Let’s Talk About YOU
By Mark W.F. Condon, Unite for Literacy vice president
One of the best things that parents can do to support their children for success in school may not be to help them with their science project or fractions worksheet. While those are terrific ways to convey to children the importance of school, these content-rich activities are more educational when the conversation that goes along with them is not about the homework, grades or remembering a particular concept for an exam.
When it comes to book reading, well-meaning parents and teachers can find themselves quizzing children about facts gleaned from books or focusing upon getting correct answers to other people’s questions about their content. In doing so, kids quickly lose interest.
Talking with youngsters during homework time is most productively guided by the goal of teaching them to talk about themselves in relation to new information or ideas—to express about how something fits into their lives or how it doesn’t.
It’s undeniable that our favorite spoken word is the sound of our own names. Knowing that is a valuable lever in working with students of all ages, even adults. It’s also valuable to know that children might recognize a major connection between two events if they can somehow see themselves as that connection. This mental act enhances retention and application of learning beyond the classroom. Otherwise, things can seem trivial and isolated, destined to quickly fade, disconnected from kids’ lives.
To make new information permanently ours, we must create a personal link that helps us to understand ourselves in light of new information. This is most likely to occur when children are led to talk with others about how the subject, story lines, and characters found between the pages of books are relatable to them. Instructionally, this establishes that every child has something unique to contribute to any lesson and thus to each other.
Successful parents and teachers invite each child’s contribution, either using their name or the word “you.” The prevalence of the word YOU in the advanced levels of critical thinking shown in the diagram above is a clear indication of how the path to developing a life of informed thought is centrally self-reflection, not rote memorization. The deeper the thinking about something, the more the learner, YOU, appears in this graphic.
Guiding the development of this type of personal thinking is about getting children to think about themselves in a lesson and in building personal connections to expand new information into personal resources.
Meaningful conversation about shared books or events suggests stepping back from them and exploring their personal significance. Because when children learn to think deeply, it means they have learned to reflect upon how things impact their lives. And it all begins with inviting them to talk about themselves.