After a quick post on developmentally appropriate practice (with a vivid analogy) ignited a list of questions from readers, I started this series to look more deeply into DAP — what it means, why it’s disappearing, and what the consequences are.
In the last installment of this series, I want to address a common question. “But what about….” We hear it many forms, and it’s always a question worth asking. “What about my son who learned to read at 4 and has been doing great ever since?” “What about Program X, which seems to show results, even though people claim it’s not DAP?”
The best answer to this type of question that I can think of came from Dr. Marcy Guddemi of the Gesell Institute, whom I interviewed a few years ago for this post regarding the institute’s recent findings on DAP. In explaining how some children seem to perform beyond their level, Dr. Guddemi pointed out that children may actually appear to learn some of these tasks. But, she added, this “learning” is actually “training”.
Because they are not developmentally ready, the children haven’t built the appropriate connections for meaningful knowledge. Referring to these as “splinter skills” she said, “You can train them, but the knowledge and understanding—the true learning—has not happened. Our country has this hang up that if the child can perform, that they know.”
(It was this interesting juxtaposition of the words “perform” and “learning” that reminded me that Robert Titzer, the creator of “Your Baby Can Read”, holds a degree in “human performance”, not education.)
This concept of splinter skills conjures in my mind the story of “Clever Hans”, a famous horse in the early 1900s whose owner claimed he could do math, read, and spell, skills he displayed through a series of hoof taps. When the spectacle was more closely examined, however it was found that the horse (who obviously lacked the full foundation to do what people claimed he was doing) was simply responding to unintentional visual cues given by his questioners and audiences. He had all the right answers, but none of the understanding.
When I asked Dr. Guddemi to expound further on the topic of splinter skills, she offered this explanation:
“The problem with splinter skills or “performances” is that it is not REAL learning. Real learning happens when brain cells are connected to build meaning for the child. When a child memorizes a splinter skill with no brain connection, it is quickly forgotten—like cramming for a test! What a waste of time for the child when they could be developing real meaning that will stay with them and also be the foundation for more and more difficult and challenging learning!”
This is one of the points that is often missed when we lose sight of DAP and become focused on performance over learning. It isn’t just a question of whether or not the learning is effective, but there’s also a question of missed opportunity. If time, effort, attention, and other finite resources are being put into programs that are not developmentally appropriate, the flip-side is that foundational experiences that ARE needed are likely being neglected.
One quick example would be the push-down effect where the curricula from older grades is creeping into younger and younger classrooms. While some see that as an advance, the reality is that pushing down usually pushes something else out. In preschool and kindergarten classrooms in particular, what often gets pushed out are the critical and developmentally responsive experiences that come from an emphasis on social skills and play-based learning.
Continuing with the interview, I asked Dr. Guddemi what her response is to those who reject the study done at the Gesell Institute, saying their children did learn to read at 4 and have been successful ever since.
“Some children do learn to read at 4. But not all children CAN learn to read at four. Walking is another example. Some children learn to walk at 9 mo but no one can teach all 9 mo old babies to walk!! Our research supports that fact that we must respect developmental differences. Early walkers are not better walkers than later walkers, and research shows us that early readers have no advantage over later readers by the end of third grade. Each child is different! Gesell Institute wants each child to be respected and supported in the type of learning that is right for where the child is developmentally.”
Take Aways
1. Some children ARE ready to master skills at early ages. The bell curve of normal development allows for outliers on both sides. But the fact that one child is ready sooner doesn’t mean we can or should assume the same standard for every child.
2. Some children can perform skills without having the real knowledge behind it. In the process of mastering a performance, they’re missing out on building the skills they actually need to build a strong foundation for actual connections and learning.
Just because we can get children to perform tasks at earlier ages, does not mean they have the natural capacity to maintain those skills and convert them to real knowledge in a natural setting. Additionally, and perhaps more tragically, those children who cannot be “trained” ahead of their natural schedule suffer the consequences, being labeled as “difficult” or “slow”. By the time they are naturally ready to develop skills on an appropriate developmental schedule, they have already been left behind. It seems in an effort to create more success we have only created more unnecessary failures.
We need to ensure that our children are getting the foundational skills appropriate to their developmental level and that we aren’t settling for what amounts to a party trick in the place of real learning.
