When I was attending elementary school in China, there was one question on the end-of-semester 1st grade math test that counted for 20 percent of the final grade:
There are 14 apples on the tree.A hungry monkey eats 5 apples.How many apples are left?
The other students gave the correct answer: nine apples. I, on the other hand, answered: "Not sure, as I do not know how many apples may fall." My reasoning was that when the monkey took apples off the tree, other apples might fall to the ground, so there was no clear answer to this question. Even though my idea was creative, I received a bad grade on the test and ranked last in the class. My parents were asked to come to school to talk to the math teacher, for I had been designated as a student with a potential learning disability.
Although 30 years have passed, I can still recall that gloomy night, how my parents blamed me for not understanding the intention of such a simple question to test subtraction skills. No one asked me to explain the reasoning behind my answer, and no one admired my creative interpretation. What mattered was that I got a bad score on the test, ranked last in the class, and humiliated my parents in front of the teacher. This experience adversely affected my early childhood school life. I began to curb my imagination, from which I had always derived substantial pleasure, and sought only the answers and behaviors my teachers and parents preferred in order to do well on exams and receive praise.
The early years of learning (K–3) are an exciting time of rapid growth and cognitive and emotional development, and of building a solid foundation for independence, self-confidence, and self-reliance. During this journey, however, teachers, parents, and other adults might inadvertently curb a student's enthusiasm for learning by focusing too much on grades and scores and the "right" answers; indeed, my own experience in 1st grade shows how my teacher and parents discouraged my thinking outside the box and how such stifling of my imagination negatively influenced my enthusiasm for learning.
Based on my study of optimal early childhood learning, students' cognitive abilities, and emotional intelligence development, I illustrate three skill sets that benefit students' emergent literacy and math development and are conducive to their social-emotional advancement in the long run: unconstrained skills, reflection literacy, and autonomy. These three domains in particular work together to nurture and boost children's creative thinking and problem-solving aptitudes, drive them to take more initiative to learn, and set them on course to mature into lifelong learners.
1. Unconstrained Skills
In their literacy research, Snow and Matthews (2016) point out that early elementary school teachers may spend too much time on readily teachable skills (constrained skills) such as the letters of the alphabet, spelling rules, or sentence-level mechanics. Conversely, they may spend too little time on unconstrained skills such as background knowledge, reading critically, meaning making, and other knowledge learned across students' lifetimes that is not easily quantified but deeply influences their delight and accomplishment in reading.
With the help of teachers' guided instruction, students engage, practice, and gradually develop constrained skills in alphabetic knowledge, phonics, and vocabulary rules, and they eventually master high-frequency words and sentence structure. Some students will learn at a faster pace and others may fall behind, but eventually, between kindergarten and 3rd grade, most students will gain foundational reading skills in reading sounds, vocabulary, and comprehension.
Nevertheless, according to Dougherty Stahl (2011), these constrained skills, while necessary, are "insufficient for the development of more sophisticated, complex reading abilities" (p. 53): Curricula dominated by a narrow set of finite limits and structures focusing on performing isolated skills within a short period of time cannot prepare students for future success with unconstrained capabilities like cognitive flexibility, critical analysis, and contextual variation.
Constrained skills are mostly taught through explicit instruction and learning to follow rules, but children need more than this. Research shows that in the long run, it is the unconstrained capacities that most influence children's cognitive, academic, and social-emotional development (Snow & Matthew, 2016). Unconstrained skills such as critical thinking and meaning making in real contexts exert a great impact on the path to achieving full literacy. They aid in cultivating students' problem-solving skills and help them take more initiative, ownership, and responsibility. If unconstrained aptitude is compromised in early childhood (as with my experience with the math test), there will be a higher price to be paid later in reading and writing capabilities at the upper-grade levels; indeed, it may even ruin a child's psychological health. Therefore, teachers need to nurture students' unconstrained skills so that they can engage in and concentrate on deeper learning, take on challenges, and develop effective communicative and critical thinking capabilities.
2. Three Literacy Dimensions
Linguistics researcher and professor Ruqaiya Hasan's (1996) three dimensions of literacy—recognition literacy, action literacy, and reflection literacy—emphasize the importance of cultivating and mediating children's linguistic meta-language, creativity, and literacy consciousness beyond rule-based instruction and text reproduction, positioning students to see themselves in the text.
Recognition literacy focuses on students' development of verbal and visual recognition through the teacher's explicit instruction and demonstration, such as when a child learns phonology, grammar rules, vocabulary forms, and other linguistic (de-)coding skills in a decontextualized way. Action literacy is cultivated through communication and construction of existing established knowledge, such as when a teacher asks students to retell the events of a story in their own words, linking language usage in certain specific contexts. Both recognition literacy and action literacy can be nurtured by a teacher and will enable students to engage in powerful acts of meaning making at early ages. For instance, a child displays a strong grasp of recognition literacy when she can correctly pronounce the word "attitude" and refer to its definition, and demonstrates action literacy by using the word in a sentence under certain communicative circumstances and context.
