Early Childhood

Reimagining education in the age of longevity

Olivia Peterkin — Wed, 04 Jun 2025 22:10:56 +0000

Reimagining education in the age of longevity Olivia Peterkin Wed, 06/04/2025 - 15:10

Brain and Learning Sciences | Early Childhood | Research and Practice

In this episode of School’s In, GSE Professor Mitchell Stevens discusses ways to prepare young people for long lives of learning, work, and transitions.

June 12, 2025

By Olivia Peterkin

With the average human lifespan doubling in the 20th century, and people living well past traditional retirement age, how might education and work evolve to enable people to thrive across that lifespan?

Mitchell Stevens, a professor at �� Graduate School of Education (GSE), believes that the idea that people stop learning and contributing to society after they turn 65 is not only an expensive way to age, but “a terrible waste of human talent.”

“A much more ambitious but challenging way to make use of that gift [of longer lives] is to reorganize the other institutions of life,” said Stevens, who is also co-director for the �� Center on Longevity, which is redefining aging by advancing research, education, and public engagement that create lifelong opportunities for growth, connection, and contribution.

“Specifically …[to reorganize] the institutions of education and work to enable people to prosper and enjoy longer lives in advance of old age,” he said.

Stevens joins hosts GSE Dean Dan Schwartz and Senior Lecturer Denise Pope on School’s In as they discuss new ways to prepare young people for long lives of learning, work, and transitions. They also discuss the critical importance of early learning to enhance the cognitive capacity and desire for learning that will serve children well across long lifespans.

“As a society, we need to think about early investments in everyone's children as a good investment for all of us into the future,” Stevens said.

“I'm neither a psychologist nor a learning scientist, but I will say I've learned enough from my colleagues to know that motivation is a huge component of effective learning,” Stevens said. “And we currently organize education and training in such a way that there's no reason for us to expect that the people in our classrooms are motivated.”

They also discuss the �� Center on Longevity’s work to research and answer questions of the future of work.

“How can we take the lessons that we've already learned about the benefits of education and learning to enable transitions and self-discovery and build new forms of educational provision for people to enjoy over the course of their lives?,” Stevens said. “It's a much more optimistic framing of our complicated future than a lot of others on offer.”

Transcript

Mitchell Stevens (00:00):

The goal of a well-educated life is to create a desire for learning.

Denise Pope (00:09):

Welcome to School's In, your go-to podcast for cutting-edge insights in learning. From early education to lifelong development, we dive into trends, innovations, and challenges facing learners of all ages. I'm Denise Pope, senior lecturer at ��'s Graduate School of Education and co-founder of Challenge Success.

Dan Schwartz (00:32):

And I'm Dan Schwartz, I'm the Dean of the Graduate School of Education and the faculty director of the �� Accelerator for Learning.

Denise Pope (00:42):

Together, we bring you expert perspectives and conversations to help you stay curious, inspired, and informed. Hi, Dan.

Dan Schwartz (00:52):

Hi, Denise. Imagine you live till you're 100, what are you going to do for the last 25 years?

Denise Pope (00:59):

You know what? I am not the type of person who's going to retire. I can't imagine retiring. I will work less than what I'm working now and I'm very happy to read books and cook and hike and spend time with my hopefully grandchildren, et cetera. But this whole idea of retirement and just do nothing for 20, 30 years, whatever, not me.

Dan Schwartz (01:21):

Huh, interesting. I plan to just, I'll play pickleball. So if you keep going, are you going to need to keep learning or are you sort of learned everything and you'll just keep doing the same job for 25 years?

Denise Pope (01:35):

Oh my gosh, Dan, don't you think you're learning every day? I just learned literally a new trick on my phone. No, seriously, I didn't know I could do this. I just learned it. I was very excited. I will use it. I'm learning literally every day, I'm learning something new. Are you not?

Dan Schwartz (01:51):

I was thinking more about like learning differential calculus as opposed to like the new button that plays a video. So today we're going to talk about growing older and are you going to continue working? And if so, do you need to be educated again to learn these new jobs as times change or was what you learned as a kid in the first 12 years of school enough to carry you through? These are hard questions, but the good news is we have an expert to help us understand these complex waters. So it is my pleasure to welcome back Professor Mitchell Stevens to School's In, our favorite guest. And he's a professor of education and by courtesy, sociology. He's also the co-director of the �� Center on Longevity, which is highly relevant to today. So welcome, Mitchell.

