Learning to LOVE words, not just read them

D. Mark Weiss PhD - Instructional Technology and Learning Sciences

This interview with Frederick is about how my views of our homeschooling experience have changed after completing my degree in Instructional Technology and Learning Sciences. I'm hoping to make some things more clear than they were years ago as we journeyed through home schooling with our 11 children.

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"In my own family, all 11 of our children can read. But I have noticed that not all of them "love" to read. I've asked them about this observation. They agreed."

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INTERVIEW WITH FREDERICK

Frederick: So you have put some thoughts together about how little children can learn to love words? Let's get to it.

Mark: Well, I have been working on five ideas and just the other day, those ideas finally came together for me. These ideas are about education at home for little children, say between ages one and maybe eight.

Frederick: What about the older children?

Mark: I have gathered some ideas about them too, but let's begin with the the little ones first.

Frederick: OK.

Mark: The first idea is one I have been pondering for maybe 5 or 6 years. I first read it in a book by David A. Bednar called, Increase in Learning and then his book Power to Become. I was struck first by the title Increase In Learning because the title wasn't Increase in Teaching. For me, there has been an elephant in the room about education in the home. We have all experienced teaching that didn't result in learning. And yet learning is the goal for our little ones; for all our children really. So I wondered, is there a way to increase learning without increasing teaching or increasing teacher talking? 

Frederick: That's kind of counter-intuitive.

Mark: It sure was for me. Some people suggest that if a child doesn't learn it's the child's fault. But over the years, I have studied and seen some methods of teaching work better than others when measuring student learning outcomes. So, while our kids do bear some responsibility for their learning, maybe most of it,  those who guide their learning bear some of that responsibility too.

Frederick: That seems fair to me. And parents who decide to educate their children at home have more control over how learning occurs and what methods they use. They don't have to repeat in the home what they experienced when they went to school if they can find better ways.

Mark: Yeah, that's what I have been thinking. So Bednar says in essense that teaching isn't talking first. Rather, "observing, listening and discerning" is a pre-requisite to talking.

Frederick: I'm not sure how that works. That is quite a different picture than I have in my head.

Mark: Right, it was for me too. I kept wondering what he could possibly mean. Another quote from his book  kind of caught me even more by surprise. Bednar, who is a religious leader, continued, "Parents and gospel instructors who talk without observing, listening and discerning teach neither lessons nor people. Rather, they talk to themselves in front of people." That made me laugh at first, when I thought of all the classes I took over the years. I sure saw a lot of professors talk to themselves in front of their students. But, then I began to connect these ideas with some of my research that suggested it was possible for learning to be more student centered rather than teacher centered.

Frederick: How so?

Mark: Observing, listening and discerning painted a picture of a home schooling parent, observing the activities of their little ones, listening to them talk, and then discerning from observing and listening what is really going on in their heads. I began to see that this approach meant that the prompts for what to do next at home, especially for little ones, were centered more in the child and not as much in the parent/teacher. So rather than all the pressure being on the parent/teacher as the "sage on the stage”, observing, listening and discerning positioned the parent/teacher as more of a "guide on the side", more responsive and supportive of the kids.

Frederick: But parents and teachers are the ones who have the knowledge, and the kids don't have that knowledge. I can't see how the kids can drive the learning process?

Mark: That's a great question, which brings me to the second thought in this string of ideas. When Cyndy and I first began our home schooling odyssey, we attended a conference in the early 80's where Elizabeth Montgomery spoke. She said, "The work of a child is play." I found out later Montgomery wasn't the only person who said that.  That didn't make total sense to me then. But now, after my PhD research it makes more sense to me than ever before.

Frederick: In what ways?

Mark: First let's go back to Bednar. He says teaching begins with observing, listening and then discerning.  If a parent/teacher is going to observe their children, the children have to be doing something to observe, they have to be saying something to listen to. What better "something" to observe than your children at play? If a parent/teacher is going to listen to their children, what better time to listen than to hear them talking while they are playing? I mean children talking when they are playing is so unfiltered, so natural, so representative of them.

