By Priscilla Ribeiro

Priscilla B. Ribeiro holds an M.B.A and an Ed.S. in Educational Leadership, she is currently working towards her doctoral degree in Peabody’s College of Education and Human Development at Vanderbilt University.  She is currently a director supervising the high school principals in the 6th largest school district in the United States.  Priscilla began her educational career as a teacher for at-risk students.  She also served as a district resource teacher, assistant principal, and principal at both the middle and high school level.  Priscilla serves as a coach to aspiring leaders and principals.  She has collaborated on policy-development with the State of Florida and her school district to promote meaningful learning experiences and increase achievement for all students.  Priscilla was recipient of the Assistant Principal of the Year Award for the State of Florida and Magnet School Principal of the Year for Broward County Public Schools.

What does an article about toddlers learning from videos have to do with adolescent and adult learning? Surprisingly, there are many lessons from the research that can be applied to the K-12 learning environment.  As public schools frantically adjust to a virtual school model, for many of us (teachers, administrators and students) the transition into e-learning will provide ample learning opportunities and hurdles.  I found the research presented about toddler learning useful to inform how adults learn, too.

In Strouse, Troseth, O’Doherty and Saylor’s recent publication in the Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, the authors describe an experiment with toddlers, teachers, and parents that set out to determine if and how toddlers learn from watching videos (1).  While their overall answer is, sometimes and in some ways, the strategies they implemented during the viewing sessions may be applied to other learning situations, including adult professional development.

In its design, Strouse et al.’s study had an equal number of boy and girl toddlers between 28.2 and 32.3 months watch a video with an actor/teacher who would show the children new objects and name the objects in a style similar to  Blue’s Clues.  During the video presentation, the teacher would show objects and ask general questions as if talking to the toddler.  In some of the test groups the videos were watched with a parent who set the tone for a learning experience: they watched attentively, nodded, and interacted with the video and their child by asking questions, taking turns, and reacting positively to their child.  In another group, the parents sat quietly by without interacting.  Not too surprisingly, the toddlers in the group with the parents as co-viewers, the group with interaction from parents, learned significantly more than the other group that did not have the benefit of having someone to model what learning looks like. 

Although this study focused on the impact of external factors upon toddlers’ learning outcomes, its findings could provide insights that enhance adolescent and adult learning as well.   In particular, I found three ways the study related to work I do in the K-12 educational environment:

·       A responsive environment is critical to the tone for learning in any classroom;

·       Providing appropriate social cues through modeling is a strong argument for grouping students heterogeneously; and

·       Sometimes to enhance the learning for adults in a work environment, supervisors can perform the same tasks as the parents in the study.

Responsive Environments

As states look to minimize the spread of COVID19 by closing the doors to schools, we move into the era of e-learning and virtual classrooms.  Some districts (including my own) are scrambling to provide distance learning opportunities.  This launch into virtual learning is being accomplished through unresponsive mediums such as video and online learning experiences. Some in the community mock this instructional delivery, claiming that if students couldn’t learn in a classroom with a teacher, how will they learn with a computer program?

After reading this study, one may conclude these concerns have merit.  Without the individualized student feedback and supportive cues regarding the relevance of learning, students who struggle in school will continue to feel disengaged and disinterested, which could result in diminished or lost learning. 

The lesson districts should take from the study is that for online learning to be effective, there must be a component of interaction between the student and the instructor. The toddlers were asked to do simple association, but more importantly to transfer and make generalizations by identifying similar objects in real world. This ability demonstrates “real learning” is occurring.  In the study this type of learning occurred most frequently for the toddlers “who received the most social cues from the responsive video actress and from parent modeling of requested behaviors” (Strouse et al., 2018).  For our adolescents to continue to process and retain information in a meaningful way, the instruction must include motivational and contingent responsiveness along with opportunities for authentic engagement based on the individual student’s needs.  Providing opportunities for students to use Facetime or other interactive live-video platforms is one way we can provide support.

Modeling

As children mature from toddler to adolescent, they often value peer model more than parent model. However, they still look to others to guide their behaviors. Learning from positive peer behavior and interactions is one of the strongest arguments for inclusion and heterogeneous grouping in classes.  Strouse et al.’s (2018) study indicates that no significant learning occurred when the parents did not provide appropriate social cues such as modeling responses to the prompts, how and what to gaze at, and attention points.  Yet schools don’t take always these factors into consideration when grouping students into classes.  Schools often prefer grouping students homogeneously as it decreases the demands for teachers to create different lessons to meet the needs of a variety of academic levels within the same class.  However, the toddlers in the study benefited from an additional individual modeling thinking-processes and behaviors along with the teacher’s instruction.  In the same way, providing the struggling student with peers who model appropriate communication, critical thinking, and self-regulation allows the struggling student opportunities to imitate those behaviors that will make them better students. 

Of course, one difficulty in implementing this model is finding the right combination of high performing, average, and struggling students in one class.  Another challenge is determining if value added from peer interaction outweighs the loss of a teacher providing targeted instruction.  In other words, because of the challenge of individualizing instruction for a variety of academic levels within the same class, a teacher will often develop instruction aimed at reaching the average, or worse, to the lowest achievement level.

Application to Supervisor Relationships

Effective techniques used by the co-viewing parent and teacher in the study are surprisingly similar to those strategies that are effective between administrators and adult learners during mandatory professional development.  To successfully launch new mandatory initiatives, I have found that a supervisor must be present to provide context.  That is, the supervisor must introduce and emphasize that the information being presented is important (i.e. set up the learning environment).  He or she must provide social cues such as modeling attention and interest. The supervisor should also provide verbal cognitive support such as asking participants questions and giving them positive feedback in order to maintain adult interest. 

Perhaps the intent of Strouse et al.’s (2018) study did not have anything to do with adult learning. However, I found many similarities between my actions as a teacher, principal, and coach and the actions performed by the co-viewing parent.  Perhaps when adults are not driving their own learning experience and are not authentically engaged in learning (as is often the case with mandatory professional development), they require the same learning supports toddlers do.

Bottom Line:

·       All learners can benefit from an online environment that includes opportunities for the learner to be guided and questions to be answered in real-time.  This can be accomplished by setting up collaborative sessions using applications such as Facetime or Zoom.

·       Students need positive modeling of best practices; peers can be the best models. Teachers embarking on the on-line learning platform can benefit from learning from more proficient peers, too.

·       Learning outcomes improve for both adults and adolescent learners when there is a guiding presence that informs the learner that a topic is important and provides guiding questions regarding focus points. 

References

(1) Strouse, G. A., Troseth, G. L., O'Doherty, K. D., & Saylor, M. M. (2018). Co-viewing supports toddlers’ word learning from contingent and noncontingent video. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 166, 310-326.