attachment

Understanding Healthy Development & Learning:

Six Key Issues

- Karl F. Wheatley, Ph.D.

OK, so we’ve been wrestling with “big-picture” education and people want to know how you teach that way. It begins with focusing on the goals we value most for kids, learning not just to read and write and do math, but also love of learning, creativity, initiative, critical thinking, social skills, respectfulness, physical and mental health, etc.

Then, as noted in the syllabus, big-picture education requires teachers to 1) have a big-picture perspective on education, 2) to understand healthy development and learning, and 3) to be ethical professionals—including advocating for what we believe is best for kids and for America. Healthy development & learning means you make progress on all fronts, not boosting performance in one area of development by causing harm in others.

Child development is a huge and important topic, especially for teachers pursuing “big-picture”/DAP education. (Proponents of test-driven schooling often consider child development irrelevant, perhaps because factory schooling is based on the idea of assembly lines, and was never designed to adapt to how real children learn and develop). I’ve taught child development a lot and here are six issues I believe are especially important for you to understand—in order to support your efforts to do big-picture education:

1) Normal Development

2) Attachment

3) Basic Needs

4) Healthy Motivation

5) Deep Learning

6) Systems Effects

Normal Development. I can’t re-create a whole child development course here, but teachers are more likely to make learning appropriate for children if they know what is typical for children of a given age, culture, gender. For example, there is massive variance in when kids learn to do certain things, and are ready to learn those things, and this is normal, fine, healthy. Trying to make everyone learn the same thing at the same time simply doesn’t fit how kids are, and thus, doing this creates problems where none existed before. Similarly, young kids have lots of energy and need to move, and need to be engaged in active learning. That so many kids are being put on drugs to pay attention is a clear signal that our curriculum is inappropriate and not engaging for many children. Understanding normal development also means understanding how factors like culture and poverty profoundly affect development and learning.

Finally, understanding normal development means understanding the idea of a normal distribution—that half the kids are always and will always be below that “average line” in the middle. A kid being below average doesn’t mean there is something wrong with the kid or the teacher, and being above average doesn’t mean the kid is being challenged much or learning a lot, and doesn’t tell us if the teacher is teaching well. No matter how perfectly or horribly we teach, half the kids will be above average and half below, and we can’t tell just from where kids are on the bell curve whether the kid or teacher is doing a lousy, average, or great job, considering where they started.

Attachment. If kids have warm, secure attachments to key adults in their lives, they will more likely imitate the models those adults provide, internalize the values and ideas the adults communicate, and comply with reasonable requests. Authoritarian governments and schools rely on power to control people; democratic governments and schools rely more on reason, relationships, and the consent of the governed/learners. Relying on direct use of power to control people tends to undermine out relationships with them: Developing positive attachments with people and being a good role model makes controls like extrinsic rewards, punishments, threats less necessary. Teachers are not there to be students’ best friends, but when kids like, trust and respect us, everything is easier … and shouldn’t human relations in life and school just be that way? These secure attachments come when children interact with adults who are sensitive to children (interpret their cues accurately), highly responsive (do things that respond to kids’ actions, interests and concerns), relatively non-directive (not controlling), consistent (but not rigid), and who provide appropriate stimulation/enrichment. The strategies for adult interaction attached to the child observation assignment helps promote secure attachments.

Basic Needs. Just as plants need adequate air, sunlight, food and water to grow properly, children have basic physical and psychological needs. When these needs are met, children are more physically and mentally healthy, grow better, and function better in society. Basic physical needs include healthy food, shelter, and physical safety. Basic psychological needs include feelings of security, autonomy/freedom, competence, relatedness/belonging, enjoyment, and power. It is important to note that psychological needs are in the eye of the beholder—what matters is if the learner feels competent, secure, etc. Different people interpret the world differently, which is why a strategy can sometimes help or hurt some kids while having little effect on others. This reality is another reason highly standardized education doesn’t work and is resisted by learners, and why education should have substantial individualization—often determined by the learners themselves.

