Sometimes I feel like in our education system, we're treating
children as if they're going to be children forever. And if you have
children who are too scared to make a mistake and
too scared to try something harder, we're basically scaling
back the process of innovation for our children. How can I ensure
that what we're doing right now is
building a skill that will allow them to leave
and be independent and succeed when they're on their own? Welcome
to Neuroeducation, where we're exploring the neuroscience of
how to switch on the brain to supercharge learning. I'll be sharing
with you innovative teaching techniques, effective parenting strategies,
and educational advocacy. I'm your host, Angie Dee.
Together, let's revolutionize children's learning. Today,
we're going to be talking about self-directed learners
and what is the most important characteristics
that our children need when they get out in the world. Often
in education, we can be looking right here at the
child in grade four, in grade five, or in grade six,
grade 10, grade 12 and beyond. But
we focus on that level of education
and just that grade without thinking about
what's the end goal? What is the end goal here? So
what is the end goal for education? We
will have children that become adults that
walk out of the doors of education, out
of the educational halls. And even as parents, we
will have children that will walk out the doors of our home and
they will go on to lead their lives. And sometimes I
feel like in our education system, we're treating children
as if they're going to be children forever. When we look
at teaching children skills, Sometimes I'm
amazed that the way that we teach a child in
grade 4 and in grade 7 and
grade 10, I still see us teaching children in
the same manner in grade 12. They
don't have a lot of freedom. They're still being told
to do certain things every single lesson, every
single week, and they're not given enough freedom because
what we want to do is slowly prepare them for
the real world. And we want to be able to give them
greater and greater freedom. A lot of adolescents have
said they didn't feel prepared for the real world because we
taught them like children and we didn't give
them that freedom. And then day one,
as soon as they leave school, they have a hundred percent freedom. So
where is the graduation of freedom? Maria
Montessori talks about this concept of freedom
within limits. That as a child shows they are
more and more responsible, we give them greater and greater freedom. And
I think this is incredibly important in parenting and
in teaching. Why? Because when
the children walk out those doors for the final time, then
life is up to them. They have to make their decisions
based on their own inner compass, their intuition, their
guidance, their values and their morals. When
we punish children in schools, I'm amazed that
often the punishment doesn't fit the crime. Maybe
a child is bullying, well you
get a detention. What is that teaching them in
life? Is that teaching them to be more compassionate? Is
that teaching them about how that affected maybe let's say poor
Jane who was bullied? Or does it just give them an arbitrary
punishment that has nothing related to what they've done? In
the same respect we have the
same thing that happens for other punishments. Maybe you're
not wearing the right uniform. I remember when I went to
high school, I was always late. Unfortunately,
after multiple times of being late to high school, I was giving
an afterschool detention. Did it help me with my punctuality? No.
When I got to university, one of my friends, Jodie, who's
always on time, I asked her, I said, how are you on time? all
the time. And so she said, well, this is
how I do it. Wherever I need to be. I make sure I'm going to be
there 10 minutes early. And then I give myself a five
minute buffer before getting into the car. Just in case
I forget my keys or I forget something, I've got to go back in the house. So
sure enough, I implement Jody's very simple
instructions and my punctuality improves at least
by 50% much better than afterschool detention. So
Here we have skills in learning,
academic learning that they're going to use maybe in university or
maybe in their creating their own businesses that we
can give children to have greater and greater freedom and
greater and greater responsibility, teaching them the skills of what
they're going to use for life. So in grade
10, usually in Montessori schools, A
lot of the time children begin to do much more
self-directed projects. They're deciding what
they're going to be learning about and they're setting themselves up for
what they want to be learning after they leave school. In
the same respect we have life skills that we want to teach children. Sadly
in Australia we have an incredibly high rate
of suicide and teenage depression. What
are we not teaching our children in schools to be able to
deal with these kind of stresses that they will face in
life? If we give children greater opportunities
to be able to deal with certain pressures and maybe have
to organize their own time and their
projects, when they become adults and when they walk out
those doors in the final days of schools or at
home from parents, we know that they're going to have skills
to be able to manage their time, to organise themselves
and to deal with the problems of the world. If
you have a adolescent, I
would be always thinking of them as
what's going to be happening in five years. Okay. I'm going to deal with this situation now,
but maybe I might be able to give them a punishment and not let them do
something. Or I can be thinking, how
can I ensure that what we're doing right
now is building a skill that
will allow them to leave and
be independent and succeed when they're on their own. In
the same right our current teaching method of
education has basically formed
a way of an extrinsically motivated
feedback response. If you do well on a test in
primary school, maybe you get a sticker. If you do
well in a quiz, maybe you
get something on a star chart. All of these things are outside of
the child. Intrinsic motivation is
something where motivation comes from the inside. And
in Montessori education, ironically, there's
no stickers, no star charts, no reward
charts. And people say, well, how can children be motivated in
this classroom if they're not
getting any rewards for doing the right thing? Well,
what we've discovered actually in psychology, that
the more you attune the child to their own intrinsic motivation,
to learn something to become better, to reach a
goal, ask them what are their goals for different subjects, where do
they want to improve, that the better the learning
is and the more effort they put in. And the
same thing goes with tests that they have basically looked
at two groups of children that were given
extrinsic and an extrinsic reward and
also extrinsic motivation. So these two groups of children
that they studied were given a problem to solve.
And the first group of children, when they finished that problem and
they solved it, they were given a lots
of congratulatory verbal affirmations of
saying, good work, good job. You're so smart. And
the other group, They praised the
effort involved. So they said, wow, I
really saw you trying really hard. You're really trying to work that
out. You're trying to figure out those problems. Of
these two groups, when they were asked if
they wanted to do another problem that was even harder, the
first group that got the extrinsic affirmation, 90% of
them said no, not interested. They didn't want to. And
every single child in the intrinsic group
where got given affirmed for their effort all
said yes, they wanted to try something harder and something
more difficult. So what is that showing us? When
we are allowing the child to
see what's their inner effort that they're putting into something and
we're affirming the effort that goes into the process rather than
the end result or rather than their intelligence or academic results
in something, it helps them come back to that inner
in a compass where they can guide themselves.
And when it comes to real life, to
achieve anything greater life, we know that we have to
make mistakes. We're going to make mistakes and we're going to learn
from it and try again. We call it failing forward, learning
and trying again, learning and trying again. But if you have children who
are too scared to make a mistake and too scared
to try something harder, we're basically scaling
back the process of innovation for our children. So what we can
do is always make sure we praise the
effort rather than the end result and we can
think long term what's going to benefit our children
in terms of these skills, academically, emotionally,
socially, long term when they walk out those doors of
our school rooms and also of our homes. Thank you so
much for listening. I hope you enjoyed this podcast
and it would be an amazing help to us
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