Category: Parenting

Seeds for a Better World

Posted on | by Sam | 8 Comments on Seeds for a Better World

I’m writing a new book with some cool folks — a field guide for a better world. The goal is to translate the core design principles of the natural world, and show readers how to apply those principles in the service of creating better human systems (including, and not limited to, our schools).

To do it right, however, we need your help. So here’s the idea, and the challenge:

Imagine a small metal tin filled with colorful index cards — sort of like your Grandma’s old recipe box, but in this case, instead of each card showing you how to make peach cobbler or yummy meatloaf, they’re showing you how to build a better world.

Now, imagine that each seed/card outlines something tangible to do — the sort of thing that anyone, anywhere, can apply and “plant” in their own life and work immediately (since our own behavior is the only thing we can actually control).

Next, imagine that these seeds are scattered across the following six categories of individual action: TEACHING, LEARNING, PARENTING, LEADING, CREATING, and BEING. And imagine that every seed/card has a front and a back that outlines the what (do I do), the how (do I do it), the who (gave me this seed), and the why (should i make time to do this?

By way of example, here are three, properly titled and categorized, along with their authors and a way to go deeper.

But the real question is, what would be your seed(s) of contribution to the tin?

Maybe it’s an idea/recipe original to you, or maybe it’s an excerpt from some super useful thing you read by someone else. But if you could only provide a single seed/idea/recipe to be planted in the service of building a better world, what would it be?

Standing by for all clarifying questions and ideas, and thanks in advance for your thought and creativity!

EXAMPLE 1
FOCUS ON BETTER, NOT MORE (TEACHING)

One of the most important questions any school or teacher can ask is simple: “How can we be more thoughtful about what we do?”

Unfortunately, it’s not the question we ask most frequently. The question schools and teachers have fallen in love with — “What more should we be doing? — is much more dangerous. It also leads to the creation of unsustainable systems.

The better question, the sustainable question, the question that frees up resources for schools to do more is the question of reflection and refinement.

Schools are better when they create spaces and expectations for reflection.

Formalized protocols for the adoption of reflective practices abound — though a good place to start is schoolreforminitiative.org/protocols. What’s most important, however, is simply creating the space and support for reflecting on the work that is already being done. And while it would be ideal if this reflective practice started with the principal, it could start anywhere.

In fact, it should start everywhere. Department chairs, classroom teachers, sports coaches — we can all be models of reflection to those with whom we work. That’s why reflective practice means asking not, “What more can we be doing?” but “How can we do what we’re already doing. better?”

AUTHOR(S): CHRIS LEHMANN & ZAC CHASE

GO DEEPER — READ BUILDING SCHOOL 2.0: HOW TO CREATE THE SCHOOLS WE NEED

EXAMPLE 2
CONNECT AND REDIRECT (PARENTING)

All parents experience times when their children say things and get upset about issues that don’t seem to make sense. At moments like this, however, one of the least effective things we can do is jump in and argue with our child’s faulty logic. Instead, we need to recognize that our children are experiencing a right-brain, nonrational, emotional flood, which guarantees that any sort of logical, literal left-brain response will only make the situation worse.

Instead, try this: Connect with the right. Redirect with the left.

When a child is upset, logic often won’t work until we have responded to the right brain’s emotional needs.By letting our children know that we hear what is upsetting them, we show that we are tuned into how they are feeling. Instead of fighting against the huge waves of emotion, we surf them.

After responding with the right, we can redirect with the left through logical explanation and planning. It won’t always do the trick, but Connecting and Redirecting will almost always work better than Commanding and Demanding. It’s as if you’re a lifeguard who swims out, puts your arms around your child, and helps him to shore before telling him not to swim out so far next time.