Mitchell Stevens (02:45):

Thanks for having me back.

Dan Schwartz (02:47):

So could you tell me like A, really, are people going to live until they're 100? And then what are they going to do? If they're living to 100, I assume that 72 will be like 57, right? So when I'm 80, I'm actually sort of like I'm 60 and so I'm still got the jam of a 60-year-old, so I'll want to be doing a lot of stuff.

Denise Pope (03:08):

Hip and healthy. A hip and healthy 60-year-old.

Dan Schwartz (03:11):

Yeah, 67. Exactly.

Mitchell Stevens (03:13):

I'm looking at 60 right now.

Dan Schwartz (03:14):

It's not bad.

Mitchell Stevens (03:16):

So give me 18 months and I'll tell you.

Dan Schwartz (03:19):

It's the new 40. It's okay.

Mitchell Stevens (03:21):

The big fact of longevity is that our lifespans worldwide have essentially doubled in the 20th century. Those lifespans, of course, vary by wealth and health and other important demographic variables, but everyone is living longer. In fact, lifespans grew worldwide in the 20th century more than in all previous recorded human history. It's a huge gift that the 20th century has given us. Worldwide societies have essentially parked those additional years in old age. We've made old age longer, which is a very expensive way to age and arguably a terrible waste of human talent. A much more ambitious but challenging way to make use of that gift is to reorganize the other institutions of life. Specifically, we'll talk today about the institutions of education and work to enable people to prosper and enjoy longer lives in advance of old age. And that has been the premise of the Center on Longevity for its 15-year history, and I have been given the opportunity to convene a national conversation about how education and learning might be reframed to enable longer lives with a specific focus on public policy in the United States.

Dan Schwartz (04:47):

Can I ask a naive question?

Mitchell Stevens (04:49):

Sure.

Dan Schwartz (04:50):

I'm sort of looking forward to retirement. I'll be on Disney cruise ships every week. This is the traveling dream. And now you're saying, "No, Dan, you don't want to do that. You actually want to keep working and contributing to society." Do most people feel that way or am I-

Mitchell Stevens (05:09):

Well, no one wants to tell other people what to do. If one wants to end one's working life and spend the rest of one's time on Disney cruise ships and can afford that, fantastic.

Dan Schwartz (05:20):

Okay, fine. It may be a van, fine.

Mitchell Stevens (05:24):

But a lot of people don't want to spend large portions of their lives that way and many of us will frankly not be able to afford to live without working. And so both for the pleasure of longer lives and for the economic necessity of taking care of ourselves and our loved ones, more of us will be working for much longer periods of time than our parents or grandparents did.

Denise Pope (05:48):

So let me ask you a question because I always thought it was weird that we smush all the learning, like literally all the formal learning into age 5 to let's say 21, although I know half of America doesn't even go into higher ed, right. But we're smushing that learning. And so even when we weren't living to 100, it seemed already out of balance, right?

Mitchell Stevens (06:14):

Yeah, I think that's a very good point. One of my favorite things to point out is when Social Security was created in the 1930s in the United States, only a small proportion of the population lived past the age of 65. And so providing some sort of guaranteed income for men and women, when 66 was old, it made more sense to think about, say a 20 or 25 year career that was preloaded by education and training. But as the lifespan has expanded, precisely what you're saying, this notion that we frontload, let's call it frontload human capital development in the first 18 or 22 years of life, it doesn't seem to make nearly the same kind of sense that it might have made even three generations ago.

Dan Schwartz (07:02):

So are there going to be enough jobs?

Mitchell Stevens (07:04):

It's a funny thing about technological change and employment. The world has seen massive technological transformations in the past. There has never been a sort of magnificent under-supply of jobs despite promises that current kinds of employment might be rendered obsolete. But there's no reason to expect that employment per se won't change. Part of it, frankly, is the dynamism of the capitalism that we created in the 20th century. The desire to generate wealth creates ongoing conditions for employment. What people do and how many different things they will need to do over the course of longer careers is a question that's already become quite relevant in policy circles, as you know.

Denise Pope (07:53):

So how many jobs is a normal person going to do or how many careers are they going to have and what do they need to know then?

