... a UNESCO report
As parents we all share many of the same concerns for our children’s wellbeing and development, both physical and mental, but few of us are professional doctors or educators. In seeking to educate ourselves on how best to educate our children we discovered a comprehensive and yet easy to understand research study report entitled “How Children Learn” issued by UNESCO, which confirmed many of our assumptions and received wisdom on this subject and opened our eyes to many more considerations pertinent to both formal and informal educational choices.
In this 2002 UNESCO report on how children learn, 12 key psychological principles of child learning were explored and strategies to help children learn were offered. Future posts will cover these 12 principles in a bit more depth but in high level summary they fall into the following three broad areas:
1. LEARNING ENVIRONMENTS
Covered by the first three principles, this is about creating environments that encourage students to be active learners, to collaborate with other students, and the use of meaningful tasks and authentic materials.
In short this is about a child assuming responsibility for their own learning; to be “motivated to learn, via self-regulated goal orientation”, that is to say to motivate themselves to achieve, and to engaged in observation and memorisation of topics. A big part of achieving this is to avoid prolonged periods of inactive, or passive, listening [to instruction] and focus rather on active participation in the learning process [learning by doing]. This includes discussion of things being learned and relating these things to the real world because children need to know why they should learn something; why it is important for them to know something. Why? Why? Why? We have all experience this phenomenon with our children, right? This should be encouraged and harnessed to feed them with a thirst for knowledge.
2. COGNITIVE FACTORS
The next seven principles focus on cognitive factors [ways of learning] that are primarily psychologically internal to the child, but also involve interaction with the outside world beyond the classroom.
These principles are about how children process new things, relate them to things they already know and remember the learning points. The focus is on thinking about the topic and understanding it in context rather than on memorization via drill and practice, so-called rote learning, which is typically short term in nature. The idea is that if a child understands how something works, or why it needs to be a certain way, in the context of the forces acting upon it or the outcomes and consequences if not done a certain way, then they will remember it better than simply memorising the rules. Understanding is the key to learning rather than memorisation. This area also deals with misconceptions and received wisdom that may get in the way of learning. For example, a child thinks the world is flat because they seem to walk on flat ground. They must un-learn this to come to the understanding that the world is actually round and accept this in the context of the fact that in practical, local, everyday terms it is, or appears to be, level. After all the concept of level is key to endeavours such as structural engineering.
3. INDIVIDUALITY
The final two principles are about assessing and leveraging a child’s individuality and motivational influences, what they like and what they get rewarded for.
The last area is really about tailoring learning to the individual child’s intrinsic abilities, interests and tastes. What they are good at, what they are curious about and what they enjoy doing. This is really about matching the child’s personality and ability set to their education. Everyone is different, although they may conform to certain group generalisations and must do this to operate successfully in the world at large. Clearly the first area (the first 3 principles), especially around encouraging children to assume responsibility for their learning and set goals, is related to this third area about matching techniques to their personality. In fact, all of the principles are interrelated and the UNESCO report encourages a rounded view of all 12 principles when creating learning opportunities and structures for children.
Key messages from the UNESCO report:
Promote a desire to learn and engage with the world by using the right tasks, tools and encouragement to generate a thirst for knowledge.
Understand how children process learning and use this to guide your educational choices for them.
Consider the child’s intrinsic interests and capabilities when choosing educational topics and environments, including schooling.
Action:
So how should we go about educating our children to maximise their learning potential, especially in the crucial early years of life? Well things like deciding on preschool type and being actively involved in our children’s school life are important but we begin our lifetime’s work of teaching our children as soon as they are born. Early learning is so vital. Just talking, using facial expressions and hand gestures and touching to start with and letting them just observe us, listen to us and, when capable, help us with tasks, is how we begin. Literally every engagement with our little ones is an educational and developmental opportunity. We must be enthusiastic about learning and instil in our children a joy and thirst for learning that is directed at their emerging capabilities. Prior to knowing what their likes and dislikes are we must try things out but some things are simply basic and required by everyone like mathematics. Chief among early learning is language, without which nothing else can be learned.
Language development is key for us at Little Wriggler. Once children grasp communication then the whole world of learning is opened up. So talk, talk, talk and don’t be afraid to use proper words and sentence structures and the right tone of voice in amongst the baby speak, which is also important very early on so that the babies pick up sound recognition. Babies and young children are like sponges. They will absolutely surprise you by how fast they pick up language and the gestures of communication. And remember they understand far earlier than they can speak.
Little Wriggler has many educational videos that specifically focus on alphabet and vocabulary development via a combination of hands-on learning, phonics and relation to the world relation. All our videos seek to introduce new words and concepts whenever possible with a combination of audio and video mechanisms. Education is the key to life and language is the key to education.
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