It's Up To Us To Do It Ourselves

Unless you've been super busy living under your rock, I'm sure you've already heard that Finland has the best schools in the world, at least to the degree that their kids for the past decade have been earning top marks in something called the PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment) survey, which is, I guess, a kind of standardized test comparing all the nations on the earth (or something). 

Even if you hadn't heard the news, serious people have, making Finland the hostess with the mostest when it comes to entertaining delegations of education "fact-finders" from the rest of the western world, including the US. Making it particularly intriguing is that unlike their main competitors like China, Singapore and South Korea, Finland is eschewing the long hours of high-stress rote learning and memorization favored in these Asian nations, opting instead for a system that involves less homework and more play. 

Pasi Sahlberg, director of the Finnish Ministry of Education's Center for International Mobility, has recently authored a book about what they've done and as part of his book promotion was interviewed by Anu Partanan for The Atlantic. The article includes all the usual cool stuff about how the Finn's have gone about building the world's best schools: no standardized tests until high school graduation and highly trained teachers who are permitted a great deal of autonomy in the classroom, along with the aforementioned lighter homework load and more play. But the focus of the article is on the part of Finland's success that seems to befuddle Americans: "the goal was never excellence. It was equity."

Since the 1980's, the main driver of Finnish education policy has been the idea that every child should have exactly the same opportunity to learn, regardless of family background, income, or geographic location. Education has been seen first and foremost not as a way to produce star performers, but as an instrument to even out social inequality . . . this means that schools should be healthy, safe environments for children. This starts with the basics. Finland offers all pupils free school meals, easy access to health care, psychological counseling, and individualized student guidance. 

This is the real difference between Finish schools and the rest of us. Contrast this to the questions Sahlberg says he tends to be asked by Americans when they come, ostensibly, to "learn" about what makes the Finish system work:

From his point of view, Americans are consistently obsessed with certain questions: How can you keep track of student's performance if you don't test them constantly? How can you improve teaching if you have no accountability for bad teachers or merit pay for good teachers? How do you foster competition and engage the private sector? How do you provide school choice? . . . The answer Finland provides seem to run counter to just about everything America's school reformers are trying to do.

Of course, anyone who hasn't been living under that rock, won't be surprised that these are the questions he gets asked the most because, after all, these are the cookie-cutter solutions the corporate reformers have in their briefcases. This is the supply side merchandise they've already manufactured. Now they're busy trying to create a market for standardized tests, merit pay, and privatization. There is no natural demand for what they're selling, so it's all about ginning up hysteria about our failing systems and how they are the free market white knights riding in to save the day. (This is how supply-siders always work by the way: they create "products" for which there is no demand like, say, the Iraq War, then go about creating that demand by playing on people's fear, insecurities or patriotism. The pharmaceutical industry has become very, very good at this.) 

Instead of standardized tests created, administered, graded, and "interpreted" by corporate education companies, the Finns rely on professional teachers who use independent tests they create themselves. And I love Sahberg's answer when asked about "accountability":

"There's no word for accountability in Finnish . . . Accountability is something that is left when responsibility has been subtracted."

As far as "competition:"

The main driver of education policy is not competition between teachers and between schools, but cooperation.

There is no effort made to "engage the private sector."

And there are no private schools: "In Finland parents can also choose, but the options are all the same."

In other words, the Finns have produced the world's top scores on the very standardized tests the corporate reformers are trying to use to scare us into buying their crappy merchandise. Not only that, but from the president on down they keep telling us we need to do what they say in the name of economic competitiveness, yet I don't see Finland, Singapore or even South Korea on anyone's lists of world economic juggernauts. Sure, test crazy China's an economic superpower, but they're a Johnny-come-lately to the testing game, only recently surging to the top of the list, long after they'd made their dramatic economic gains. In other words, there doesn't seem to be much correlation between high test scores and a nation's economic might (or anything else for that matter).