Mitchell Stevens (08:02):

Okay. Well, I am not a futurist, so I'm not going to make counts of estimates, but I do think it's probably pretty safe that people's career spans, as life course researchers call them, are going to continue to expand. And if the character of work given technological change continues at even a portion of the pace that we anticipate, people are going to be doing multiple different things at different stages in their lives and they're going to have to anticipate transitions between different kinds of work and perhaps entirely different career fields over time. So how do we prepare people for that? On my view, the most important and perhaps the most radical change will be to fairly radically recast how we socialize our children to think about their future lives.

(08:52):

And you think, especially in relatively affluent families, how much of childhood is organized around getting into something called college, which is supposed to begin at the age of 18 and conclude at the age of 22 so that you can start something called your career, which is understood usually as a singular phenomenon. That's a very short-sighted way of thinking about a hundred-year lives. How do we encourage our children to anticipate perhaps entering and re-entering formal training several times over the course of their lives, having not just one, but two or three careers? That's a very different way of thinking about preparing young people for their futures than the current script that we inherit imagines.

Dan Schwartz (09:39):

So Denise, do you think your children would have understood this?

Denise Pope (09:42):

Well, I was just thinking what's so interesting. Yeah, so my kids, I don't know about your kids, Dan, but- your kid, but my kids have already held multiple jobs. Like, my dad was a doctor, when he got out of medical school, he went and stayed at one hospital his whole life and he couldn't even understand when my husband started to switch jobs, which was a very normal thing. And now with our kids, they're switching jobs a lot. I don't know if it's the new thing or if because as technology comes around, I was just talking to someone like software engineers maybe aren't as needed because AI can do a lot of coding on its own.

(10:24):

So what are all those software engineers, which were like the hit, the thing that you were supposed to be to get a lot of money when you get out of college, what are those guys and women and people going to do next, right? So I think it's a combo. So yeah, I think they would be prepared or at least understand that you're going to have multiple jobs. I think we are not preparing people well for the skills that they will need to be adaptable and successful citizens, let alone workers. So I'm going a little bit deeper.

Dan Schwartz (11:00):

Mitchell, so now we have the image of people changing jobs a lot, and then there's some assumption that they will need to learn hard things as they switch jobs or easy things. And then either way, we need to think of an ecosystem with providers who are going to provide this as opposed to them... Or they just go to YouTube and learn it.

Mitchell Stevens (11:26):

One of the most important pieces of this new life course, the new map of life, as we call it at the Center on Longevity, is just how important inputs are from ages zero to five. Longevity means that the returns on those zero to five-year investments are all the greater. So lesson one is doing everything that we can to enhance the cognitive capacity, the desire for learning in young children is going to pay off even more substantially in an era of longer lives. And so I find that to be very heartening news actually because it's so consonant with where so much policy discourse is at present.

Denise Pope (12:09):

Wait, Mitchell, so what does that mean to an average mom or dad or a preschool teacher? What does that look like?

Dan Schwartz (12:18):

At their young age, it means you teach them to handle different bosses. So like, they're three years old and you keep bringing in a different boss.

Denise Pope (12:25):

And one's a mean boss and then one's a nice boss and one lets you play in the sandbox. No, Mitchell, seriously, what does that mean?

Mitchell Stevens (12:32):

Well, Denise, I think that's a good question. I think I would say for relatively affluent and well-educated families, they're probably doing everything more or less that their young children need for healthy longevity in terms of creating rich learning environments. It's really about variation in families' capacity to provide that kind of cognitive richness and for neighborhoods and communities to do it as well. So I wouldn't say, do this differently to enable your child's a hundred-year life. But as a society, we need to think about early investments in everyone's children as a good investment for all of us into the future.

Dan Schwartz (13:17):

So you get a trillion dollars, and this is always kind of the debate in education, should we invest in early childhood? So in California, we've now decided to make school for four-year-olds. And so you need to build the infrastructure for that.

Denise Pope (13:31):

Universal preschool.

Dan Schwartz (13:32):

Yeah. You could have made it so you made high school go till grade 13. Or you could take that money and invest it in making college more universally accessible. Or you could spend it making infrastructure for adults in their 70s who are changing jobs.

Denise Pope (13:48):

Can I say yes to all? It's a lot of money.

Dan Schwartz (13:54):

No, it's not. President Pope, help me decide.

