Musings on Educating the Introvert

"Okay, so if everyone would like to get into groups of 4 or 5,  we'll get going on our team projects..."  

     A sentence, spoken at ANY point in my education, that would send my stomach into knots and my brain immediately running, its hair wildly whipping around its face, as it screamed and tried to exit my skull, bouncing around until it collapsed in a depleted heap.  Instead of the quiet contemplation of the concepts just taught, my brain could now only focus on what I was going to SAY, how the group would perceive me, and the major energy that was about to be sucked out of me by the "group dynamic."
 
     Flash forward to my daughter, now fourteen.  All through school the comments from teachers would come pouring in:  "Annie is extremely bright, but we'd like her to talk more in groups and in class discussions."  Several times, she actually got points taken off her overall mark because she rarely contributed in class.

     There is, and has been for decades now, a growing trend toward group or cooperative learning.  Teachers are attending conferences, pro-D days, and work-shops, teaching them how to facilitate group learning.  It has been widely accepted that this is a superior way to teach and learn, and I am embarrassed to admit, as a psychology instructor, that I mindlessly adopted that group-think for quite a long time.  Many of my assignments were done at least in pairs and usually in groups of up to five people.  This is especially absurd given that I am a card-carrying introvert.  During my under-graduate experience I would actively avoid classes that included group presentations or speaking a lot in class.  I found myself feeling emotionally and mentally drained by faculty meetings, wondering why, when I actually had a lot of thoughts about the agenda items, I stayed quiet and went home with my thoughts still held captive on my own copy of the agenda. The fact that it was so easy for me to see my quiet, contemplative style of thinking and being as a defect is a testament to how pervasive this extrovert bias has become.

     Enter Susan Cain, with her book called "Quiet" - about the qualities, needs and skills of the introvert trying to function in an extrovert society.  It would be an understatement to say that the book resonated with me...it spoke to me in ways that allowed me to accept myself as someone who ultimately loves to spend her time quietly, in thought, embracing her solitude or in company with a few close friends or family.  At the same time, it walked quietly over to my depleted, little brain from the first paragraph, offered it a hand up and set it to thinking about ways to engage other introverts in meaningful learning experiences in class.


     So, what did I do?  As often happens, when you have an emotional response to this kind of exciting self realization, I rushed past the middle and found myself on the other side of the pendulum. No. Group. Work. EVER. But this isn't the solution...this is just reverse discrimination. The extroverts gain clarity, enjoyment and energy from the group experience.  Why do they deserve to be denied a meaningful  learning experience?  The natural solution seemed to be to develop assignments that could be done either alone or in small groups.

     This works very well conceptually, but is not as easy as it looks, in practice.  I observed introverts being approached by other students and being softly coerced into joining a group.  It appeared that the other students were acting out a concern for the other student being "left out."  So strong is our belief that group trumps individual, the introverts were now experiencing even MORE pressure to join.

     So, when I return to campus following my maternity leave, I have a plan - in my introduction to the course I will talk about the differences between introverts and extroverts and their different needs with respect to other people.  I will use this to explain the rationale behind allowing people to work in groups or as individuals and the importance of respecting those differences.  I'm hoping this sets up a classroom climate that allows for all types of learning to take place.

    I would love to hear from other educators about how they deal with this in their face to face classrooms AND their online classrooms - how would this work with MOOC for example?  As always, thanks for reading.  :)

   
 

Musings on Baby Talk versus Parentese

     Ever heard this?  "Hewwo, my widdle man."  If you're a baby-less man, I really hope for your sake that you've never been greeted that way.  :)  If you ever are, it might be wise to run far, far away from the speaker, before you hear what they have to say next.  Ahem.  Off topic...okay.  So, when in public with my baby boy, it's amazing how often he's greeted this way, along with comments about his "widdle fingies and toesies" and "gweat big cheeks."  I'm often amused to stand there, observing him with the speakers.

    He doesn't seem particularly amused by it and, I have to admit, I'm not either.  You might be asking, "What's the harm?"  and the answer would have to be that there is no real harm being done and the adults definitely seem to get a kick out of it.  But the point is, there is no real benefit from it, either.

    Baby talk is often used synonymously with parentese, but while some would define both as infant-centered speech, I would tend to disagree.  Parentese is a specific type of infant-centered speech that has specific properties designed to help infants understand individual sounds and words, build vocabulary and teach intonation.  It does the following:

            Slows speech down, while articulating each sound, with pauses        
            between words and sentences.

