Weekly Series — Developing Young Thinkers
The goal for working with emerging learners is to help them develop mental tools that develop higher mental functions.
The new students were sitting on the carpet. The teacher facing them, asks who can tell me which shape is red? The students raise their hands and wait to be called on. All except for Jenny who blurts out the answer. The teacher asks Jenny if she noticed that everyone else raised their hands to answer? She says oops, “I forgot”.
The teacher asks Jimmy to go pick out a book from the reading area. On the way he sees the blocks on the floor and begins to organize them. Soon, the teacher reminds him what he was asked to do.
Tracy sits at the table to complete her worksheet. She looks up and sees Anna drawing. Soon Tracy and Anna are engaged in a conversation about the drawing. Before she knows it she hears the teacher say work time is over. Tracy realizes she forgot to do her work.
Higher mental functions are deliberate which means they can be controlled by thought and choice. Children lacking deliberateness react to the loudest noise or the most colorful picture.
When they acquire mental functions they direct their behavior to what is most important in their environment to solve a problem or answer a question.
Young children are able to think, maintain attention and remember things. The problem is that their thinking attention and memory are reactive. What ends up holding their attention may or may not have anything to do with the task they are expected to perform.
Online learning is more and more used to teach basic educational skills. Videos and TV generally exploit reactive learning. Scenes change every few seconds. The loud fast paced sensory bombardment makes it difficult to teach and build higher mental tools.
Online learning, videos and TV actually promotes reactive learning and minimizes the ability to build higher mental tools.
It takes the right environment and instruction to develop higher mental tools. We will talk about how to do that in our next article.
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