How Instruction Impacts Learning

[lewelma]

As promised I'm keen to keep our more interesting discussions alive. This is a topic that I've been thinking about for a while.

I've been a homeschool teacher for 16 years and been tutoring kids in math, science, and English for 5 years, and I have been working through lots of ideas about instruction vs learning.  Now I'm working my way through Learning Theories by Schunk https://www.amazon.com/Learning-Theories-Educational-Perspective-8th/dp/0134893751/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=learning+theories%3A+an+educational+perspective&qid=1578339612&s=books&sr=1-1

I've come to believe that teaching is not learning.  This seems like an obvious statement, but I used to top-down teach content in the most organized manner so that students (mine and others) could learn in the most efficient manner. I'm starting to believe that the development of attitude, motivation, and self efficacy are way way more important than content production and delivery. Two of my sisters are teachers (private HS science and Prof in Engineering at CC) and one is a counselor. The 2 teacher sisters decide what content to cover (unless dictated by AP exam or UVA engineering), produce and record lectures, produce handouts, design labs, and write and grade assessments.  My counselor sister sits one on one with clients and discusses their issues, suggests alternative ways to interpret, and gives them homework in the form of journalling to help them change their perceptions of self and how they face their problems.

As a tutor and a homeschool teacher, I have found that I am WAY more like my counselor sister than my 2 teacher sisters. And I have also found that as a tutor I am cleaning up the messes that the teachers are giving the kids in the form of content that needs to be processed. Unless you want your kid to just memorize or comprehend, then kids must do the complex task of integrating, analyzing, and evaluating content from multiple sources and with the previous knowledge that they have in their head. This task requires that they believe that they can actually do this work (self efficacy). For my kids (mine and tutorees), content understanding is the easy part; the hard part is the motivation to do the work, the belief that they can, and the executive function to accomplish their goals.  This is called self-regulated learning, and as far as I have experienced in the 20+ kids that I have tutored for 250+  hours each, it is NOT taught by teaching and assessing content. 

This leads me to the question of what kind of instruction can actually help with learning.  I'm thinking about a bigger understanding of instruction than just top-down teaching content.  I'm interested in the role of us as homeschool teachers in developing an environment that encourages learning.  So what is learning and how can you help it happen?

Ruth in NZ

Edited January 6, 2020 by lewelma

[Emily ZL]

I feel like this comes more easily to homeschoolers, especially homeschoolers who don't have the time or inclination to be top-down lecturers. My kids have to work fairly independently because there are so many of them. Then we solve problems on a one-on-one basis (the tutoring model). I don't think I own a single curriculum where I use a teacher guide to "teach" or lecture to my kids. We use Math Mammoth, and similar programs. They all show great skills for self-directed learning and I didn't really teach that either.

The question (in my opinion) is, how do you get that for kids in a public or private school? They are in a large group setting. It seems unrealistic to expect these poor teachers to get to all the content, attend to all the discipline, defend themselves to the parents, tailor their lessons to the different needs of their students if at all possible, and also to somehow teach independence and motivation to kids who may have totally messed up family situations full of academic pressure, overscheduling, two households to navigate, extracurriculars... It seems like everyone overlooks the sanity and character traits that are best for kids to succeed. A kid who goes to the right schools might end up taking a host of psychiatric drugs and failing out of school. But it seems largely a parent driven and family driven set of skills that those families make into priorities.

[lewelma]

48 minutes ago, square_25 said:

I’m on my phone, so the essay will come later. But in my experience, at least in math, the belief that you can do the work comes partially from how thoroughly and deeply you’ve assimilated the content. So it’s not unrelated.

I’m somewhat of a constructivist in my math teaching, anyway, though. So I’m very rarely a top-down teacher.

I agree that content assimilation and self efficacy are related, but not really with learners who have struggled in the past and believe that they can't do it.  It takes time and carefully well-placed comments to build up the belief in self.  I do this all the time with my younger and with my tutor kids.  

One of the things I do is discuss with a kid what their strengths are.  So for math I have a new kid who is really good at algorithms and has NO understanding of what she is doing. For her, I've started saying "well, you have a beautiful lay out of this algebra," while thinking to myself, OMG what a disaster because you have only memorized your way through math for the last 2 years.  I tell my younger and my tutorees what specific skills that they can own as special to them even their learning is one hot mess.  When parents call me an say that their kid has a terrible attitude and is failing and is convinced they can't do the work, I tell them "I can turn attitude around in 2 months, but fixing the math will take at least a year." Kids have to have a good attitude to actually engage in the work in a meaningful way.  Bad attitude equates to only basic learning, because there will be no self-regulated learning. 

