r/DetroitMichiganECE

>Many of the studies on music and sleep are done with preterm infants in the NICU – including one which compared infants who heard Mozart to infants who heard their mother's lullabies plus a control group that didn't hear any music.

>"What they found was that the mothers' lullabies were more soothing to the infants," she says. "They slept better, but they also showed a lot of the effects of decreased heart rate and respiration, better feeding, which probably explains why they had fewer days in the neonatal intensive care unit and their mothers' anxiety was reduced."

>Still, there is just something about lullabies, says Sam Mehr, who studies the psychology of music at the University of Auckland. He also directs The Music Lab. His team did a study playing songs for infants in an unfamiliar language – some of the songs were lullabies, and some weren't.

>The babies found all the songs pretty relaxing, he says, "but when they're listening to these lullabies, even though they're totally unfamiliar and not in a language the baby understands, they relax more. So there's something in the kind of DNA of lullaby that helps to calm infants."

>"You can imagine that a parent who learns that this is the case and actually increases the amount of time that they spend [singing], you could imagine all these follow-on effects, where the baby's easier to soothe, so the parent's more chilled out and not as stressed about being a parent, which is already a pretty stressful thing," he says.

>There is some evidence that singing to infants can help boost a parent's confidence (that superhero feeling I get). One study of nearly 400 mothers in England found that singing to babies daily was associated with less postpartum depression and higher wellbeing and self-esteem. And in another study, mothers that sang to their children for 90 minutes in a group felt more closeness to their infants than mothers that talked and played but did not sing.

>Metacognition is a person’s ability to reflect on their own thinking. These skills can be broken down into two areas: cognitive knowledge and cognitive regulation. Cognitive knowledge includes what we understand about ourselves as learners, such as how we learn, solve problems, and make decisions. Cognitive regulation includes how people monitor and adjust their thinking, such as assessing a task, making plans, and recognizing when things aren’t working and shifting strategies.

>For many years, learning scientists believed this type of reflective thinking developed in later childhood, but research has shown that children as young as 3 can demonstrate and develop metacognitive skills. This knowledge has important implications: Students who develop strong metacognitive skills have been shown to have improved academic outcomes in the future.

>Children are strongly invested in their play, so guided reflection on play provides a means for utilizing a high-interest activity to develop metacognitive skills. This is in line with the Universal Design for Learning principle of engagement, which recognizes that learning deepens when students are emotionally invested and find personal relevance in a task. For most children, play is the highest-engagement activity of their day. Beyond that, free play provides an opportunity for children to naturally encounter problems to solve, conflicts to navigate, decisions to make, and strategies to try, revise, and try again. The experience of play is critical, and reflection on play transforms the experience into further learning.

>For play reflection, documentation is a key first step. With our youngest students, this may include teachers capturing pictures, videos, and observational notes during play to reference during post-play reflection activities. Older students can participate in documenting their play by taking their own photos or videos. Post-play, teachers can guide students to reflect using a variety of methods, including partner or group discussion, drawing, journaling, or reflection using multimedia tools.

>During play reflection, the role of the teacher includes asking open-ended questions that help make thinking visible, validating the process of play over the product, and modeling reflective language. The goal in facilitating play reflection is not to evaluate play but rather to draw the child’s attention to their own thinking, decision-making, and emotions during play.

>Reflection prompts children to recognize their own strengths, preferences, and challenges, which builds self-awareness of their own learning. When a child says, “I’m really good at building, but I didn’t get enough long sticks before I started,” they are developing a clearer picture of themselves as a thinker and a learner. Learners who understand their own preferences, strengths, and even weaknesses are better positioned to access and sustain learning.

>When children reflect on how they navigate challenges during play, they begin to identify and name the strategies that they used. This reflection helps kids to understand that there are tools available when things feel hard. A child who reflects, “The sticks kept falling down, so I tried using bigger rocks to hold them up,” is recognizing that when one strategy fails, another can be implemented. Reflection also supports a child’s ability to build tolerance to challenges, which supports self-regulation. A child who can say, “I got really frustrated when it kept falling, so I took a break before trying again,” is learning how to name their emotional experience as well as identifying strategies that support self-regulation.