Denise Pope (13:54):

I will tell you this, I know that certain things are broken. I 100% am a backer of universal preschool, especially based on what Mitchell is saying about the early years. I think the current higher ed system is not working for a whole bunch of reasons and I think that we as people age are going to need a structure. So I'm going to combine those two. I'm going to combine those two and put my money there. Post 18 years old, change the structure, putting my money there. But not taking any money away from universal preschool because that needs it too.

Dan Schwartz (14:26):

Okay, it's done.

Denise Pope (14:26):

We solved it.

Mitchell Stevens (14:34):

Another thing that is fun to talk about is I think we need a social science of transitions. We need to encourage people to embrace and celebrate transitions rather than seeing them as onerous tasks to be overcome. And what would it mean to give people tools to make transitions, to normalize them?

Dan Schwartz (14:54):

Sorry, transitions be from one ecosystem to another?

Mitchell Stevens (14:58):

From school to work, yes. From occupation one to occupation two. From household one to household two. I mean, many of us know just how hard it is to dissolve households and create new ones. It's also very hard to make career transitions because people's identities are so tied up in their work. Thinking about how do we equip people to navigate change is I think a better way of thinking.

Dan Schwartz (15:25):

That's a good question.

Denise Pope (15:28):

Think of some major industry changes. And right now, because the environment's on my mind, I'm just thinking about the coal miners and the changes that are going on for those families, for those towns, where that was their identity, to your point, Mitchell, and we're coming in with electric or solar or whatever, and we're trying to say, "You're still needed. You're just needed in a different way, with a different field and that's going to take some different learning. And yes, some of those skills that you've adapted for years and years and years and learned and honed are not needed anymore. But that doesn't mean that you're not needed anymore." And I think that's a big... We're losing huge populations of people in these towns because of the lack of comfort or understanding around transition. Is that right, Mitchell?

Mitchell Stevens (16:17):

One of the ambitions of the Futures Project is to develop a language that gets us beyond skills. I think it's a very limiting way of thinking about human capital development because it presumes that a job is a composite of discrete things that I know or don't know how to do. But that's just a very small part of work. Work is about relationships and embodiment and identity, right. And so asking a truck driver to become a childcare worker is only very minimally about giving that person new skills. It's about asking them to essentially reconfigure their entire sense of self for a different kind of occupation. Now, school can be a very good mechanism for managing transitions. That's why historically people, quote "Go back to school," unquote, to make career transitions. So I think in a sense, we have the right scaffolding, it's education, but we don't think of it as flexibly as I think we might. And so we think about education and transitions as sort of simultaneous ventures and then design educational opportunities to enable more transitions at more phases in the life course. You know, then I think we're in very promising innovation terrain.

Dan Schwartz (17:33):

I want a concrete example. And of course it involves me 'cause all things do.

Denise Pope (17:39):

All things, all things Dan.

Dan Schwartz (17:39):

So I've just been fired as dean and I'm pissed off and I've had it with the academy.

Denise Pope (17:47):

What did you do to get fired? No, just kidding.

Dan Schwartz (17:50):

I interviewed Mitchell and that was enough.

Denise Pope (17:54):

That was it. Pull the cord now.

Dan Schwartz (17:58):

Pull the plug. No, I left for whatever reason, emeritus, I got pushed out because of time. And there's two scenarios. One is I know what kind of job I want next and I go try and find the thing that can put me in the position to be capable in that setting. And the other one is I don't really know what I want to do next and I need to explore and find out what's appropriate for me at this stage of my life. So let's take the first one. In your vision, is there like a... is the industry going to provide the training if I decide to become a programmer? Or is there going to be a grown-up community college that does this? What does the ecosystem need to change to provide those educational opportunities past college?

Mitchell Stevens (18:45):

Yeah, that's great, Dan. And I would say in line with the famous dictum that the future is here, it's just not evenly distributed. At the high end, shall we say, those with the means to do such things, there are options like ��'s Distinguished Career Institute, which is specifically for the retired dean of the Graduate School of Education who isn't sure what he wants to do next. So how about a year at a knock-your-socks-off university where you can take any classes you want and build relationships with people you never would have met before? That's a transition that's spectacular. It's just that it's really expensive.

Dan Schwartz (19:22):

That is good. And my point is to get away from the university, I've had enough of it. But it is a great idea.

Denise Pope (19:28):

He's done. He's so done, Mitchell.

Dan Schwartz (19:30):

I got fired, remember? I got fired because I interviewed you.

Denise Pope (19:33):

He's bitter and angry.

