Translator: Tomás Guarna Reviewer: Sebastian Betti
"How do worms breath under the ground?"
That's what one of my five-year-old twins asked me
when we were playing in the backyard
and all of a sudden a worm stuck out from one of the flowerbeds.
Kids ask questions like these all the time
and, in general, what happens?
They pass by us.
If we just happen to know the answer,
what do we usually do?
We tell it to them, right? And that's it.
But, generally, assuming we don't know it,
what do we tend to do?
We tell them: "Well, go look it up."
Or "I don't know." Or we move on to something else.
But I think that in those curious questions kids have
there's a huge opportunity we can take advantage of.
For almost 20 years, I've been working in education.
I work with schools, teachers, principals,
trying to make the most of what happens in the classroom to shape kids
to be curious, critical thinkers, and ready for life.
And for the past five years I've also been a mother
and in these years of talks with friends and acquaintances who are also parents,
they all ask me the same question:
"What school should I send my kids to?"
And, of course, choosing a school is a very important issue.
We could talk about that for a while.
But I believe that in that concern for children's education
so focused in school, there's something
bigger we're forgetting in the outside,
something that's usually right under our noses
without us realizing it: how do we educate them at home?
And, with education at home
I don't mean teaching them to behave properly at the table,
say thank you to grandma, or share with their brothers, no.
I'm not talking about taking kids off the school either
and educate them ourselves, of course not.
I'm talking about something else, something much bigger,
much deeper.
It's about how the link between kids and knowledge is built,
how their love of learning is shaped.
Because that's what can make all the difference in their lives.
Because it's going to give them the tools but, above all,
the desire and the commitment to keep learning forever.
And that's built at home, since kids are very young,
from the first years of life until they keep growing.
And it's built on a daily basis, in the interactions with their parents
and also with their brothers, uncles, grandparents,
and even sometimes, family friends.
But how do we awaken that love for learning at home?
What can we do?
Do we have to stop working and be all day with the kids?
Or do we make sophisticated tools
so that after a long day at work,
we come home exhausted and have even more things to solve?
Really, it's not very clear how it can be done.
But there's good news:
there are some well-tested ideas that come from the field of education,
backed by decades of academic research,
that I believe can give us some good clues to guide us.
And the best thing is that they're easy to bring home,
to things we do with kids all the time.
I've been researching these topics
and today I want to tell you something I found
thinking of the three key interactions we have with kids:
How do we answer their questions?
How do we talk with them?
And how do we praise them when they do something right?
Let's go with the first of the questions:
How do we answer kids' questions?
For some time we've known that in order to awaken
and, above all, to sustain their willingness to learn
we need to generate the habit of deep learning.
What is deep learning?
As we learn about a topic,
we go unraveling it, slowly,
seeing how it connects with other topics,
how it connects with our life,
seeing it from different points of view.
And I say that helps sustain the willingness to learn because,
as we become experts in something,
as we know something well,
we gain confidence in our own abilities as learners.
And that helps us keep going.
Here's the secret:
the curious questions of kids are a unique starting point
to generate that deep learning.
I'll tell you how the worm episode continued.
We used the question to do an exploration
that lasted for a while.
First, what did we do?
We took the worms out of the ground,
played with them for a bit, looked at them.
At first, they didn't want to grab them, but --
They get a bit grossed out, right?
Then, obviously, after a while they didn't want to put them back.
We started looking up information about worms.
How do worms breath under the ground?
How do they eat under the ground?
We found the most interesting things.
For example, worms have ten hearts
and we only have one, an important fact.
Or, worm's poop is great for plants.
The jewels of our findings were some videos
of many worms coming out from inside the same cocoon,
which we saw dozens of times.
Here's the drawing they made later.
There's the cocoon, the worms coming out.
The big one on the side is the mother.
Part of the fiction, right?
Because mum worms don't even care a bit for their offspring
but it felt strange for me to be a illusion-shatterer,
so I didn't say anything.
Afterwards, one of my kids came up with:
"What's the speed of a worm? How fast can it go?"
And we were about to look it up on the Internet.
Because you know you can find everything on the Internet, right?
You type "speed of a worm" and something shows up.
But we said: "What if we measure it ourselves?"
How do you measure the speed of something?
We decided to make a race course for worms
and make them run.
Being honest, the race didn't really work out.
because the worms didn't care about it
and wouldn't even move in the same direction.
What's more, the course was dry,
so the worms weren't slipping much,
so my kids kept trying to put in
some drops of water on each worm so they'd slip better
and also pushed theirs a bit so it'd reach the goal first.
This is the drawing of our course.