AUTHOR(S): DAN SIEGEL, M.D. & TINA PAYNE BRYSON, Ph.D

GO DEEPER: READ THE WHOLE-BRAIN CHILD: 12 REVOLUTIONARY STRATEGIES TO NURTURE YOUR CHILD’S DEVELOPING MIND

EXAMPLE 3

TAKE FIVE (BEING)

  1. Sit in a comfortable position.
  2. Take 3 slow, deep breaths.
  3. Set a timer for 5 minutes.
  4. Relax into your body.
  5. Clear your mind.
  6. Keep going.

Meditation is all about the practice. Don’t get too focused on whether or not you’re ‘doing it right’. The process of redirecting your focus to the present moment is where the benefit comes.

One of the most valuable aspects of it is that it builds resilience over time, not only during a meditative sit, but during stressful moments in your daily life as well. With regular practice, you’ll begin to notice more space between events and your reactions. You’ll find that you are more able to make choices in how you respond rather than acting on impulse.  

Breathing out slowly through your mouth stimulates the Vagus Nerve which connects with almost every organ in your body and immediately sends signals to your brain to relax. Your heart rate slows, as does the release of cortisol (the stress hormone) into your brain.

Though it can be intimidating to begin, even this short five-minute meditation, practiced frequently, can bring noticeable stress relief and peace into your life over time. For best results, try longer meditation sessions (20 minutes or more) a few times per week. Then, these five-minute sessions will have more of an immediate impact when you need them!

GARDENER: STEPHANIE BUNTON

EXAMPLE 4

(YOUR SEED HERE)

This is what it looks like when a community designs its own school

Posted on | by Sam | 1 Comment on This is what it looks like when a community designs its own school

At its best, nothing is more unifying and vital to a community’s civic health than a high-quality neighborhood school. Why, then, do all notions of “school choice” end up being about either charter or private schools?

Enter Oakland SOL, a new dual-immersion middle school in the Flatlands section of Oakland, California — and the district’s first new school in more than a decade.

Created over three years of hard work and careful planning by a motivated group of local parents and educators, Oakland SOL paints a different picture of school choice — one that is squarely grounded in the aspirations of the families and children who will comprise its community core.

To some, it’s a murky picture. After all, Oakland’s school district already has more schools than it can afford; it faces up to a $30 million budget shortfall. Yet when you consider that after fifth grade, one of every four students in the district leaves the system, Superintendent Kyla Johnson-Trammel is making a different sort of bet — one that will require districts to become more responsive to local needs and demands.

“If we can provide programs that help them make the choice to stay in our district, I actually do think that’s fiscally responsible,” said Katherine Carter, SOL’s founding principal. “It shows the district cares about creating quality experiences for our kids and our families.”

“This was really rooted in parent demand,” added Gloria Lee, president and chief executive of a local nonprofit that supports new public school options. “I hope it is the first and not the only example of a way the district can continue to evolve and create new innovative programs that serve the really diverse families in Oakland more effectively.”

We know more than we think we do.

Now is the time for a new learning story.

#thisis180

Want to Get Smarter? Be More Childlike.

Posted on | by Sam | 1 Comment on Want to Get Smarter? Be More Childlike.

Interesting piece on NPR this morning in which Shankra Vedantam reviews some of the recent research in neuroscience. You can listen to it here, and you should because it highlights something simple and significant — that the best way to keep learning over one’s life is to keep hold of the boundless inquiry that characterizes early childhood.

“Using mathematical techniques that allow researchers to disentangle the effects of genetic and environmental influences on individuals,” Vedantam reports, researchers “noticed that kids who had higher IQs to begin with seemed to have an extended period in adolescence during which they retained the ability to learn at a rapid pace, just like much younger children.

“I found that twins that had a higher IQ were showing a more childlike pattern of influence during adolescence,” said one of the researchers, Penn State’s Angela Brant.

If that’s true, it would make sense to structure learning environments for children that are proactively designed to unleash each young person’s inherent sense of wonder and curiosity. And yet, here in DC and elsewhere across the country, we are doing the opposite. It’s true — too many young people are arriving in school with extreme deficits when it comes to literacy and numeracy. And it’s true — those things matter. But the best way to help all children thrive is not by making Kindergarten resemble a 10th grade honors class; it’s by making that 10th grade honors class more like Kindergarten.