Frederick: So if the work of a child is play, what is the work of the parent? 

Mark: Perfect question. The work of the parent, for these young children, is... you guessed it. Observe, Listen, Discern. 

Frederick: Ok but what does that have to do with your research?

Mark: Good question. There is a book, and it was a good one for me, called, "How Learning Works" by Susan Ambrose. Her first chapter gathers a bunch of research together in one place that says that one important way we learn is to build on prior knowledge. We could say build on prior experience. We hear something or see something, think something and then we connect it to stuff already in our heads. For little kids this begins as babies. We don't have them attend a class on talking or walking. They learn these very complicated things by having experiences and building one thing upon the other. It's a very natural way of learning. Some call it an "organic" way of learning. So how do little kids get this "prior knowledge" into their heads? Play. Playing fills their minds with all kinds of experiences in a very natural way. They move, they touch, they hear, they interact and all the time, their minds are being filled with experiences that they later can connect to other new experiences. And this is what most adults have forgotton, namely what they experiened/learned when they played as children, and how much play really contributed to a foundation for future learning.  These prior experiences are really important for kids as they go forward. Remember we are focusing on little kids more than older kids. 

Frederick: But not only important for kids, important for the parent/teachers, because as their children play the parents can observe, listen and then ponder what is going on in their kids heads. Is that right?

Mark: It seems right to me. But there are a couple of things that parent/teachers can become uncomfortable about. Since their play experiences are being gathered in their heads, parents get uncomfortable because it's hard to see the "learning" happening. So they get anxious. And then you have the neighbors, grandparents, and even little friends who are asking questions all the time, comparing, "My child is reading and doing math. How about your/our little Billy?" It takes a lot of courage to let this natural learning process happen, well, "naturally". We keep wanting to be the sage on the stage, like we experienced when we went to school, putting pressure on our kids too soon, but more importantly, putting pressure on us as parents to be something we haven’t trained for years to do. 

Frederick: So you keep saying, "natural or organic". Why is it important that learning be natural as you say?

Mark: Another great question. First, if the future you see for your children includes them being "self-directed learners" or as some say, "independent learners", and not just “test takers and forgeters” they need confidence that they can explore and learn on their own. This confidence that they develop also impacts their movitation to learn. Fighting motivation in students is really an uphill battle.  And of course the early years are so formative. So during those formative years, trusting them to mostly learn by their own experiences communicates to them in a powerful but subtle way that you trust them and that's it's ok for them to trust themselves to learn on their own. This trust that little children all have at first, seems to be really fragile. It seems to me that if we impose on them learning from the outside too soon, they can begin to question whether they should continue to learn on their own, or if they should learn by being told from an outside person. I think that is where the "discernment" that Bednar talks about comes in. And if I were to err, I think I would err on the side of preserving their natural curiosity and independent learning and be very careful about formal instruction too soon.

Frederick: Good advice. Another question has been nagging at me. If in at home, the primary responsibility for home schooling rests on the mom, and I'm not saying that is right, she can't spend all day observing, listening and discerning. I mean she has other things to be doing, and one advantage of a more formal approach to learning in the home is that it sets time boundaries. Once the lessons are done, the kids can do their thing and the mom, in this case, can do her things.

Mark: True, very true. So why not set time boundaries for the observing, listening and discerning?Maybe the parent observes and listens to them for a hour or so, makes a few notes, and calls it good. It sounds too simiple doesn't it? Of course, there would be some spontaneous observing, listening, and discerning moments as well. You wouldn't shut them out. But if moms or dads are going to be able to persist educating in the home, they need to have a life too. So there is a way to get around that.

Frederick: So far this makes sense. But it's kind of high level, kind of theoretical. Can you share some examples to kind of make this approach more accessable?

