I will be off to Canada on vacation for the rest of the summer. Will be taking a break from the blog until August 24. Have a great summer, everyone.
To fix this, one avenue we can take is to look at Deci’s Self-Determination Theory. Instead of carrots and sticks, humans need three basic psychological nutrients to build intrinsic motivation: Autonomy, Competence, and Relatedness. When we support these, motivation comes from within! We will explore each of these in the next few posts.
Then there’s the instinct to reward — stickers, snacks, a points chart. Paul’s worry is that prizes quietly signal the task wasn’t worth doing for its own sake. We mean to motivate, but we can end up teaching children to work for extrinsic rather than intrinsic reasons. How do we fix this?
This video by David Paul explores more examples and delves into some of the underlying psychology in a child-centered approach in the language classroom:
Teaching tip: When introducing language targets, a useful technique David Paul recommends is to simply put the language out there. For example, rather than carefully pre-teaching to ensure no mistakes are made, we can look at a child, smile and say [language target]. If she cannot answer, smile again and ask other children. Aim to generate the feeling, “Here is an interesting puzzle to be solved. Trying to solve it could be fun.”
In this way, students, from the very outset, experience dealing with the unknown and making mistakes along the way as an integrated part of learning, rather than something to be avoided.
Creating a playful, supportive classroom atmosphere that encourages curiosity and exploration is an important factor not only in how students approach making “mistakes” but how they feel about learning as a whole. In the English classroom, this starts with how language targets are introduced.
Teaching tip: When a child makes an error, hold off. Pause, then offer a gesture — a raised eyebrow, or counting the words on your fingers, or a hint — that nudges them to find and fix it themselves. The wait time does a surprising amount of the teaching. View mistakes as learning opportunities.
An excellent, just-released report on the Science of Learning.
Paul reframes the mistake itself. Use mistakes as a learning opportunity or a sign of thinking in progress — and the best moment to hand back to the child, so they’re the one who notices it and puts it right. Tips on how exactly to do this in tomorrow’s post.
Unlearning the Rescue
The next instinct is to rescue. A child struggles to solve a puzzle, or stumbles, and we step in to fix it — quickly, kindly, almost automatically. But every fast correction quietly tells the child that finding out the answer was our job, not theirs. What’s the alternative strategy? Next post…
Teaching tip: when planning lessons or activities, rather than starting with an explanation, think of ways of introducing the lesson target that encourage exploration. The ISLE approach to teaching physics gives some great examples here: www.islephysics.net/philosoph… I will share some examples for the language classroom in the future posts.
We can start with a subtle but fundamental shift in how we plan our lessons. Instead of asking, “How do I explain this clearly?” we start with, “How do I set this up so the children work it out?” Less delivery, more design — and a lot more trust in what our students can reach on their own.
Unlearning the Urge to Talk
To many educators teaching means telling. So we explain — and we work hard to explain well. David Paul’s quiet challenge: in a child-centered class, the most useful thing in the room is often the teacher’s silence… getting out of the way and giving students the time and space to think and discover.
What ties Paul’s thinking together is constructivist psychology: the idea that children build their own understanding rather than receive it. Every idea keeps returning to one practical question — what would we do differently in the actual classroom if we trusted children a little more?
A Mentor and a Habit of Unlearning
On the topic of student-centered learning, let’s shift to young learners. I first learned about the concept of child-centered learning while attending one of David Paul’s one-day workshops when I was first starting out about 25 years ago. That workshop was literally a life-changing experience.
Parkhurst in 1922. Minerva in 2012. Dalton X in 2027. Each asked the same question: what does education look like when it truly serves the learner? We don’t have all the answers. But we’re building the space to find them. Go forth unafraid.
The Minerva Baccalaureate builds transferable skills across everything. The A-Levels build mastery in something specific. What if it were possible for them to coexist? Broad thinkers and deep specialists, learning alongside each other, encompassed and nestled in the Dalton Plan framework.
A-Levels have no required subjects. As a result, students are able to specialize in what aligns with their own individual interests and goals. In that sense, the freedom of choice and flexibility actually aligns with the Dalton Plan.
The IB and MBacc ask: can learners think across everything? The A-Levels ask: how deep can learners go? Neither is necessarily better. They serve different kinds of learners. So, the question could be asked: Why not serve both?
The A-Levels are taken by 175,000+ students in 160 countries. Recognised by the Ivy League, Russell Group, and leading universities worldwide, including the top public universities in Japan. For students with clear direction, they’re a powerful signal of mastery.