That’s something educators have known for a long time. Now they have the research to boot.

Making Sense of Steubenville

Posted on | by Sam

As educators, what are we to make of the ongoing tragedy in Steubenville, Ohio – a community in which one teenage girl was raped and publicly humiliated, two teenage boys are being shipped off to juvenile detention, and two other teenage girls are now under arrest after threatening to beat and kill the victim?

First, we must recognize the central role that parents play in helping their children develop a clear sense of right and wrong. As the victim’s mother said in a prepared statement to the court, “We hope that from this something good can arise. I feel I have an opportunity to bring an awareness to others, possibly change the mentality of a youth or help a parent to have more of an awareness to where their children are and what they are doing. The adults need to take responsibility and guide these children.”

Second, we must acknowledge that every community has the potential to allow this sort of behavior to occur. Like other communities, the members of Steubenville High School’s football team were afforded respect and privileges few teenagers can manage responsibly. More troubling, however – and more relevant for those of us who have dedicated our lives to supporting the learning and growth of young people – was the behavior of all the other students who gave implicit support to the boys’ actions by documenting and trading pictures of the assault – and doing nothing to protect the girl, whose drunkenness was so severe it prompted one of her assailants to say she resembled “a dead body.”

Finally, we must take stock of the work we are doing every day in our schools and classrooms – the only factor squarely in our control – and ask ourselves what it is we are explicitly working to instill in the young people we are there to serve. The fact that our state and national policies continue to overvalue academic knowledge (and a myopic definition of academic knowledge at that) at the expense of every other aspect of child and adolescent development is not an excuse for inaction. As educators, we have a responsibility to think long and hard about what kind of people we hope will graduate from our schools – and what sorts of skills and dispositions those people will need to embody – and then make sure the work we are doing each day (and the standards to which we hold ourselves accountable) are aligned with that vision.

The good news is this is already happening in scores of schools across the country – from New Hampshire to Iowa to Colorado. It’s even happening at the state level in Illinois, where every school has not just a set of academic standards – but a set of social and emotional standards as well. And it can start happening in any school, anywhere, as soon as that community decides that the holistic development and growth of children matters more than anything else.

“Human compassion is not taught by a teacher, a coach, or a parent,” the victim’s mother also said. “It is a God-given gift instilled in each of us.”

That’s not quite right. Our capacity for compassion is certainly present in each of us at birth. But it’s equally true that while all of us are born with the potential to behave compassionately, none of us is able to do so without the benefit of strong support, clear guidance, and a supportive network of adults that believe characteristics like empathy are not merely soft skills – they’re benchmarks of what we aspire, on our best days, to become.

(This article originally appeared in Education Week.)

Open House Do’s and Don’ts

Posted on | by Sam

It’s that time of year again: when parents across the country — but particularly parents in major American cities — prepare to schedule a flurry of open houses in a frantic search for the best school for their child.

It happened to me a year ago; between January and March I visited more than 20 schools in search of the best place for my 3-year-old. Even though I’ve been working in schools my whole adult life, it was a daunting, disorienting experience. I can only imagine what it feels like for parents who haven’t stepped foot in a school since their own high school graduation.

To help ease the anxiety of my fellow parents, here are a few essential rules of the road: three questions to ask, and three things to look for.


Questions to Ask

  1. What is your definition of success — and how do you know if you’re reaching it?
  2. What aspect of your school are you most proud of — and where do you need the most work?
  3. What’s the general profile of your faculty — and how long do they stay?

