Historical Perspectives on What is “Developmentally Appropriate”

Posted on December 1, 2010 by Thomas Armstrong

Thirty-five years ago, when I was at the beginning of my teaching career, Piaget was all the rage.  We read his books, and puzzled over how observation of children interacting with real life situations could enable us to understand the development of their minds.  We also were able to catch the tail end of interest in the work of Freud and saw how childrens’ early struggles with issues like autonomy, jealousy, and initiative, could affect their ability to emotionally manage the ups and downs of life later on in development.  These days, it seems that Piaget and Freud are hardly ever mentioned in educational discourse, let alone read.  Instead, the buzz words of the day are accountability, standards, data, and academic achievement.  If we’re interested in the child’s development at all, it’s usually to help us understand how to get the child to achieve academically. This explains why we are now expecting children to master academic material at younger and younger ages.  Again, back in my early days of teaching, early childhood education was seen primarily in terms of play experiences that children created out of their own imagination.  Today we have preK-16 programs that attempt to foist the atmosphere of later academic learning on children as young as three or four.  And the sad thing is that the child development experts of our day are busy researching a child’s ability to master academic learning in the early years, rather than questioning whether or not this is such a good thing in the first place.  Twenty years ago, I wrote a column on learning for Parenting Magazine, and when I did the research for an article on computers in education, it was difficult to find anyone in the field who would come out and say that children below the age of four should have access to computers.  Now, if I suggest that children under four not be exposed to computers, I’m considered out of touch with the times.  Thirty years ago, the National Association for the Education of Young Children wrote a position paper which stated that young children should not be subjected to standardized tests.  Today, they have abandoned this position and talk instead about the different sorts of tests that young children appear now to need.  Is there anyone with a historical sensibility that can see how vastly we’ve shifted over two or three decades in our understanding of what children need?  I believe we need to keep a historical perspective in order to see more clearly how the concept of “developmentally appropriate” has been perverted into a mandate to teach things that were clearly developmentally inappropriate thirty years ago.  And those of us with the experience to see the broad view of education over thirty or forty years, ought to raise our voices and let it be known that what is going on with young children and academic learning is not okay, and can only serve to harm their deeper sensibilities and interfere with their full development as whole human beings.

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Interview with Neurodiversity Advocate in Wired Online

Posted on October 8, 2010 by Thomas Armstrong

There’s a very good interview with neurodiversity advocate Ari Ne’eman on the website of Wired magazine.  He discusses the importance of helping autistic individuals and others with mental and neurological disabilities live better lives – lives of quality – free of discrimination, stereotypes, limited access to tools of living, and other limiting factors.  This is a much better focus, in his opinion, than trying to find a cure for autism or trying to make autistic individuals behave more like “normal” people.  I applaud Ne’eman’s agenda, and am glad that he’s a member of the National Council on Disability.  I only hope that he will be inclusive in his approach, and look at not only people with autism, but those with other labels including ADHD, dyslexia, schizophrenia, mood disorders, anxiety disorders, and intellectual disabilities.  Most of what Ne’eman says about autism is applicable to these other disabilities as well.

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Some Thoughts About Play Around the World

Posted on August 25, 2010 by Thomas Armstrong

I have noticed that kids in Scandinavia are allowed to play in freer ways than in the United States.  For example, in one elementary school that I visited in Norway, kids were climbing trees, and they were really high up – I was very concerned for their safety.  And yet the teachers seemed perfectly at ease with this.  In Iceland I saw kids playing on these gizmos that involved hopping onto a tire and zipping along this clothes line looking apparatus.  I’m sure something like that would not be allowed in our litigious society – it would be a law suit waiting to happen.  I’m going to be presenting on September 7 and 8, 2010 at the Annaliese Schools in Laguna Beach, California, and I was glad to read on their website that they endorse “mud play” at their schools. They noted that mud play was especially helpful for kids with behavior and emotional problems.  I just want to say hip-hip-horray when I hear things like that going on in education in the United States. Messy play is good play.  I was traveling in Asia and had a layover at Narita airport in Tokyo a few years ago and while I was wandering around I happened to notice a “play room.”  Initially I thought this was a great idea – having a place to reduce the stress of traveling through play.  But when I went in all the kids were playing video games – there wasn’t anything else in there for them to do but be a high-tech zombie.  I’m afraid that’s what a lot of people have come to accept as play in our society, but it isn’t play at all – it’s crap, and it’s turning our kids into robots.

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What Full Inclusion Means for Neurodiverse Kids

Posted on July 2, 2010 by Thomas Armstrong

I was just reading an article on the website “Disability Scoop” about inclusion of kids with intellectual disabilities in Connecticut’s public schools.  Connecticut ranks second in the country in terms of the percentage of intellectually disabled kids mainstreamed in regular classrooms.  So one might view the state’s efforts as exemplary.  However, the article indicates that many of these students sit at the back of the classroom or off to one side,  often working on different assignments than their “normal” peers.  The article also indicated that many teachers are not trained to help include these students in the classrooms, and rarely have any assistance (teachers’ aides and other resources) in helping them with inclusion. 