(Top Image Source, Center Image Source)
Catch this whole series on DAP, starting with the short post that ignited it all, On DAP and Why We Don’t Push Kids Down the Stairs. (Image Source)
A performing little child IS NOT CUTE and I suspect many adults are “pushing them down the developmental stairs” to feel proud themselves: “show Fernanda how you count to 20 in English” (we are Spanish speakers) I hear them say to a 24 months old girl. “How cute is this child, what a great parent/teacher I am”, they whisper within. The day focus is done on early childhood real needs and not on the adult satisfaction, things will change. I dont mean they do it deliverately, but they are doing it! We, professional teachers have the enormous responsibility to help parents in discovering this truth in a loving caring way. And we have the enormous responsibility to bring this issue to discussion in the educational field as much and as consistently as possible.
Wow…my favorite post in the series. I am so glad you covered this question, it makes perfect sense. What pulled it all together for me was the Dr. Marcy quote referring to our country’s hang up with performance. I was just at my Kindergarten son’s P/T conference this morning and we were discussing my sons sometimes inconsistent knowledge of some letters and site words. He seems to do better on paper than verbally.. which could be his strength, but this makes me wonder if its just performance and his brain is finally catching up in making some true connections.
Thank you so much Heather! It takes time to build those true connections. When we step back and look at all a kindergartener is learning under the banner “letter knowledge” (26 letters, 52 when you consider upper and lower case, and even more if you consider all the fonts they’re exposed to– and that’s just the form! — add about 30 more for the letter sounds they learn in kindergarten to go with them — easily near 100!) it’s a little easier to be patient and allow them reasonable space to build real knowledge through their experiences. I’m so glad you’ve enjoyed this series. Thank you!
Interesting perspective. Yet I wonder: is this condemnation of “splinter skills” too broad? Aren’t there areas where children need to learn very specific skills first, in order to then put them together at a later age, and use them for deep knowledge and understanding?
Take learning to handwrite. This skill is very complex: to succeed at it, children need to develop many component skills. They need to acquire motor control of their shoulders, arms, wrists, fingers. They need to learn and practice a proper pencil grip and master controlling a pencil in such a way as to make clear, purposeful, controlled marks on paper. They need to learn to focus their attention, to sustain concentration on a task for more than a few minutes. They need to learn to segment words into constituent sounds, and to associate the sounds with the corresponding shapes. Then they need to learn the muscle movement needed to replicate these shapes on paper. And they need to learn to put the shapes (letters) in order of the sounds to make the worlds.
All these are what you might call “splinter skills” that children can learn early, and that don’t directly lead to children who can write (in the sense of communicating a thought on paper, or fully “understanding” written communications). They all are, however, foundational skills that three- and four-year-olds can and do learn joyfully in Montessori classrooms all over the world. They play sound games, to orally segment words. They sew, they paint, the button, they peel eggs, to strengthen muscles. They build towers, put together puzzles, or match musical tones, sounds or colors and extend their attention span. They trace and color Metal Insets, animal puzzles, geography maps, and learn great pencil control. They trace Sandpaper Letters with their fingers, and automate they sound-shape associations as they also learn to make the shape with their fingers. They build words with the Moveable Alphabet, learning that words are made up out of letters arranged in order.
All of these individual activities are chosen by the children, because they are enjoyable in their own right, not because a teacher provides any extrinsic incentives for them to engage in these activities.
Then, all of the sudden, we see an “explosion into writing”: a four-and-a-half or five-year-old suddenly begins to write, whole words or even sentences–and a few weeks or months later, he or she starts reading phonetic books with ease. We see this all the time in our Montessori classrooms: children who have learned the “splinter skills” of reading and writing, who suddenly get it, who put the component skills together and emerge as writers and readers, much earlier than is the “norm” in other settings. When this happens, they aren’t just “performing” for others; their writing and reading isn’t something memorized for a test or to show off to adults. They are actually reading and writing, and they love it, as evidenced by them choosing book after book or scribbling messages on any piece of paper they can find.
There is a normal distribution on when children learn certain skills–but the environment they act in influences where this bell curve rests. In an environment where babies are constrained in containers (cribs, high chairs, bouncers, strollers) they will learn to crawl and walk later than in one where they have freedom to move, interesting objects to reach out to and safe places to pull up to stand and cruise. Muscles and brains grow with exercise, and the type of environment a child finds himself in does impact how much exercise his mind and body get, how well he develops, who close he gets to achieving his full potential.