Each of these questions is designed to drill down on how well a school understands what it does — and why it does it. Surprisingly, many schools haven’t thought about this as much as they should. They may have some generalized notion of success in terms of test scores or general statements about a child’s development. They are likely to know what they do well. They have to know how many of their teachers come and go each year. But if they can’t speak really clearly and specifically about what success will look like for your child — and do so in ways that go beyond just academics  – and if they can’t identify quickly where they still need work (because all schools, even the best ones, have room for improvement), you have good reason to wonder if they really have a plan worth investing in.

As examples of schools that have taken the time to figure it out, check out Mission Hill, the Blue School, or MC2 — three schools with clearly defined visions of individual- and whole-school success, and three schools with explicit lists of the sorts of skills and habits they want their students to master. Simply put, these schools know where they’re going — and how they’ll get there. Your child’s school should, too.

Things to Look For

  1. Hallways & Classrooms
  2. Playgrounds & Playspaces
  3. Safety & Security

If you visit a school during school hours, peek in the classrooms. Do students look engaged and energetic, or withdrawn and bored? Are the hallways filled with student work — and if so, does the work reflect a real range of skill-levels and ideas, or does it all look the same? Good schools know how to get kids involved — by making the learning as hands-on and relevant as possible — and they recognize and celebrate the uniqueness of each child.

Good schools also have good playspaces for children — or at least a good plan to get them there, if, like many urban charter schools, they do not yet inhabit a building with its own playground. Ideally, your child’s daily opportunities for physical activity and play are frequent and easily accessed. And if they have to travel offsite, be sure to find out the path to the playground, and how long it will take to get a small herd of children there and back every day.

And finally, good schools take the safety and security of your children seriously. Is it easy or difficult to walk into the school without being stopped or questioned by any adult? Does the school have protocols in place in the event of an emergency? And most importantly, does the school’s commitment to safety and security not interfere with the child’s sense of wonder and curiosity? Children should expect maximum security, but that doesn’t mean they should be expected to learn in environments that feel like maximum security prisons. A good school knows the difference.

The best and worst feature of modern K-12 schooling is that there are more choices to weigh and sift through. But the good news is that, as with the schools themselves, the clearer we the parents are on what we want in a school — and why we want it — the more likely we are to find a match in the marketplace.

Good luck!

 

The Empathy Formula

Posted on | by Sam | 2 Comments on The Empathy Formula

For over a year now, I’ve been working with a remarkable group of people at Ashoka who believe empathy is the foundational skill we need in order to become effective changemakers in modern society — and who are bold/quixotic enough to envision a world in which one day, every child learns to master it as readily as s/he masters the ability to read and write.

The challenges associated with an idea this big are myriad. Public education in America is organized around content knowledge, not skills. It defines success via the prism of intellectual, not emotional, growth. It survives via compulsion, not commitment. Any effort to elevate a “soft skill” like empathy must unfold within a larger culture that aspires, tragicomically, to be Bruce-Willis hard. And any adult who already sees the value of nurturing empathetic children needs useful guidance in how to actually do it.

It’s a tall order. And in a recent conversation with some of my Ashoka colleagues, I heard something that might diffuse all those challenges in a single stroke.

As it turns out, there’s a formula we can use to explain how people master empathy, even if no one’s ever described it that way before. And best of all, it’s got a familiar ring to it:

E = EC².

This “Empathy Formula” first emerged out of a conversation several years ago between Emotional Intelligence author Dan Goleman and behavioral scientist Paul Ekman. As Goleman describes it, the two men were discussing FEMA’s feckless response to Hurricane Katrina, and trying to clarify what went wrong, and how the full range of human capacity could be activated in solving our most intractable problems in the future.

What Goleman and Ekman mapped out — in a little-read blog post from 2007 – was three different ways a person can convey empathy. The first is “cognitive empathy,” or the act of knowing how another person feels. This is the first stage of becoming empathetic, and while it may be helpful in motivating people or running for elective office, it also has a dark side if it exists in isolation: narcissism and sociopathic behavior, to name a few.