Dan Schwartz (19:34):

So I'm done. Having these specialized curated programs are exciting, but like you said, there's a price tag.

Mitchell Stevens (19:43):

Another piece of our conversation this year is in the United States, the social contract for education and learning ends with a high school diploma. The only thing you are owed by right as a resident of this country is a high school diploma or equivalent. After that, you might call it the United States of You're on Your Own or the United States of Good Luck with That. Is that an adequate social contract? And if the answer to that question is no, if we decide as a country that our people deserve more education and training than that, then we have some very large questions.

(20:19):

How much more are they owed? And who's going to pay for that? Is that a government responsibility? Is it a philanthropic responsibility? Is it an employer responsibility? And furthermore, employers may need older workers, much will likely need older workers much more than they currently do because of steady declines in fertility. So the talent of the future is very likely going to be talent that is living in the third and fourth quarters of its life. Who's responsible for those transitions? And as a country, we've barely begun to ask those questions.

Denise Pope (20:53):

So super interesting, Mitchell. So just to push back a little bit, right now in many, many, many states, community college is free. You actually don't even need a high school degree to go ahead- You can be 18 years old, you walk in. So you can get free education. The sticking point is they're not also paying you a salary. So unless you are working, and oftentimes have a family to take care of, and going to school, it turns into a nearly impossible roller coaster of a ride. So it sounds good that community college is free, but we're forgetting about the other parts of people's lives that they're trying to then balance at this really precarious time.

Dan Schwartz (21:33):

Oh my God, I've got to start going to school now.

Denise Pope (21:36):

I know. This is what I'm saying. Then we have this other model, the Walmart and the Starbucks or whatever, I might not be getting these right, who will actually pay to have you go to school. If you're a worker, they will pay to have you go to school. So I like that model. I know there's handcuffs built in, like you've got to come back. But I like that model of we understand that just going to community college and trying to work and trying to have a family is really hard, so we're going to try and make it a little bit easier. Am I reading this right, Mitchell? Is this the way of the future?

Mitchell Stevens (22:08):

Again, those conversations are just beginning, but the questions are quite profound. So yes, Starbucks and Chipotle, for example, both offer pretty substantial post-secondary education benefits to their employers. Is that a gift or is that a responsibility? If it's a responsibility, then who ultimately pays for that? And should Starbucks and Chipotle receive federal government subsidy for doing that? Those are the kinds of questions about responsibility that we're, again, sort of just beginning to address. And your other point is really important too. I mean, even if education and training is free in dollar terms, adults almost always inherit some sort of caregiving responsibility and so they experience investment in themselves as a trade-off from care work. So that's another important avenue. If we're going to expect and enable people to make education and learning transitions over their lives, you know, how are we going to accommodate the care costs that that will entail?

Dan Schwartz (23:14):

So Mitchell, I know you're a sociologist, but I'm going to ask a psychological question.

Denise Pope (23:18):

Uh-oh

Dan Schwartz (23:19):

Well, you've been in this space, so you may have heard. Is there some reason to think that the way I teach a 70-year-old should be different than how I teach, say, a 21-year-old? Or the same, nothing changes and they'll sit in front of lectures and hate them just like 22-year olds?

Denise Pope (23:38):

That's not how you're supposed to do 22-year olds either. Thank you very much, Dan Schwartz, Dean of the School of Education at ��.

Dan Schwartz (23:44):

Thank you, Denise. Now, do we know if there's differences?

Mitchell Stevens (23:48):

I'm neither a psychologist nor a learning scientist, but I will say I've learned enough from my colleagues to know that motivation is a huge component of effective learning. And we currently organize education and training in such a way that there's no reason for us to expect that the people in our classrooms are motivated. I think we want to imagine a future world in which not only the desire to learn, but the imperative to learn and the maturity to take advantage of a learning responsibility creates conditions for very different motivational contexts than what we currently see in many of our young people.

Dan Schwartz (24:27):

So I know how to solve that with older people.

Mitchell Stevens (24:30):

I'm listening.

Dan Schwartz (24:31):

Give them frequent flyer points for doing well on tests.

Denise Pope (24:36):

So they can go on the cruise if they do that-

Mitchell Stevens (24:39):

I know a few 17-year olds for whom that would work too.

