Teaching Preschool Children just became Complicated (or Simple - Depending

Teaching Preschool Children just became Complicated (or Simple - Depending on how you Look at It)

What do you think of parents who read books to their unborn babies in the hope that the experience will somehow make them extra intelligent? And once they are born, how about parents who buy one of those products they sell on infomercials that promise to help your child read by the age of one? Ours has become a society of pedagogues - where everyone's trying to drum a little extra something into a child. And the government isn't leaving this alone either. The No Child Left Behind act actually says that preschool children are supposed to be given more direct teaching. And then there are the skeptics. These people look at how parents can coach their toddlers to within an inch of their lives and wonder why. Are there any actual results that show that teaching preschool children to recite the alphabet backwards really does anything for them in improving the quality of their lives?

For the first time now, those who fight for a little sanity in preschool, are getting a little science to back them up. There have been two studies done, at MIT and UC-Berkeley, published in the journal Cognition, that bring a little science to the whole debate. Basically, the point that these studies try to make is that help from a teacher is only a good thing for an older child that is already well on his way to thinking about things for himself. A small child needs to find a way to understand how to approach life, how to approach a problem on his own and to find information. Having everything handed to him by a teacher will only stunt his motivation for self-discovery, the study says.

To find out what they did about how preschool children learn, the researchers got two groups of kids together, and gave both groups a new kind of toy with all kinds of new hidden features. One group of children had a teacher come in and completely explain the toy to them before she gave it to them. The other group just had a teacher come in, play with just one fun feature of the toy in a way they could see. The teacher then left. They found that once both teachers had left, the children in the group that didn't have anything explained to them found a great deal of fun with their toy and discovered lots of its secret features. The other group that had the teacher explain the toy to them not only had less fun at playing with their toy, they ended up discovering a whole lot about it.

When a teacher goes to town explaining everything about a new concept, preschool children hearing the explanation try to understand what they're being taught; but they rarely try it take the concept and run with it and find things on their own. When children are not directly taught much, they have pretty much no choice but to use their heads and do something with what they were taught. This concept can be proven with the use of a new kind of complex (but fun) toy too.

But these research results don't just tell us that we need to teach our preschool children in a certain way. They apparently want us to completely overhaul our concept of the teacher as well. Children instinctively know that when a teacher comes in, she is supposed to tell you everything that's worth knowing. Even if the teacher just comes in and tries to inspire the children under her charge to learn on their own, they instinctively shut down. Just the presence of the teacher makes learning difficult. This line of research sounds promising and inspiring.

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