            Many, many repetitions of common words

            Use of a sing-songy voice, with emphasis on inflections and tone

     The advantages of parentese are that the frequent repetition of common words builds up vocabulary and a budding sense of the grammar of the language; by slowing the speech down and over-articulating the sounds the baby can better understand where one word stops and another begins and imitate the mouth and tongue movements of individual sounds.  The high-pitched, sing-song voice holds the infant's attention and helps to clarify how we can use tonality and inflection to indicate a declaration versus question.  Interestingly, both women and men appear to automatically use higher-pitched voices and slower speech when they encounter an infant - parentese appears to be very natural for most adults.  Baby talk, as I see it, consists of adults imitating the sound substitutions that naturally occur in infant and toddler speech before they can make the full range of sounds in our language.  For example, the sound of "w" is often easier to make than the "l" sound.  Therefore a small child might say "I wove you" instead of "I love you."  It's adorable to hear, no doubt, but why would you purposely feed your child a steady diet of incorrectly articulated words when developing speech is hard enough?  In addition, once children are old enough (around 2 and up), they recognize that you are repeating their sound substitution and can be offended by it.  Given that there are no advantages to using baby talk and it has the potential to upset toddlers, I'm not sure I understand the drive to use it with children at all.
 
   When I talk about this in class, a good question that often comes up is:  "If a child says 'I wove you', then, should you immediately correct them and get them to practice the right sound?"  The answer to that question is generally "no." It's often enough just to model the correct pronounciation in conversation, such as "You Love me?  That's lovely.  I Love you, too"  Once the child's musculature of the mouth and tongue develop further, they will begin to use the adult pronounciation spontaneously.  You can also paraphrase the sentence back.  For example "That wabbit is widdle" could be responded to as "That Rabbit IS really Little, and so cute!"  Children are exceptionally observant and will automatically compare their articulations with yours - you can often hear them practicing in infancy and in the early years.

     I hope this didn't come across as the ramblings of a sleep-deprived mother/educator who is cranky and taking it out on the lovely people at the mall who approach her son with such positivity.  :)  I've never actually spoken to anyone about this outside of class and blog.  It's just a distinction that is often made blurry by the literature available to new parents, and a topic I think is important for language development.  So...nitey-nite, my widdle weaders. I wuv you.  ;P

         
   

Musings on Lantern Attention in Children

   
     My son, Nikolai, is just about six months old.  We have a djembe drum at home and sometimes I sit, with him on my lap, and we play together.  At first I played and he watched.  Then, I would lift up his little hand and guide him to hit the drum.  Within the past month, as soon as the drum comes within arm's length, he flails his little hand up and down, making an impressively steady beat.


     The other day we were at the mall.  Deciding to take a break, we sat down at one of the tables in the Food Court.  As soon as we sat down, Nikolai got very excited and started repeatedly banging his hand down on the table.  It wasn't until then that I realized that the shape and colour of the table strongly resembled that of the djembe.  I was much more focused on the goal of getting settled and arranging snacks for my children.  This had me reflecting on Alison Gopnik's work on flashlight versus lantern attention, and what that means to our development over the lifespan.

     For those of you not familiar with Gopnik's work, please allow me to provide you with a link to her TED talk about "What Babies Think"  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cplaWsiu7Yg.  She explains that babies and small children have what she'd describe as lantern attention - the attention is spread out across the entire environment in a diffused way, much like the soft, broad light of a lantern.  Adults, however, learn to focus that attention on one or two key elements and filter out other stimuli.  Therefore, an adult's attention is more like a flashlight - a bright, focused, concentrated area of illumination.  My experience with Niko in the mall illuminates (if you'll forgive the pun) this discrepancy.  I was focused on the goal of providing snacks, so my attention to other shoppers, the table, shapes, smells, sights and sounds was, for all intents and purposes, shut off.  His attention, however, was on all of these things at once, leading him to make the discovery of the "djembe table," and all of the glee that came with that discovery.

     Gopnik makes it clear that it is important, much of the time, for adults to have flashlight attention...they have jobs to do, errands to run, houses to maintain, etc.  If all adults had lantern attention, it would be a pretty different, and probably highly amusing, society.  She mentions, however, how important it is for adults to allow themselves to experience lantern attention from time to time.