So I think that as an instructor, my first goal is to develop a positive attitude. I can do this with positive interaction with content, but I can't develop a positive attitude with 'get it done, stop complaining' approach. When I tried this approach with my younger last year with mechanics for physics, he got the work done and mostly stopped complaining, but there was not joy and no engagement and everything was forgotten within a month.  However, on the other side, I have had many people on this board shocked that my dysgraphic boy is willing to work on his writing for 2 hours a day.  This is because I work every single day on planting seeds for a positive attitude.  And this positive attitude means that he owns the work and is thus motivated to do it. 

My second goal as an instructor is to teach how you how to make connections between content. I had a homeschool friend who helped me to understand this.  He bough his kids a massive TV monitor for their computer that could display 8 sheets of paper at once.  He told me that to be a high end learner you must make connections.  And to make connections, you need to see the different pieces of the puzzle all at once. 

So when I 'instruct', I'm actually not thinking that much about how to teach the content, I am much more thinking about how to create a positive attitude and skills at connection.

[lewelma]

7 minutes ago, Emily ZL said:

I feel like this comes more easily to homeschoolers, especially homeschoolers who don't have the time or inclination to be top-down lecturers. My kids have to work fairly independently because there are so many of them. Then we solve problems on a one-on-one basis (the tutoring model). I don't think I own a single curriculum where I use a teacher guide to "teach" or lecture to my kids. We use Math Mammoth, and similar programs. They all show great skills for self-directed learning and I didn't really teach that either.

 

I would love to think that all kids can be self-directed and self-teach, but I have found that this is just not true.  My older was, my younger so isn't.  Some of my students are and some of them are NOT. Part of what I try to do is get them self-directed and capable of self-teaching, but I am definitely having mixed results with this.  My younger boy in particular seems to require interaction to learn, and basically can't do much of anything on his own.  

Quote

The question (in my opinion) is, how do you get that for kids in a public or private school? They are in a large group setting. 

It is impossible. I'm kicking around doing a PhD in education, and every time I think of topics I'm interested in, they require a 1 on 1 instructor/learner model.  Kids in school fend for themselves.  One of the research questions I am interested in is how self-regulated learning varies between students and whether it can actually be impacted in any meaningful way without tons of one on one time.  I'm just not sure it can be. And even with tons of one-on-one time like with my younger, I am only just now with him starting 11th grade, getting even a small hint of this capability.  It will be my full focus for the next 2 years, over any content goals.  He will fail at uni if I cannot get this done. 

Edited January 6, 2020 by lewelma

[73349]

I was considering this topic a few years back in the context of schools: people conflate all kinds of things with education & learning. Here if you'd like a look.

[Emily ZL]

46 minutes ago, lewelma said:

I would love to think that all kids can be self-directed and self-teach, but I have found that this is just not true.  My older was, my younger so isn't.  Some of my students are and some of them are NOT. Part of what I try to do is get them self-directed and capable of self-teaching, but I am definitely having mixed results with this.  My younger boy in particular seems to require interaction to learn, and basically can't do much of anything on his own.  

It is impossible. I'm kicking around doing a PhD in education, and every time I think of topics I'm interested in, they require a 1 on 1 instructor/learner model.  Kids in school fend for themselves.  One of the research questions I am interested in is how self-regulated learning varies between students and whether it can actually be impacted in any meaningful way without tons of one on one time.  I'm just not sure it can be. And even with tons of one-on-one time like with my younger, I am only just now with him starting 11th grade, getting even a small hint of this capability.  It will be my full focus for the next 2 years, over any content goals.  He will fail at uni if I cannot get this done. 

Yeah, that's fair. Of my 5 (soon 6) kids, only 3 are schooling and they are in K, 1st, and 4th. So those are limited data points. But the three of them all just love working on their own. I give their assignments very close attention, and the K child gets very little formal work to do. But they just love owning it. Perhaps this is just too limited of a data set. And kids change as well.

[lewelma]

1 hour ago, square_25 said:

Oh, you too, eh? 😛 My hubby keeps suggesting that I do one. But I have young kids, unlike you, so I don't have the time!! 

Well, in 2 years I'm done with homeschooling.  I can still tutor like I'm doing now to bring in the $$, but then how will I fill my school-hours?!?!?!  My dad has an MD, a PhD, and a DMin, so I figure I can get 2 PhDs and still have time for one more.  🙂  And my grandmother lived to 103, so I'm not even half way there. 

