Appreciating the developmental process

It is hard, as an adult so far removed from the earliest levels of language learning, to appreciate the successes of young children when they make so many mistakes. At this point in our adult lives, language and our use of it seems like such second nature, it is difficult to celebrate the incremental gains, and not just see all the misspellings and grammatical errors.

This topic of conversation came up in an article I read entitled Every Mark on the Page: Educating Family and Community Members about Young Children's Writing by Kate Foley Cusumano. Many parents express concern about their own child's early writing ability based upon the mistakes their child makes. Cusumano uses anonymous examples of student work and, in conferences or workshops, teaches parents and community members what is the normal range for children and how best to support them.

While reading this article, I was reminded of an exercise from a methods course in teaching mathematics in which we worked with numbers and problems in a base 5 system, rather than base 10. That exercise really drove home for me how much we take for granted knowing our number system as adults, and how becoming uneasy with a different system can help us to better help emergent learners. It a similar situation with reading and writing.

If all we do is focus on the mistakes that young learners make, and if we do not celebrate their successes, then we risk making that subject which is the focus of our critical gaze, into something that the child dislikes and feels frustrated about. I'm reminded of anecdote I heard years ago, in which a young child's creative writing is criticized for the errors it entailed. Subsequently, the child was able to create writing that had fewer errors, but was also much less creative. As educators and adults in children's lives, we want to encourage an enjoyment of learning behaviors and activities first and foremost. We want to celebrate what is great about what children are doing, and then bit by by address concerns of writing convention, for example. Understanding that there is a process to learning, students will make mistakes along the way, and encouraging enjoyment of the learning will lead to much better outcomes.