Denise Pope (24:41):

I was just going to say that it comes right back to the zero to five. Hear me out. You want people to be curious. You want to keep the light on in their eyes. You don't have to teach a four or five-year-old to be curious and to love learning. They explore. They learn. They're constantly doing. They'll play with the wrapper of the present more than the present. But somewhere we are losing that light of curiosity and that engagement, as Mitchell was saying, that intrinsic motivation, and I think we've got to double down. That would be my two cents.

Mitchell Stevens (25:15):

What I very much enjoy about this project is I hear a lot of doom and gloom in the future of work discourse. What are we going to do with the truck drivers? Is there going to be enough jobs for everybody? Will human beings be able to keep up with technology? All of those questions are important, but they're very frowny-faced questions, right. Longevity is a smiley-faced question. How are we going to make this work? How are we going to take advantage of this extraordinary gift that our ancestors have given us? How can we take the lessons that we've already learned about the benefits of education and learning to enable transitions and self-discovery and build new forms of educational provision for people to enjoy over the course of their lives? It's a much more optimistic framing of our complicated future than a lot of others on offer.

Denise Pope (26:05):

I love the happy-faced questions better than the frowny-faced questions. If you could give a parent or an educator one piece of advice, Mitchell, based on what you know and the longevity of education, what would that be?

Mitchell Stevens (26:17):

Don't presume that the goal of good parenting is to get your kid into a fancy school and graduated by the age of 22. That is not the goal of a well-educated life. The goal of a well-educated life is to create a desire for learning, a flexibility and a recognition that different kinds of opportunities make sense for different people at different stages in their lives. I think if we could get that, the mania that's associated with getting our children into a small number of schools at a very specific stage in their life course, if we could put brackets around that and get people to think more broadly and flexibly about what a well-educated life looks like, I think we'll make a great deal of progress.

Denise Pope (27:07):

Well said. Well said, Mitchell. Thank you so much. Thank you for joining us. Really fascinating conversation. Thank you all for joining this episode of School's In. Be Sure to subscribe to the show on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you tune in. I'm Denise Pope.

Dan Schwartz (27:23):

I'm Dan Schwartz.

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Faculty and Research

Faculty mentioned in this article: Mitchell L. Stevens

New �� initiative aims to close a culture gap in measuring kids’ foundational skills

Carrie Spector — Fri, 27 Sep 2024 20:27:20 +0000

New �� initiative aims to close a culture gap in measuring kids’ foundational skills

Carrie Spector Fri, 09/27/2024 - 13:27

A child in Bangladesh is given tasks to assess executive function skills, which strongly predict the ability to thrive in school and beyond. (Photo: Ishita Ahmed)

Child Development | Early Childhood | International Education

A global network led by �� education professor Jelena Obradović works to help promote executive function skills in children around the world.

September 30, 2024

By Carrie Spector

Certain skills are essential for many demands of everyday life, helping us to focus, control impulses, manipulate information in our minds, and shift from one task to another. These skills, known as executive functions (EFs), begin developing in early childhood and are linked to behaviors that serve well into adulthood, from learning to relationship-building.

These skills are considered universal across cultures. But what about the way they’re measured?

Tests used to track children’s development of these skills are often based on assumptions that don’t match cultural norms, producing inaccurate information and making it harder to support kids properly, researchers say. Young people around the world may be identified as having poor EF skills just because they were not familiar with certain parts of the testing protocol.

GSE Professor Jelena Obradović spoke about the importance of EFs at a conference at UNESCO headquarters in Paris on Sept. 26. (Photo: Arthur de Tassigny)

“EFs strongly predict how kids thrive in school, and there are many ways to intervene and help them improve these skills,” said Jelena Obradović, a professor at �� Graduate School of Education (GSE) and a faculty affiliate of the �� Accelerator for Learning. “But to understand where help is needed, we need to know that we’re measuring the right thing. We need assessments that align with their cultural context and everyday experiences.”

Obradović, a developmental psychologist and director of the �� Project on Adaptation and Resilience in Kids (SPARK), recently set out to fill that need. A longtime researcher studying EFs in children around the world, she reached out to fellow experts in the field and established the Global Executive Function Initiative (GEFI) at ��, a network of scholars working to promote EF development and assessment across cultures.

On Sept. 26, at an international conference on brain sciences, early childhood care, and education held at UNESCO headquarters in Paris, Obradović presented on a panel about the importance of EFs and introduced new guidelines developed by GEFI for adapting assessments to better capture EF skills in children ages 3-12 around the globe.