Edited January 6, 2020 by lewelma

[lewelma]

1 hour ago, Emily ZL said:

Yeah, that's fair. Of my 5 (soon 6) kids, only 3 are schooling and they are in K, 1st, and 4th. So those are limited data points. But the three of them all just love working on their own. I give their assignments very close attention, and the K child gets very little formal work to do. But they just love owning it. Perhaps this is just too limited of a data set. And kids change as well.

Not trying to shoot down your experience, I'm just particularly interested in those kids who you have to *teach* self-regulated learning.  My older was like your kids, he just did it from a young age.  But not my younger and some of my tutor kids.  So why?!?!  Why can they not do it? And how can I can I change my instructional practice (viewed in a broad way) to develop these skills?

[lewelma]

39 minutes ago, square_25 said:

I would guess your younger son is an outlier, but I think that kids in school environments often have a sort of "learned helplessness": they learn so many things they don't understand and are told not to question so many times, they lose their ability to figure anything out themselves. 

Younger son is definitely an outlier as all 2e kids are.  Nothing like 99th+ IQ with 5th percentile writing.  And I do think that this dichotomy triggered/encouraged him to desire to always work with me/brother/father rather than try to align these two things that were impossible to align.  However, I would say that 90% of my students were not self-regulated learners when they came to me (18 out of 20). And I have only been able to really impact about half of the other kids, and this is over 3-4 years of working with them.  So Why do some kids develop these skills and other don't.  This is kind of my PhD thesis idea. I think that self-regulated learning is the key to an effective education. 

Edited January 7, 2020 by lewelma

[8filltheheart]

Self-regulation does not exist in early childhood anymore. Kids are controlled their entire lives between daycare and activities. When you are constantly told what you will be doing every minute of your life, is it any surprise when you then sit back and wait to be told what to do?

In terms of your original question, simple things like the power of 3 (naming, recognition, recall) are a good way to interact with little children and the 4 hallmarks of a Jesuit education (prelection,  reflection, active learning, repetition) are good teaching strategies in general.

[Little Green Leaves]

I think most people will have some areas where they learn easily and other areas where they struggle. It’s easiest to be an active, self-motivated learner in areas where you’re naturally gifted. That’s why great musicians are able to practice for so many hours a day, for example. It’s much harder to be self-regulated in areas where you’re weak. 

I know for me, it was almost impossible to focus on math when I was a teenager. I am not awful at math but I’m definitely not gifted. Doing math didn’t feel rewarding to me; it wasn’t exciting, and I couldn’t feel myself making measurable progress. It was mostly a slog. I could only really handle math by either sort of shutting off my brain and just getting it done, or else making a huge effort to turn the math into poetry in my brain, if that makes sense!

With my kids, I’m going on the theory that there is no huge rush to develop motivation. They’re naturally motivated to work on the areas they’re good at. For the area that they’re weaker in, I don’t mind sitting next to them, literally and figuratively, and acting as their external motivation.

 

[lewelma]

What I see is that the instruction that is the most effective for both my students and my younger son is not 'teaching' content (although I do that to), but it more about creating an environment. This just sounds so fluffy, but what seems to work is me acting to manage/teach self efficacy, motivation, executive function skills, all of which combine into self-regulated learning.  For about 20% of my students, I tutor them in basically ALL their subjects (I'm pretty broad with all the homeschooling I've done). What I have found is that it is not just their worst subjects that kids have no idea what to do, it is for their best subjects too. Clearly, it depends on the kid, but I see much more of a dichotomy between kids than within a kid on the capability to learn, not from an IQ point of view but from a how-do-I-take-what-the-teacher-has-given-me-and-do-anything-with-it point of view. 

So I tell kids that there are 3 things they must be able to do: 1) identify what they need to know (testing requirements), 2) know what they know (metacognition), 3) find a way to get from one to the other (study skills). Most books you read are only about #3, but there are so many kids that can't do #1 and #2.  So when I'm tutoring, I'm using a subject like math to teach these 3 things. Yes, I do content but it is like give a fish vs teaching a kid to fish.  If I focus on content, I'm just handing them a fish.  If I focus on developing self-regulated learning, I'm teaching them to fish.

This is why I'm asking the question about how instruction impacts learning.  What do you *do* that is not top-down teaching that actually impacts learning.

Edited January 7, 2020 by lewelma

[8filltheheart]

8 hours ago, lewelma said:

What I see is that the instruction that is the most effective for both my students and my younger son is not 'teaching' content (although I do that to), but it more about creating an environment. This just sounds so fluffy, but what seems to work is me acting to manage/teach self efficacy, motivation, executive function skills, all of which combine into self-regulated learning.  For about 20% of my students, I tutor them in basically ALL their subjects (I'm pretty broad with all the homeschooling I've done). What I have found is that it is not just their worst subjects that kids have no idea what to do, it is for their best subjects too. Clearly, it depends on the kid, but I see much more of a dichotomy between kids than within a kid on the capability to learn, not from an IQ point of view but from a how-do-I-take-what-the-teacher-has-given-me-and-do-anything-with-it point of view. 

