The similarities are
probably not leaping at you….. Colour? Shape? Taste??!! Surely not…..
However, there are some
important analogies that can be drawn between the ripening of an avocado and
the developmental readiness of a child to transition to school and deal with
the enormous cognitive, linguistic, social, and physical demands of life in and
out of the classroom.
People who are familiar
with my work will know that for over a decade, I have been carrying out
research on the language and social skills of young people in the youth justice
system. I have blogged
about this research previously and copies of relevant papers can be found on
my La Trobe University homepage.
In a nutshell, this
research shows that some 50% of young people in the youth justice system
(whether on community-based or custodial orders) have clinically significant expressive
and receptive language difficulties. I am not keen on using the term “specific
language impairment” for this population, because in all likelihood, their
difficulties are anything but “specific”, reflecting a broad range of
biopsychosocial risks in early life. Regardless of the terminology, however
language and learning difficulties are strikingly evident in this population
(though
often misunderstood by others).
An almost universal
feature of the early histories of these young people is their disaffection with
school, their histories of suspension and exclusion, their very poor levels of
academic achievement, and of course, their early departure from school,
invariably with no marketable employment skills.
Early language exposure
sits on a social
gradient with respect to the quantity and quality of child-focussed talk
experienced in the early years. Unfortunately, at a population level, this
means that children from different suburbs of the same city will arrive at
school with very different levels of expressive and receptive language skills
(vocabulary, phonemic awareness, syntactic sophistication, narrative abilities).
Readers in Australia may be interested to have a look at how children in their
own areas are faring on some key domains relevant to school commencement and can do so by accessing the Australian Early Development Index
(AEDI) website.
Classrooms are very verbal environments, so if you arrive
at school with inadequately developed expressive and receptive language skills,
chances are you will not only find the auditory-verbal demands of the classroom
pretty challenging, but you’ll also struggle to make the transition to literacy – in itself a fundamentally linguistic skill-set.
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| Image courtesy of olovedog / Free Digital Photos |
These inequalities in
readiness to meet the demands of school-life have serious and long-reaching
implications. In the short-term, they create very wide developmental
discrepancies in ability level that must somehow be accommodated and catered to
by early years teachers. Like it or not, benchmarking begins in the first year
of school, and teachers are charged with the sometimes formidable task of moving
a highly variable group of learners towards (and ideally beyond) minimum benchmarks
in key curriculum areas such as literacy and numeracy.
Returning then to
avocados. Have you ever tried to mash up an unripe one because you wanted to
make guacamole? If so, you will know that an unripe avocado, perfect in all as
it may well be, is not going to give you guacamole. Not today, not tomorrow and
maybe not for quite a few days. If it’s allowed to have those extra days,
however, it will get there, and your guacamole will be delicious.
As the diagram below
shows, avocados progress through developmental stages, ranging from “1” – not at
all ready to use, to “5” – ready for a range of uses.
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| Image Source |
In reality, children in early years classrooms display the same (or even greater) variability with respect to their readiness to commence formal learning.
While it would
be great if we could “even out” the effects of early life experience, (e.g. through
community-based programs such as Sure Start and Head Start), in reality this
remains an elusive goal and the gulf between the ready-for-school and the not-quite-ready-for-school
opens up more and more over the primary school years. With respect to early
reading achievement, this has been referred to as the Matthew Effect and is described here by Professor Keith
Stanovich.
When an avocado isn’t
ready to use, the best thing is probably just to put it to one side for a
while, knowing it will mature with time. Here the analogy with children breaks
down, because children who are not quite ready for the formal demands of a
classroom do of course need a wide range of developmentally appropriate,
play-based, language-rich experiences. Such experiences will foster readiness for the cognitive and linguistic demands of more formal learning.
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| Image courtesy of digitalart / Free Digital Photos |
So - instead of thinking about school readiness in terms of children’s readiness for school, perhaps we could re-configure this to be about schools’ readiness for children? I suspect we have more chance of success if we re-think what goes on in early years classrooms, than if we try to socially engineer large-scale change in disadvantaged communities. I’m not saying, of course, that quality pre-school experiences are not valuable, but I am arguing that school is a population-based (i.e. universal) intervention with very high participation rates (at least in the early years). As a universal intervention though, it is not currently conferring equal levels of advantage and opportunity across the community.
In my fantasy-if-they-made -me-education-minister-for-a-day world, the first year of school would be all about consolidating the early expressive and receptive oral language skills that underpin both social competence and the transition to literacy, to strengthen the tail of the developmental curve and create genuine readiness for the life-changing experience of learning to read and write.
(c) Pamela Snow 2014
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