The second is “emotional empathy,” or the capacity to physically feel the emotions of another. Until recently, we were at a loss to explain how, or even why, we do this. But now scientists have located the process in a set of special cells in the brain called mirror neurons. These cells are what help us recognize and understand the deepest motives and needs of our fellow human beings. As with cognitive empathy, however, emotional empathy can have troublesome consequences if applied in isolation. As Goleman writes, “One downside of emotional empathy occurs when people lack the ability to manage their own distressing emotions can be seen in the psychological exhaustion that leads to burnout. The purposeful detachment cultivated by those in medicine offers one way to inoculate against burnout. But the danger arises when detachment leads to indifference, rather than to well-calibrated caring.”

That leads to the third and final part of the formula — “compassionate empathy”, which is what occurs when we combine the previous two in the name of acting upon what we think and feel. This was the missing ingredient in FEMA’s response to Katrina. Is it possible that it’s also the key to helping us unpack not just how to walk in another’s shoes, but also how to act compassionately on their, and our, behalf?

What would happen if schools were more mindful of this Empathy Formula? Instead of offering disconnected but well-intentioned efforts to help children think, feel or act, would adults start to help children think, feel and act? Would communities be increasingly populated with people who were neither narcissistic nor emotionally empty? And would the most pressing problems of our day — from energy to education to enlivening our civic life — be analyzed, internalized, and diffused by a new generation of changemakers?

Ashoka certainly thinks so. What do you think?

(This article also appeared in the Huffington Post.)

 

Are Parent Trigger Laws a Good Idea?

Posted on | by Sam

It’s hard not to feel excited for the group of parents who successfully took over their California community’s school, and who now are dreaming of bigger things. “Our children will now get the education they deserve,” said Doreen Diaz, whose daughter attends Desert Trails Elementary in Adelanto. “We are on the way to making a quality school for them, and there’s no way we will back down.”

It’s equally hard to feel confident that this story will have the ending Ms. Diaz and others envision. For starters, any proposed changes at the school won’t take place until 2013. What happens when the majority of parents who spearheaded the campaign move onto the local middle school? Will a majority of the parents who opposed the trigger seek to switch the school’s focus a second time? And with something as complex as creating a healthy school in an environment beset by poverty — 100% of the school’s students are eligible for the free lunch program — how can the members of this community become fluent around issues of teaching and learning to make thoughtful choices about the future direction of their school?

A few months back, I suggested that this debate could provide an opportunity for the nation to step up its game in two areas — making effective group decisions and understanding how people learn — via a massive national book club (hello, Oprah?).

Clearly, this will never happen. But here’s something that must: a series of well-facilitated community conversations and meetings that help all residents of the Desert Trails attendance zone imagine their ideal school, and then work backwards to make that ideal real.

A great starting point would be to ask everyone in Adelanto to share the story of the most powerful learning experience of their lives — and then to stitch those stories together in order to build a school that is designed to create those types of experiences for all kids. I’ve been gathering people’s learning stories for years now, and they all point to a small set of core conditions that any good school must possess.

In fact, I can guarantee that the sort of place the parents of Desert Trails seek will need to be challenging, engaging and supportive, and that what kids learn will need to feel relevant to their lives and be as hands-on as possible. That means any proposal disproportionately concerned with raising kids’ test scores should be rejected outright, as should any proposal that doesn’t offer kids a balanced curriculum that includes physical education, the arts, and an approach to learning that gets kids outside of the classroom and into their communities. It means throwing out any proposal that isn’t clear about how it will equally foster a child’s intellectual, social and emotional growth. It means ignoring any proposal that doesn’t directly address how it will provide wraparound services for the children and families of Adelanto, whose needs extend far beyond the schoolhouse door. And it means tossing any plan that isn’t explicit about how it will provide all of these resources in a community where school funding is still determined by local property taxes.

In other words, anything is possible — and this thing in particular is really, really hard.

