Eight-year-old Becka asked me if she was actually learning anything. The friends on her block had told her that she wasn’t learning because she didn’t have tests every week like they did in school. Hmmm… I could see how that would be confusing to a child educated outside of school and it’s a pretty fair question. Becka told me that her mom said she learned by playing, but she wasn’t too sure. I asked Becka if she thought she was ready to start working on her superpower of focus and she said YES, she wanted to spend more time learning how to read and do math.
Becka’s family embraced an self-directed philosophy, but they were open to Becka self-directing herself into what Becka thought of as school time. Becka’s mom figured out how she might spend a solid block of time partnering with Becka to work on her basic skills. I’ve had plenty of kids beg for tests and “homework” and I wouldn’t be surprised if Becka started asking for some traditional measures of assessment so she would be sure she was learning. Everyone wants to feel capable and competent and how will we know unless we have some way of knowing?
Becka and her mom sat down to talk about what Becka wanted to learn. They wrote down a short list and developed a few clear, daily goals working towards the skills that were important to Becka. This process seems pretty straightforward, but if not done with awareness, it could be very discouraging to Becka.
Becka’s mom needed to really have a handle on Becka’s competency levels going into the concepts she wanted to learn. Too hard and Becka might shut down or think that she really didn’t know much. Even though the skills we chose might be a tad too easy, it felt best to err on that side of the equation. We could easily bump up the challenge once Becka got going. Once we found the Challenge/Skill sweet spot, Becka’s mom found a block of time to sit down with her and offer some feedback as they learned together. Becka’s mom used all three types of feedback…lots of appreciation, along with coaching and a tad of evaluation. This gave Beck a clear sense of what she was learning and where she needed to focus more attention. The appreciation really helped to keep her confidence up and inching forward using paper-thin progressions helped it never seem too, too hard.
For kids that struggle with anxiety, it may be helpful to understand that information through our senses is filtered by fear and by our goals. If a child can focus more on her goals, she is focusing less on her fear. Clear goals need to be specific and immediate. Your child needs to know what she is doing now and what she is doing next, in order to keep anxiety levels down.
*Paper-thin progressions: We build one small skill atop one small skill. Start where your child is fully competent and then very slowly add the smallest bit of challenge to that skill. Once that’s grasped, do it again, and again and again in such paper-thin progressions. This is how we bounce off of boredom and keep anxiety at bay.
Words like testing and assessment are often loaded because of our own history with such labels. Many kids, though, don’t have a negative feeling in their bodies when they haven’t had those same stressful experiences. Kids can be excited to show what they know and it’s up to us not to let our own labels and experiences taint that positive frame. Sometimes it can help kids to label any anxiety as excitement. Often the two feelings have a similar flavor, but calling it excitement in our minds, helps our bodies refrain from releasing stress hormones into our system.
Leave me a comment: What's a goal your child might be interested in pursuing?