>Learning from failure can spark creativity and strengthen problem-solving skills. This type of reflection supports productive failure and resilience, helping children learn to use setbacks as opportunities to adjust their approaches, persist, and try again.

>Most powerfully, when students can examine and reflect on their thinking about play, it improves their ability to apply that thinking in other contexts, including academic work. The language of reflection can be transferred from play to more specific academic tasks and life experiences.

>Education is not necessarily a qualification for making one's life successful, nor for safeguarding one's own interests. It is really a qualification for a fuller life, a life of thought for oneself and of consideration for others. Education is that which gradually expands in its length and breadth, horizontally and perpendicularly. We may further explain this as being the knowledge of oneself and one's surroundings; the knowledge of others, both those who are known to us and those who are unknown and away; the knowledge of the conditions of human nature and of life's demands; and the knowledge of cause and effect, which leads in the end to the knowledge of the world within and without.

>No doubt it is difficult to think of vast knowledge of life in connection with a child, but we must remember that as a rule the grown-ups underestimate the capacity of a child's mind, which is very often more eager to understand and more capable of comprehension than that of a grown-up person. Although you cannot start with a deep subject at the beginning of a child's education, you can always keep before you the large design you have in view and wish to reach.

>The great fault of modern education has been that, with all its advanced methods of training children, it has missed what is most important; namely the lesson of unselfishness. Man thinks that an unselfish person is incapable of guarding his own interests in life; but however much it may appear so it is not so in reality. A selfish person is a disappointment to others, and in the end a disadvantage to himself. Mankind is interdependent, and the happiness of each depends upon the happiness of all, and it is this lesson that humanity has to learn today as the first and the last lesson.

>The infant begins its first activity in life by making a noise, trying to speak or moving its hands and legs to show a certain rhythm. If the same faculty which every infant shows naturally is taken as the basis of his education, one can educate even an infant. The education given at the earliest age is invaluable to the child, for as the child grows, it acquires certain habits by itself; and once it has become fixed in its way of looking at things and thinking and behaving, these habits are hard to change. It is like letting the rainwater make its own way instead of digging a canal to take the water to the farm or garden. In this way a child's tendency to learn and to act can be used to the best advantage, if the parents only know how. The Indians say that the mother is the first Guru; this should be realized by all parents. Education begins at home, and it is this first education which is the foundation of all that a child may learn in the future.

>The first education a child needs is to harmonize its thought, speech and action. All things external have their reaction in one's inner life, and the inner has its reaction on the exterior. Therefore some knowledge of tone and rhythm is essential in the beginning of a child's education. A child should be taught the elements of music with regard to the pitch in which it should get in touch with its friends, with strangers, with its parents, while playing or at the table; in every varying condition it should feel that the pitch is different. The child should be taught how to make its choice of words when speaking to different people, to strangers, to its friends, to its parents, to the servants of the house; making the voice softer or louder must be done with understanding.

>The child is most energetic when it is growing, and every action, sitting, standing, walking, or running, every movement it makes should be corrected and directed towards harmony and beauty. For the nature of life is intoxicating, and every action deepens the intoxication of life in a child, who is still ignorant of the outcome of every action; it knows little of the consequences and is only interested in the action. By nature a child is more enthusiastic and excitable than a grown-up person, and if its actions are not corrected or controlled it will mostly speak and act without consideration of harmony and beauty; for the nature of the child is like water which runs downwards and it needs a fountain to raise it upwards. Education is that fountain.

>It is a great pity that at this present time, when the cry for freedom seems to be so dominant, people often think, 'Why should not the children have their freedom?' But it must be understood that it is not the path of freedom which leads to the goal of freedom. Liberty is not an ideal to begin life with, it is a stage of perfect freedom which must be kept in view in order to arrive at the desired end.

