“Why are traffic lights red, yellow and green?”
When a child asks you a question like this, you have a few options. You can shut her down with a “Just because.” You can explain: “Red is for stop and green is for go.” Or, you can turn the question back to her and help her figure out the answer with plenty of encouragement.
No parent, teacher or caregiver has the time or patience to respond perfectly to all of the many, many opportunities like these that come along. But one book, Becoming Brilliant: What Science Tells Us About Raising Successful Children, is designed to get us thinking about the magnitude of these moments.
Kathy Hirsh-Pasek, a professor at Temple University and a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, is a distinguished developmental psychologist with decades of experience. So is her co-author, Roberta Golinkoff at the University of Delaware. This book features a new framework, based on the science of learning and development, to help parents think about cultivating the skills people really need to succeed.
Since this interview first appeared, Golinkoff and Hirsh-Pasek have begun working with an entire school district — Godfrey-Lee Public Schools, just outside of Grand Rapids, MI — to bring their system, called the six C’s, into classrooms.
What follows is an excerpt from our conversation.
What led you to write this book?
Kathy Hirsh-Pasek: What we do with little kids today will matter in 20 years. If you don’t get it right, you will have an unlivable environment. That’s the crisis I see.
Roberta Golinkoff: We live in a crazy time, and parents are very worried about their children’s futures. They’re getting all kinds of messages about children having to score at the top level on some test. The irony is, kids could score at the top and still not succeed at finding great employment or becoming a great person.
Your “21st-century report card” contains six C’s derived from learning science: collaboration, communication, content, critical thinking, creative innovation and confidence. What’s new is the way you relate these skills to each other, and also, you’ve described what they look like at four levels of development.
Hirsh-Pasek: The first, basic, most core is collaboration. Collaboration is everything from getting along with others to controlling your impulses so you can get along and not kick someone else off the swing. It’s building a community and experiencing diversity and culture. Everything we do, in the classroom or at home, has to be built on that foundation.
Communication comes next, because you can’t communicate if you have no one to communicate with. This includes speaking, writing, reading and that all-but-lost art of listening.
Content is built on communication. You can’t learn anything if you haven’t learned how to understand language, or to read.
Critical thinking relies on content, because you can’t navigate masses of information if you have nothing to navigate to.
Creative innovation requires knowing something. You can’t just be a monkey throwing paint on a canvas. It’s the 10,000-hour rule: You need to know something well enough to make something new.
And finally, confidence: You have to have the confidence to take safe risks.
Golinkoff: There isn’t an entrepreneur or a scientific pioneer who hasn’t had failures. And if we don’t rear children who are comfortable taking risks, we won’t have successes. To read more from Anya Kamenetz, click here.