So I tell kids that there are 3 things they must be able to do: 1) identify what they need to know (testing requirements), 2) know what they know (metacognition), 3) find a way to get from one to the other (study skills). Most books you read are only about #3, but there are so many kids that can't do #1 and #2.  So when I'm tutoring, I'm using a subject like math to teach these 3 things. Yes, I do content but it is like give a fish vs teaching a kid to fish.  If I focus on content, I'm just handing them a fish.  If I focus on developing self-regulated learning, I'm teaching them to fish.

This is why I'm asking the question about how instruction impacts learning.  What do you *do* that is not top-down teaching that actually impacts learning.

I don't think about teaching the way you do your first couple of sentences.  I see those as what I nurture as a parent and it starts from infancy.  When I have written on the forums over the years that self-entertainment is my focus during early childhood, it is precisely b/c through self-entertainment that children learn to develop their own regulated environment.  Children who learn how to use their imaginations to create dramatic play environments are creating their own internalized motivation which in essence is developing self-efficacy. They are learning how to take the necessary steps to produce the outcomes that they desire. Learning to play in a way where they are responsible for their space(whether it is establishing a place for building a fort or dam, or setting up a home for their doll,  or building with Legos or blocks, or coping with the necessary cleaning afterward, etc) is a basic step toward owning the outcomes of ones own behaviors which is a basic step toward self-regulating.  Through trial and error of attempting to build something that has gone from frustration to success internalizes skills that cannot be developed when adults guide, direct, control the majority of childhood play.  Children who establish self-control in their play (if you dump out 1000s of Legos and throw them everywhere, the natural consequence is that pieces will be lost and you are going to have to clean up a huge mess) are having a life long skill developed.

I also don't think you can discuss teaching generically the way you describe without accounting for age/goals.  How you teach a child to read, correctly write the alphabet/numbers, etc is a different form of teaching than discussing an abstract concept.  In general terms,  young children are learning the absolute foundational skills (how to form numbers letters, relationships between letters/sounds to reading words, relationships between digits/counting and values, etc).  Once foundational skills are mastered, children can move from learning how to read to learning to read for information.  A child who has to focus all their energy on decoding a word has a different experience with the words on the page than a child who is reading a page with ease and reading for content/understanding.  

For little children, approaching teaching in terms of the 3 major steps to learning is an easy way for parents who don't have a background in teaching to understand how to guide their children toward mastering basic skills. 

• naming----singing songs about letters/sounds, creating letter artwork, etc are all focused on naming---giving a name to symbol that represents something. 
• recognizing----learning to discern out of a group of options.  Which letter is a b?  Which letter makes an mmmmm sound?  They don't need to know how to write a b on command.  It is an intermediate step between learning the name and recalling independently.  
• recalling---knowing independently how to write a b and that it makes the b sound.

Quote

1) identify what they need to know (testing requirements), 2) know what they know (metacognition), 3) find a way to get from one to the other (study skills). Most books you read are only about #3, but there are so many kids that can't do #1 and #2.

For older children, I use their interests as a launching pt for our studies.  I do focus on content, bc I think content is important.  But, allowing them to assist me in designing their courses is giving them ownership over what they are learning.  Following the Jesuit philosophy of education, some of your list are encompassed, but in a different way and more fleshed out. I have modified their classroom approach to suit our family life and my teaching abilities.

ETA: Not sure what happened but an entire block quote disappeared from my post. In rereading my post, somehow a huge chunk was deleted.  I don't have time to figure out what is missing and retyping it.

Quote

I can't remember what all I had included in here originally, but in essence, this link is a simple summation of Jesuit pedagogy. 

Four Hallmarks of a Jesuit Education: Prelection, Reflection, Active Learning, Repetition (link to article)

• prelection-- “... the preview, conducted by the teacher with the active cooperation of the class, of every class assignment. It should be clearly understood that the prelection is not a lecture; it is essentially a co-operative effort which elicits the interested activity of the students.... To awaken the interest of the student in the subject matter; To set precise and attainable objectives for the assignment; To point out more important or complicated phases of study; To suggest problems to be studied for review or discussion or judgment"

In our homeschool, I have modified this to mean a couple of different things. First, it means designing courses with my children developed around their interests.  They are already taking ownership over the content being learned bc they have chosen the subject matter.  Second, it means developing my own understanding of the subject matter so that I know how to design the course and know the goals/areas wanted mastered.

• reflection and active learning--"Growth in the maturity and independence that are necessary for growth in freedom depends on active participation rather than passive reception. Important steps toward this active participation include personal study, opportunities for personal discovery and creativity, and an attitude of reflection. The task of the teacher is to help each student to become an independent learner, to assume the responsibility for his or her own education."

In our homeschool, with my younger kids, I sit with them and read aloud and ask open-ended questions as we go through whatever it is we are reading or watching (documentaries).  Our reading is not just reading, it is reading within a conversation. For my older kids, they know their learning objectives before they start reading, they read independently, take notes from their reading (similar to Cornell notes or their own version of notetaking), and then discuss with me what it is they are learning. Their assignments (bc I give them assignments on the topics I want them to master more fully b/c I do value the content of what they are studying) pull out specific areas that I want them to research independently in order to go into more depth.  That research is used to write a some sort of paper on the topic.  I also take this approach with my kids who are learning how to write paragraphs, etc.  We take three simple articles on the subject.  They read them and highligh what they think is important.  I review it with them and then they turn their highlights into notes for an outline, then outline, then write a paragraph.  As they get older they turn paragraphs into "chapter books" (multiple independent paragraphs without necessary transition words or topic paragraphs, etc.  They illustrate their books, etc.). Those then progress to into multiple paragraph reports, etc.

• repetition--Ignatian repetition is not on simply reviewing the material, but always reviewing with the idea of new learning, discovery and deeper integration. Repetition is not a simple repeating of what has been learned, but rather a time to integrate and analyze what has already been learned. For some students it is a time to integrate facts that were not understood or understood imperfectly during the first learning. For other students it is a time for even greater analysis and synthesis of the material already known. Like prelection, repetition affords an opportunity to promote higher level thinking skills and to further augment students’ reflection about their learnings.

In our homeschool, this is encouraged through the research described above combined with the fact that I design our courses to cross-curriculum.  What they study in one subject is integrated into another so connections are being made and explored across various subjects. 

FWIW, I personally cannot fathom a top-down teacher led approach in a homeschool environment. 

Edited January 7, 2020 by 8FillTheHeart

[Little Green Leaves]

8 hours ago, lewelma said:

What I see is that the instruction that is the most effective for both my students and my younger son is not 'teaching' content (although I do that to), but it more about creating an environment. This just sounds so fluffy, but what seems to work is me acting to manage/teach self efficacy, motivation, executive function skills, all of which combine into self-regulated learning.  For about 20% of my students, I tutor them in basically ALL their subjects (I'm pretty broad with all the homeschooling I've done). What I have found is that it is not just their worst subjects that kids have no idea what to do, it is for their best subjects too. Clearly, it depends on the kid, but I see much more of a dichotomy between kids than within a kid on the capability to learn, not from an IQ point of view but from a how-do-I-take-what-the-teacher-has-given-me-and-do-anything-with-it point of view. 

So I tell kids that there are 3 things they must be able to do: 1) identify what they need to know (testing requirements), 2) know what they know (metacognition), 3) find a way to get from one to the other (study skills). Most books you read are only about #3, but there are so many kids that can't do #1 and #2.  So when I'm tutoring, I'm using a subject like math to teach these 3 things. Yes, I do content but it is like give a fish vs teaching a kid to fish.  If I focus on content, I'm just handing them a fish.  If I focus on developing self-regulated learning, I'm teaching them to fish.

This is why I'm asking the question about how instruction impacts learning.  What do you *do* that is not top-down teaching that actually impacts learning.

I guess I'm confused. Are you talking about learning, or are you talking about the ability to complete assignments and pass tests? 

When I tutored English, we tutors had a simple question we were supposed to ask ourselves: "what does the student need to know in order to do x?"

X could be anything from "pass the placement test" to "write a letter to landlord" to "revise the grammar errors in this essay." It sounds very basic, but it created a clear, simple focus. I think the beauty of tutoring and home schooling is that you meet the student where he or she is, and you set very individualized goals for each student at each moment.

It seems to me that both tutoring and home schooling allow you to teach study skills at the same time as teaching academic materials. The two are sort of folded into each other. I used to teach my students how to take notes by having them take notes on whatever I was saying. I did absolutely zero top-down teaching. I didn't even do much big-picture explanation. I'd say I provided micro-guidance for my students. We did everything side by side, so that I was right there for them as questions arose; I gradually stepped back as the students grew more confident and capable. 

[maize]

1 hour ago, 8FillTheHeart said:

I don't think about teaching the way you do your first couple of sentences.  I see those as what I nurture as a parent and it starts from infancy.  When I have written on the forums over the years that self-entertainment is my focus during early childhood, it is precisely b/c through self-entertainment that children learn to develop their own regulated environment.  Children who learn how to use their imaginations to create dramatic play environments are creating their own internalized motivation which in essence is developing self-efficacy. They are learning how to take the necessary steps to produce the outcomes that they desire. Learning to play in a way where they are responsible for their space(whether it is establishing a place for building a fort or dam, or setting up a home for their doll,  or building with Legos or blocks, or coping with the necessary cleaning afterward, etc) is a basic step toward owning the outcomes of ones own behaviors which is a basic step toward self-regulating.  

While I agree with you on these things, the outcomes are extremely variable and highly dependent on the child's genetics/epigenetics etc. Just as some children will develop high level social thinking and social skills simply through being in an environment that allows them to observe and practice and others will not and need much more direct instruction and scaffolding.

ADHD and executive function difficulties appear to have a significant heritable component, and for kids who get the poor executive function genes simply being in an environment designed to allow the development of self regulation does not produce the levels of self regulation one could expect from a child predisposed to good executive function.

My kids lean heavily towards executive function difficulties, they unfortunately got not one but two parents who struggle themselves. My family of origin though was much more mixed; some of my siblings are very good at executive function and some of us consistently struggle with it. We experienced similar early childhood environments, no television or video games, lots and lots of imaginative play. While I don't doubt that all of us benefited from this, the type of self regulation you describe only developed in those whose brains were set up to develop that way.

I am intrigued by lewelma's experience with explicit teaching of executive function skills.

Edited January 7, 2020 by maize

[8filltheheart]

17 minutes ago, maize said:

While I agree with you on these things, the outcomes are extremely variable and highly dependent on the child's genetics/epigenetics etc. Just as some children will develop high level social thinking and social skills simply through being in an environment that allows them to observe and practice and others will not and need much more direct instruction and scaffolding.

ADHD and executive function difficulties appear to have a significant heritable component, and for kids who get the poor executive function genes simply being in an environment designed to allow the development of self regulation does not produce the levels of self regulation one could expect from a child predisposed to good executive function.

My kids lean heavily towards executive function difficulties, they unfortunately got not one but two parents who struggle themselves. My family of origin though was much more mixed; some of my siblings are very good at executive function and some of us consistently struggle with it. We experienced similar early childhood environments, no television or video games, lots and lots of imaginative play. While I don't doubt that all of us benefited from this, the type of self regulation you describe only developed in those whose brains were set up to develop that way.

I am intrigued by lewelma's experience with explicit teaching if executive function skills.

I dont equate self-entertainment with lack of training/supervision.  I am also not posting with lack of experience with kids with serious issues. Ruth's post are written from an older child perspective. My pt is that is as parents and homeschoolers these skills can and should be addressed from a much earlier age. If you are homeschooling from the beginning, thinking in terms of suddenly addressing self-regulation in middle/ high school has missed the mark.  The solution is not to just keep kids constantly scheduled/controlled bc of behavioral issues. That is avoiding developing self-regulation.

Edited January 7, 2020 by 8FillTheHeart

[lewelma]

On 1/8/2020 at 1:26 AM, 8FillTheHeart said:

I don't think about teaching the way you do your first couple of sentences.  I see those as what I nurture as a parent and it starts from infancy.  When I have written on the forums over the years that self-entertainment is my focus during early childhood, it is precisely b/c through self-entertainment that children learn to develop their own regulated environment.  Children who learn how to use their imaginations to create dramatic play environments are creating their own internalized motivation which in essence is developing self-efficacy. They are learning how to take the necessary steps to produce the outcomes that they desire. Learning to play in a way where they are responsible for their space(whether it is establishing a place for building a fort or dam, or setting up a home for their doll,  or building with Legos or blocks, or coping with the necessary cleaning afterward, etc) is a basic step toward owning the outcomes of ones own behaviors which is a basic step toward self-regulating.  Through trial and error of attempting to build something that has gone from frustration to success internalizes skills that cannot be developed when adults guide, direct, control the majority of childhood play.  Children who establish self-control in their play (if you dump out 1000s of Legos and throw them everywhere, the natural consequence is that pieces will be lost and you are going to have to clean up a huge mess) are having a life long skill developed.