The third type of literacy is reflection literacy, which aims to nurture students' capabilities for producing new knowledge and questioning standards or norms without purely following what others teach them. Reflection literacy is when students imagine, critique, inquire, and analyze their values and understandings of things in their immediate surroundings. In short, reflection literacy is crucial because it questions socially constructed meanings and conventions and builds a more in-depth, holistic understanding of social practices.
For young learners, reflection literacy plays a pivotal role in advanced logical progression development, nurturing their ability to apply previous knowledge to something new. Below are some examples of classroom activities teachers can conduct to cultivate students' reflection literacy aptitude:
Activity 1: Language Detective: Teachers provide students with a form and ask them to jot down 10 words they hear most in their communities, either on the street, at the store, in the park, or at school. Students can also write down words they struggle with and check these words themselves or discuss in class with peers or the teacher. By listening to what the people around them say, students will learn to look for particular word patterns and actively reflect on the connection between written and oral language.
Activity 2: Little Writer: Teachers ask each student to write three different words on different pieces of paper (one object word, one adjective to describe the object, and one action word). The students then work together to connect all the pages into a complete story. Teachers can ask students how they created the story clues and why during a certain section they might feel glad, angry, worried, or silly when reading the story. Teachers can also work with the class to develop a creative title for the book and put the students' names at the top as the authors.
Both of these activities offer various opportunities for thought-sharing in speech and writing that can be incorporated into students' emergent literacy development. The Language Detective activity, for example, helps students become more aware of their surrounding environment and to internalize what they learn in and outside of class. During story creation and sharing, students have substantial cognitive flexibility to express their imagination and invoke all five senses.
It is important to note that the three types of literacy education do not exist in a progressive relationship led by teachers step by step. All categories can and should be carried out at the same time, although the proportion of time spent on them may differ depending on the ages of the students. Even young children who are still at the stage of recognition literacy benefit from the cultivation of the three types of literacy simultaneously. Above all, reflection literacy skills must be developed as early as possible.
3. Empowering Autonomy
As I discovered when I scored poorly on my math exam all those years ago, teachers and parents want young children to listen to directions and follow rules exactly, and some parents punish their kids for misbehavior or other noncompliance. Nevertheless, the ultimate goal of education is to prepare students to be independent and resourceful, to take action when parents or teachers are not around to intervene or offer help, and to find ways to handle issues or problems that they encounter in daily life. We want children to become self-directed learners, set their own goals, and be responsible for their behavior.
One way to do this is to encourage students to create an activity tracker. Figure 1 depicts an activity tracker made by a seven-year-old Chinese girl to document her activities in a given month. In the left column, she writes her to-do-list items, and whenever she finishes an item on the list, she makes a dot or checkmark by the date on the calendar. Because this girl is a bilingual student learning both Chinese and English at school, both languages are used on the tracker. She makes decisions about her own topic selection (math, English, calligraphy, taekwondo, or playing catch). Below the horizontal line, her parent or guardian can list her tasks for the month and mark when she finishes any particular item. When I asked the girl what the heart shapes represent, she told me that they represent time to hug and play with her parents; according to the tracker, she hugs and plays with her parents every day.
Figure 1. Example of a Young Student's Activity Tracker
Photo Courtesy of Fang Gao
Children tend to follow their self-imposed commitments more often than rules enforced by adult authority. Items on the tracker are their own rules, so they are in charge of enforcing them. They will make adjustments to the self-imposed guidelines as they grow, reallocating time for attending classes, participating in campus club activities, or connecting with peers; additionally, they may fail from time to time, not completing all items on the list. All of this is part of the learning process, an opportunity to raise their thinking patterns to the next level. Along the way, parents and teachers can listen to the children's feelings, serve as role models, or occasionally provide some positive discipline or respectful disagreement, all of which are signs of healthy family and school environments.
Self-discipline and self-regulation can only be learned through empowering autonomy. Sufficient amounts of autonomy in decision making and time control are indispensable for students and should be taught and fostered at a young age. Not only will children develop a sense of ownership over their lives, being more motivated to communicate, collaborate, and take more personal responsibility, but they will also acquire a more active interest in the surrounding world and be prepared to shoulder social responsibility for good citizenship.
Beyond the Simple Answer
Thirty years after that fateful math test, I picked my seven-year-old niece up from school one day while her parents were at work. With a mischievous grin, she posed a simple math problem: "There are 15 birds in a big pine tree. Two birds were caught by a naughty boy. How many birds are left in the tree?"
"Thirteen birds," I replied.
My niece laughed joyfully and answered, "Oh, my silly aunt, there should be zero birds left, as the birds are so scared that they all fly away!" She told me how her teachers praised her for her imaginative answer. I saw tremendous power in my niece's answer, combining math and her understanding of animal behavior in the real world. The unconstrained skills, inspiration, and reflection that children like her draw from their own lives can go wild and fly when they are given permission to think freely and creatively. I felt myself cheering for my niece, for it seemed to me that her success was also my success. In my niece's voice, I also heard my own.
