RETURN TO HEART LEARNING 7/19 by Dave Graber . Amended 7/20 for blog
I started teaching in Southern Montana Indian schools
in 1973. I was soon discouraged with large numbers of students who seemed
rebellious against my teaching. In time I realized most were probably unable to
sit down, hold still, be quiet and pay attention. A trusted grandparent friend
came to my parent/teacher conference. He said it was the Cheyenne way to enjoy
seeing children physically active, the more the better. Sitting down, holding still,
being quiet, and paying attention were not taught. The Cheyenne way of child
upbringing built strong hearts so respect and quietness were learned when the
child was ready.
I remember faculty room conversations back then
criticizing parents for not teaching their children to obey. Children came to
school with difficulty respecting teachers, and often erred in responding to
teachers’ demands for obedience. It took me years to start respecting a
culturally different way, what I now call “heart learning.”
My respect for these ways grew slowly over the
decades. At first I could not see the self-discipline of elders patiently
responding to my questions. It seemed they joined in rebellion with their
children. Desperate for better ways of handling their young, I began imitating these
elders. But this was largely new to me, and to nearly all other non-Indian
faculty. Back in 1973, in a school 99% Cheyenne Indian, we white teachers were
opposed to having our European cultural way of discipline undermined. We
resolved to continue the culture of reward and punishment for students established
by the Bureau of Indian Affairs leaders. We were frustrated that rebellion
against us was not only just OK, it was encouraged. We faculty could only see only
one way out: use force and fear to dominate our classrooms. Our use of consequences
were failing. But the community was patient.
I began to notice in family gatherings children getting
positive attention from adults more than adults requiring attention and correct
responses from children. Games, dances, song, and stories built children’s
hearts by eliciting responses from adults without correction. Children danced
out of time, or sang improperly, without being corrected. I wondered what was
wrong them. Cheyenne elders didn’t care whether their children danced or sang
correctly or not. I was helped along patiently by my friends at singing and
drumming sessions with White Buffalo Singers.
Now I know that volumes of new scientific evidence
supports the ancient ways of the Cheyenne and other indigenous nations for
children’s learning. Yet today, especially in Montana, mainstream education has
maintained an anti-indigenous culture of discipline for learning. It mistakenly
bypasses heart learning. Instead it focuses on teacher-assessed corrections of
student efforts.
self-assessment of learning.
How do we find heart learning? Engaging the whole
body, collaborating in fun and games with others, with child self-assessing.
This is the heart learning foundation for all learning. It invites balance in
responses. No one person, not even the teacher, elicits all or most of the
responses. Everyone in the class is empowered to do and be. With freedom to
enter into song, dance, and verbal or vocal expression, emotions are connected
with others in joy and safety to engage. Instead of teaching, the teacher
attends to structures and scaffolding. Then school subjects are included as
needed in the quest children’s minds and hearts are together engaging. The
quest for skill and understanding of a game, life skill, story, or other real
challenge normal in the community is the learning focus.
All children can engage in collaboration with teacher
and others regardless of developmental level. Then the teacher, with the
ancient kinds of training, becomes the facilitator. The child constructs
knowledge in collaboration with adults and peers as friends and family. The
heart’s need for fearless trust, engagement, joy, and celebration is the
foundation for cognitive understandings. These are built by the child at the
appropriate developmental level. Direct instruction
happens with natural requests of the teacher. The student, not the teacher
controls the teachable moment. Teacher controls the scaffolding and the
structures designed so learning can happen.
Humankind’s survival needs mainstream education to
return to educating the heart. It should not have been separated from cognitive
learning. Heart learning is the foundation of human achievement. It engages
with other human beings for the good of all. It builds the evidence that grades
or money are mindless and ineffective motivators for life success. Many new
(ancient) standards of Montana’s current common core uphold the better, internal
motivators. Now is the time for each Montana child’s heart learning foundation to
be accessed by our schools. A good place to start is see how other nations have
adapted or discarded assessment protocols deploying external assessment over children,
replacing them with internal heart motivators.
Developmentally
appropriate standards
Worldwide, Non-Western cultures have been rebuilding
heart learning with quality outcomes-based research. It attends to the full
developmental needs of children. The total social, emotional, spiritual,
kinesthetic and cognitive learning together, in other words, heart learning are
accessed together. Children and parents are weaned from the concept that
children must sit down, hold still, be quiet, and pay attention to adults so
they can learn. Of course discipline to do this is essential as children mature!
But external discipline for learning at too young an age hinders achievement in
heart learning. Even one child suffering heart learning damage at school, destined
to be a loser because of this toxic pedagogy, is a problem worth solving. We
need a change back to inclusive heart learning, as it was in all our heritage
family learning before the industrial revolution, when children were engaged
placing themselves at their developmentally appropriate level for learning
anything.
