A recent article in Slate, “Why Preschools Shouldn’t Be Like School, has been making the internet rounds lately. Developmental psychologist Alison Gopnik writes about two recent studies from MIT and UC Berkeley, both of which explore the effects of direct instruction on preschool age children.
The basic gist of the studies is that when children are directly shown how to manipulate a toy to make it do interesting things, versus being given the freedom to explore independently, they spend less time with the toy and are less likely to make their own discoveries. Gopnik writes:
As so often happens in science, two studies from different labs, using different techniques, have simultaneously produced strikingly similar results. They provide scientific support for the intuitions many teachers have had all along: Direct instruction really can limit young children’s learning. Teaching is a very effective way to get children to learn something specific—this tube squeaks, say, or a squish then a press then a pull causes the music to play. But it also makes children less likely to discover unexpected information and to draw unexpected conclusions.
Why might children behave this way? Adults often assume that most learning is the result of teaching and that exploratory, spontaneous learning is unusual. But actually, spontaneous learning is more fundamental. It’s this kind of learning, in fact, that allows kids to learn from teachers in the first place.
I don’t think Gopnik or her colleagues are suggesting that preschool can’t be a valuable learning environment. But this article demonstrates that the typical view of school is still all about direct instruction. This is the framework that researchers are still using: preschools should be less like “school”.
Well, I’ll argue that all schools should be less like school, if “school” means listening to what teachers say for eight hours a day. I never cease to find it fascinating (and frustrating at the same time) that Dr. Montessori’s observations about the developmental needs and tendencies of young children still remain relatively unknown in the world of education and psychology and are being “rediscovered” over 100 years later.
I don’t want to dismiss the value of good teachers (they get enough of that from everyone else these days). But I do want to encourage researchers and education policy makers to re-imagine the role of the teacher. The sooner we move away from this antiquated notion of the teacher as the source of knowledge and the student as the vessel, the better. In certain situations, it is appropriate for a teacher to give more direct instruction…but in most cases, students learn more efficiently, and more joyfully, when teachers are facilitators rather than directors.
On a side note, I’ve read two of Gopnik’s books (The Scientist in the Crib: What Early Learning Tells Us About the Mind, and The Philosophical Baby: What Children’s Minds Tell Us About Truth, Love and the Meaning of Life, and both are fantastic.)
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More research that supports Montessori education!
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