Honestly, from what I know about Finland's system, there are many points to quibble about. It hardly represents what I would consider the best-of-all-possible-worlds school system of my dreams, but it's a whole hell of a lot closer to the kind of rational, progressive approach I think children deserve.

And, oh, how I love the stick in the eye of the corporate reformers, who seem either unable or unwilling to hear it:

Finland's experience shows that it is possible to achieve excellence by focusing not on competition, but on cooperation, and not on choice, but on equity . . . The problem facing education in America isn't the ethnic diversity of the population but the economic inequality of society, and this is precisely the problem that Finnish education reform addressed.

I can hear them shouting, "socialism!" from here, but it just goes to show how much they've twisted that term through using it to fear-monger. It's about equal opportunity, which used to be the most American thing in the world. It seems to me the Finns have identified a basic demand within its citizenry, a demand for equality, then set about satisfying that demand like good capitalists should. Right now in America, we have corporations running amuck and an income gap between rich and poor that is ever-widening. Nearly one in four children live in poverty today. People are loudly demanding a more equitable society. The Finns have a product that seems to satisfy that demand, but it's clear that these so-called capitalists have no intention of bringing it to market.

I guess it's up to us to do it ourselves. Anyone want to start a cooperative?

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We Were Playing Yesterday

Corporate education reform types advocate for standardized testing as a way to assess learning. They seem to like the way the "data" from these tests can be distilled down into raw numbers, then easily charted, graphed, compared, and otherwise manipulated. Of course, much of what we learn (in fact, I would say very little actual learning) can be so easily quantified, so they're forced to focus their tests primarily on reading comprehension and math because those things reduce themselves most easily into numbers, ignoring pretty much everything else a child might have learned, including learning how to learn which is the most important thing to know. Here are a few examples of discoveries made through the process of free play that I observed in our classroom yesterday over about a 30 minute period, none of which will ever be measured by a test.

*****

We were playing yesterday with colored magnetic "washers." 

It's a set with vertical dowels and cards with patterns. The idea is to try to match the pattern on the cards by stacking the washers on the dowel.  You're not just matching the colors, but also trying to match the spacing of the washers depending on whether or not you arrange them so as to attract or repel one another.  Some kids take on the challenge of trying to match the patterns. Others prefer to experiment on their own. 

Rex was doing it his own way, creating a tower with several gaps caused by the magnets repelling each other. He pressed down on the top of his stack of washers, compressing them, then letting them go, creating a kind of bouncy, spring-like effect. Finally, he released the compressed stack suddenly enough that the top few washers flew several inches into the air. He turned to look at me over his shoulder with a big grin, then went back to recreate the experiment several more times, proving it to himself.

*****

We were playing yesterday with a sensory table full of flax seeds, magnet wands, and lots of little metal bits and pieces.

At one point I captured the bottom half of a metal tin on my wand and began using it as a scoop. I said, "Scoop, dump, scoop, dump," as I worked with my accidentally created tool. There were only a couple of kids there and they were busy with their own experiments. I stopped talking and started watching them.

After a couple minutes George was standing beside me. I used my scoop. "Scoop, dump, scoop, dump."

George grabbed a handful of flax seed. I dumped my scoop, but before I could dig back into the seeds, he filled it for me. I continued my pattern, saying, "Dump," then turned the scoop over. George filled it again. We did this for several cycles, "Scoop, dump, scoop, dump," the teamwork getting smoother each time. In fact, with each repetition George filled the scoop faster and soon we were operating like a well-oiled machine.

George shouted, "Three!" I guessed what he meant, holding the scoop out as he quickly put three fists full of the seeds into it. I counted his handfuls, "One, two, three, dump. One, two, three, dump." We then repeated this for several cycles, gradually getting faster and faster.

George shouted, "Five!"

And I complied, "One, two, three, four, five, dump! One, two, three, four, five, dump!" It was an intense minute or so. He was laughing as he did it, apparently losing himself for a moment in our game.

We continued for a couple minutes before he suddenly grabbed his own magnet wand and used it to "steal" my tin bottom.

