Ok - so I'll admit that I think Karen Pryor is amazing.
Here's a recent blog post from her site:
http://www.clickertraining.com/node/3104 A piano teacher at a lunch gathering told me, �The key thing, for me, is breaking things down into small units, and then starting with a point of success.� She�s grasped a crucial concept�start with something the student can already do right, and proceed in manageable steps. Boy, that�s very different from my piano lessons as a child! I can�t help but notice that the language is straight out of TAGteach�. When I asked her, she had never heard of TAG. But she has the concept.
TAG is 'acustical traing' in this context.
What I think is so crutial here is that after a task is broken down into managable tasks, one has to observe the child's performance to see if the tasks have or have not been mastered. Starting with the 'points of success' could be interpreted to mean 'stuff that isn't too hard' but I believe that it also has to include 'but is hard enough for the child to feel successful.'
What I think it really lacking in adult humans is two things -
1) stepping back from what we are trying to teach and being able to break it into steps
2) being a close enough observer to know what the child already knows and what skills are already mastered.
This is true for academics and for teaching social skills at home, yes?
I think that the great appeal of Montessori is that it does break learning jobs into small tasks. The problem is that the model just isn't complete enough to deal with kids who take different routes to learning the same thing and look 'all over the place' by the Montessori perspective. Maybe no model will ever be complex enough for the human mind?
Love and More Love,
Grinity
