By: Trisha Knueven
On Saturday, March 12, 2011, I had the privilege of going to the 24th Annual Early Childhood Conference 2001 on my very favorite campus at Xavier University. This conference was Montessori in nature and supported by the Montessori Education Department at Xavier University. Alfie Kohn was featured as the keynote speaker. His speech was titled: Teaching Children to Care. Here is my take on his talk:
Kohn opened up his speech asking the audience of predominately parents and Montessori affiliates what is one thing that they wished to instill in children. As a group we came up with a laundry list including: stewardship, mindful, compassionate, caring, global citizen, helping, satisfied, problem-solvers…. Kohn put all of these characteristics into a well-crafted sentence about what we wish to instill in children and then went on to talk about the ways in which we keep this from ever happening because our approach to teaching and guiding children is all wrong!
He quoted Albert Einstein “Not everything that can be counted counts and not everything that counts can be measured.” We are actually harming children by assigning them letter grades or numbers rather that simply communicate negatively to a child no matter what. Research has proven that it is a negative effect. So, we need to stop doing this to children! There are other means of assessing children and making sure that they are learning what they need to know. Grades should go out the window and we as teachers, parents, and professionals need to advocate for this archaic way of assessment. Homework should also be outlawed! Homework says to a child “the only thing important in life is academics.” And, the more homework given the worse effect it has. Teachers who give lots of homework really aren’t interested in the whole child. Children need time away from academics after school in order to play, engage with peers, and be with their families. Research finds that there is no benefit of any type of homework until children are at least in high school and even then there is more pain than gain. Children simply view all homework as something to get over with so they can move on to do something else more desirable. That’s why the best schools give virtually NONE unless a child actually wants to have it and consents to it because they want to exercise their minds more after school.
Instead of grades and homework, everyone needs to be more focused on ways to increase a child’s natural ability to be the caring, loving, and compassionate types of people that we all clearly want. Two studies have found that children who get lots of positive reinforcement (verbal good jobs, high fives, star charts, etc.) end up less caring and generous than other children. WHY? Because this type of behavior encourages the child to be more self-centered and more self-focused, and when they do not get the feel good feelings from this type of approach because an adult is not hovering over them all the time their self-esteem plummets. It is equally wrong to emphasize reciprocity to settle sharing disputes.
Alfie’s Goals for Children
1. Have children develop enduring commitments to sharing and caring.
2. Have children help when they take pleasure in helping AND still help when there is no pleasure for them to receive (aka Altruism)
3. We want to promote children to help everyone beyond their circle of friends, their school, and own country. We want them to be global carers.
How?
Motives matter not just behaviors. It is the motive behind the fist punch that needs to be dealt with. The hitting child can learn first-hand a great deal from the face of the injured child. The hitting child can comfort the injured child. The hitting child can explain why the hit happened and these feelings can be dealt with in a more constructive way. Putting a child in time-out really doesn’t do any good. That is an adult way of tackling negative behavior. It doesn’t work the same way with children because they are not always rational thinkers. Children are never “sorry” and we should stop forcing them to say this when they do not mean it! We need to focus on self-discipline. Psychologists talk about intrinsic motivation. Are children workaholics in training?
A child’s desire to care is inborn and it can either be encouraged or stifled. There are 7 ingredients to promote caring that are outlined in Kohn’s books. This information was gained through a workshop and I simply do not want to give it all away because I am not copyrighting here. I found the ingredients to be very helpful and recommend that you check out his website for more.
Alfie Kohn’s website is: www.alfiekohn.org
On his website there are links to his books, articles, audio/video, etc. It’s a great site and I really feel like his approach with all the latest research supporting it is perhaps what we should all consider and welcome into our families and schools. These approaches are followed by the Montessori community.