>Consideration is a faculty which it is most necessary to develop in the child from the beginning; for once it has become inconsiderate, it is difficult to give it the sense of consideration. Consideration cannot be taught; it must come by itself; but the duty of the parents is to help it to rise in the child. They can very well accomplish this in a pleasant manner, without becoming a bore to the innocent mind of the child, by showing it where consideration is needed in different situations of life.

>It is easy to accuse a child of inconsiderateness, but that does not always profit it. On the contrary, the child will often become annoyed at such accusations and hardened in its faults, defending its actions against the accusations of others, which is a natural human tendency. The way of the wise is to show appreciation whenever that child shows consideration, and to make it conscious of that virtue, so that it may be able to enjoy its beauty. This develops in the child a taste for virtue; it feels happy to act rightly, instead of always being forced to do so. It is on strength of mind that the entire life of the child depends, and strength of mind can be developed in the child by making it self-confident all it thinks, says, or does; it must get to know something instead of being forced to believe it.

>But it is altogether a wrong principle, for children as well as for grown-ups, to divide work and play thus. Play should be useful and should be work at the same time; and work should be made like play, in order that it may not be a tedious task but a pleasure in life. If this idea were worked out well it would solve a great many labor problems which disturb the peace and order of humanity so much today.

>It can be best done by teaching children to play and work at the same time, so that when they are grown-up work and play will continue to be the same. All that one does with pleasure is done well and produces a good effect. Doing depends on the attitude of the mind. When the mind is not in a good state, whatever be the work, however interesting, it will not be well done. To bring about peace and order in the world it is necessary that all work should be made pleasant, and that all pleasure should be turned into work, so that in taking pleasure no work is lost and there is pleasure in working. The central theme in the education of children should be the occupying of every moment of their life in doing quite willfully something which is pleasurable and at the same time useful. Life is a great opportunity, and no moment of life should be lost.

>The great fault of the modern system of education is that it only qualifies a man to obtain what he desires in life; and he tries to obtain this my every means, right or wrong, often with no regard for what losses or pain he causes others. The consequence of this is that life has become full of competition in trade, in the professions, and in the State. In order that one may gain another must surely lose. In this way the shadow changes its position from morning to evening; in the end the shadow must prove to be only a shadow, and one realizes it matters little which direction the shadow takes.

>The study should be divided, partly indoors and partly outdoors. The teaching given to a child indoors should be different than the study given out of doors. The outdoor study should concern all that the child sees; one can then include the practice or the experience of what it has learned indoors.

>The freedom of the child must always be considered; it should never be forced but only guided gently. One should produce in a child the desire to choose as its friends those whom it feels to be congenial. As soon as the liberty of a child is interfered with, the child begins to feel captive and the lantern of its conscience becomes dim. Therefore the duty of the parents is to guide the child constantly, yet freeing it gradually to make a choice in everything in life. Parents who do not understand this and do not attach sufficient importance to it, very often cause the child to go astray while trying to guide it.

>A child should learn to recognize its relation and duty to all those around it. Once should let it know what is expected of it by its father, mother, brothers, sisters; for the recognition of relationship is the sign of human character which is not seen among animals. A son who has not been a good son to his mother will not be a good husband to his wife, for he has missed his first chance of developing thoughtfulness and the love quality. But as the child grows it must be led to have some idea of the further relationship between human beings. For the world is a family, and the right attitude of a young soul must be to see in every man his brother and in every woman his sister; he must look on aged people as he would on his father or mother.

>The betterment of the world mostly depends upon the development of the coming generation. The ideal of human brotherhood should be taught at home; this does not mean that the child must recognize human brotherhood before recognizing the relationship at with his own brothers and sisters; but the relationship at home must be the first lesson in human brotherhood which the child may reach by realizing the brotherhood of the nation, of the race, of the world. It is a fault when a person does not progress in the path of brotherhood. The child should be taught to picture first its own town as a family, then its nation as a family, and then the entire continent as a family, in order to arrive at the idea that the whole world is a family.