That’s not really inclusion in my estimation.  Full inclusion isn’t just a definition of how often a child with special needs spends in a classroom.  It’s really a question of the quality of that time.  Kids with special needs should be engaged in the same kinds of activities as every other student.  That doesn’t mean that they will be doing identical assignments.  The school work may need to be modified to meet their specific needs (e.g. a different reading level, a scaled-down project, a modification in how an assignment is carried out etc.), but it is still in the ballpark of what the other kids are doing. 

Not long ago, I visited a school in the Boston area that truly meets this criteria of being a full inclusion school.  It’s the William W. Henderson Inclusion Elementary School in Dorchester, Massachusetts. One third of the population of the Henderson school has special needs. The day that I visited, they were putting on the school musical (“Annie”).  I saw students with Down syndrome and Williams syndrome and severe autism being fully included in the activities of the program.  Similarly, in going into classrooms later in the day, the kids with special needs were often indistinguishable from the neurotypical kids.  This is probably because every child was engaged in a task tailored to their individual needs. 

This is the secret to full inclusion schools.  They treat every student as having special needs.  There isn’t a dichotomy between “normal” and “special education” instruction.  The educators there simply work to find the specific resources that each individual student needs.  This requires a school-wide commitment to creating an atmosphere where every student is treated as special.  I don’t believe you can have a “full-inclusion classroom” going on in one part of the building while traditional education goes on elsewhere in the school.  Everybody in the school needs to be involved in the principles of full-inclusion, otherwise there will be a sort of entropy working to drag the full-inclusion classroom back to the “norm.”  At the Henderson school, they’ve been working toward creating this climate of inclusion for the past ten years.  The implies a continuity of staff and an on-going commitment to the principles and practice of full inclusion.  It’s not an easy process, to be sure, but the Henderson school, and similar schools around the country, show that this is not a pie-in-the-sky ideal to shoot for, but rather a here-and-now reality that is worth pursuing.

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Finding One’s Niche in Life

Posted on June 17, 2010 by Thomas Armstrong

I was just reading an article in The Watertown (NY) Daily Times about a seventeen-year-old named Christopher Durgen who has ADHD and autism.  As a young child, he had trouble getting along with classmates and was frequently suspended from school.  That all changed around the end of his sophomore year in high school when he disovered electronics. He enrolled in a two-year program in electronic engineering at a local technical school.  One of his first projects was building a radio.  His teacher believes that it was being around students who shared his own interest in electronics that helped him gain confidence in himself.  Significantly, the article states:  “the hands-on electronics program provided a better outlet for his energetic personality than sitting in an English or social studies classroom.”  Now, he is a member of the National Honor Society and the National Technical Honor Society, and is competing in the computer maintenance technology contest at the SkillsUSA National Leadership Conference in Kansas City, Mo.

This student was adrift until he found something that he was good at.  This led to his establishing better relationships, a deeper sense of inner confidence, and expertise in a career directed field of study.  As I read the piece, I kept thinking of how important it is that people find their niche in life.  These days, if students have labels, they usually end up in special education programs that focus on their disability.  The adults who are responsible for them get together in IEP meetings to discuss their needs and what they require help with, and usually end up drawing up goals connected to their areas of difficulty.  But educators rarely discuss how to create a niche where the students’ abilities can be utilized and celebrated.  It seems to me that this should be the single most important focus of an IEP meeting, or any other meeting to discuss a troubled or troubling student. 

Think of it as a bird creating a nest.  Or alternatively, think of a fish out of water — this is what it’s like for many students who are failing in our schools.  Nobody has given much thought to how the environment can be restructured so that the gifts of a student are what predominate.  The first step in this process is finding out what the student is good at — educators and parents need to be “strength detectives” and make an exhaustive list of all the skills, talents, abilities, intelligences, and aptitudes of a student.  The second step is looking at the resources available in the home, school, and community for developing these positive attributes: programs, mentors, technology, strategies.  These are the twigs in the nest, or the ingredients of positive niche construction.   The big question is how to convince the schools that this is the most important thing they can do to help a struggling student. 

What’s frustrating is that this is not rocket science.  It’s incredible simple.  Yet school culture is so filled up with bureaucracy, schedules, labels, testing, procedures, paperwork, and more, that this very basic process of honoring gifts and finding resources to match those gifts, gets lost in the shuffle.  Fortunately, there are students out there like Christopher Durgen, who can point us in the right direction, and show us how dramatic the change can be when the focus is on what a student does right.

Posted in Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), autism, Neurodiversity, Special Education, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment