NurtureShock (23 page)

In one famous Russian study from the 1950s, children were told to stand still as long as they could—they lasted two minutes.
Then a second group of children were told to
pretend
they were soldiers on guard who had to stand still at their posts—they lasted eleven minutes.

“The advantage of little kids,” explained Bodrova, “is they don’t yet know that they aren’t good at something. When you ask
a child to copy something on the board the teacher has written, he might think, ‘I can’t write as good as the teacher,’ so
then he doesn’t want to do it. But hand a notepad to the child who is pretending to be a waiter in a pizza parlor. Johnny
ordered cheese pizza, you ordered pepperoni. They don’t know if they can write it or not—they just know that they have to
do something to remember the pizza orders. They end up doing more writing than if you asked them to write a story.”

It’s well recognized that kids today get to play less. As pressure for academic achievement has mounted, schools around the
country have cut back on recess to devote more time to the classroom. This, in turn, created a backlash; experts and social
commentators opined that playtime was too valuable to cut. Their arguments were straightforward: the brain needs a break,
kids need to blow off energy, cutting recess increases obesity, and it’s during recess that children learn social skills.
Tools suggests a different benefit entirely—that during playtime, children learn basic developmental building blocks necessary
for later academic success, and in fact they develop these building blocks
better
while playing than while in a traditional class.

Take, for example, symbolic thought. Almost everything a classroom demands a child learn requires grasping the connection
between reality and symbolic, abstract representation: letters of the alphabet are symbols for sounds and speech; the map
on the wall is a symbol of the world; the calendar is a symbol to measure the passage of time. Words on paper—such as the
word “TREE”—look to the eye nothing at all like an actual tree.

Young children learn abstract thinking through play, where a desk and some chairs become a fire engine. More importantly,
when play has interacting components, as in Tools, the child’s brain learns how one symbol combines with multiple other symbols,
akin to high-order abstract thinking. A child masters the intellectual process of holding multiple thoughts in his head and
stacking them together.

Consider high-order thinking like self-reflection, an internal dialogue within one’s own mind, where opposing alternatives
are weighed and carefully considered. This thought-conversation is the opposite of impulsive reaction, where actions are made
without forethought. All adults can think through ideas in their heads, to differing abilities. But do kids have the same
internal voice of contemplation and discussion? If so, when do they develop it? Tools is designed to encourage the early development
of this Socratic consciousness, so that kids don’t just react impulsively in class, and they can willfully avoid distraction.

Tools does this by encouraging that voice in the head, private speech, by first teaching kids to do it out loud—they talk
themselves through their activities. When the kids are learning the capital
C,
they all say in unison, “Start at the top and go around” as they start to print. No one ever stops the kids from saying it
out loud, but after a few minutes, the Greek chorus ends. In its place is a low murmur. A couple minutes later, a few kids
are still saying it out loud—but most of the children are saying it in their heads. A few kids don’t even realize it, but
they’ve kept silently mouthing the instructions to themselves.

Kids who are doing well in school know it; when they write down their answer, they know whether or not their answer is correct.
They have a subtle sense, a recognition of whether they’ve gotten it right. Children who are struggling are genuinely unsure;
they might get the right answer, but lack such awareness. So to develop this awareness, when a Tools teacher writes a letter
on the board, she writes four versions of it and asks the kids to decide which is the best
D
.

Leong explained, “This is designed to trigger self-analysis of what a good
D
looks like and what would they like their own
D
’s to look like. They think about their work, when they think about hers.” Tools children are also frequently responsible
for checking each other’s work. In one class Ashley observed, pairs of kids were practicing their penmanship, after which
they were to take turns circling which of their partner’s letters were best. After one child raced through his checker duties
too quickly, the other boy complained. This five-year-old actually wanted his supervisor to be more critical of his work.

Many of the exercises are chosen because they teach children to attend background cues and control their impulses. The simple
game of Simon Says, for instance, entices a child to copy the leader, yet requires the kid to pay close attention and exercise
intermittent restraint. Similarly, when the teacher plays the clean-up song, the children have to notice where they are in
the music in order to make sure they’ll be finished before the song ends. In buddy reading, the natural impulse is for every
kid to want to read first; the child who holds the ears and listens patiently is learning to quell this impulse and wait.

The upshot of Tools is kids who are not merely behaved, but self-organized and self-directed. After just three months of a
pilot project, Tools teachers in New Mexico went from averaging forty reported classroom incidents a month to zero. And Tools
kids don’t distract easily. During one lunch period in a New Jersey school cafeteria, the Tools kindergartners watched the
entire rest of the student body become embroiled in a food fight. Not one Tools kid picked up as much as a scrap of food to
throw, and when they returned to class, they told their teacher that they couldn’t believe how out of control the older children
were.

While Tools’ techniques might sound fuzzy and theoretical, the program has strong support in neuroscience. In other chapters
of this book, we’ve often touched upon the development of a child’s prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain that governs
executive function—planning, predicting, controlling impulses, persisting through trouble, and orchestrating thoughts to fulfill
a goal. Though these are very adult attributes, executive function begins in preschool, and preschoolers’ EF capability can
be measured with simple computerized tests.