*****

We were playing yesterday with puzzles with metal bits on the pieces. The challenge is to use a magnet on a string to lift the pieces from their places. The kids didn't think this was enough of a challenge, so they started working on using the magnets on strings to return the pieces to their spots. It took a great deal of concentration and a steady hand. We started calling it "the hard way."

After having successfully restored the pieces to his puzzle Jody said, "I found an even harder way." He then got his magnet on a string swinging like a pendulum, carefully lowering it toward the puzzle until the the magnet was nearly touching the surface, when it got close enough, it suddenly leapt to attach itself to a puzzle piece. "That's the harder way."

*****

We were playing yesterday with small building sets that feature powerful magnets under the boards. The magnetism allows the tiny metal bits to be arranged into structures and shapes that gravity does not normally permit.

Most of the time we create our structures by adding one metal bit at a time, but Finn piled all his pieces into a mound on the magnetic base, then used both hands to sculpt it into a shape as if it was some sort of stiff, unruly metallic clay.

He pushed and shoved the bits, finger-wrestling them, squeezing them, but when he let go, each time the whole thing collapsed. Finally, he said, "I have to hold it to show it to you."

*****

We were playing yesterday with some magnetic letters on a sheet of metal. Or rather, I should say, no one was playing with them, but they were out and available. Nearby a group of kids were playing with the cardboard blocks, working together to build a house that wound up incorporating all of the blocks, leaving an empty cabinet.

At one point I cruised by where they played to find three kids sitting in the cabinet. They were giggling. They told me that this was the bathroom and they were all sitting on the toilet. Later I came by and found all the magnetic letters in the cabinet.

This time they explained, "This is our food." Calder objected, "No, they're letters." River replied, "They're letter food!" Luca picked up an E, saying, "I'm having an E for lunch." The others appreciated the joke and they each retold it, going through the alphabet one bite at a time.

*****

We were playing yesterday with cardboard boxes . . .

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Clutching

A few years ago, we had to quadruple our Hot Wheels collection because we, in a quirk of demographics, enrolled an extra large class of 2-year-old boys. We were forced to make the investment because so many of those boys desired to have a car clutched in each fist.

I've been thinking about writing this post for a few days. I'd assumed

that I didn't need to take any extra photos of kids clutching things

because, well, it's so prevalent I was certain that I'd already have plenty

of photos of the phenomenon. But I was wrong. I take a lot of pictures

of hands (in fact I take mostly pictures of hands) but I'm so focused on

what the children are "doing" that I didn't have any of a child simply

clutching something. At best I have these pictures in which a child

is showing me something, often while I'm trying to get a snapshot

of something else entirely. 

They all pick things up and carry them around, some more than others, but they all do it at some time or another. Sometimes it's a kind of treasured item, like with the Hot Wheels. In any given class there are always girls who have a stuffed animal or doll from the classroom collection that they clutch while moving from place to place, perhaps placing it carefully beside them while, say, making a painting, but picking it up again the moment their hands are free.

I'm not talking about those special comfort items from home, nor even about our classroom items being used as surrogate comfort items, although there is some of that. And I'm not even necessarily talking about special items, like cars or dolls. I'm thinking rather about a stage of play most 2-year-olds seem to go through in which clutching items is the main obvious feature of their play.

They arrive in class with this tendency, I see them in the world around me clutching mom's keys or a rock they've picked up off the ground, and now it's already starting to fade a bit as we're 4 months into our school year. But at any given moment there are still a half dozen children in the room, walking around with something clutched in their hands: a pizza wheel from the play dough table, a pawn from Candyland, the magnifying glass we keep near the tadpoles, a domino. 

It's such a universal behavior that it must be an important thing. For the longest time I just thought it was mostly about not knowing or caring or remembering the convention of picking things up then putting them down, because so often they only put what they clutch down when they spot something else to clutch, usually dropping the first item where they stand, without looking back.

So how does that work? When I clutch an item, I immediately discover things about it's weight, it's texture, it's shape, it's temperature.