So frankly, those eleven minutes the winning worm took
to reach the goal aren't too reliable, so as to say.
But those eleven minutes of being with the timer on,
cheering on the worm to make it, were unforgettable.
Those are the things
that we thought up to do with the worms at that moment.
They could've been others, sure.
Because what's important isn't what we do with kids in particular,
but rather to unravel those topics that interest us
to see where they take us.
As an adventure, as a shared game.
And every topic is valid, even if we don't know much about it.
Because it's not about learning,
but rather to pass along the love for learning.
And to do that you don't need to know it all.
I just happened to know some facts about worms,
not the hearts thing, but something.
But for example, on other days, my kids came up
with a bunch of question on the Independence Wars.
A topic I studied --
you all have --
a thousands times as a student, and I never learned much.
In fact, I even found it quite boring.
And learning with them was even better.
Because it let me dust off a topic
that in my head was full of cobwebs, forgotten,
and reconnect with my own curiosity.
To me, that's one of the biggest drivers
that makes me want to do this sort of things with my kids.
And the other big driver is to see them learn.
I believe there's few things as exciting
as seeing a girl or a boy build their own way of thinking,
their own vision of the world.
And in this process comes in the second key: conversation.
For a while, we've also known that to build the way of thinking
the great driver is language.
And that's why it's so important that, when we talk to kids,
we help them put into words what they're thinking,
and why they think it.
And this is important, not only for us,
to measure the temperature of what they're understanding and not,
and help them starting from there.
But especially for them.
Because in order to gain autonomy, to learn how to learn,
kids need to progressively become aware of what they have
and haven't understood yet.
And how what they're learning is connected
to what they knew beforehand.
This is useful for all conversations,
but a good moment to do this with kids
is, for example, when we read with them.
At home, when we read books with the kids,
we can simply stop every once in a while,
to chat about the story,
about how the characters in each part may have felt,
to talk about whether we would've felt the same way
in the same situation.
We think of other possible endings.
For example, what would've happened
if Cinderella had left the ball at half past twelve?
Or we think if they'd recommend this book to other kids.
What would they tell them to make them want to read it?
Or, for example, we try to see who wrote these books.
Had we read another book from that author before?
Was it similar in any way to the one we're reading?
Or we check who the books are dedicated to.
For example, once a book said:
"To Toto, my faithful partner of adventures."
Who would Toto be?
Their dog, brother, best friend?
And we also do this so kids
realize that books,
or any other work of art, like movies, or plays,
paintings, or inventions, aren't made by superheroes,
but by flesh-and-bone people like them.
Learning can be beautiful,
but also very frustrating,
it demands a lot of effort.
Because sooner or later, we'll stumble upon a situation
that we find hard, something that isn't too easy
and we'll have to face it.
That's why we need to stay motivated.
Here's when the third and last key comes in: praises.
And I love this one because I think it's the easiest one to implement
but it's the one we do the other way round.
What do us mums, dads,
let alone grandparents do when kids do something right?
We praise them, right?
With the best intentions, we want them to gain confidence,
to be sure of themselves, motivated.
And we say things like:
"Great, you're so smart!"
Or: "You're such a genius!"
But research shows not all compliments help.
In fact, even some could be counter-productive.
Now we know that when we praise kids for their talent,
for their intelligence, kids start choosing easier tasks
that don't challenge them as much.
They go for what's safe.
On one hand, because they don't want to let us down,
but also because they don't want let down themselves,
the image they're building of themselves.
Luckily, the opposite happens when we praise their effort.
For example, if we tell them:
"Great! It shows you worked hard."
Or: "You practiced so much!"
Kids keep choosing things that defy them more and more.
Because we help them feel in control of the process.
One can't control how talented they are at doing something,
but one can control how much effort they put into it.
At home, I became a bit too much of a fan of these praises for effort
and my kids already found out.
So when they do something right they usually look at me and say:
"I tried really hard, didn't I mommy?"
(Laughter)
If we think about it, awakening the love for learning
isn't too different from being hunters
waiting for that moment of opportunity
when we can learn with our kids.
And I'm not saying it's easy
or that we can do it all the time.
But I think that if we do it at least sometimes,
we can make an enormous difference.
And I realized that generates touching, wonderful moments
when we're together as a family
that are by far my most favorite moments of all these years,
and that, hopefully, they'll remember when they grow up
and they think about their childhood.
That's why, the next time someone asks me
"What school should I send my kids to?"
I think I'll have the answer.
I'll tell them the fundamental question isn't that one, but another one.
I'll tell them the question is:
"What do you answer to your kids when they ask you
how a worm breathes under the ground?"
Thank you!
(Applause)