Key point 1: If learners don’t get their basic needs met in appropriate ways, they will seek inappropriate ways to get them met. Unfortunately, these include acting up, bullying and gangs: Gangs can actually help kids meet many or all of their basic psychological needs.

Key point 2: You’re trying to succeed with all the kids in your class, not just some, so you want to find strategies that simultaneously help all children meet their basic needs, not strategies that help kids by hurting others. So, for example, although I enjoyed being the fourth grade spelling bee champion, the 25 other kids all were losers of that competition. Classroom competitions prevent most kids from meeting their basic needs, because the game is rigged so most will fail (even if all kids try really hard). If we want all kids to try hard and make progress, we need teaching and assessment strategies that focus on all kids steadily striving for and achieving personal bests.

Healthy Motivation. Motivation is not simply energy that people have more or less of and the trick is to increase the energy: Motivation comes from a complex interplay of goals, beliefs, emotions, and personal interpretations about tasks, ability, etc. Fear can motivate people to action but so can love or hope, but a lifetime of being motivated by fear turns out very different in many ways than a lifetime motivated by love or hope.

To be considered “healthy motivation,” the kind of motivation that drives us must help us get valued tasks done (learning to read, cleaning up), while not causing harm in other ways (e.g., prolonged stress can cause various physical and mental problems), and while yielding other benefits (e.g., happiness and enjoyment yield other benefits).

Five of the most important elements of healthy motivation are 1) intrinsic motivation, 2) a growth mindset, 3) autonomous self-regulation, 4) learning goals, and 5) achieving a state of flow. Other important elements include positive efficacy beliefs, controllable and internal attributions for success and failure, and inspiring visions of possible selves (a goal for who we want to become).

Deep Learning. Schools have too often focused on the short-term memorization of low-level facts and artificial mastery of low-level skills, and have done so in a way that a) turns kids off to learning, b) results in rapid forgetting of what was learned, and c) leaves kids with poor ability to apply what was learned to real life. Education should be about mastering meaningful knowledge and skills in a way that they are truly understood and so that learners can apply that knowledge and those skills to real world problems and challenges. Research indicates that big-picture education is better than factory schooling at promoting deep understanding and real-world applications, in part because traditional schooling artificially divorces learning from life (and frequently ignores real understanding—it’s impossible to “bubble in”), while big-picture education means learning is connected to real life.

Systems Effects. All aspects of development are interrelated and influence each other. Sleep affects health and weight management and memory and intellectual functioning. So does stress and exercise, but in opposite ways. Positive emotions promote secure attachments, intrinsic motivation, better memory retrieval, greater creativity and better problem solving, and better physical and mental health. Traditional factory schooling too often focuses only on cognitive development, and by ignoring other aspects of development, directly creates a range of problems for learning and development—problems that are quite easily avoided or minimized. Driving high school kids to do so much homework that they don’t get adequate sleep tonight, too few people stop to think that today’s late night successes will undermine the same child’s learning and development tomorrow—as they doze through class, or barely stay awake. Pressuring kids to learn in order to pass tests, too few stop to realize that this process substantially displaces intrinsic motivation, and too often turns education into a cynical game where people are just trying to jump through hoops, do enough to get by, but not truly learn.

Healthy big picture education means promoting all areas of kids development simultaneously—learning to read in a way that also sustains our love of books, learning science in a way that would make more kids want to become scientists, learning in a way that sustains and builds or physical and mental health while strengthening our intellectual skills. What this requires is balance, and keeping multiple goals in mind at once. I studied third grade math teaching for my doctoral dissertation, and the best teacher I studied talked about how she was always balancing in her mind the goals of helping kids learn on the one hand versus sustaining kids motivation to learn on the other hand. If she saw kids’ engagement dropping, she would back off, change gears, try something different, even if it meant giving up a little of her “reaching agenda.” We can ignore kids needs and emotions and drill them kids all day and night in the early grades and rack up impressive test score gains, but if they hate learning and are burned out by third grade (not uncommon), is that really what works best in the long run? Is that what we really want?