Mind in the Making

Mind in the Making: The Principles of Facilitated Learning

2013-06-10T17:51:22+00:00

download The Principles of Facilitated Learning

Executive function skills are critical for children to learn

2013-04-25T18:42:48+00:00

By Ellen Galinsky

There have been an increasing number of highly influential calls for America to wake up to the importance of what are called "executive function skills."

Take the high school graduation rate. Economics professor at Princeton University and former member of the President's Council of Economic Advisors, Cecilia Rouse, was asked on PBS's Need to Know a while back what she would do to improve the high school graduation rate (where America is reported as 21st among the top 28 industrialized nations). In addition to stating that she would invest more in the early childhood years and would provide more support, including mentors, for children in the 8th to 9th grade transition, Rouse called for a rigorous curriculum that includes promoting executive function skills. She says:

When you talk to employers, they say that students and job applicants ... don't have the executive functioning kind of skills to really be able to function in today's workplace.

Noting that machines and computers can now perform routine tasks, she states that we need employees who can do what ONLY people can do, such as problem solve and use their creativity. Unfortunately, however, she concludes:

Many people have argued that our curriculum is stuck back in the 1950s and 1960s and that everyone, soup to nuts, needs to be thinking about what are the skills that we need to be teaching our children going forward.

To help educators and parents better understand the role executive function skills play, I'll be participating in a free webinar on May 7 titled "Mind in the Making: Executive Function and the Seven Essential Life Skills Every Child Needs." The webinar is open to anyone who's interested in finding out more and it's hosted by Bright Horizons. You can go here to sign up.

During the webinar, parents will discover:

The simple everyday things parents can do to build life skills in your children
The connection between life skills and school readiness
Strategies to help fuel your child’s natural passion for learning
Methods for empowering your child to manage stress, take on challenges and build resilience

(We'll also be giving away five free copies of my book, Mind in the Making: The Seven Essential Life Skills Every Child Needs.)

High Quality Preschool for All: Why It’s So Important

2013-02-14T22:40:53+00:00

President Obama made history this week when he called for “high quality preschool for all” during the State of the Union address.

But why is this proposal so critical?

Erin Ramsey, Mind in the Making's new Senior Program Director, offers her perspective:

We now know that learning begins at birth.

We also know that the relationships, environments, and the opportunities for learning are key factors in children’s healthy development. The brain is rapidly developing during the first five years of life and it is imperative that children are engaged in loving, trusting relationships; in safe, peaceful and stimulating environments and receiving good nutrition in order for the brain’s infrastructure to make the connections.

These factors are essential to school readiness and lifelong success.

To Let Kids Fail Or Not To Fail…

2013-01-30T18:35:18+00:00

“Why Parents Need to Let Their Children Fail,” is the title of an Atlantic article getting lots of attention this week.

The piece, written by Jessica Lahey, who writes about education and parenting, cites a new study looking at the ramifications of students not being allowed to fail.

This from Lahey’s piece:

“The stories teachers exchange these days reveal a whole new level of overprotectiveness: parents who raise their children in a state of helplessness and powerlessness, children destined to an anxious adulthood, lacking the emotional resources they will need to cope with inevitable setback and failure.

I believed my accumulated compendium of teacher war stories were pretty good -- until I read a study out of Queensland University of Technology, by Judith Locke, et. al., a self-described "examination by parenting professionals of the concept of overparenting."

Overparenting is characterized in the study as parents' "misguided attempt to improve their child's current and future personal and academic success."

Not surprisingly, the article has got tons of people pretty vocal for one side or the other.

When I tweeted a link to the article, I got two opinoins on the debate:

@ASQHealthcare wrote:

So agree about this. Kids need to fail sometimes to learn problem-solving skills.

And @EdNavigation wrote:

Without "overparenting," the #child's "failures" may have catastrophic results. Just ask #parents of those with #autism, etc.

It’s hard to prescribe one approach because every kid and parent is so different. That means, parents and educators have to decide on what works best for their situations.

But what if allowing children to suffer setbacks they are able to flourish?

“I like the notion of failing to succeed,” says Ellen Galinsky, author of “Mind in the Making: The Seven Essential Skills Every Child Needs.”

In Chapter 7 of her book “Skill Seven: Self-Directed, Engaged Learning” she points out that “all children have weaknesses,” but “how do we deal with those? I think it’s important for children to know that making mistakes is an essential part of learning.”

