research consistently finds that rewards, punishments, and other external motivators, reduce instrinsic motivation: they replace the joy of learning with the work of learning.

We've heard a lot about the neuromodulator dopamine over the last decade or so, often within the context of what's popularly called a "dopamine hit." We wring our hands over the "easy" dopamine of, say, social media scrolling, but that's at least in part a misunderstanding of the function of dopamine. Dopamine is central to the hunger that is curiosity. As neuroscientist Charan Ranganath puts it, "(I)f dopamine motivates us to learn, then maybe the boost we get from curiosity isn't from getting the answer to the question we're interested in, but rather from the question itself." In studies, dopamine circuits seem to be triggered by the questions that make the participants curious, rather than by learning the answer.

In other words, curiosity is about what we often call thinking. This is what early childhood education pioneer Eleanor Duckworth was talking about when she said that correct answers are far less important to education than the thinking that leads to answers, even objectively wrong answers. 

"Chasing information to satisfy our curiosity," writes Ranganath, "can sometimes have bigger effects on memory than learning in order to get an external reward . . . curiosity improves memory for both the mundane and the interesting, whether you're eight years old or eighty-eight. In contrast, external rewards seem only to enhance memory for information that we re not curious about . . . Our findings suggest that the people who show the biggest learning benefits from curiosity also score high on a personality trait called openness to experience."

And openness to experience, wonder, is a far better predictor of learning even than simply being interested in something. 

Play-based learning puts curiosity at the center where it belongs. Unlike the standard school approach of stuffing children whether they're hungry or not, play-based learning provides the time and space for the "thirst" for knowledge and the "hunger" for learning to naturally emerge. It's what motivates us to bridge that gap between what we know and don't know. Curiosity, like hunger, is the best sauce.

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Books have a way of transforming us unlike any other media out there. Be it fiction or non-fiction, a books has the power to fully immerse us into a world in way that makes us come out the other side a changed -- and better -- person. I've put together this list of 16 books that have done that for me. They are intentionally not early childhood books, although each one has, in one way or another, profoundly transformed my work with young children. Maybe you'll find a few new ones here that will do the same for you. To download the list, 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!

"Appreciation is a Holy Thing"

After reading a story, then singing our final song together, the children came forward to hug me, not one at a time, but all together, and there we were, a massive scrum of bodies, wrapping one another up in our arms.

Since my first year teaching, this was the way the two-year-olds said goodbye to me at the end of the day. I never asked for it or encouraged it in any way other than, I suppose, to be open to it. It always started on the first day of class each year because there was always that one child who genuinely felt the urge to hug me, to receive a hug from me, then others saw it, thought, "I want some of that," and came for their hug as well. I said the children's names as they approached, "Here's my Sarah hug, my Nora hug, my Alex hug . . ."

Mister Rogers said, "I believe that appreciation is a holy thing." We were saying goodbye to one another, of course, but we were also saying thank you, expressing our gratitude, showing our appreciation, not in payment for any particular favor, but simply for the time we had together. It started spontaneously, then, as the year progressed, became a sort of ritual, each child making it their own. There were some who rushed to be first, others who waited for the crowd to thin. Some didn't want to let go. Some come back for a second and third and fourth hug. A few didn't want to hug, preferring a high five or simply eye contact. Some were moved to hug their classmates.

It was a beautiful way to end our time together, topping one another up before heading off into our separate lives.

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Books have a way of transforming us unlike any other media out there. Be it fiction or non-fiction, a books has the power to fully immerse us into a world in way that makes us come out the other side a changed -- and better -- person. I've put together this list of 16 books that have done that for me. They are intentionally not early childhood books, although each one has, in one way or another, profoundly transformed my work with young children. Maybe you'll find a few new ones here that will do the same for you. To download the list, 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!

Happy Interdependence Day!