Story Time

Posted on | by Sam

The other night, at a friend’s house for an early evening barbeque, I tried and failed repeatedly to get my 3-year-old son to eat his dinner.

It didn’t matter that the other kids at the table were eating. It didn’t matter that these were hot dogs we were talking about. And it definitely didn’t matter whether I pleaded or demanded that Leo fill his belly. He was, quite simply, not having it. And there was nothing I could do to change his mind.

Sensing my exasperation, my friend Jeremy leaned over and whispered: “Watch this.”

“Would anyone like to hear a story?” he asked. Leo stopped what he was doing, nodded, and listened intently as Jeremy spun a tale about a little boy lost in the forest who followed a single firefly, discovered a Sembar tree where all the other fireflies gathered to light up the night sky, and gained entrance to a secret, magical world.

Although there was a moral to Jeremy’s story, its message was not so symmetrical as to suggest that good boys clean their plates. And yet for the duration of the story, Leo listened, fully engaged in the wonders of an imaginary landscape, and absent-mindedly ate his dinner.

I was grateful for Jeremy’s clever parenting – and annoyed I didn’t think of it myself. After all, a convergence of recent research has confirmed something we have always instinctively known to be true: when we follow the trail of a well-crafted story, our brains light up like a Sembar tree.

Dr. James Zull is a professor of Biology at Case Western University, and the author of the book The Art of Changing the Brain. As he puts it, “We judge people by their stories, and we decide they are intelligent when their stories fit with our own stories. Recalling and creating stories are key parts of learning. We remember by connecting things with our stories, we create by connecting our stories together in unique and memorable ways, and we act out our stories in our behaviors.”

Zull says using vivid metaphors is a particularly effective way to foster new connections between the more than 100 billion neurons in a human brain. These connections are called neuronal networks, and once they’re made, they possess specific physical relationships to each other in the brain, and thus embody the concept of the relationship itself. “If you believe that learning is deepest when it engages the most parts of our brain,” Zull adds, “you can see the value of stories for the teacher. We should tell stories, create stories, and repeat stories, and we should ask our students to do the same.”

Of course, the same can be said for parents, and not just before bedtime.  If we want our children to develop the internal hardware to understand the world – and then imagine that world through the eyes of experiences of others – we should help them make sense of their surroundings through the stories we read and share. It is, quite simply, how people learn – and oh by the way, it may even help your child finish his dinner.

Kid Whisperers

Posted on | by Sam

In theory, Buck is a documentary about horses, and a cinematic profile of the laconic cowboy who has learned to speak their silent animal language.

In fact, Buck is a documentary about how people (and animals) learn – and a reminder that just because something has always been done a certain way doesn’t mean there isn’t a better way to do it.

Against a backdrop of horizontal landscapes, azure skies, and shape-shifting clouds, the movie follows Buck Brannaman as he conducts horse clinics across the country. But these clinics aren’t solely about helping people learn to ride horses. “A lot of times, rather than helping people with horse problems,” he explains in the film’s opening minute, “I’m helping horses with people problems.”

Buck’s own life story bears this out. A professional rodeo entertainer by the age of six, he was beaten mercilessly by his hard-driving father, Ace. By the time a gym teacher spotted the network of thick welts on his back and buttocks, the young boy had grown silent with fear and mistrust. Swift interventions by caring adults and a loving foster family slowly restored Buck’s sense of self-worth, but the father’s beatings left a permanent wound the son sought to heal through a different understanding of human and animal nature. “I was looking for a peaceful place to be,” he explains in a clipped, twangy rhythm.  “There’s a lot of fear in both the horse and the human. So there has to be trust.”

Unfortunately, the historic approach to horse training was about anything but trust. Horses were tied to posts, whipped, prodded, and constrained – the logic being that the only way to get such strong animals to submit to a human’s will was by literally “breaking” them down. Brannaman’s clinics demonstrate a different approach, one based on a deep sense of empathy, respect, and communication – and filled with valuable lessons for the participants that extend beyond the riding circle.

