How do we teach children to
truly understand and internalize truth?
When faced with a child who has misbehaved or made a choice contrary to my wishes, my natural response is to lecture them. Lecturing, while effective at imparting my opinion and expressing my frustration is NOT the most effect way to foster understanding. Understanding is a step beyond knowledge. It requires experience, personal application and reflection. As a teacher of math and science, I have learned about the levels of critical thinking. The bottom level of learning is knowledge followed by comprehension, application, analysis, synthesis and then evaluation. The higher levels of learning require more student interaction and foster greater understanding and internalization of principles. Knowing this should help me change my teaching tactics, but old habits are hard to break without concerted effort. How often in frustration I have said, “Haven’t I told you a million times!” Maybe I need to take a hint from my own words and quit ‘telling’ and start fostering analysis, synthesis and evaluation. Recently this has caused me to deeply look at how I respond to my children.
How do we foster those higher levels of thinking?
First, we need to remember that we all learn best through study, experience and reflection. In the education world this is referred to as ‘Inquiry Learning.’ For example, a child learns a stove is hot and not to touch it, not by simply being told this, but by experiencing an uncomfortable sensation when they touch the hot stove. As the child thinks of his experience, he developes his own understanding of this truth. From that understanding he patterns his future actions.
Second, we have to treat our children as agents who have the ability to act not as objects to be controlled. In order to become effective independent learners, children need opportunities to make choices, to draw their own conclusions and experience natural consequences.
Instead of ‘telling' we need to ask questions that guide our children to have their own learning experiences and draw their own conclusion. Then they will be empowered to use their agency and gain their own understanding.
I recently tried this tactic with my twelve-year old daughter. She had been responding very negatively to her brother. I had tried my previous pattern of lecturing to no avail. A few Sunday’s ago I was helping my daughter work on a goal setting program for the young women at church. We were talking about the importance of patience in mothering. For the goal she had to learn about patience and form an action plan to develop patience. I asked her,
“How do you think patience would help your relationship with your brother?”She responded with her thoughts. Then after studying some scriptures on patience, on her own she decided to practice patience with her brother for her goal experience. Tonight she came to me to sign off her goal. As I thought back on the last three weeks, I realized that her relationship with her brother had drastically improved. I asked her about her experience, what she had learned, how she thought it had affected her and how it had affected our family.
By setting a goal she had independently learned, practiced, and internalized a principle in a way that my lecturing had never inspired. Furthermore, we had good, relationship-building conversations instead on guilt ridden, angry exchanges.
As I have reflected on this experience, I have realized that I need to actively choose to handle problems with my children by using Inquiry learning instead of by reacting and instinctively lecturing them. I need to ask them questions that cause them to reflect on their behavior, it's consequences and their goals for the future. I need to invite them to study and then act what they learn. Then I need to follow up to help them evaluate their experiences.
I guess reflection and experience teaches parents lessons as well!
I invite you to read or listen to the following, but especially the portions from Elder Bednar's Book. Ponder and write about how you can apply these principles to the people you teach. Share with us some ways that you are learning to offer invitations to learn.
Eyring, Henry B. "A Life Founded in Truth" BYU Speeches, Aug 2000
Bednar, David A. "Increase in Learning." Deseret Book, 2011
(preface, Chapter 1, Chapter 1 related readings)
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