Talking to Young Children About the Death of Young Children

2012-12-18T18:52:29+00:00

By Ellen Galinsky

The front pages of newspapers show hearses lined up and the headlines talk of the mournful task of saying goodbye. An eight-year-old child is quoted in a New York Times article, speaking of his six-year-old friend, Jack Pinto:

I used to do everything with him. We liked to wrestle. We played Wii We just played all the time. I can’t believe I’m never going to see him again.

America has had a collective experience of death over the past days. Amid the December skies and the festively lit Christmas trees in Newtown, Connecticut are the votive candles, the shrines, the stuffed animals, and the loving notes to the children and adults who tragically lost their lives on December 14^th.

This shared and heartbreaking loss has spilled into all of our lives, whether near or far, whether old or young, whether we knew those who lost their lives or not.

For many of us, this collective loss has raised questions of how we talk about this the loss with children—from safety in schools, to killings, to death.

For some of us, this collective loss reminds us of the loss of our own children—as it does for me—soon after his birth years ago on a December day, not unlike today. And I, like many parents in Newtown, faced the task of telling my five-year-old son about the death of his brother.

60 MINUTES: Babies help unlock the origins of morality

2012-11-19T19:39:20+00:00

Are we born good? Great piece on 60 Minutes last night.

Can infants tell right from wrong? And if so, how would you know? Come to Yale's baby lab. Lesley Stahl reports.

Raising Thankful Children

2012-11-15T17:00:34+00:00

Julie A. Riess, Ph.D., is a consultant on Child Development and Education at Families and Work Institute. She is a developmental psychologist and the director of the Wimpfheimer Nursery School at Vassar College.

This article was originally published in the Poughkeepsie Journal by Gannett Publications on November 19, 2000.

As we enter this season of Thanksgiving, we may find ourselves reflecting more often on how to raise a thankful child. At first glance, parents might think about how to teach the social scripts of thank you. Should a two-year-old be forced to say “thank you” to Grandma for a gift? Should a four-year-old sign a thank you note for a birthday present? Should a six-year-old show appreciation for a large helping of spinach and cranberry sauce on his or her Thanksgiving plate?

Parents often have the best intentions of raising a thankful child as part of their parental job descriptions. We tend to use the social graces of “please” and “thank you” as one index of raising “a good kid.” Indeed, manners such as these are important tools for getting along and working together with others in our society.

Vote Early, Vote Often!

2012-11-03T03:19:39+00:00

Julie A. Riess, Ph.D., is a consultant for Child Development and Education at Families and Work Institute. She is a developmental psychologist and the director of the Wimpfheimer Nursery School at Vassar College.

This article was originally published in the Poughkeepsie Journal by Gannett Publications on October 26, 2008.

I have a campaign message for parents: Vote early and vote often.

Although this may sound like a suggestion to become parents who are role models in corruption of the political system, it is actually a message about the important role parents play in the political socialization of their children.

Let’s Take Life-Skills Learning Seriously

2012-10-15T18:15:53+00:00

By Ellen Galinsky

When I left the Education Summit everyone seemed to be talking about developing life skills, not just basic academics, in children as a way to ready the workforce of the future. That's a good thing. What's not so good is the perception that such skills, including self-control and taking on challenges, are soft, or non-cognitive skills.

These skills require intellect and are indeed cognitive skills as much as they're social and emotional skills.

If we don't get the language right we risk seeing the focus on skills end up as an education flavor of the month.

Part of the problem may be all the recent hype around the premise of Paul Tough, author of a new book titled "How Children Succeed." Tough, who has been showing up everywhere lately, including NPR, the Wall Street Journal, and at last week's Summit, is promulgating the idea that skills, including self-control and persistence, are non-cognitive.

He argues against what he calls the "cognitive hypothesis" where what matters most is stuffing information into children's brains. Instead (the operant word), he calls for developing different qualities:

..a list that includes persistence, self-control, curiosity, conscientiousness, grit, and self-confidence. Economists refer to these as non-cognitive skills, psychologists call them personality traits, and the rest of us sometimes think of them as character.

I, too, have been investigating these issues for the past eleven years by reviewing longitudinal studies from numerous academic disciplines. I have found that, in fact, there are a group of skills that predict school and life success, and many are similar to Tough's. These include focus and self control, perspective taking, communicating, making connections, critical thinking, taking on challenges, and being a self directed learner. This is the list of skills I would argue are most important because they are based on numerous studies that follow children as they grow up.