“You can’t be a good guy when you leave the barn, and a bad guy when you enter the barn. Human nature doesn’t work that way.”

“Your energy moves the horse.”

“Everything’s a dance.”

“Respect isn’t fear; it’s acceptance.”

“It’s not the young-un’s fault. He just doesn’t know what’s expected of him.”

At one point, Brannaman demonstrates what he means by holding one end of a rope and asking a participant to hold the other. “If I jerk at you, hard and sudden, like this, you’re going to flinch every time I approach you. And that’s definitely one way to get the horse’s attention. But if I just pull gently and steadily until you feel the tightening of the rope, like this, then I’m operating on feel, and I don’t even need to grip the rope tightly. It’s how you get there, to that point of deep communication, that matters.”

What makes Buck such a powerful film is the way he proves what we instinctively know to be true about how people learn – and struggle to act upon. Too often, instead of providing the parental or pedagogical equivalent of what Buck does with horses – call it “kid whispering” – our actions result in whispering kids. Instead of engendering a deep sensitivity to the invisible, orderly dance that occurs between two beings learning to trust one another, our efforts result in visible indicators of control. It’s the modern manifestation of the age-old saying: children are to be seen, not heard. And it’s just as out of tune with how we learn as horse breaking is with how they learn.

Buck reminds us that when learning is understood as the effort to empathize with another, it transforms both teacher and student. He reminds us that the journey is certain to surface what is submerged, and require us to make sense of what we see. And whether we’re parents, teachers or trainers, he demonstrates that the art of the whisper comes in the search for, and discovery of, the delicate balance between reassuring structures and empowering freedoms, something Buck describes as the ‘soft feel.’

“Most people think of a feel as when you touch someone,” he tells us. “But a feel can have a thousand meanings. Sometimes a feel is a mental thing. Sometimes it’s a glance exchanged between horse and human from across the arena. But always it’s an invitation from the horse to come closer, and it’s a moment of perfect balance.”

Hey Parents – It’s Time to Stop Playing Favorites

Posted on | by Sam

The other night over dinner, hours after my mother-in-law had returned home to New York, I casually asked my son Leo: “What was your favorite part of the weekend?”

As I watched him stare blankly back at me, struggling to find an answer, I found myself wishing I could have a parental do-over. Why do we ask children this question so often? Would it make a difference if we asked it a different way?

Anyone who’s a parent knows what I’m talking about: we’re always asking kids to tell us their favorite color, pick their favorite TV show, or select their favorite relative. And our intentions are in the right place; after all, we’re trying to learn about how they see themselves and others, and to give them a chance to reflect on what feels good and pleasing.

But here’s the problem: children don’t see the world as a set of isolatable favorites; we make them see it this way.  Watching Leo’s face, I realized that for him, there was no single favorite memory – just a pastiche of happy experiences that blended together to make up a general feeling I’ll call “Weekend with Nana.” It wasn’t until I asked the “favorite” question that it even occurred to him he should decide which of his experiences with her was the best of all.

This distinction is not exclusive to Leo. All of us benefit greatly when we develop metacognition – or the skill to reflect on our own thoughts and feelings, see ourselves interacting with the environment and people around us, and become familiar with our own preferences and the preferences of others. Recent research even suggests this may be the most important skill of all when it comes to learning how to learn, both in school and in life. Yet the reality is that asking kids to pick favorites isn’t an optimal path toward helping them become more holistically self-aware; it’s an emotional short cut that teaches them to artificially divide their memories into preferred parts.

How might Leo have responded differently if I had asked this question instead: “What made you feel happy this weekend?”

The difference between the two questions is subtle but significant. With one, we’re asking children to rank the world. With the other, we’re inviting them to reflect on it.

Only one of those questions will actually help build the muscle memory of metacognition, and allow for a fuller understanding of the multiplicity of experiences that shape how we think and feel. And that’s not playing favorites.