During the easiest stage of these tests, a child sees a red heart appear, either on the left or right side of the screen,
and then pushes the corresponding button—left or right. Even three-year-olds will do this perfectly. Then the child sees a
red
flower
and is instructed to press the button on the
opposite
side of the flower. The new task requires her brain to toss out the old rule and adopt a new rule—this is called “attention
switching.” It also requires the child to inhibit the natural urge to respond on the same side as the stimulus. For three-year-olds,
this switch in rules is very hard; for four-year-olds, it’s a challenge but somewhat doable. Now the real test begins. The
computer begins randomly showing either a red heart or a red flower, and the child needs to hold in her working memory
both
rules: heart = press same side, flower = press opposite side. The hearts and flowers are shown for only 2.5 seconds, so the
kid has to think fast, without getting switched up. It requires attentional focus and constant reorienting of the mindset.
For children’s brains, this is very difficult. Even thirteen-year-olds will push the wrong button 20% of the time.

The foremost expert on executive function in young children is Dr. Adele Diamond at the University of British Columbia. A
few years ago, she was approached at a conference by Bodrova, who told her about the experiment in the Passaic preschool.
Diamond wondered if the success of Tools might be because it was exercising children’s executive function skills. So Diamond
went to Passaic to visit.

Diamond recalled, “In the regular classes, the children were bouncing off the walls. In the Tools classrooms, it was like
a different planet. I’ve never seen anything like it.” She decided to return the next year and test the children’s executive
functioning. “I could see the difference with my own eyes, but I wanted hard data,” she said.

To do this, Diamond ran the Passaic children through a number of the executive function computer tasks. She found a huge gap
between the regular kids and the Tools kids on executive function. On one task, the regular kids tested not much above chance,
but the Tools kids scored at 84%. On a very difficult task, only one-quarter of the regular kids could complete the test,
while over half the Tools kids completed it.

“The more the test demanded high executive function,” Diamond noted, “the bigger the gap between the kids.”

Every parent has observed a young child and wondered, with some frustration, when he’ll be able to sit still (other than in
front of the television). When will he be able to sustain an activity for a solid half-hour? When will he be able to stay
on task, rather than be distracted by other children? When will he be able to truly apply himself? At times, it seems that
a child’s cognitive ability, which might be very high, is at war with his distractability.

Usually we concern ourselves only with the detrimental end of this spectrum—the kid who can’t learn because he’s easily distracted.
What we overlook is that being at the beneficial end of the spectrum—being able to concentrate—is a skill that might be just
as valuable as math ability, or reading ability, or even raw intelligence.

So why are some kids better able to direct their attention? What are the neural systems that regulate focus—and is this perhaps
why Tools is getting such good results?

Dr. Silvia Bunge is a neuroscientist at the University of California, Berkeley. Her newest research is on a region of the
brain called the rostral lateral prefrontal cortex. This is the part of human brains that is most different from ape brains.
It’s responsible for maintaining concentration and setting goals. “This is only speculative, but having kids plan their time
and set weekly goals, like they do in Tools,” Bunge told me, “in effect wires up the RLPFC, building it, strengthening it.”

The broad term Bunge uses for a child’s regulation of focus is “cognitive control.” Cognitive control is necessary in many
contexts. In the simplest, the child is trying to avoid distractions—not just external distractions, like another child making
funny faces during class, but internal distractions. “Like the thought, ‘I can’t do this,’ ” Bunge explained.

Cognitive control is required whenever the brain has to manipulate information in the mind; this might be holding a phone
number in memory just long enough to dial it, or planning chess moves in advance, or weighing the pros and cons of two choices.
But it isn’t just about managing information: it’s also part of the process of squelching frustration and anger, and stifling
an inappropriate or impulsive response.

An impulsive
social
response might be giggling in class, but there are impulsive
academic
responses, too. On multiple-choice achievement and IQ tests, there’s always a “distractor” in each list of answers, a choice
that is almost right. Children with weak cognitive control are tricked into selecting it. Their final score will dock them
for intelligence, or reading comprehension, but they’re perfectly intelligent and read just fine—they just can’t regulate
their impulsivity.

According to Bunge, cognitive control is not “on” all the time. Rather, the brain can allocate more or less cognitive control
as it sees fit. This works as a feedback loop between two subregions in the brain. One subsystem is supposed to measure how
well you’re doing on whatever you’re supposed to be doing. When it senses you’re not doing well enough, it signals another
subsystem, which allocates more cognitive control: it improves your concentration. When a child seems to be lacking in control,
it’s not just that her brain
can’t
concentrate—she’s not aware she even
needs
to concentrate. The first part of the feedback loop isn’t doing its job. She’s literally not paying attention to how well
she’s doing.

Think back to the Tools curriculum, where children are routinely asked to check and score their own work against answer sheets,
and are always buddied up with a partner, checking each other’s work (even in preschool). Bodrova and Leong can’t emphasize
enough how crucial it is for children to develop an awareness of how well they’re doing and when their work is completed accurately.
This sensitivity is required for the feedback system to function, and for concentration to be increased.

Bunge’s specialty is putting school-aged children into fMRI scanners and monitoring brain activity while they take tests similar
to the heart and flower task described above. She’s found that the adult brain has a specialized region of the frontal lobe
devoted to regulating rules—all sorts of rules, from heart and flower rules to the rules of grammar to the rules of driving.
(When this region is damaged, people speak and write ungrammatically.) This rules region allows people to be proactive: they
recognize circumstances where rules will apply, as if glancing ahead in time, preloading the brain for what to do. This proactive
response is very much like private speech—telling yourself what to do, a step ahead of doing it. Decisions are made instantly,
and correctly. Schoolchildren taking the same tests don’t yet have this rules region to draw upon; rather than proact, their
brains react. Stumbling, trying to get the rules straight, their error rate is high.