We must hang together gentlemen . . . else we shall most assuredly hang separately. ~Benjamin Franklin

Happy Independence Day! And “happy” is the appropriate greeting for this long weekend. The Declaration of Independence was the first historical instance of the word "happiness" appearing in the founding documents of any nation.

In 1776, 56 men signed their names to this radical document. As a result they were, without trial, proclaimed traitors by the government and sentenced to death. These were middle class people. John Hancock was the wealthiest among them and he was not even a millionaire by today's standards. The wealthy sided with the king. Most of the signers were working people -- farmers and tradesmen primarily. None of them left behind a family fortune, or a foundation, or any other kind of financial memorial of their lives. Our nation is their legacy.

Their average age was 33 (Thomas Jefferson's age at the time). The youngest was only 20-years-old. The oldest was Benjamin Franklin, who was 83.

As a result of having signed the Declaration of Independence, all 56 of the signers were forced to flee their homes. Twelve returned to find only rubble.

As a result of having signed the Declaration of Independence, 17 of them were wiped out financially by the British government.

As a result of having signed the Declaration of Independence, many of them were captured and tortured, or their families were imprisoned, or their children were taken from them. Nine of them died and 4 of them lost their children.

As I read the Declaration of Independence, as I do each July 4, I find myself in awe of their courage. They were all aware of the likely consequences, but they did what they knew must be done. Two centuries later, I still feel the outrage they must have felt as I read through the specific governmental abuses that lead them to that critical moment.

Even more than our Constitution, the Declaration of Independence is the beginning point for the United States of America. I find it both educational and inspirational to return to the source before heading out for fireworks.

When Franklin was asked what kind of nation they were forming, he answered, "A republic, madam, if you can keep it."

I worry at times that we won't be able to keep it, that, in fact, we've already lost it. I worry that too many of us have declared our independence not from tyrants, but from one another, not understanding that in creating a constitutional government of, by, and for we the people, we were also declaring our interdependence.

At the signing to the Declaration of Independence in 1776, Franklin famously said, "We must hang together gentlemen . . . else we shall most assuredly hang separately." 

And while we come together this weekend to commemorate our independence from tyranny, this is also a day for embracing our fellow countrymen, for celebrating our interdependence. In that direction lies happiness.

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Books have a way of transforming us unlike any other media out there. Be it fiction or non-fiction, a books has the power to fully immerse us into a world in way that makes us come out the other side a changed -- and better -- person. I've put together this list of 16 books that have done that for me. They are intentionally not early childhood books, although each one has, in one way or another, profoundly transformed my work with young children. Maybe you'll find a few new ones here that will do the same for you. To download the list, 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!

"Since We're Neighbors, Let's Be Friends"

For the past several years, I've been limiting my news consumption to about 5 hours of local news a week, usually "watched" while I'm preparing dinner. 

Yesterday, there was a story about a nearby town's preparations for the nation's oldest continually running July 4 parade. From the looks of it, the parade is mostly local groups, marching through the streets, making their music, performing their dances, and waving their flags, while the rest of the town comes out to wave their own flags and cheer. The key figure in the story was an older woman who has been part of organizing the festivities for the past several decades. The story concluded with her saying, "We're just as excited today as they were back then."

There was another "World Cup" adjacent story about a young teen whose health issues have made it impossible for her to play her beloved soccer. She has now started a drive to raise money to help others in her situation. The concluding thought from this girl, "I'm just happy I can help others."

There were more stories, of course, but I'm going to stop there because I'm tearing up as I write this. I often find myself tearing up as I watch my local news. There are, of course, darker stories. There was, for instance, the frozen food warehouse that recently burned down. That story was mostly interviews with the people who live around the facility. The smoke was bad, but some of the people say that the stench of tons of rotting food is worse.

But compared to national news, the overall slant of my local news is much more positive, probably because it's always about my "neighbors." Even national news stories are offered from a local perspective featuring interviews with local people whose lives are directly impacted. This is so much more elevating than professional pontificators who seethe and shout based on some sort of abstract political theory or other. As you know, national news tends to thrive on setting up everything as conflict and performative debate between partisans. It raises your blood pressure, but otherwise goes no where. 