Using the list of skills I identify, it is clear that they are indeed cognitive. They are also social and emotional. All of these skills are based on executive functions of the brain. These are the brain functions we use to manage our attention, our emotions, and our behavior in pursuit of our goals. Adele Diamond, one of the foremost researchers on executive functions, finds that they predict children's success as well as--if not better than--IQ tests, as she explains:

Typical traditional IQ tests measure what's called crystallized intelligence, which is mostly your recall of what you've already learned--like what's the meaning of this word, or what's the capital of that country? What executive functions tap is your ability to use what you already know--to be creative with it, to problem-solve with it--so it's very related to fluid intelligence, because that requires reasoning and using information.

The skills I think we should promote are not only cognitive-social-and emotional, they reap cognitive results. As just one example, a new study by Megan McClelland of Oregon State University and her colleagues found that one aspect of executive function skills in four-year-olds--what the researchers call "attention-span persistence"--is strongly predictive of whether or not these same children graduated from college when they were 25-years-old. The researchers define attention span-persistence as "the ability to focus, attend to relevant information, and persist on a task."

All this dovetails nicely into the key theme from last week's Summit. Amid the familiar educational rhetoric, it became clear that the concept of an achievement gap has evolved into the notion of a workforce readiness or skills gap. Three prominent CEOs--Ellen Kullman of DuPont, John Noseworthy of the Mayo Clinic, and Eric Spiegel of Siemens made this point loud and clear at the Summit, reinforced by many prominent educators, the current Secretary of Education Arne Duncan and several of his predecessors, researchers and case studies.

There was the predictable search for a magic bullet to move the United States ahead from its slipping international standing in educational attainment and in workforce readiness. Is parent choice the answer, Common Core State Standards, higher expectations, teacher quality, or parent engagement? These debates were often tied to current events (the Chicago teacher strike, family poverty, etc.) and just as often turned into posturing blame games about who's really for kids--teachers (as represented by unions) versus parents versus school boards versus business. To use a tag line from the 90s: "who's for kids and who's just kidding?"

By rallying around the importance of teaching life skills to our youth we can all say we're for kids. But we're all just kidding ourselves yet again if we end up putting key intellectual qualities in a "soft skills" education bucket.

We need to take the essential life skills I've identified seriously and realize children need both content and skills. Content is the "what" of learning, content is also the "how."

Medicating children to teach focus?

2012-10-09T15:29:48+00:00

By Eve Tahmincioglu

A New York Times article published this morning on how kids without attention disorders are being giving medications is already one of the top emailed stories on the publications website.

It’s gotten lots of people up in arms that doctors are prescribing Adderall, a popular drug to treat attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), to low-income children as a way to increase focus and self-control.

This quote from Michael Anderson, an Atlanta pediatrician quoted in the story:

“I don’t have a whole lot of choice. We’ve decided as a society that it’s too expensive to modify the kid’s environment. So we have to modify the kid.”

Dr. Anderson is one of the more outspoken proponents of an idea that is gaining interest among some physicians. They are prescribing stimulants to struggling students in schools starved of extra money — not to treat A.D.H.D., necessarily, but to boost their academic performance.

Comments about the story are already flowing into our Facebook page this morning. It’s clearly gotten many parents and educators up in arms on social media.

But are there alternatives to drugging up kids when it comes to teaching even the poorest children out there essential life skills?

"We're not going to get into the debate about medication versus non medication but there are other ways for parents and teachers to promote focus and self control," stressed Ellen Galinsky, author of Mind In the Making.

Here are some tips on how to promote focus and self-control in children:

Encourage children to pursue what interests them. When children have deep interests, they become more motivated and pay more attention to what they are learning.
Play games that require children to pay attention, remember the rules and follow directions – I Spy, Red Light/Green Light, Simons Says.
Have children (preschool age or older) play sorting games where the rules change: first ask them to sort by color, then sort by shape. This game has children remember the rules and then resist the temptation to go on automatic and keep doing what they were doing.
Play other games where children (preschool age or older) can’t go on automatic: for example, ask them to say ‘night’ when they see a picture of the sun and to say ‘day’ when they see a picture of the moon. These games help them gain more self-control.
In addition, computer games that promote focus and TV shows that age appropriate and meaningful can also help children with these skills.

And as Galinsky stated in her book:

“Keeping the fire in children’s eyes burning brightly and keeping their engagement in learning strong are what is most essential to me.”