When I walk around the room with an item in my fist, adults remark on the item, saying things like, "You have a magnifying glass," or "That belongs on the red table," and when they do I begin to learn something about what I'm holding. After enough people say the words "magnifying glass," I know what it's called. After enough people tell me it belongs on the red table I know that's where it goes.

I try using the item I clutch instead of my hands, perhaps using it to splash water or to apply paint to my paper. Sometimes those results aren't a whole lot different than with my hands or the "approved" tools. Sometimes what happens is not pleasant at all, like when I get water in my eyes. Sometimes the results are worth repeating, like what happens when I drive a car through paint.

Sometimes when I clutch something it causes the other people to freak out. For instance, the other children might wail or try to grab it back or hit me. What an incredible thing that is! Sometimes the adults try to persuade me, or even compel me to stop clutching it, saying things like, "Johnny had it first," or "That's dangerous!" Who knew? Now I do. Or at least I will after clutching those items a few more times.

So why wouldn't I want to clutch items? Who knows what's going to happen simply by holding onto something and going about my life. 

Clutching, I've come to understand, isn't a behavior so much as a series of very earnest questions.

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If You Really Want A Smart And Happy Kid

If you really want a smart and happy kid, watch him. Just hang out while she's doing whatever it is she's doing. 

Try to not ask questions unless you're genuinely curious. Try to not praise unless you're genuinely impressed. Try to not boss him around. When your agenda conflicts with hers, try to understand when she behaves as if there is a conflict.

Try to not even talk unless you have something urgent or informative or heartfelt or very funny to say.

If you don't know the answer, be brave enough to say, "I don't know." If you don't want to answer, say, "I need to think about that," because that's what you're going to be doing right up until you inevitably do answer.

Touch him a lot. Pick her up when she needs it, but otherwise let her stand on her own feet.

When he gets hurt, you'll know what to do; that's the easy part of parenting. The hardest part is letting her just be smart and happy.

This is all good practice for a lifetime as a parent, especially when they're all grown up. The best of it is to love them, to watch them, and to be there because they still need you even if you're not doing anything at all.

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Bigger, Longer, Louder Memories

I suppose everyone's memory works this way, but I often remember things from my childhood as having been much bigger or longer or louder than they were to anyone else. We all know how that might work with a traumatic experience. For instance, the one time the neighbor yells at us for cutting through his rose beds gets transformed through the vagaries of human memory into a campaign of fear and intimidation waged over an entire childhood. Memory works like that for non-traumatic things too. For instance there is a whole slew of toys I recall from a certain period of my boyhood that, in my mind, absorbed and entertained me for years, but that, when I get the "truth" from mom turned out to have been passing fads for a few weeks in the spring of 1968, if she remembers it at all. 

One of the toys that fits into that category for me was a kind of action board game called Rebound. It was a table top take-off on the retirement community game of shuffle board, involving pucks (plastic disks with ball bearings in the center) that you propelled along a track toward the scoring zone. Like shuffle board, the deeper into the scoring zone you placed your puck, the higher your score, unless you were a bit too heavy handed, in which case the puck fell off the end of the board scoring a big, fat zero. The thing that made it much, much cooler than plain old shuffle board was that you had to bounce your puck off a pair of thick rubber bands, positioned at the far end of the board, that caused them to "rebound" back toward you.

Oh man, the way my memory has it, I spent hundreds of hours mastering this game, both in competition with my brother, but also in solitary practice, working on my technique, aim, and velocity. One of the most gratifying aspects of the game was to use your puck to knock your opponent's off the board into the "zero" pot, while yours remained up top, scoring the maximum "100." I worked until I'd more or less mastered this, coming to an intimate understanding of the physics required to place my puck exactly where I wanted it. 

Whether I became as skilled as I recall or worked at it as diligently as I remember, is immaterial. The truth, whatever the truth, is that I became so fully absorbed in understanding something that the process of learning is still with me some 40 years later. Maybe on a clock the time I put into it can be measured in minutes, but in reality it was the work of a childhood.