What I enjoy about my small doses of local interviews is that the people on my screen aren't shy about not having all the answers, of being internally conflicted between this or that approach, and overall showing their genuine emotion and concern. Even when I suspect they don't vote the way I do, I still get to see their fuller humanity on display, which naturally allows me to better understand where they're coming from. This is what it means to me to be well-informed about the issues.

This is why I get teary. I get teary because these are the actual people amidst whom I live. And I like them. I like that they're my neighbors. Every year, right around the 4th of July holiday, I find myself getting teary. I know our great "experiment" in democracy is far from perfect. I know that people continue to be poor, oppressed, and left out. I feel for them and strive to use my own political agency to rise them up, set them free, and bring them in. I've shared many of these actions here on the blog over the years, for what it's worth.

I get teary because despite our ongoing failures, I'm moved and even amazed by this audacious thing we are trying to do as a nation. For 250 years, a relatively short time in the scheme of human existence, we have, in our way, as a nation of we the people, attempted to self-govern. It's messy, even ugly at times. And the way our media, politics, and technology has evolved makes it even messier and uglier. But when I turn to my neighbors, when I turn to the people amidst whom I actually live, I continue to be inspired by what we're capable of striving toward, who we are capable of being. Democracy will always be an experiment. It will never be perfect. The promise isn't happiness, but rather the collective pursuit of happiness.

This weekend, I'll be celebrating, not with family, not with old friends, but with my neighbors. 

Among my greatest inspirations is Mister Rogers' whose work with young children was rooted in the metaphor of the neighborhood. In his daily program Mister Roger's Neighborhood, he gave us a blueprint of how the medium of television could be used to pull people together rather than divide them. "Since we're neighbors, let's be friends." It's both a simple and breathtaking aspiration.

It's the neighborhood, the people amidst whom we live, the people we see at the local coffee shop, grocery store, out walking the dog, for which we are made. When I think of democracy, that's who I think about. When I get teary, these are the people, these every day people full of doubts, emotions, fears, and passions, that touch me the most. 

I worry that so many of us don't have the privilege that so many people my age had of growing up in real neighborhoods. They still exist, but they're much harder to find these days.

This is why I believe that the central purpose of every preschool is to be that local community for this generation of young children. To be a place where we learn about and from real people, rather than the cartoon cutouts that come to us through a media that thrives on stereotype and division. Our preschools can be the place where young children first learn that the messiness of self-government need not turn ugly; where empathy and compassion grow best; where real people come together to talk about their concerns, their ideas, and their needs; where negotiation, compromise, and ultimately agreement stand at the center of our relationships with one another. Our preschools can be places in which young children are marinated in community.

I've always approached preschool as an experiment, both for me, and for the children, because that's what our democracy is: an experiment in living together. It's an experiment in which the beaker sometimes blows up in our faces, in which the results are not always what we expected, and in which we the people are the only ones who have the power to do something about it. It's from this foundation of being good neighbors that we can hope for a better tomorrow.

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Books have a way of transforming us unlike any other media out there. Be it fiction or non-fiction, a books has the power to fully immerse us into a world in way that makes us come out the other side a changed -- and better -- person. I've put together this list of 16 books that have done that for me. They are intentionally not early childhood books, although each one has, in one way or another, profoundly transformed my work with young children. Maybe you'll find a few new ones here that will do the same for you. To download the list, 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!

Imaginative Play is Thinking Play

Imaginative play is the backbone of most of the play we see in our preschool classrooms. It might be making art or building with blocks or playing house or putting on costumes and creating entire worlds. It's the opposite of our cultural stereotypes of "school" because it's not about "just the facts." On the contrary, it's about counter-factual thinking, which is, as it sounds, using our imaginations to create something that isn't, in fact, real.

