Am I spreading disinformation?
Discovery learning in young children - the new conspiracy theory?
The post which got this response wasn’t one which I had thought of as my most controversial. Here is what I said in its entirety.
Discovery learning involves trying things out, experimenting and getting it wrong. This is how young children learn. Instruction is a far less efficient way to do this, as anyone who has spent any time with 3-7 year olds can tell you. You can tell children things as many times as you want. You can read a perfectly designed script that explains phonics. And then that child will turn around and say 'How can I become a caterpillar?' and your speech is halted in its tracks. What we say to children and what they learn are very different things. Children learn through discovery and play. If we don't understand that, then we do them a grave disservice.
Apparently this is disinformation.
So why do I say that direct instruction is less efficient than discovery learning as a way for young children to learn? Direct instruction seems intuitively to make sense, after all. No messing around with trying to figure things out. Much more efficient to just tell them. It certainly feels more efficient as the adult.
I have no problem with direct instruction. I prefer to be told the crucial information when I am learning. Tomorrow I am about to start running a training course for therapists – three days of direct instruction and deliberate practice. They want to know how to do something and my job is to help them do that in the most efficient way possible. I am not expecting them to learn how to do therapy through play or to discover it for themselves.
Children’s learning – particularly young children – isn’t the same as adult learning. Their brains work differently. They are less focused, more expansive and they have a shorter attention span. They find it hard to listen to things they find boring and they need to move around a lot. They are ‘into everything’ and full of energy, but they often find sitting still and listening very difficult. In fact, sitting still takes so much effort that they may have nothing left to actually listen. This is uncontroversial in the developmental psychology and neuroscience world. Brain development really matters, and four-year-olds (and fourteen-year-olds) are not just non-expert adults.
School learning is different to adult learning in other ways. Adults choose what they learn, children are told what they will be learning. Adults often think that children should learn to read (or do maths, or do many other things) before the children themselves see the need. The adults may be right (we could argue that point), but again, this means that children’s learning isn’t the same as adults. With adults, you can give them the information because they want to know it. With children, you have to start with helping them understand why this might be useful. Without this, your explanations are unlikely to stick. Learning without a reason for doing so becomes meaningless. They don’t necessarily want to know what you are telling them.
Discovery learning is a stage of life. It’s not free of adult input, and it’s not ‘leaving them to figure it out by themselves’. It’s intensely interactive, with the child as an active participant.
Once they grow up, they can’t go back and catch up on that time of experiencing the world in a different way. Our children deserve to be allowed their time to play.
I wonder what Carl Hendrick has by way of evidence to back up his authoritative statement that "Kids do NOT learn to read by discovering it for themselves." All I know is that there's plenty of evidence going in the opposite direction, and that dyslexia is so much less common in self-directed learning environments (such as the unfortunately named 'democratic schools') that people within such an environment often don't know that dyslexia and the associated industry for remedying it actually exists.
I have to agree that there's far too big a gap between the advantaged and the disadvantaged, but I doubt that discovery learning as such is likely to increase it. Discovery learning doesn't simply equate to: "Buzz off and discover how to read, but leave me alone while I do this tax return / washing / video game etc." It means providing an environment in which children feel invited to explore in a (reasonably) safe place, observe what skills and tools appear to be useful/essential and acquire them in whatever way suits them best (very often by mimicking what the others are doing). We still don't know exactly how it works, but we do know that it does work.
What feels like an important parallel point here is how the development of executive functions increases rapidly at 3-6 years of age, and leading scientists state that we ought to allow children to engage in play based learning in particularly this age bracket to enable the brain to direct energy into those sections of the brain for it to happen. To delay academic learning in what you can call instructional ways (phonics, etc) until after that age for the brain to mature as it ought to. Without it, children don’t have the necessary emotional regulation and impulse control to be healthy learners in a classroom.