Spontaneously Joyful

My mantra for the week is, "I invite myself to be spontaneously joyful." And just to think it makes me feel, well, spontaneously joyful! As Taj Mahal sings, "Remember that feeling as a child, when you woke up and morning smiled?" It's time, it's time I felt like that again.

This morning on National Public Radio I heard a great story on a new approach to early childhood education based on the work of our good friend Lev Vygotsky. You can listen to the NPR story here. Called "Tools of the Mind", the approach intends to teach children to regulate their own learning. The premise is that children do not learn as well as they could because they have not learned how to regulate their social, emotional and cognitive behaviors. Self-regulation forms the basis of executive functioning, which research shows correlates more highly with academic achievement than early reading or math skills.And, those of us in schools know that the lack of executive functioning greatly impedes our ability to teach.

What I really like about this approach is it is rooted in play, what we used to call "free play." When children create their own scenarios and play them out, or experiment with tools of their own choosing, they are learning about the world. Much of children's experience in our modern world involves them in highly structured activities (lessons, organized sports) or electronic environments (TV, video games)which demand little in the way of imagination. In a Tools of the Mind classroom, children use their imaginations in their play -- yet with one important pre-condition: intention. Children learn a process that requires them to declare their intention before they play, to an adult who records it on paper, and then with whom they debrief when they are done. In this it is very similar to the seminal High/Scope "Plan-Do-Review" cycle. High/Scope's nearly forty years of research shows the unequivocal importance of high quality early childhood education. Tools of the Mind offers a new way of thinking how to support young children in learning about their learning.

Which, to my mind, is one of the many sources of spontaneous joy!