They use their imaginations to paint a "spooky ghost with spider legs" or build a Lego laser or bake a pan of play dough muffins. They play games in which they are mommies or baddies or baby snow leopards. Sometimes critics of play-based learning point this out as a nothing more than a silly waste of time, but nearly everything around us that isn't nature is a product of counter-factual thinking. Someone had to first imagine a vehicle that propelled itself with a motor before it could ever become a reality.

Imaginative play is more than invention, of course. It's also how children come to understand their world. When they pretend to cook they are exploring, from the inside, something that is obviously important to understand. Dress up play is a gateway to storytelling and ultimately literacy. It's also a part of how we develop empathy and understanding of others. 

The imaginative play of children often seems dreamlike as they cobble together their play from fragments of past experiences, loose parts, compromise, and agreement. In imaginative play there can be two queens, talking gorillas, and healthy cookies. An orange rind can become a rainbow. A stick can be . . . well, almost anything.

Yesterday, I wrote of our memories as something we construct, or as experimental psychologist Frederic Bartlett put it, an "imaginative reconstruction," born anew, altered, adapted, and improved, each time we evoke them. He also argued that imagination is a product of memory. Indeed, the process of assembling bits and pieces into a cohesive product of imagination is, in our brain, remarkably similar to the process we use to call up memories. 

As neuroscientists Charan Ranganath puts it, "the hippocampus and the DMN (default mode network) . . . function at the crossroads between memory and imagination by allowing us to extract the ingredients from past experiences and recombine them into new creations. In other words, our brains are not memorization organs, but rather thinking organs, and imagination, not being a silly waste of time at all, stands at the center of it.

When we attempt to make children stop playing in order to force-feed them academics we are, in a pathetic adult-centric way, attempting to control their memories, the raw material they have at their disposal for thinking. And what dull stuff it is. Foolishly, we declare that all children must be forced to know this or that, ignoring the fact that our brains have evolved to be singular, to take in meaningful information and transform it in unique and idiosyncratic ways (i.e., by thinking) into something else. That is the entire story of human evolution.

And that is exactly what children are doing as they engage in their imaginative play. They are making memories and meaning, meaning and memories, in a creative cognitive process, which is, at the end of the day, what our brains are meant to do.

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Books have a way of transforming us unlike any other media out there. Be it fiction or non-fiction, a books has the power to fully immerse us into a world in way that makes us come out the other side a changed -- and better -- person. I've put together this list of 16 books that have done that for me. They are intentionally not early childhood books, although each one has, in one way or another, profoundly transformed my work with young children. Maybe you'll find a few new ones here that will do the same for you. To download the list, 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!

"Well, He Won't Do That Again"

"Well, he won't do that again."

We've all said, or at least thought it. And more often than not (but not always) we're right. Like when a child goofs around on the edge of a fountain on a cold day and falls in. We expect that unpleasant experience to "teach" them a lesson. At least, we hope, it's less likely that they're going to need us to caution them about it the next time. Either they're going to avoid it or they're going to use the information they gathered the next time to exercise a bit more caution

This doesn't mean that we don't care about their tears. Of course, we comfort the child. Dry them off. Get them new clothes. But we don't need to add to the unpleasantness by attempting in our heavy-handed adultness to "drive the point home" with a lot of "So what did we learn today?" style scolding. That just shifts the focus from the actual lessons learned to whether or not the adult is pleased with them, which is a different thing. 

In his book Why We Remember, neuroscientist Charan Rangnath, writes, "We are wired to learn from our mistakes and challenges -- a phenomenon called error-driven learning." It's learning that derives from actively doing (playing on the edge of a fountain) rather than passively memorizing (listening to a safety lecture). If a child really wants to play by the fountain, no amount of our cautioning will teach them as effectively as that error.