Mark: Sure. And this is the third idea  and builds on the first two.  The first was "observing, listening and discerning" and the second was "the work of the child is play". The example I will share has to do with learning words and loving them. Getting back to Elizabeth Montgomery. In that presentation we listen to years ago, she introduced to us an educator from New Zealand by the name of Sylvia Ashton Warner. I won't go into her entire story here. But she moved to New Zealand from England and was tasked with using a British teaching method with Maori children about age five. The British method was failing miserably and she began looking for a different approach. If I have this right, and I may not have it perfectly, she changed her daily organization and began each school day with an hour of play, art, dancing, and maybe even walks outside. She moved about among the children and listened to their conversations as they played, noting the words they used. In time, she also noticed that some words used by the children sounded more important somehow. These words were packed with emotion. She eventually called these words, "first words".  So listening to their conversation and paying special attention to the "first words" used by the children, she would write a word down on a thick card. Then she would meet with the child, have them trace each letter of the word with their finger and then she would say the word to them. Then ask them "what is this word?",  whereupon the child would repeat the word back to her. She would congratulate the child, give them the card and have them put it in their back pack.

Frederick: So what happened next?

Mark: Well, the next day she would have them bring the card back out of their backpack, have them look at the card and ask them, "What is this word?" Amazingly, in most cases the child would repeat the word. She would repeat the process frequently enough so that overtime, each child had a number of words and cards that belonged to them. The genius was that the words were the words that the children loved, felt emotion about and were their very own. She used the words that "belonged" to the child, to "teach" them how to read and spell. Over time, as the children came to class, Warner would collect the cards from each child, gather the children together in a circle on the floor, put the cards in the middle of the circle and have each child "claim" a card, one at a time, name the word and spell it. This activity continued until all the cards were claimed. Sometimes a card would go unclaimed, suggesting to Warner, that this word was no longer a "first word" for any of the children in her class. That was fine. She moved on, day by day, collecting more words, making more cards and giving the cards to that child.

Frederick: So this is what you mean by observing, listening and discerning?

Mark: Well it's one way to look at it isn't it? Her approach goes beyond that though.

Frederick: In what way?

Mark: Sometimes, during play time, as she moved around among the children in her class, she not only listened for words, she also listened for the stories the children told one another. Stories about their families, about tradgedies, pets, walking home from school, etc. All kinds of things. She would write down the stories she heard, made up of the words that "belonged" to the children, and would carefully use the stories to "teach" the children reading skills. The words of these stories were words common to most of the children in the class. So when they would "read" them together, they enjoyed the experience. They would help one another too. Learning to read was enjoyable instead of an onerous learning task.

Frederick: So this is quite different than the "Dick and Jane" approach that I remember using at that age in school.

Mark: The "Dick and Jane" approach is ok I guess, except the words may or may not "belong" to the children. Those words are kind of imposed on them in a way. And imposing words may teach the how to read. But they may not learn to love to read. The Dick and Jane experience is just a bit foreign.  The words used in the stories collected by Warner, WERE words that belonged to the children, and the stories were their own too. The experiences in the stories were their own. And the stories represented to the childen, "life" as they really experienced it. There is a certain authenticity to this approach that children seem to recognize and appreciate. This approach is immediately more comfortable. 

Frederick: So, listening, observing and discerning isn't only about "first words",  it's also about stories too... the stories that belong to the kids themselves rather than made up by some curriculum writer. That is really facinating. And it makes sense. But...

Mark: You want to know if I have had experience with this myself? Well I have in senior engineering classes at the university.

Frederick: Really with nearly graduated college students?

Mark: Yep. And actually when we were home schooling our children, Cyndy did something quite similar. She would ask our kids to tell her a story. She would take it down word for word. Then she would help them read it back to her. Or sometimes she would have them draw a picture. Then she would have them tell a story about the picture. Again, she would write it down word for word and then help them read the story back to her.

Frederick: So she came up with that on her own?