>When Tolstoy opened his school in the autumn of 1859 in a single room of his large manor house at Yasnaya Polyana, free education for peasant children did not exist in Russia. Occasionally, a village would boast of a priest or an ex-soldier who taught a few children at so much per head. The subjects were elementary, the method a mixture of blows and learning by heart, and the results negligible. This situation Tolstoy wished to remedy by substituting public education based on entirely original pedagogical methods.

>With half a year of highly successful teaching behind him, it was almost inevitable that Tolstoy should find himself bedevilled in a maze of speculation on pedagogy and obsessed with schemes for improving national education. In March, 1860, he wrote to a friend, E. P. Kovalevsky, brother of the Minister of National Education, of his efforts and mentioned that he already had fifty students and that the number was growing.

>>"Wisdom in all worldly affairs it seems to me," he continued, "consists not in recognizing what must be done but in knowing what to do first and then what comes after."

>after reading Montaigne, he wrote:

>>"In education, once more, the chief things are equality and freedom."

>Julius Froebel, nephew of Friedrich Froebel the celebrated educational reformer and founder of the kindergarten system, has left an interesting account of his discussion with Tolstoy:

>>" 'Progress in Russia,' he told me, 'must come out of public education, which among us will give better results than in Germany, because the Russian masses are not yet spoiled by false education."'

>Tolstoy went on to inform him of his own school in which learning was in no sense obligatory.

>>"'If education is good,' he said, 'then the need for it will manifest itself like hunger."'

>From his visits to the schools of Marseille, Tolstoy took away a gloomy impression of the futility of the subjects taught and the lifeless, unimaginative methods of teaching them. On the other hand, when he talked with workers and children on the streets, he found them intelligent, free-thinking, and surprisingly well informed, but with no thanks to their schooling.

>This situation led him to conclude in a later account of these experiences, in an article entitled "On National Education":

>>"Here is an unconscious school undermining a compulsory school and making its contents almost of no worth.... What I saw in Marseille and in all other countries amounts to this: everywhere the principal part in educating a people is played not by schools, but by life."

>This is the kind of characteristic half-truth that Tolstoy was fond of deducing from incomplete experience, and it became an important factor in his educational theorizing. But even half-truths that blasted away the hard shell of traditional and erroneous thinking on vital social problems had their value for him.

>Over the door of the school Tolstoy placed the inscription: "Enter and Leave Freely." Perhaps he was thinking, by way of contrast, of Dante's inscription over hell: "Abandon Hope, All Ye who Enter Here," which he would hardly have hesitated to place above the entrance to most European schools he had visited. Certainly the atmosphere of his own school convinced the children that education was a precious and joyous heritage.

>Tolstoy believed that all education should be free and voluntary. He supported the desire of the masses for education, but he denied that the government or any other authority had the right to force it upon them. The logic of things, and his study of the operation of compulsory education abroad, convinced him that in this form it was an evil. Pupils should come to learn of their own accord, for if education were a good, it would be found as necessary as the air they breathed. If people were antagonistic, then the will of the people should become the guiding factor. Tolstoy's faith in the "will of the people," even though the people might oppose commonly accepted notions of progress, contained the seeds of his later anarchism, and was a direct slap at radical reformers who would uplift the masses against their will.

>Tolstoy also believed that education should answer the needs of the masses, but his conception of their needs had nothing in common with that of contemporary progressive thinkers. Nor did he have any patience with the widespread pedagogical conviction that education should mould the character and improve the morals of students. These were matters for family influence, he declared, and the teacher had no right to introduce his personal moral standards or social convictions into the sanctity of the home. In public education he was concerned primarily with peasants, the vast majority of the population. But he was not bent on elevating them above their class by the power of education (a definite evil in his eyes); he was concerned with making them better, more successful, and happier peasants.

>In this context the individualistic direction of Tolstoy's thought was apparent. The assumption of civilization's progress in Macaulay, Buckle, and especially in Hegel, he firmly rejected. For some time opposition between the good of the individual and the good of society had been troubling him. He was already developing a philosophy hostile to the pragmatic ideal that progress could be achieved only by social education of the people through the medium of democracy. Progress was personal, he felt, and not social. Education must serve the individual and not society, for the individual's capacity to serve humanity was what gave meaning to life. Yet he did not appear to see the contradiction in his rejection of the whole modern concept of progress. He would teach the peasant child what he needed, but what he needed was often conditioned by the social system in which he lived.