My six-year-old is a typical Montessori child, who played with the Montessori materials, who learned the component skills, and who suddenly, right around her sixth birthday, put it all together and progressed from sounding out phonetic readers to devouring 200 page chapter books and writing ten-page creative stories before she was even eligible to start first grade. She was late, at least in comparison to other Montessori children, but no-one really cared about her pacing–and she’s still way ahead of typical public school expectations. I love, love, love that this whole process was joyful, that she thinks (rightfully!) that no-one taught her, that she mastered these skills all by herself, that she is excited about reading and writing, that it all seems like a natural process to her.
I am curious: do you view these Montessori exercises as developmentally inappropriate “splinter skills” because they don’t have “real knowledge” behind them? Or are you arguing against things like worksheets, memorizing out-of-context sight words from flash cards, frontal instruction and extrinsic motivators, of the type used in Kumon learning centers and other “academic” early learning programs?
I am not Amanda, but regarding your question: “Yet I wonder: is this condemnation of “splinter skills” too broad? Aren’t there areas where children need to learn very specific skills first, in order to then put them together at a later age, and use them for deep knowledge and understanding?”
Splinter skills, by definition, are skills that are learned (or taught) earlier than developmentally appropriate. All those wonderful skills you speak of in your comment are skills that they are learning on their own in a developmentally appropriate way. They are the building blocks or foundational skills for other skills, such as handwriting (in your example).
The activities that are done in a Montessori environment are not splinter skills. They are, as I explained, foundational skills for later learning. Those skills DO have real knowledge behind them. When your child is using tongs to sort objects he is building his fine motor skills for future hand writing. When you child is tracing letters in the sand, he is laying the foundation for phonemic awareness. These are all DAP.
What is NOT DAP is teaching skills to children without first teaching/exposing them to those foundational skills and doing so at a time that their brains are developmentally ready to learn them. A child may be able to “read” at age 4 but will their brains be able to actually read to LEARN any earlier than if we teach them at 6?
Heike, Katie answered pretty much along the same lines as I was thinking. The tasks you mentioned are foundational to the larger, more “performance-type” skill of writing, and are completely appropriate as Katie pointed out. With the foundation in place and a proper responsiveness to development (even if that happens sooner than with others) the performance of the skill represents real learning, with all the appropriate connections. It’s a splinter skill when a child “performs” without the proper foundation. One quick example I can think of from my own nerdy background is when I learned the vocabulary word “photosynthesis” at a very young age after looking in my older sister’s science textbook. I would rattle off that definition just to try to prove that I was as “smart” as she was. In reality, I had no clue as to the true significance of what I was saying because I didn’t have the foundation and background. I had plucked one word off the page and memorized it. I was showing off a splinter skill — performance without real knowledge. A child my same age, however, could have had real knowledge about the word and definition after experiences with plants and discussions using the vocabulary to build the proper connections. That would be real knowledge. The two of us would give the same definition (performance) but only one has a real foundation for knowledge
LOVE LOVE LOVE this post Amanda. I agree…this one I think is my favorite and it really brings all your posts together. It’s like In speech development, the /r/ sound tends to develop later than many others. Some children do have their /r/ in at 3, but most learn it between 4-5 with others needing a little more time. Developmentally, I would not be teaching a 3 year old an /r/ just because *some* kids learn it at three. But if a child is 7 and cannot make ANY /r/ sounds correctly, I may need to teach it.
Great post!!
When my son was young he loved to line things up (monster trucks,heros etc) and name them. We never encouraged it, it just happened. So as he got older and moved on to different things we where surprised when he couldn’t remember what he used to love. But as I look back it makes perfect sense he wasn’t ready yet. He liked naming them and lining them up but that is just how he wanted to interact with his toys he was not being a boy genius, just a kid. We go to a school that feels all things come in there own time and there is no rush,which I love and realize how important that is. Develope the whole child not just his supposed smarts.
The Law of Individual Differences is always ignored. Just because one child can pick things up quicker doesn’t mean that many others can. And your example of learning the definition of photosynthesis and actually understanding what it is perfectly explains the learning of splinter skills. Great post, Amanda! Loved it!