#005 - Preparing Children for Success in the Real World 👦🌍💼

Sometimes I feel like in our education system, we're treating children as if they're going to be children forever. And if you have children who are too scared to make a mistake and

too scared to try something harder, we're basically scaling back the process of innovation for our children. How can I ensure that what we're doing right now is building a skill that will allow them to leave and be independent and succeed when they're on their own? Welcome to Neuroeducation, where we're exploring the neuroscience of how to switch on the brain to supercharge learning. I'll be sharing with you innovative teaching techniques, effective parenting strategies,

and educational advocacy. I'm your host, Angie Dee. Together, let's revolutionize children's learning. Today, we're going to be talking about self-directed learners and what is the most important characteristics that our children need when they get out in the world. Often in education, we can be looking right here at the child in grade four, in grade five, or in grade six, grade 10, grade 12 and beyond. But we focus on that level of education

and just that grade without thinking about what's the end goal? What is the end goal here? So what is the end goal for education? We will have children that become adults that walk out of the doors of education, out of the educational halls. And even as parents, we will have children that will walk out the doors of our home and they will go on to lead their lives. And sometimes I feel like in our education system, we're treating children

as if they're going to be children forever. When we look at teaching children skills, Sometimes I'm amazed that the way that we teach a child in grade 4 and in grade 7 and grade 10, I still see us teaching children in the same manner in grade 12. They don't have a lot of freedom. They're still being told to do certain things every single lesson, every single week, and they're not given enough freedom because what we want to do is slowly prepare them for

the real world. And we want to be able to give them

greater and greater freedom. A lot of adolescents have said they didn't feel prepared for the real world because we taught them like children and we didn't give them that freedom. And then day one, as soon as they leave school, they have a hundred percent freedom. So where is the graduation of freedom? Maria Montessori talks about this concept of freedom within limits. That as a child shows they are

more and more responsible, we give them greater and greater freedom. And I think this is incredibly important in parenting and in teaching. Why? Because when the children walk out those doors for the final time, then life is up to them. They have to make their decisions based on their own inner compass, their intuition, their guidance, their values and their morals. When we punish children in schools, I'm amazed that often the punishment doesn't fit the crime. Maybe

a child is bullying, well you get a detention. What is that teaching them in life? Is that teaching them to be more compassionate? Is that teaching them about how that affected maybe let's say poor Jane who was bullied? Or does it just give them an arbitrary punishment that has nothing related to what they've done? In the same respect we have the same thing that happens for other punishments. Maybe you're not wearing the right uniform. I remember when I went to

high school, I was always late. Unfortunately, after multiple times of being late to high school, I was giving an afterschool detention. Did it help me with my punctuality? No. When I got to university, one of my friends, Jodie, who's always on time, I asked her, I said, how are you on time? all the time. And so she said, well, this is how I do it. Wherever I need to be. I make sure I'm going to be there 10 minutes early. And then I give myself a five

minute buffer before getting into the car. Just in case I forget my keys or I forget something, I've got to go back in the house. So sure enough, I implement Jody's very simple instructions and my punctuality improves at least by 50% much better than afterschool detention. So Here we have skills in learning, academic learning that they're going to use maybe in university or maybe in their creating their own businesses that we

can give children to have greater and greater freedom and greater and greater responsibility, teaching them the skills of what they're going to use for life. So in grade 10, usually in Montessori schools, A lot of the time children begin to do much more self-directed projects. They're deciding what they're going to be learning about and they're setting themselves up for what they want to be learning after they leave school. In

the same respect we have life skills that we want to teach children. Sadly in Australia we have an incredibly high rate of suicide and teenage depression. What are we not teaching our children in schools to be able to deal with these kind of stresses that they will face in

life? If we give children greater opportunities to be able to deal with certain pressures and maybe have to organize their own time and their projects, when they become adults and when they walk out those doors in the final days of schools or at home from parents, we know that they're going to have skills to be able to manage their time, to organise themselves and to deal with the problems of the world. If you have a adolescent, I would be always thinking of them as

what's going to be happening in five years. Okay. I'm going to deal with this situation now, but maybe I might be able to give them a punishment and not let them do something. Or I can be thinking, how can I ensure that what we're doing right now is building a skill that will allow them to leave and be independent and succeed when they're on their own. In the same right our current teaching method of education has basically formed a way of an extrinsically motivated

feedback response. If you do well on a test in primary school, maybe you get a sticker. If you do well in a quiz, maybe you get something on a star chart. All of these things are outside of the child. Intrinsic motivation is something where motivation comes from the inside. And in Montessori education, ironically, there's no stickers, no star charts, no reward charts. And people say, well, how can children be motivated in this classroom if they're not

getting any rewards for doing the right thing? Well, what we've discovered actually in psychology, that the more you attune the child to their own intrinsic motivation, to learn something to become better, to reach a goal, ask them what are their goals for different subjects, where do they want to improve, that the better the learning is and the more effort they put in. And the same thing goes with tests that they have basically looked

at two groups of children that were given extrinsic and an extrinsic reward and also extrinsic motivation. So these two groups of children that they studied were given a problem to solve. And the first group of children, when they finished that problem and they solved it, they were given a lots of congratulatory verbal affirmations of saying, good work, good job. You're so smart. And the other group, They praised the effort involved. So they said, wow, I

really saw you trying really hard. You're really trying to work that out. You're trying to figure out those problems. Of these two groups, when they were asked if they wanted to do another problem that was even harder, the first group that got the extrinsic affirmation, 90% of them said no, not interested. They didn't want to. And every single child in the intrinsic group where got given affirmed for their effort all said yes, they wanted to try something harder and something

more difficult. So what is that showing us? When we are allowing the child to see what's their inner effort that they're putting into something and we're affirming the effort that goes into the process rather than the end result or rather than their intelligence or academic results in something, it helps them come back to that inner in a compass where they can guide themselves. And when it comes to real life, to achieve anything greater life, we know that we have to

make mistakes. We're going to make mistakes and we're going to learn from it and try again. We call it failing forward, learning and trying again, learning and trying again. But if you have children who are too scared to make a mistake and too scared to try something harder, we're basically scaling back the process of innovation for our children. So what we can do is always make sure we praise the effort rather than the end result and we can think long term what's going to benefit our children

in terms of these skills, academically, emotionally, socially, long term when they walk out those doors of our school rooms and also of our homes. Thank you so much for listening. I hope you enjoyed this podcast and it would be an amazing help to us at the podcast if you leave a review. at Apple Podcasts or on Spotify or subscribe on YouTube. There'll be more information below in all of the links. Thanks