I also don't think you can discuss teaching generically the way you describe without accounting for age/goals.  How you teach a child to read, correctly write the alphabet/numbers, etc is a different form of teaching than discussing an abstract concept.  In general terms,  young children are learning the absolute foundational skills (how to form numbers letters, relationships between letters/sounds to reading words, relationships between digits/counting and values, etc).  Once foundational skills are mastered, children can move from learning how to read to learning to read for information.  A child who has to focus all their energy on decoding a word has a different experience with the words on the page than a child who is reading a page with ease and reading for content/understanding.  

For little children, approaching teaching in terms of the 3 major steps to learning is an easy way for parents who don't have a background in teaching to understand how to guide their children toward mastering basic skills. 

• naming----singing songs about letters/sounds, creating letter artwork, etc are all focused on naming---giving a name to symbol that represents something. 
• recognizing----learning to discern out of a group of options.  Which letter is a b?  Which letter makes an mmmmm sound?  They don't need to know how to write a b on command.  It is an intermediate step between learning the name and recalling independently.  
• recalling---knowing independently how to write a b and that it makes the b sound.

For older children, I use their interests as a launching pt for our studies.  I do focus on content, bc I think content is important.  But, allowing them to assist me in designing their courses is giving them ownership over what they are learning.  Following the Jesuit philosophy of education, some of your list are encompassed, but in a different way and more fleshed out. I have modified their classroom approach to suit our family life and my teaching abilities.

ETA: Not sure what happened but an entire block quote disappeared from my post. In rereading my post, somehow a huge chunk was deleted.  I don't have time to figure out what is missing and retyping it.

• prelection-- “... the preview, conducted by the teacher with the active cooperation of the class, of every class assignment. It should be clearly understood that the prelection is not a lecture; it is essentially a co-operative effort which elicits the interested activity of the students.... To awaken the interest of the student in the subject matter; To set precise and attainable objectives for the assignment; To point out more important or complicated phases of study; To suggest problems to be studied for review or discussion or judgment"

In our homeschool, I have modified this to mean a couple of different things. First, it means designing courses with my children developed around their interests.  They are already taking ownership over the content being learned bc they have chosen the subject matter.  Second, it means developing my own understanding of the subject matter so that I know how to design the course and know the goals/areas wanted mastered.

• reflection and active learning--"Growth in the maturity and independence that are necessary for growth in freedom depends on active participation rather than passive reception. Important steps toward this active participation include personal study, opportunities for personal discovery and creativity, and an attitude of reflection. The task of the teacher is to help each student to become an independent learner, to assume the responsibility for his or her own education."

In our homeschool, with my younger kids, I sit with them and read aloud and ask open-ended questions as we go through whatever it is we are reading or watching (documentaries).  Our reading is not just reading, it is reading within a conversation. For my older kids, they know their learning objectives before they start reading, they read independently, take notes from their reading (similar to Cornell notes or their own version of notetaking), and then discuss with me what it is they are learning. Their assignments (bc I give them assignments on the topics I want them to master more fully b/c I do value the content of what they are studying) pull out specific areas that I want them to research independently in order to go into more depth.  That research is used to write a some sort of paper on the topic.  I also take this approach with my kids who are learning how to write paragraphs, etc.  We take three simple articles on the subject.  They read them and highligh what they think is important.  I review it with them and then they turn their highlights into notes for an outline, then outline, then write a paragraph.  As they get older they turn paragraphs into "chapter books" (multiple independent paragraphs without necessary transition words or topic paragraphs, etc.  They illustrate their books, etc.). Those then progress to into multiple paragraph reports, etc.

• repetition--Ignatian repetition is not on simply reviewing the material, but always reviewing with the idea of new learning, discovery and deeper integration. Repetition is not a simple repeating of what has been learned, but rather a time to integrate and analyze what has already been learned. For some students it is a time to integrate facts that were not understood or understood imperfectly during the first learning. For other students it is a time for even greater analysis and synthesis of the material already known. Like prelection, repetition affords an opportunity to promote higher level thinking skills and to further augment students’ reflection about their learnings.

In our homeschool, this is encouraged through the research described above combined with the fact that I design our courses to cross-curriculum.  What they study in one subject is integrated into another so connections are being made and explored across various subjects. 

FWIW, I personally cannot fathom a top-down teacher led approach in a homeschool environment. 

Wow 8, thanks SO much for writing all that out!  There is so much here to ponder, both in how to help my younger and how to help my tutorees. And I absolutely love your take on the purpose of play in young children. Very fascinating. Your response is spot on for answering my question about what you do to encourage learning if it is not top-down teaching. Thanks!