     Babies and small children learn everything from this lantern attention - they absorb the world and process their findings at incredible rates.  All species who show greater mental processes and the ability to experience a range of environments, problem-solve and adapt, have babies who take a long time to become independent from their parents - they need this time to learn about their worlds, make sense of them and learn skills they will need later, as adults.

     So, if lantern attention is so critical to early childhood development, why are we, as a society, so eager to rush children into adulthood?  Over the past few decades we've seen letter and number learning and traditional academic tasks assigned to younger and younger children.  Preschools boast of their graduates coming out reading and doing simple math, we have flashcards for toddlers and babies and we even have music and programs to play through our bellies so that our fetuses becomes primed to learn specific tasks.  The shift is away from allowing babies and toddlers to experience the world through simple interactions, observations and exposure (all lantern-type activities) and toward forcing flashlight attention, on squiggles that represent letters and symbolize numbers at the expense of everything else.

     This leads me to my biggest concern...what happened to the importance of play and social competence?  More than early academic learning, enriched environments, exposure to academic tasks, IQ tests and early academic competency, social competence (the understanding of social etiquette, social skills, learning turn-taking, good sportsmanship, kindness, compassion, empathy, helping behaviour, conflict resolution skills) is the biggest predictor of later academic success and the biggest buffer against mood disorders in adolescence such as depression or anxiety.  Children, with their lantern attention, are perfectly equipped for taking in information about social interactions - they naturally imitate, they learn social language by experiencing it, by taking in information from both their's and other's interactions about what flies and doesn't fly with peer groups and the adults in their lives.  Socio-dramatic play offers the lantern-biased child to soak this information up on all sensory and cognitive levels.  We under-estimate what children are getting from natural experiences such as water-play (math skills), drawing and telling their own stories (literacy skills) just to name two examples.

     I hope that I can provide my little person with as many walks in nature, giggles with peers and creative opportunities as I can before they are driven into a microcosm that wants them to trade in their lantern for a shiny new flashlight.
   
 
   

Musings on Parenthood

I had the opportunity to watch a lot of parenting recently, in a park.  As someone who has made a career working with children with a variety of behavioural needs, I've always understood the benefits of reinforcement in parenting and in working with people in general, but over and over again I find myself musing about what we, as adults, choose to reinforce.  For example, two young boys, about three or four years old, were playing together.  Most of this play centered around racing up the climber and speeding down a spiral slide, over and over again.  This play was joyous and there were so many good examples of turn-taking, helping (one boy got his coat sleeve caught on a screw and the other helped him free himself) and thoughtful verbal exchange.  The adult, seemingly engaged in texting, largely missed all of this.  As you'd expect, at some point in this story there was a conflict....a dispute about who should be going down the slide first.  This consisted of raised voices, furrowed brows, and at one point, a push.  The adult jumped up, and without really checking in to find out what had happened, hauled the "pusher" down and sat him for time out. To his credit, the little guy paid his due, but with a tear-stained face and a palpable sense of injustice.  So, what do we glean from this?  This is an inattentive, "bad" caregiver?  I don't think so.  But I do think, as a result of of evolutionary wiring and the influences of parenting and society, that we tend to pay far more attention to the things that go "wrong" rather than the things that go "right."  One could argue that this mismatch is fundamental to our survival...attending to the discrepancies in our world will give us the greatest chance of living another day and passing along our genetics.  However, what about our emotional well-being and growth, our sense of safety, justice, understanding of right and wrong, self worth?  The thing is, we're all guilty of it at some point or another - with our spouses, our co-workers, our friends, our children, even our laws are set up to fine the unlawful, rather than reward those who are helping the world to be a safer place.  In extreme cases, parental neglect in this way can find a child finding all sorts of trouble to get into simply in order to secure the adult's attention.  So, this week I'm staying mindful of my role in that dynamic - thanking my teenager for hanging up her towels rather than berating her when she forgets, leaning over to snuggle and play with my infant every few seconds as he rolls around on the floor and stays engaged independently as I write this, and cooking my spouse a special meal to thank him for the many times he gets up with our rowdy little infant in the night-time, despite having a very physically demanding job.  Studies say a ratio of 3 reinforcements to 1 punishment will maintain positive, healthy relationships - if we take a look at our day to day existence, I wonder how many of us could say we're meeting even that minimum expectation.