Resources

Can the Right Kinds of Play Teach Self-Control? by Paul Tough, New York Times, September 25, 2009.

Mirrors James Heckman's findings about the necessary complimentarity between cognitive skills taught in schools and non-cognitive skills (values and behaviors). One of the central observations, the difference made on learning between poorly managed classrooms and those that are well managed (children obedient to commands at a level commiserate to their age) is entirely consistent with what we (TTMD) observe in our classroom readings. It is very difficult to accomplish much in a classroom with many children pursuing many individual agendas.

While the article effectively provides a snapshot of a particular teaching technique, Tools of the Mind, it is also rife with the mis-directions, shiboloths, false strawmen, qualifying the means via the goals, over-focusing on single outcomes over the whole array of desired outcomes, false-dichotomies, innumeracy, etc. that characterizes so much discussion pertaining to education and literacy. Examples:

The figure of 18,000 children being instructed is cited as if to credentialize the initiative but that would be 18,000 out of 8,000,000 which gives it a different perspective.

Nobody would, I don't think, dispute the importance of children having good non-cognitive skills (behaviors and values) but the time spent in school also needs to achieve some modicum of knowledge transferance, skills development, and general socialization as well.

The displacing of theory over experience and measured results -

Angela Duckworth, a psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania, has spent the last seven years trying to find reliable, repeatable methods to improve self-control in children. When I spoke to her recently, she told me about a six-week-long experiment that she and some colleagues conducted in 2003 with 40 fifth-grade students at a school in Philadelphia.

"We did everything right," she told me: led the kids through self-control exercises, helped them reorganize their lockers, gave them rewards for completing their homework. And at the end of the experiment, the students dutifully reported that they now had more self-control than when they started the program. But in fact, they did not: the children who had been through the intervention did no better on a variety of measures than a control group at the same school. "We looked at teacher ratings of self-control, we looked at homework completion, we looked at standardized achievement tests, we looked at G.P.A., we looked at whether they were late to class more," Duckworth explained. "We got zero effect on everything." Despite that failure, Duckworth says she is convinced that it is possible to boost executive function among children - she just thinks it will require a more complex and thoroughgoing program than the one that she and her colleagues employed. "It’s not impossible,” she concludes, “but it’s damn hard."

Reinforced by the later observation in the article:

There are not yet firm experimental data that prove that Tools of the Mind works.

Anyway, an interesting article but revealing little of a factual nature.