This review was written by Jean Marzollo, one of the nation’s leading writers of children’s books. My children, and now my grandchildren, grew up reading and loving her “I Spy” books, and many others.
A wonderful educator friend of mine, Ellen Booth Church (http://www.ellenboothchurch.com) sent me a copy of her new book, Getting to the HEART of Learning, published by Gryphon House, 2015. I wish every candidate running for president would read her first two paragraphs and quote from them on the podium:
“All learning is social-emotional learning. Children do not learn skills in isolation but through social connection and interconnection to the real world—their world. It is their curiosity about the world that stimulates their desire to learn and to share what they have learned. We all learn best when we care about what we are learning and whom we are learning it with. Children live their lives with their hearts and minds open and connected. From that union of heart and mind, they develop into people who are balanced, happy, and successful.
“Take a quick look at what is being presented in the news, and you will see the need in our culture for social-emotional development. Preschool and kindergarten teachers recognize both the need to address social development in their students and with their students’ families and the need to teach the basic skills that are essential to learning. These two things do not need to be separate; in fact, they truly are inseparable.”
In Chapter 3, Getting to the Heart of Science, Church says, “Children are natural scientists. They wonder, predict, and experiment with everything! Scientists work best in a lab team, and these activities are designed just for team explorations. The children will explore science themes as well as processes together as they build the social skills of cooperation, helping, and working with others. Many of these activities work best with a partner. The children will have to wait to use materials, control impulses to take over, and communicate ideas together. In the process, children also will be building problem-solving skills that will last a lifetime.”
Church says that in order to get to the heart of learning, we need to help preschool and kindergarten teachers teach basic skills and social skills while studying the exciting topics of sound, magnets, camouflage, sunlight, melting, weather, clouds, mirrors, sand, seeds and plants. She spells out, in enjoyable detail, lesson plans for these topics in her book.
Imagine a presidential candidate quoting Aristotle (as Church often does in her presentations): “Educating the mind without the heart is no education at all.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
“we need to help preschool and kindergarten teachers teach basic skills and social skills while studying the exciting topics of sound, magnets, camouflage, sunlight, melting, weather, clouds, mirrors, sand, seeds and plants.”
Early Childhood Education teachers are already skilled at holistic teaching. What we need to do is stop the mandates that come from people who don’t know how to teach young children, get out of their way and LET them teach this way.
Excellent comments! I don’t know if the “All” part of Ellen Church’s essay is entirely accurate, but meaningful education really is “social-emotional learning.” I suppose there are many small-town public schools that fit this image, but the massive institutions that typify much of the education world struggle to find a meaningful place for human emotions and relationships in the curriculum. I guess this is primarily why I support school choice – the government – now and always – operates very poorly in the interpersonal arena.
Parents on the other hand, tend to have a much greater concern for the emotional/social wellbeing of their children than principals, superintendents, and bureaucrats. Give parents greater (financial) control over not only the choice of their child’s school but its curricular priorities, and we may have a solution to our nation’s declining human and social capital – especially in the inner cities.
When more local churches can afford to run schools that will address the needs of their children on a more human level, within a context of trust, shared core values, and parental involvement, and without the micromanagement of the state, THEN we may begin to see more socially and emotionally healthy kids and the rebirth of a healthy social fabric in our inner cities.
I can see how you might think that, but experience has shown otherwise. There’s a whole host of reasons why the free market cannot promote social-emotional learning. For starters, it’s too expensive to pay qualified, caring, veteran teachers, so charter schools and other market choices tend to find the youngest, cheapest and most compliant teachers they can. For another, the market rewards anything that is easily replicable and scalable, which genuine relational teaching is not.
And just as a side note, there’s this little thing called the Constitution that’s supposed to prevent the government from financing religious schools (and why religious schools would want to be financed by the government is beyond me).
Public school teachers were able to implement this approach just fine until the Common Core was written without a single expert in Early Childhood Education or child development on the team, which turned Kindergarten into the new 1st grade.
“Is the Common Core killing kindergarten?”
http://www.bostonglobe.com/ideas/2015/06/13/common-core-killing-kindergarten/lydG3pnscVEnTEoELUZWdP/story.html?event=event25
Not sure about Obama’s reading preferences (“Arne’s Adventures in Blunderland”?), but I know GW Bush is partial to “The Pet Goat”
You mean we can’t just sit them all in front of an Ipad with some cool Aps and some “educational” web sites? What’s all this hands-on, touchy feely stuff?
Of course the all-purpose adjective in federal policy has truncated the meaning of learning to strictly “academic” content, “academic” skills, “academic” achievement, mastering the required and predetermined content/skills grade by grade, no child left behind, all racing to the top and getting there at the same time. This pervsion of education comes from corporate types who think there is no difference bewtween corportate and military training for adults and education for children and young people who are not yet of age.
I LOVE “booktv” on C-span 2 each weekend. There are so MANY GREAT books written by great authors who utilize years of research in writing their books. On MANY subjects. I have learned so much.
I first heard of Dr. Ravitch when she was interviewed there.
In watching and listening my profound ignorance in so many areas and that what I thought was true was only partially true or in many cases I had no idea at all of that about they had written.
Education: expanding one’s parameters of perspective, the eternal search for glimmers of truth.
Reblogged this on David R. Taylor-Thoughts on Texas Education.
Sounds like a great book. I have expressed these same thoughts many times. 🙂
There are a number of books that should be read by everyone..parents, teachers, administrators AND POLITICIANS; Those include: “What If Everybody Understood Child Development?” Rae Pica, “SPARK, The Revolutionary Science of Exercise And The Brain”, Dr John Ratey, M.D., “Brain Rules” and “Brain Rules For Baby” , Dr. John Medina, PhD, “Smart Moves, Why Learning is Not All in Your Head”, Dr. Carla Hannaford PhD and “The Brain That Changes Itself”, Dr. Norman Doidge. Each of these is more than worth your while. “SPARK” has become the bible for Physical Education Teachers.