Mark: Yes she did. Interestingly, I recently had an experience with this approach, a small one, in my own extended family. Let me share this before I share what happened in the senior engineering class. Our family shares videos with one another online. One of our sons, Ben, shared a video of two of his daughters. Ben had just come home from Mexico and brought home with him large "surprise eggs". These eggs are chocolate, covered with foil and have a surprise inside. His oldest daughter pealed the foil off the egg quickly, opened the egg and found her surprise. The younger daughter was struggling with finding a starting place for the foil. The older daughter grabbed the egg to open it for her sister. We could hear our son's voice on the video say, "Please give the egg back to your sister and let her do it on her own." To which the older daugher replied, "Dad, I am just trying to HELP her." There was an unusual level of emotion attached to the word "help" and I heard it while watching the video. This older daughter is anxious to read. So I called up Ben, reminded him of the video and pointed out to him that when the his older daughter used the word "help" it had a high emotional content attached to it. I explained how he might use this word to help her learn to read. When he got home from work, he didn't use a card, but instead wrote the word on the condensation on a window in his home. Then he explained that this was the word "help", asked her to repeat it and spell it letter for letter. The next day as he was driving to work, he called me and excitedly explained that the next morning before he went to work, he re-wrote the word on the window and without saying the word, asked his daughter what the word was. She said the word and spelled it. That is the end of the story. At this point, we will see if the parents have the discipine to listen, observe and discern how to move forward.

Frederick: So you mention discipline. I mean this is a great story, but this approach is a bit harder than picking up a Dick and Jane book isn't it?

Mark: It kind of depends on the outcome you want for your children. Struggling with kids who don't want to read or don't love to read, can be stressful as well.  As parents, sometimes it's hard to compete with the educational experience we remember having as we were growing up. We don't really remember the younger years that well. We remember the laters years of our education. So we sometimes want to replicate that memory from later in our life, forgetting that we didn't learn that way when we were young.

So if the outcome you want for your children is for them to love to read, how reading is introduced to them, the method of learning to read, can either encourage their love of reading, or discourage it. And it's not just about reading. Let’s talk about senior engineering students. We introduced a completely new way of learning engineering principles. In the interviews afterwards almost to a student they admitted that they wished they had learned engineering this new way from the beginning because it was so authentic and satisfying. They felt that much of their degree had been such a drudgery, and kind of a grind. Warner says that imposing formal learning too soon, is like putting a framework over a tree making it grow in an unnatural shape. "And instead of the wholeness of the expansive tree we have only the twisted and stunted bush." Children can experience in the best of homes imposed frameworks, all well meaning, but that subtly impact that fragile curiosity and natural love of words and learning. They often learn how to accomplish a learning task, at the expense of loving the learning process. We have all seen this.

Frederick: So first words and their own stories. What else did you learn from Warner?

Mark: Warner didn't only use words and stories. During play time, she also had them do crayon drawings. The topics of these drawings, when observed, also provided Warner a window into the minds of their students and provided topics of discussion during class time. If I have it right she would ask questions about the stories and listen to their explanations, gather words and stories, etc. Again, this is another way of observing, listening and discerning.

Frederick: Is there more?

Mark:  She also took the children on walks. A nearby forest and field provided triggers for the kids to talk and ask questions. She also used nature walks to explain arithmetic, pairing, comparing, colors, shapes, and sizes. She would begin with "Explain to me what you see here." And the pointing to something, the conversation would begin as would he observation, listening, and discerning.

Another thought I have had recently has to do with how this applies to Sunday worship in the home. For home schoolers who are religiously oriented, and not all are, I think these same principles can apply. Reading them a story from your religous tradition and asking them to tell it back to you, or draw it for you, can provide yet another opportunity to observe, listen and discern, connecting words, phrases and stories from family experiences to your religious tradition.

Frederick: So let's summarize these ideas.

Mark: Sure. So 1) Bednar suggests observe, listen and discern. Montgomery and others say that 2) the work of the child is play. Ambrose summarized that 3) learning consists of building on prior experiences stored in the mind. We connect that idea with #2, play is the finest way for younger children to put experiences into their minds to which future learning is connected. We need to trust that learning is occurring when they are simply playing. In addition,  4) observing children playing provides an opportunity to observe, listen and discern, especially with the words we hear them speak that are associated with their emotions. Other ways of observing, listening and discerning include  5) the stories children tell one another, the drawings and art they produce, and taking nature walks.

Frederick: Thanks Mark. You've given us a lot to think about.