“In order to develop normally, a child requires progressively more complex joint activity with one or more adults who have an irrational emotional relationship with the child. Somebody’s got to be crazy about that kid. That’s number one. First, last and always.” — Urie Bronfenbrenner
“The seed must grow regardless of the fact that it’s planted in stone”
— Tupac Shakur, “The Rose That Grew From Concrete”
A recent New York Times article asked 37 education researchers to rank 30 ideas for fixing American schools.
Small-group tutoring came first.
The science of reading was second, followed by universal pre-K, increased school funding and higher teacher pay in high-poverty schools.
The researchers were asked to judge each idea according to its likely effect on academic achievement, generally measured through standardized test scores. The 30 ideas themselves came from researchers, policymakers, existing programs and proposals circulating across the political spectrum.
I keep coming back to the winner. Why does small-group tutoring work?
The obvious answer is that three or four students with one tutor receive more individualized instruction. The tutor can identify mistakes, adjust explanations and spend more time on whatever a child does not understand.
But that is only a small part of what happens.
Put three children in a room with the same adult several times a week and you have also created a relationship. The tutor remembers what happened Tuesday. She notices when a child is frustrated. She asks questions, encourages him and expects to see him again. Those who study tutoring count that kind of sustained relationship among the core ingredients of the programs that produce the largest learning gains.
Maybe separating relationship and instruction is part of our problem.
Think about an orange.
We know oranges are good for us, and we know they contain vitamin C. So we identify vitamin C as the important part. Then we get to work. We extract it. Refine it. Synthesize it. Process it. Eventually, we have a concentrated dose of the thing we decided was valuable.
We have also turned an orange into a pill. Something natural into something processed.
Then we discover that the pill is hard to swallow. So we add “sugar.” We disguise it. We make it look and taste like candy.
Education sometimes follows the same path. We see children learning through interactions with other people and identify the academic content as the valuable ingredient. We extract it and refine it into standards, curricula, instructional minutes, learning objectives and assessments.
Then we discover that a lot of kids don’t particularly want what we’ve made.
So we “sweeten” the deal. Points. Badges. Prizes. Gamification. We spend enormous amounts of time figuring out how to make the concentrated educational product more appealing and, therefore, consumable.
Meanwhile, we are standing under an orange tree.
The problem isn’t that vitamin C doesn’t matter. It does. The problem is assuming that we can separate it from everything else and still get the same result.
An orange also gives us fiber. The two arrive together. That is the dosage that Dr. Nature recommended. Plus it already comes presweetened.
I think relationship may be some of the fiber we’ve been extracting from education.
Urie Bronfenbrenner, one of the most influential developmental psychologists of the last century, argued that development happens through sustained, increasingly complex interactions with other people. He sometimes put the idea more simply: “Somebody has got to be crazy about that kid.”
Suneeta Kulkarni’s Granny Cloud experiments pushed on something similar from another direction. Children were connected remotely with older adults whose primary job wasn’t to teach the subject. They encouraged them, showed interest, asked questions and admired what they were discovering.
It is almost comically low-tech.
An adult is interested in what a child is doing.
We have those resources everywhere.
Parents. Grandparents. Teachers. Coaches. Neighbors. Older children. Younger children. People who know things. People who don’t know things but are willing to wonder alongside somebody else. Opportunities for children to talk, listen, explain, imitate, argue, teach and be taught.
The garden is full of fruit.
Yet we often make those relationships conditional on a narrower purpose. A child gets a tutor because reading scores are low. A mentor appears because the child is “at risk.” An adult-child interaction becomes valuable because it produces some other measurable outcome.
Maybe we have that backward.
You learn math with somebody. You read with somebody. You build something with somebody. You become interested in something because somebody you care about finds it interesting. You explain something to a younger child and discover that teaching it changes your own understanding.
[Related: Be seen — A simple activity for fostering deep relational visibility in youth groups]
Seen this way, the Times ranking gets more interesting.
Small-group tutoring may deserve its place at the top. But perhaps the intervention works so well because we have accidentally put some of the orange back together.
The child gets instruction and attention. Academic content and conversation. Practice and encouragement.
The dosage contains both the vitamin C and the fiber.
The reduction happens when we decide which ingredient deserves the credit. Then we try to isolate that ingredient so we can deliver it more efficiently.
And it makes sense that we keep locating the remedy inside school because that is where we are measuring the problem. But children spend their lives moving through a much larger garden. They bring yesterday’s conversations, relationships, arguments, screens, games, disappointments and discoveries into school with them.
Schools should improve. Good instruction matters. Academic content matters. Vitamin C matters.
But maybe our obsession with isolating the active ingredient has made education much harder than it needs to be. We continue to go through the process of refining and disturbing perfectly designed natural solutions.
Perhaps before inventing the next intervention, we should look around at what is already growing.
The fruit is hanging pretty low.
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Pass the mic: Where hip-hop meets human development. Each month, Daniel Warren, Ph.D., will bring scholars and rappers into dialogue to spark new ways of seeing youth, culture and change. Previous pieces in series:
- Productive struggle, J Dilla, and knowing when enough is enough
- Manifest Destiny’s Child
- You might also like: The problem with learning styles
- Keeping it real
- Structure, control and leaving room
- Look inside: What MCA taught us about gratitude, growth and growing up
- Shifting the game: Kuhn, hip-hop and the future of youth work
- When positive youth development meets the Native Tongues
- Biggie through Bronfenbrenner’s Eyes
Dan Warren, Ph.D., is director of youth development and education at Fluent Research. He writes Youth Today’s Pass the Mic column. Warren previously conducted research at Tufts University’s Institute for Applied Research in Youth Development and the National Service Center for the Boy Scouts of America, and spent a decade as an elementary school teacher in the Boston area.
