Becoming Brilliant: What Science Tells Us About Raising Successful Children

by Roberta Michnick Golinkoff

Becoming brilliant : what science tells us about raising successful children / Roberta Michnick Golinkoff, PhD, and Kathy Hirsh-Pasek, PhD.

Society for Research in Child Development,

the pace of change we and our families are experiencing is ever increasing. But some things stay constant, despite the fact that there may be robots entering preschools: the need for children to be nurtured, to be made to feel safe, and to avoid trauma.

In this book, we share the work of our colleagues around the world about what is best for children and what they will need to be productive members of their community, good citizens of the world, responsible stewards of their own lives and destinies, and successful people to boot.

is imperative to envision an evidence-based educational system that makes contact with the workforce of the 21st century. All too often that link is never made.

What if we could create a world in which the educational system matched what we know about how children learn? What if school actually offered programs that matched the demands of the future world that our children will inhabit?

Our hope for this book is that it will help you move beyond the anxieties and get a glimpse of what really works.

We’ve identified the 6Cs as the key skills that will help all children become the thinkers and entrepreneurs of tomorrow. These skills will also help children become contributing members of their communities and good citizens as they forge a fulfilling personal life.

Collaboration

Communication

Content

Critical thinking

Creativity

Confidence

in this kind of a classroom, we meet what Professor John Bruer, an expert in the developing brain, called knowledge transformers rather than just knowledge digesters.

What if parent–teacher conferences focused on the 6Cs—content, collaboration, communication, critical thinking, creativity, and confidence—in

What if the report card you received gave you a fuller profile of your child’s strengths and weaknesses?

A report card based on the 6Cs captures the skill set that kids growing up in the 21st cen...

People whose skill set is limited to content sometimes do wonderfully in school but never seem to get anywhere on the job.

Author’s mainstream publishing blogs etc

Although the world beyond the ivory tower stresses the importance of teaching children content, content, and more content, we see a broader vision for our children that includes the mastery of many skills and competencies. We

our Huffington Post blog; on a blog for the Brookings Institution; in our tweets (@kathyandRo1);

Blog

serving on the board for nonprofit organizations for children such as Choices, Frontiers of Innovation, Alliance for Childhood, Jumpstart, and children’s museums; and now in this book.

Potential partners

the “learning industry” has convinced many among us that the memorization of content is all that is needed for learning success and joyful lives.

many families feel at a loss when deciding what their children really need. Here we offer a set of guiding principles so that you can ensure your children develop all the skills they need to reach their potential and still be happy and well-adjusted.

In this book, we rethink education in and out of school that is inspired by the science of learning.

Mastery of facts at an early age, they claim, leads to bigger and better brains, and better brains lead to better jobs with higher earnings and more discretionary wealth. There are actually toys out there like Brainy Baby that boast a separate DVD for the right brain and the left, even though neuroscientists have all but debunked the theory that a person, let alone a baby, can be right-brained or left-brained. Then there is the multimillion-dollar revenue from products like Your Baby Can Read. Those of us who study early language and literacy are known to talk back to the television when ads like that come on. “No, your baby CAN’T read!” we retort. Like the beloved stuffed animal in Margery Williams’s Velveteen Rabbit or Woody in the movie Toy Story, the classic toys have moved to the back shelf. Parents don’t want to buy a Slinky or a package of Play-Doh that doesn’t have obvious educational value. As parents, we pass by the spatial learning embedded in forming clay and constructing train sets. We whiz by the storytelling and language learning that naturally envelops us when playing with toy castles where we encounter crenellations and knights in shining armor who must traverse the moat. We want to optimize the learning potential of our child’s every waking moment. Who wouldn’t want a fast-food learning recipe straight from the box that will set your child’s trajectory for study at the Ivy Leagues? The problem is that filling heads with facts is not the secret to success ...

What parents Need to know

Mastery of facts at an early age, they claim, leads to bigger and better brains, and better brains lead to better jobs with higher earnings and more discretionary wealth. There are actually toys out there like Brainy Baby that boast a separate DVD for the right brain and the left, even though neuroscientists have all but debunked the theory that a person, let alone a baby, can be right-brained or left-brained. Then there is the multimillion-dollar revenue from products like Your Baby Can Read. Those of us who study early language and literacy are known to talk back to the television when ads like that come on. “No, your baby CAN’T read!” we retort. Like the beloved stuffed animal in Margery Williams’s Velveteen Rabbit or Woody in the movie Toy Story, the classic toys have moved to the back shelf. Parents don’t want to buy a Slinky or a package of Play-Doh that doesn’t have obvious educational value. As parents, we pass by the spatial learning embedded in forming clay and constructing train sets. We whiz by the storytelling and language learning that naturally envelops us when playing with toy castles where we encounter crenellations and knights in shining armor who must traverse the moat. We want to optimize the learning potential of our child’s every waking moment. Who wouldn’t want a fast-food learning recipe straight from the box that will set your child’s trajectory for study at the Ivy Leagues? The problem is that filling heads with facts is not the secret to success ...

Skills current kids will need for effective value creation in their future

into an integrative and systemic set of skills that can produce the outcomes we want for our children.

6Cs: collaboration, communication, content, critical thinking, creative innovation, and confidence.

Key point

Working in teams is at the center of new business models and is even how many of us learn to learn.

Collaboration, resting as it does on self-control, is a core skill and is one that is fundamental to being socially competent as a child and as an adult.

Built on the foundation of collaboration is...

Strong communication skills are related to better health and to strong academic skills.3

Content is one, but only one, of the six skills central to children’s development. It is what we reap from communication—how

It is the mastery of content, and the ability to quickly and strategically incorporate new information, that offers the foundation for thinking, the stuff we need to know to be critical thinkers and creative innovators.

that knowledge is doubling every 2 years.11

The critical thinker who can take a step back and reflect on what is wanted, what the question is that needs to be answered, will be the person all look to in this new era. That person will have what scientists call executive function skills: the ability to inhibit old solutions to problems and to rapidly shift to a new approach, as well as the ability to craft the plan needed to make that problem a thing of the past. Critical thinking is all about focus: Digging in deep and holding the relevant facts in mind enables solutions.

Creative innovation is born from content and critical thinking.

The work world is ever changing. It is estimated that graduates today will hold 10 jobs in their lifetime and that eight of those jobs have not yet been invented.

the business executives in the Partnership for 21st Century Skills survey called for a more creative and flexible workforce. An IBM study released in May 2010 reported that creativity and management of complexity were the two key characteristics most prized by 1,500 global CEOs.12

Having the confidence to persevere enables us to overcome our failures and not throw in the proverbial towel. Having the self-regulation not to flip out when the first solution doesn’t work will be important for persevering. All too often we meet children who are not allowed on jungle gyms because they might fall and children who are rewarded for the right answer but not encouraged to try solving the problem another way.

Linda Darling-Hammond said on July 30, 2011, to attendees at a Save the Children march in Washington, DC, Many people are asking, “Why are we here?” . . . We are here because we want to prepare our children for the 21st century world they are entering, not for an endless series of multiple choice tests that increasingly deflect us from our mission to teach them well.7

President Bush and his team were well-intentioned, but even Ravitch, in her 2010 book titled The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education, apologized to the nation for being wrong.8 Alas, the reforms continue. NCLB was a colossal failure. Reforms continue in the meantime. Children who were 4 years old and in preschool in 2001 when NCLB was introduced took the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) tests 11 years later as high school 15-year-olds. How did they do? One might think that with all of that educational preparation, they would outclass students from other industrialized nations. America’s math score ranks at a paltry 30th, a full 13 slots behind Slovenia. In reading, we are 20th, behind Finland, Poland, and Japan. And in science we are only 23rd!9 Memorization of factoids will not get you a good score on the PISA, nor will it prepare you for real success in the 21st century.

Pisa program for international student assessment

Learning scientists have not given up. In 2004, the National Science Foundation began a project called the Science of Learning Centers that would fund applied research capable of moving learning science from the lab to our schools and to our living rooms. An army of scientists is involved, collecting evidence about how children learn best—about how brains process the written word, about how spatial skills like map reading feed into mathematical learning, and about how the inability to stop yourself from making impulsive decisions can impair learning. Those of us who study how kids learn in high-tech worlds with avatars and in low-tech environments like parks have much to share with the learning industry. And, most important for our economy and our children’s future, the findings that flow from our work are completely consistent with the needs expressed by the business community. But our education right now—the education brought to us by the learning industry—could not be further from this vision. With scripted texts, many teachers—despite their concerns—must be on page 3 on Tuesday and page 6 by Wednesday. The irony of the press to test pushed by the learning industry is that we are not educating but eradicating our future. One of our most prized (and lamentable) examples of this problem is that of the young Teach for America volunteer we knew who had been placed in the Philadelphia school system and called us to lament the fact that she had been asked to teach adjectives....

In 2015, there were 7.2 billion people on the planet, 40% of whom were connected to the Internet on 25 billion devices, all of which can talk to one another, yielding tremendous productivity. By 2020, there will be 11.5 billion people, and more than 50% will be connected on over 50 billion devices. The pace of technological change is the same in Africa as it is in the United States. Across the globe, robots will be telling humans what to do. Only people who are creative and collaborative will be able to go beyond what a well-designed robot could achieve. Turnipseed went on to say that today’s academic manufacturing system does what it was designed to do: The ability to learn and succeed with a single body of knowledge is just not the world we live in today.

The Ministry of Education wants the product of Singapore schools to develop a good sense of self-awareness, a sound moral compass, and the necessary skills and knowledge to take on challenges of the future. He is responsible to his family, community and nation. He appreciates the beauty of the world around him, possesses a healthy mind and body, and has a zest for life.5 Wow! While policymakers in the United States were taking music, art, and recess out of our schools to make more time for reading drills, Singapore was declaring those “extras” essential to educating the next generation of thinkers. The Ministry of Education realized that the 4- and 5-year-olds in their preschools today would be the workforce of the future and that to remain a modern-day economic miracle, they would have to train those children to be critical thinkers and creative innovators. The founders of MindChamps had jumped on the bandwagon and were betting that they could create a new educational model built on learning science that would address Singapore’s new definition of success. The website of Singapore’s Ministry of Education tells the world what they now value: We want to nurture young Singaporeans who ask questions and look for answers, and who are willing to think in new ways, solve new problems and create new opportunities for the future. And, equally important, we want to help our young to build up a set of sound values so that they have the strength of character and resilience to deal wi...

Issued on June 15, 2009, a report on Ontario’s early learning program detailed how “a universal preschool program, taught by educators trained in early childhood development and schooled in the importance of learning-based play, will improve school readiness.”12 Putting play at the center of their educational agenda is exactly what learning scientists advocate; unfortunately, it’s antithetical to the way most Western countries pour information wholesale into the minds of young children.

Designed to distribute technology, to promote knowledge, and to generate social equality, the program populates laptops with books, educational materials, and games that all families can use and enjoy (see http://laptop.org/en/children/countries/uruguay.shtml). Scientists in South America designed games that children play to spur their love of learning and intellectual curiosity. Computer games are great for children if their content is created with learning science principles as a guide.14 While children are learning content, they do so in a fun, engaged, and collaborative way, with teachers and parents at their side. Uruguay’s top learning scientists have created apps that they can keep improving through research.