Zone of Near Development

Di sini saya taipkan semula antara rumusan daripada buku 'Einstein Never Used Flash Cards' dari bab 'The Quest to Define Intelligence'.


Work within your child's zone of development.

Remember that your child learn best when they're encouraged to move just slightly beyond what's already comfortable for them. Most likely you're already doing some of the following steps at least some of the time with your child, but describing them can help you appreciate how important your role is.

• Follow your child's interest. Don't try to make your child do a task you assign, but instead figure out what the child wants to do. Let her set up the problem she wants to work on, whether it's putting shapes into matching holes or finishing a puzzle.

• Reduce The number of steps your child has to go through to achieve the goal she has set for herself. For example, if your child wants to put shapes into a box with holes that match the shapes (a toy many of us have) but can't stabilize the box and put the shape through the hole at the same time, you stabilize the box. If your child needs to open a door and press something to make an event occur but she can't open a door, you open the door to allow the child to do the next step.

• when your child gets frustrated, encourage her to stick with the task (note : encourage not force!). Don't try to make her stick with it; try to motivate her by saying things like "We can do it together!" or "Let me help you." Frustration is often a sign that the child can't figure out what to do next. If necessary, go back to previous step : Break the task up to small steps.

• Demonstrate : Flagging motivation often indicates a good time to show your child how the task is done. As you demonstr, continue to encourage your child with language such as "See? The ball went into the box! Now you do it!" Demonstrations are very helpful since we all learn from imitating others.

• Talk about the difference between what your child did and what need to be done. By describing the child's actions, you help him understand why A doesn't work, but B will. For example, you can say something like "It doesn't work when yo force it, but it might work if you put it gently." By calling attention to the differences, you are teaching him alternative means to an end. 

• Make connections for your child to things she does know how to do. Effective teachers for people of all ages help the learner to link what they are learning to things they already know. Say things like "This is like the toy you played with at Andrea's house. Remember? This one works almost the same way!" This helps the child bring knowledge she already has to bear on the new task she has set for herself.

Stress effort, not achievement.

Your children will miss 100 percent of the shots they don't take. If we're critical and fact-driven, we're teaching our children not to take those shots. what we need to teach them more than anything is that it's okay not to be perfect., that we make mistakes, too, and that we love for their effort. In contrast, an intense emphasis on early learning teaches them not to think outside the box. Yet this is just the opposite of what develops an intelligent person. We should be teaching our children to think creatively, to recognize that the walls of the box are only made of cardboard. 

Have you heard the old saw about genius being 10 percent inspiration and 90 percent perspiration? sometimes the old saw are true. One of the differences between people who achieve and people who don't is motivation. Professor Carol Dweck of Columbia University has made her life's work from understanding what motivates children to learn. When recently asked whether IQ was a reliable measure of children's real abilities and potential, she responded, "IQ test can measure current skill, but nothing can measure someone's potential....Research on creative geniuses shows that many of them seemed like fairly ordinary. Yet at some point, they become obsessed with something and pursued it avidly over a long period of time...Many of these contributions could not have been predicted by IQ scores."

So how can we create children who love to learn? Children start out that way -as Piaget has made so crystal clear. They are like little sponges. To keep them that way- to avoid drying up their curiosity- we need to be encouraging, not critical. We need to praise the strategies they use to solve a problem, rather than their intelligence. This implicitly says to children that with the right approach, they can do most anything. In this way, we free our children from the anxiety of disappointing us ("If I try something new and fail," they may otherwise reason, "my mom will no longer think I'm so smart,") and enable them to focus on persevering in challenging circumstances. The result is a mastery-oriented child, a child who doesn't give up when faced with a difficult task but instead embraces and enjoys the challenge.

Read also : Boosting Your Baby's Development