Edited January 8, 2020 by lewelma

[lewelma]

On 1/8/2020 at 2:51 AM, Little Green Leaves said:

I guess I'm confused. Are you talking about learning, or are you talking about the ability to complete assignments and pass tests? 

Well, if the tests and assignments are well designed, learning equals completing assignments and passing tests. The book Engaging Ideas by Bean is exactly about this situation.  *Learning* is supported by creating assignments that develop deep thinking and reflection. This is one of the ways that I think we can support learning through 'instruction'.

The other way I think we can support learning is through improving attitude.  But that is way trickier to describe on paper, but it is something that I do very effectively, and is where I really shine as a teacher. 

Now, I'm muddling around with what 8 describes as her instruction techniques.  I think I do all these things with my younger, but without clear cut names for my techniques.  What I love about naming complex tasks is that it helps you to focus more clearly on improving your performance in them.  However, I need to think about whether I do these things with my tutorees.   

[lewelma]

On 1/8/2020 at 3:14 AM, maize said:

While I agree with you on these things, the outcomes are extremely variable and highly dependent on the child's genetics/epigenetics etc. Just as some children will develop high level social thinking and social skills simply through being in an environment that allows them to observe and practice and others will not and need much more direct instruction and scaffolding.

ADHD and executive function difficulties appear to have a significant heritable component, and for kids who get the poor executive function genes simply being in an environment designed to allow the development of self regulation does not produce the levels of self regulation one could expect from a child predisposed to good executive function.

My kids lean heavily towards executive function difficulties, they unfortunately got not one but two parents who struggle themselves. My family of origin though was much more mixed; some of my siblings are very good at executive function and some of us consistently struggle with it. We experienced similar early childhood environments, no television or video games, lots and lots of imaginative play. While I don't doubt that all of us benefited from this, the type of self regulation you describe only developed in those whose brains were set up to develop that way.

I am intrigued by lewelma's experience with explicit teaching of executive function skills.

I so agree with the genetic component. My younger boy at the age of 2 would just sit.  We would be at a friend's house with my older boy running around with friends on bikes, and my younger boy would sit next to me. I would hand him a car, and he would sit there for 2 hours, not even playing with the car, just doing nothing.  People started to ask "is he ok?" and I would say "he does more at home." But as he got older, it got worse. From the age of 4-6 would just wait.  Free time for him meant nothing. I would walk in a room and he would be sitting on the sofa doing *nothing*. I would ask him what he was doing and he would say 'waiting.' He was waiting for me to initiate something, and he had a horrible attitude about the waiting I was forcing him into. He had *no* internal drive at all, even from a very young age. None. 

It has taken me 10 full years to get him to the point he is at now, which is somewhat motivated to do cool stuff.  He is much much better when he has activities to go to, because the timing and expectations are set.  As we worked through helping him lay out a way to learn where he would take control of his education, he finally decided on a strict school schedule with exact times to the minute of starting and finishing each subject, each break, etc.  This was the only way that he could motivate himself to do any work.  But I have come to believe that if this is what he requires to be internally motivated, then he can just set this system up where ever he goes.  So for this boy, the key to helping him with 'learning' was helping him work through a plan for 'motivation.' So when answering my own question, the instruction on reflecting how he could motivate himself, what structures did he need in place to make he actually do *anything*. This process of reflection took 3 full years to implement and have him own. Without motivation, he would still be doing nothing, and thus learning nothing.

So to answer my question on what instruction impacted learning, for this boy it was instruction in self-reflection and motivation. We did trial and error of methods to improve his motivation and learning, and we did this for 3 full years. We kept charts about techniques and his attitude. We wrote daily journal entries evaluating how things went and how he could improve. I got him to trial reward systems, times of the day, subject changes, hands-on, program design, sleep schedule, food, drill, self-interest, on-line, on-paper, collaborative, independent, short sessions, long sessions, exercise, accountability, etc. You name it, we trialed it.  Until he found a *way* to learn, he was not going to learn anything. Self-reflection was key. That is what I taught him.  

Edited January 8, 2020 by lewelma

[lewelma]

3 minutes ago, OneThoughtMayHideAnother said:

 

This is something I know I need to do better. I realize you mention it's hard to describe, but if you had a moment at some point to elaborate on what you do in order to plant those seeds for a positive attitude, and, in general, what you think are some of the best methods of encouraging the development of intrinsic motivation, I would be very grateful. And I think many other homeschooling parents reading this thread might benefit from your insight, too. 

I have to actually get my planning started for my younger, but I'll try to get back to this later today.  You should just hop a plane and come visit me in NZ, and we could have a lovely chat over a cuppa.  🙂