Memory is a strange thing. Most of what you will do today will never become part of your memory. The boy who fell in the fountain will likely never fully recall the events leading up to his fall. He will, if necessary, be able to construct a "memory" involving walking to the bus stop with his classmates and riding to the Wooden Boat Center, but that will mostly be his brain determining what "must have" happened rather than what "actually happened." 

Our brains have not evolved for literal recall, which is why we struggle with things like remembering the name of that movie with that actor from that other movie. Or as cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker puts it, "Our minds evolved by natural selection to solve problems that were life-and-death matters to our ancestors, not to commune with correctness."

No, what this boy will remember of the events leading up to his fall will be largely cobbled together from what is called his semantic memory, which is "our ability to recall facts of knowledge about the world, regardless of when and where that information was learned" and applied "across a range of contexts." In other words, other field trips and bus rides will play at least as large a role in what he remembers.

When he recalls the fall itself, however, and perhaps the immediate aftermath (the shivering, the discomfort, the consequences), that will be called up by his episodic memory, which is "the kind of remembering that allows us to call back, and even reexperience, events from the past." It's still a construction, but one that requires us to "mentally return to a specific place and time." Episodic memory is what we generally refer to when we talk about "our memories." (Although, this too is a construction, or an "imaginative reconstruction.")

Much of what passes for education in our schools involves training children to do something that isn't natural to the human mind, which is precise recall, usually assessed by testing. The problem, as Rangnath puts it is that "tests are optimized for last-minute learning that enhances short-term performance at the expense of retention." And as we know, most of what we store in our short-term memory is gone within days, if not hours.

"Lasting benefits come from error-driven learning, during which we are not always going to be successful," writes Rangnath. "We learn and retain more from the struggle of pushing ourselves to the edges . . . than we do by memorizing and regurgitating on command." This is a big part of why play-based learning, which could really just be another name for error-driven learning, is so powerful.

"Perhaps," concludes Rangnath, "instead of rewarding success, we should normalize mistakes and failures and incentivize constant improvement. Rather than emphasizing mastery, we need to celebrate the struggle -- working to learn, rather than to prove you have learned something."

In this case, he's writing about his university students. Fascinatingly, he is not opposed to testing, but rather believes that we do testing in the wrong way. In his work, he uses tests not as a foundation for grades, but rather as learning tools in which his students are free to be wrong. He's found that "when we look under the hood of the hippocampus . . . we see that the benefits of testing do not come from making mistakes per se, but rather from challenging yourself to pull up what you have learned." The more often we do that, the more likely it is that we will be able to recall it.

"Well, he won't do that again."

The boy tested his world. He fell into cold water on a cold day. The consequences tell him it was a mistake. But this is different than a university test with its precise answers. As adults we might think there is a "correct answer," that the boy has learned to never again goof around on the edge of a fountain. We may even try to drive that point home, but that may not be how he sees it. His urge to goof around on the edge of the fountain may remain, but what he has done, through error-driven learning, is gain information that will make it less likely that he fall in the future.

He may still hop up on that fountain if, say, it's a warm, sunny day when the consequences of a fall won't be so uncomfortable

He may still hop up on that fountain if, say, he feels he has developed a better sense of balance.

He may still hop on that fountain if, say, the adults turn their backs, because, at the end of the day, he was curious about testing a different kind of limit.

Perhaps the worst thing we do in education is make children afraid of being wrong. They worry about bad grades, adult disapproval, or even punishment, instead of being free to struggle toward their own learning. Error-driven learning is play-based learning. It's not the successes that matter, but the pursuit of success that gets us out of bed in the morning. And that's where the learning is.

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The Preschool Autism Summit is going to be great! Our understanding of autism and educating autistic children is changing almost daily. I can't wait to dig into all 30 of these sessions. I know I'm going to learn a lot . . . And I know I'm going to be a better teacher for it. And it's FREE . . . So why not join us for 3 days of outstanding summer PD? Get your free pass right 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!