>In his article "On National Education" Tolstoy defined education as "a human activity based on desire for equality and a constant tendency or urge to advance in knowledge." Education, he asserted, was history and therefore had no final aim. Its only method was experience; its only criterion, freedom.

>During the morning, elementary and advanced reading were taught, composition, penmanship, grammar, sacred history, Russian history, drawing, music, mathematics, natural sciences, and religion; in the afternoon there were experiments in physical sciences and lessons in singing, reading, and composition. No consistent order was followed, however, and lessons were lengthened or omitted according to the degree of interest manifested by the students. On Sundays the teachers met to talk over the work and lay out plans for the following week. But there was no obligation to adhere to any plan, and each teacher was placed entirely upon his own. For a time they kept a common diary in which were set down with merciless frankness their failures as well as their successes.

>Originality was the guiding spirit. Freedom ruled, but never to the extent of anarchy. When Tolstoy purposely left the room in the middle of a lesson to test the behaviour of his students, they did not break into an uproar as he had observed was the case in similar circumstances in classrooms he visited abroad. When he left, the students were enjoying complete freedom, and hence they behaved as though he were still in the room. They corrected or praised each other's work, and some-times they grew entirely quiet. Such results, he explained, were natural in a school where the pupils were not obliged to attend, to remain, or to pay attention.

>Tolstoy insisted that only in the absence of force and compulsion could natural relations be maintained between teacher and pupils. The teacher defined the limits of freedom in the classroom by his knowledge and capacity to manage. And the pupils, Tolstoy wrote, should be treated as reasoning and reasonable beings; only then would they find out that order was essential and that self-government was necessary to preserve it. If pupils were really interested in what was being taught, he declared, disorder would rarely occur, and when it did, the interested students would compel the disorderly ones to pay attention.

>The successful functioning of such a school demanded unusual ability on the part of the teacher. Tolstoy admitted this, and justly claimed for himself a certain pedagogic tact. Always in his mind was the pupil's convenience in learning and not the teacher's in teaching. He argued that there was no best method in teaching a subject; the best method was that which the teacher happened to know best. That method was good which when introduced did not necessitate an increase of discipline, and that which required greater severity was bad. The method should develop out of the exigencies of a given problem in teaching, and it should please the pupils instead of the teacher. In short, teaching, according to Tolstoy, could not be described as a method; it was a talent, an art. Finality and perfection were never achieved in it; development and perfecting continued endlessly.

>In this free atmosphere of student-dominated learning, certain traditional subjects were resisted in a manner that led Tolstoy to doubt their ultimate usefulness and to question the desirability of teaching them to youngsters. Grammar was such a subject. Although his emphasis in instruction favoured analysis, the kind involved in grammar put the students to sleep. To write correctly and to correct mistakes made by others gave his pupils pleasure, but this was only true when the process was unrelated to grammar. After much experimentation with teaching the subject, he concluded in an article in Yasnaya Polyana that

>>"grammar comes of itself as a mental and not unprofitable gymnastic exercise, and language — to write with skill and to read and understand — also comes of itself."

>In the pages of his educational magazine, Tolstoy provides vivid accounts, filled with all the charm of his realistic art, of daily life at the school. On a cold winter morning the bell would ring. Children would run out into the village street. There was no lagging on the way, no urge to play the truant. Each child was eager to get there first. The pupils carried nothing in their hands, no homework books or exercises. They had not been obliged to remember any lesson. They brought only themselves, their receptive natures, and the certainty that it would be as jolly in school that day as it had been the day before.