Several years ago I found a couple re-makes of my old Rebound game at a store at which I no longer shop. I think they're actually better than our old plastic one, being, for one thing, made of wood. I use many toys in our classroom to which are attached my own childhood memories, and some, like when the kids get to play with my old Matchbox car collection, I make sure they know they're special, but most of the time I think it's best to stay out of the way and let them create their own process of learning without some old guy's wildly inaccurate childhood memories getting in the way. 

I've had these out in class before and typically most of the kids will try their hand at it in a sort of drive-by fashion, but there are always one or two boys (targeting toys almost always seem to attract more boys than girls) will really get into it. And this pattern held true this time. 

I more or less stayed out of the way, checking in periodically to make sure they hadn't lost too many of the pucks because replacing them will likely involve detective work, but I observed long enough to have flashbacks to my own childhood experiments. At one point I noticed that only one of the boards was in use, while the other lay fallow. I could see why: someone had removed the rubber bands from the pegs that held them in place. I returned them to their proper position, saying, "This one's fixed now."

When I returned a few minutes later there were no kids playing there and the rubber bands had again been removed, this time from both boards. Sheesh! I replaced them again. Almost immediately the boys returned to play.

When I later found the rubber bands yet again removed, I decided to stay to see what was going on. A team of three 3-year-olds had formed the core of the play there all morning and they returned right away. The scoring zones meant nothing to them. It was all about the hands-on physics of speed and trajectory. I guess I should say this was true for two of the boys. The third one, Luca, was just observing, standing quietly alongside as his friends raced their pucks. It was during a lull in the action caused by a hunt for a lost puck under a piece of furniture that I noticed his fingers deftly creep across the board where they carefully removed both rubber bands. With the puck recovered, his buddy returned to the table only to be disappointed to once more find the board was "broken." 

The two Rebound players then joined forces on the one functioning board, but it wasn't long before Luca again found an opportunity to remove those rubber bands as well. When the boys discovered that both boards were now, once again, broken, Luca said, "Let's go in the loft."

I'm still not 100 percent certain that Luca was fully aware of what he was doing, but writing it all down here, it sure seems like he must have had a plan, one that he'd worked out over the course of the morning. Not everyone wants to "go deep" with Rebound. Some people would rather play with their friends in the loft.

They crowded themselves together up the stairs and into the loft. Luca had done something pretty cool, every bit as cool as figuring out how to knock an opponent's puck off the board. I wonder if this will be one of those bigger, longer, louder memories for Luca. Or maybe it will be one for me.

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Something That Matters

In the decade I've been at Woodland Park, we've sent two kids to the hospital. One turned out to be a precautionary over-reaction. The other involved a boy who tripped while walking on a smooth, dry linoleum floor, splitting his chin open, requiring two stitches.

I think that's a pretty good track record for a school like ours with a play-based curriculum, although this isn't to say we don't suffer our fair share of bumps, bruises, scrapes, and cuts. I'd be awfully wary of any preschool that doesn't boast its fair share of those. As an Austrian ski instructor named Lars once told me, "If you don't fall down, you can't learn anything."

I've written before about the concrete slopes that for better or worse are features of our outdoor classroom, and most recently about how the children, after a bit of retrofitting by the parent community, now use the longer, steeper one as a concrete slide. Seeing how much fun they were having with it, taking turns climbing to the top, the sliding back down, I at first regretted that we'd removed the site's original very tall, rusty metal one, but now that we've entered a state of "normalized relations" with the slopes, I'm seeing that what we have is far more versatile than a proper slide, which is, after all a kind of one trick pony, hardly worth the real estate it takes up.

They're still sliding down the slope, of course, but now it's not "sliding" so much as just a way to get from one place to another. Many of the kids have now developed a kind of full-body confidence on the steep slope that can only come from experience, dropping almost casually onto their bottoms to slide down, often continuing to carry on their conversations while in motion. There's very little of the tottery-ness that characterized our first couple months of school, the kind of physical behavior that had the adults catching their breaths. Whereas in the beginning, even the most physically adept among us would climb up it using hands and feet, now most of the kids who like to play there are pretty much just walking up and down the slope like they would any of the thousands of paved hills in this city of paved hills.

