Learning

While most learning happens before the age of 3, your myelin grows throughout life and your brain actually peaks around age 50. As I posted before, this is related to the amount of healthy foods you eat, exercise for your body and mind, as well as education.

There are a few things you can do to help this process along. First, parents and teachers should eliminate passive learning. Listening to a lecture or sitting and watching a video or demonstration are some of the worst ways to encourage learning. If a topic requires passive learning, teachers/parents should do cold calls on students to check for understanding. Waiting for children to raise their hands and volunteer allows most students to be less active with their thoughts and analysis.

Another important technique is to celebrate struggle and repetition. For anyone familiar with the Montessori method or the Suzuki method, this is apparent. Don't celebrate correct answers, but encourage the struggle. Compliment the continued effort, the focus, and when they finally achieve success point out how proud they must feel about themselves. If you only mention success and focus a big celebration, they will learn to value that more than the struggle. Once they get it right, don't just move on. Let them repeat the entire process again and again. They will get faster and more confident. They might even find different ways to solve the same problem. These are keys to learning.

Also help your child focus on what their future self will be doing. Do not tell your child what they will do, if they say they are going to grow up to be a lemon, just go with it. Talk about what they might do or what they want to learn before they get there. Keep a goal in front of their eyes in the form of a person. This could be an imaginary person (the first toddler to land on Pluto) or a real person (the President). This will often cause more of a drive than just telling your child they will go to college and get a job.

When looking at preschool programs, I of course did research on what the neuro-scientists have found. They have compared many different types of programs. Multiple studies have found two different answers. Montessori and Tools of Mind are the repeated "winners" of these studies. These are vastly different programs so it's important to think what would be best for your child.

Tools of Mind is based on deliberate play. Students will write (or draw) their plan for play and are expected to stick with it for a long period of time. They learn focus and self control above all else and the academics just seem to fall into place. This is an impressive program, but depending on the area you live in, may be difficult to find. Where I live there aren't any close to us.

Montessori is also an excellent method, but you need to research carefully. The term Montessori can be used by anyone and many schools call themselves Montessori even if they don't follow any of the method. There are tons of "Montessori" schools around where we live, but less than 10% actually follow the method. I suggest reading Montessori: The Science Behind the Genius before you look at schools so you will know what to look for in each classroom. Many of the false Montessori schools around here were easy to identify by the existence of a transition class, dividing classes by age (all 4 year olds together), or the lack of Montessori materials.

As of last Summer (the last time I read the research on this topic), I have not seen a single controlled study comparing Tools of Mind to Montessori. If anyone knows of one (published in a peer reviewed journal) I would love to see it.