Executive Function of the Mind
Heart learning accesses the mind’s affective domain
in the building of executive functioning. Decades of research have demonstrated
that when children’s bodies are engaged in kinesthetic, social, spiritual and
emotional learning, cognitive learning happens much better. It's easily
demonstrated that the most troublesome children in any given classroom in
elementary are often the brightest. Is it possible our modern obsession with
cognitive learning steers some children in dysfunctional directions? Harvard
University’s Developing Child Center has extensive studies on the mind’s
executive function development–the center of heart learning.
Direct
Instruction
An essential element of this return is
developmentally appropriate direct instruction. Children better learn to learn
from others directly when it’s not demanded too early. When a child says, “let
me do it!” parent/teacher trainers should have been building systems and
scaffolding so the child can do it with a sense of autonomy. Mainstream
education commandeers the instructional task children love to do for
themselves. Direct instruction needs modification with adult self-discipline. Adult
wisdom must learn when the child’s empowerment to self-teach is better than the
adult’s ability to impart knowledge. Unfortunately, teacher education has focused
on lowering the age when children are content to accept disempowerment to
learn. So enormous college coursework like “teaching in the content area” needs
discarding and rebuilding from scratch. When we start solving the essential
heart learning problems of Indian education the whole nation’s education system
will benefit. Unruly children will be thriving again. Direct instruction as a
strategy will return where it belongs, away from the teacher’s initiative, so
the teacher has energy to build the systems and scaffolding, designed so teacher
can easily self-limit DI to responsivity.
Culturally Sustaining and Restorative Pedagogy
How can we do it? By listening to elders who remember
the old ways of respect for children, and studying both modern science of human
development, and other indigenous decolonized ways of learning. The academic
field of Culturally Sustaining and Restorative Pedagogy (CSRP), where evidence
exists empowering learners to learn and to be is a great way to start in
academics. Before getting into academics, it’s best to listen and experience the
old learning in families or cross-generational gatherings at work, play, in ceremonies,
with singing, dancing, and multisensory intergenerational engagement. Or
visiting classrooms designed around heart learning or any of the many labels for
accessing the Creator’s intent for children to thrive. This is unfortunately
rare in Montana schools, and most needed in Indian education.
Curriculum exists to help
children do what they can. (By DG
8/19)
It helps if children are allowed to do stuff with real stuff,
and are expected to with adults or peer collaboration. The process itself is so simple and natural.
Every successful culture, family, or community has built and run their own
curriculum... until recent centuries. Now, modern society pays specialists to
do this for children at younger and younger ages.
The best practices in school reform strategies reverse this.
They promote building content from life practices, celebrations, arts, and in
the heritage and current culture of the child’s family connections. Children
thus empowered to do elder-familiar stuff can elicit approving responses from
community/family. This becomes a true foundation for success in school and
life.
Modern mainstream schooling often deprives children of heart
learning. Outcomes-based strategies
entice children to want to do what they normally would not want to do. It would be good to ask some questions again:
What should my children learn?, when should they learn it? How should they
learn it? Where should they go for help
and wisdom? Who should be doing the
learning (teacher or student)? Who can assess whether it’s learned? Who bears
the responsibility of not having learned it? These should be answered by the
child, and the child’s best interests.
Then success is better achieved, and assessed by the
presence of:
1) multi
generational learning, across ages, like a human family not a puppy litter.
2) Culturally
appropriate activities.. what has been
done in child raising for generations
3) Place-
learning: doing what families have long done in the community in this place.
4) Imagination
and creativity: Each child must be guided to enjoy making toys or models or
pictures of his/her own learning stories and experiences to match his physical,
cognitive, social and spiritual competencies important where they live.
5) A
learning circle: Where children’s right to be heard telling their own stories
aurally, visually, non-verbally, and spiritually, moving into verbal expression
after syntax is built, continually having their own stories /songs heard and
not discredited.
6) Hands
on activities—experience based with real stuff.
7) Respect
for everyone’s right to be engaged at their level.
8) Teacher
providing structure and scaffolding: questions, challenges, and puzzles
children can figure out.
9) Children
telling stories & acting/dancing on their own before books or paper are
prioritized
Curriculum
like this will be rebuilding children’s dysregulated stress response systems with
self-actualization, healthy attachment, mindfulness, attunement, responsivity,
reactive relationships appropriate to build children’s proactive capacity for
their own management.
Curriculum questions? Schools with track records of doing
this? Look up progressive education,
indigenous pedagogy, compassionate schools, trauma sensitive schools, escuela
nueva foundation, culture sustaining restorative pedagogy.