In the weeks leading up to the holiday break, the kids had started taking ropes up the slope with them, then dangling them down its face, almost like they were fishing for friends, who, of course, took the bait. I'll confess at first to wondering if this was something to which we needed to put a stop, but as I watched them play, I found myself genuinely impressed by the remarkable care and caution they demonstrated with themselves and one another. The adults at Woodland Park often talk about helping children assess their own risk, about how helping children learn to be responsible for their own safety is the single most important thing we can do to create the kind of school that doesn't regularly send kids to the hospital, while still giving them the opportunity to "fall" so that, you know, as Lars says, they learn something.

The first thing I noticed was that despite how it looked, none of the kids were really putting their full weight on the ropes being dangled down the hill for them to grab while climbing up. They already knew not to fully trust the stability of the child who served as the uphill anchor for their climbing rope. In fact, the rope climbing was as much a dramatic play exercise as a physical one, as most of the kids were merely walking up the slope under their own power while holding onto the rope with one hand, creating the illusion they were using it to climb.

As for the kids serving as anchors, many of them started by standing in a full upright position, but as their downhill friends put more of their weight on the rope, they began to lean back on their haunches. As more weight was applied, they fell into a full squat, further lowering their center of gravity until finally they found the most stable anchoring position of all was to take a seat on the ground, eliminating the risk that they would be pulled down the hill.

When kids found themselves losing their balance, when the rope holder's strength began to sag, when the climber lost momentum, it was a sight to see them recognize what was happening, then simply drop to their hips and slide to the bottom where they could start over with a little more wisdom under their belts. 

During the time the kids were doing this the other day, there were three of us adults fully engaged in keeping our eyes on things. Finn and Grey's mom Jenny stood directly at the bottom of the slope making informational statements about what she saw happening, occasionally, and without unnecessary urgency, warning the kids, of course, about things they might not have noticed (e.g., "Rex, Luella is right behind you.") Charlotte's mom Amanda and I were a ways off, discussing what we saw, almost trying to find reasons for the kids to stop doing what they were doing, but we couldn't.

While we saw children engaged in "risky" behavior, I'm quite certain that none of the kids saw it that way. It was a self-selected activity, one limited by their own willingness to test their capabilities. We adults could have made them see "the danger" by repeatedly pointing out the hardness of the concrete or the steepness of the slope. We could have raised their level of caution about the insecure nature of the ropes they were using to climb up and down. We could have caused them to question their confidence, their judgement, their competence. We could have raised their level of anxiety and doubt. But instead we found a way to stand back and let the children figure these things out for themselves, leaving them to discoveries about their own judgment and abilities, ones grounded in experience rather than our worst-case-scenario fears.

Parents often talk about wanting to teach their kids to be responsible, then go about it by trying to boss them into it, picking for them those things for which we think they ought to feel responsible (e.g., "Clean up your room" "Make your bed."). But this mostly just teaches obedience, which does nothing to further the kind of responsibility we want children to take on. The problem is that it's almost impossible to feel responsible for things that one sees as unimportant. We might clean our room, but if we're taking responsibility for anything it's for keeping mom happy (which is not the same thing), even if we're not just doing it to avoid a punishment. 

Responsibility always involves something that matters and nothing more manifestly matters than our own safety. And that is exactly what we are doing when we give them the space to test themselves with "risky" physical or emotional behavior -- balancing, climbing, swinging, running down hills, swinging hammers, public speaking, performing on a stage -- responsibility for something that matters to them. When we step back and allow children to engage reality as they see it before them, without our always being there to catch them, without our anxieties there to cloud their judgment, we find that they are perfectly capable of being responsible for themselves, which is ultimately the responsibility from which all others come.

And sure, as Lars will tell you, they'll fall if they're ever going to learn anything, but they'll do that anyway, even while walking on a smooth, dry linoleum floor.

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