>At the end of a lesson Tolstoy would announce that it was time to eat and play, and, challenging them to race him out-doors, he would leap downstairs, three or four steps at a time, followed by a pack of screaming laughing children. Then he would face them in the snow and they would clamber over his back, desperately striving to pull him down. He was more like an older brother to them and they responded to his efforts with devotion and tireless interest. Their close, even tender, relations are touchingly reflected in one of the magazine articles. He describes how, after school, he accompanies several of the pupils home on a moonless winter night by a roundabout way through the woods, entertaining them with tales of Caucasian robbers and brave Cossacks. The youngest, a ten-year-old boy, furtively clasps two of his teacher's fingers during the most fearful part of a story. At the end of the narration, by one of those quick transitions of children, an older pupil suddenly asks why do they have to learn singing at school? "What is drawing for?" Tolstoy rhetorically asks, puzzled for the moment about how to explain the usefulness of art. "Yes, why draw figures?" - another queries. "What is a lime tree for?" a third asks. At once all begin to speculate on these questions, and the fact emerges that not everything exists for use, that there is also beauty, and that art is beauty

>>"It feels strange to repeat what we said then," Tolstoy writes, "but it seems to me that we said all that can be said about utility, and plastic and moral beauty."

>Tolstoy ended this account in his article by meditating on the age-old question of the moral and practical utility of educating the masses. The cultured, he wrote, would remonstrate: Why give these poor peasant children the knowledge that will make them dissatisfied with their class and their lot in life? But such a peasant boy, concluded Tolstoy, addressing the upper class,

>>"needs what your life of ten generations unoppressed by labor has brought to you. You had the leisure to search, to think, to suffer — then give him that for which you suffered; this is what he needs. You, like the Egyptian priest, conceal yourself from him by a mysterious cloak, you bury in the earth the talent given to you by history. Do not fear: nothing human is harmful to man. Do you doubt yourself? Surrender to the feeling and it will not deceive you. Trust in his [the peasant boy's] nature, and you will be convinced that he will take only that which history commanded you to give him, that which you have earned by suffering."

>He declared that nearly all contemporary art was intended for people of leisure and artificial training and was therefore useless to the masses, whose demand for art was more legitimate. He dismissed with some vexation the stale notion that in order to understand and appreciate the beautiful a certain amount of preparation was necessary.

>>"Who said this?" he asked in his magazine account of the writing of the story. "Why? What proves it? It is only a dodge, a loophole to escape from the hopeless position to which the false direction of our art, produced for one class alone, has led us. Why are the beauty of the sun, of the human face, the beauty of the sounds of a folk song, and of deeds of love and self-sacrifice accessible to everyone, and why do they demand no preparation? "

>The ABC Book, based upon pedagogical theories that Tolstoy had developed and put into practice in his village school was designed, as he said, for the teacher who loved both his calling and his pupils. The work firmly eschews useless or erudite knowledge, or facts beyond the comprehension or experience of beginners. For the chief significance of teaching, he maintained, was not in the assimilation of a known quantity of information, but in awakening in students an interest in knowledge.

>With ruthless dogmatism he condemns outright the phonetic and visual methods of teaching then used in Russian elementary schools. And those native teachers who burned incense to German pedagogical theory he sharply criticized for failing to understand or respect the educational needs of the Russian masses. All a teacher has to know, he declares, is what to teach and how to teach. To find out what to teach, one must go to the people, to the students and their parents. At present, he asserts, the people demand that their children learn how to read and write and to cipher. Until they demand something more, teachers have no right to teach more. As for how to teach, he sums it up in his old phrase: the only criterion for pedagogy is freedom, the only method is experience.

>Despite hostility to Tolstoy's educational practices and writings during his lifetime, since then there has been a tendency to acclaim him a brilliant innovator and one of the most significant of educational reformers. Experimental schools in America and abroad have profited from the full accounts he left of his own experiences. His methods of teaching the alphabet and reading, his insistence on self-reliance by obliging students to do manual labor, and his belief that the child should be allowed as much freedom as possible in the classroom — these features of his system have had their influence in later progressive education. And one of his principal theses, that the school should always remain a kind of pedagogical laboratory to keep it from falling behind universal progress, has found wide acceptance as an educational premise.