“These are foundational skills that support any kind of goal-directed behaviors, and they’re going to be important for lifelong learning,” said Obradović. “If we can measure them well, we can promote and improve them.”

Skills for lifelong learning

Executive functioning generally involves three core skills: inhibitory control, working memory, and cognitive flexibility. Inhibitory control includes not only resisting an impulse or habit, but also being able to suppress distractions and focus on a task. Working memory refers to the ability to keep information in mind and use it in various circumstances, such as following instructions. Cognitive flexibility involves the ability to shift attention between various tasks or demands, especially in response to feedback or changes in the environment.

To assess a child’s EF skills, there are two basic approaches: observing children’s actions in everyday settings, where teachers and parents report on behaviors linked to the skills; and direct testing, where children are given a battery of tasks designed to measure different components of EF skills. Both approaches have advantages, Obradović said, but they can also both be tainted by cultural biases.

For starters, measures that work in one culture might not apply to another. A classic way to test children’s ability to control impulses is the marshmallow test, where children are left alone in a room with a marshmallow for a period of time and told they’ll be rewarded if they wait to eat the snack. Researchers are aiming to measure a universal skill – but the way children respond to this specific challenge depends on their culture.

“If you come from a place where waiting for a snack is culturally socialized, where it’s the default, there’s no impulse to inhibit,” Obradović said.

In a 2022 study to measure children’s ability to delay gratification, led by GEFI network member Yuko Munakata, U.S. and Japanese children were asked to wait before eating and before opening a gift. The Japanese children waited three times longer for food than for gifts, while U.S. children waited nearly four times longer for gifts than for food.

Cultural conventions account for the discrepancy, Obradović said. In Japan, children are socialized to wait to eat until everyone is served, a habit less prevalent in U.S. children’s daily life. And in the United States, gift-giving often takes place on special occasions like birthdays and holidays, so kids are accustomed to waiting to receive them – whereas in Japan, children receive gifts regularly throughout the year, with no tradition of waiting.

A child in Côte d'Ivoire is given a battery of tasks designed to measure different components of EF skills. (Photo: Michael Sulik)

Biases embedded in testing

Direct testing through tasks, often administered on a computer or tablet, is generally considered a reliable way to measure children’s EF skills, Obradović said. But many assessments have been developed in high-income, western countries like the United States, with cultural biases embedded in the test itself or how it’s administered.

A child’s ability to maintain eye contact when given instructions for a task might indicate their ability to focus, but in some cultures, children may not be socialized to make direct eye contact with authority figures. And “gamifying” tasks is a popular way to engage children and standardize tasks, but it can lead to distorted results.

“Gamelike tasks are a lot more relevant for kids who are schooled or for kids who are from a western context, because they engage in these kinds of one-on-one, game-like educational activities all the time,” Obradović said.

Even interacting one-on-one with an assessor might be an unfamiliar experience in some settings. Young children in low- and middle-income countries especially tend to be inhibited in testing situations and hesitant to interact with strangers, and this reluctance could affect the measurement of their EF skills.

EF tasks sometimes use talking puppets to motivate kids to participate, because U.S. children have been socialized to see puppets as approachable and fun. But doing research in rural Pakistan, Obradović found that preschoolers refused to take instructions from a puppet because the scenario was so unfamiliar.

“These tasks work really well in many places,” Obradović said. “But we’re encouraging researchers to use local expertise and pilot testing to see what will work in their setting. We’re helping them think through the questions to ask and giving them ideas about how to adapt the tests.”

An assessor works with a child in Bangladesh. New guidelines developed by the Global Executive Function Initiative at �� provide recommendations to better capture EF skills in children ages 3-12 around the globe. (Photo: Ishita Ahmed)

Scaling up guidance

The guidelines developed by Obradović and her GEFI colleagues grew, in part, from seeing a need to scale up and standardize the ad hoc guidance she’s extended over the years.

Obradović has worked for more than a decade in the Global South, adapting standard EF tasks to the culture of the populations she studies. “Periodically I’ll get emails from researchers asking, ‘Can you send me your tasks?’ or ‘How would you modify this?’ ” Obradović said. “I’m glad to share with anyone, and I’ve always kept everything open-source. But at the end of the day, a lot of these decisions come down to a judgment call, and I wanted to widen the circle of people making those calls, to pool our knowledge and experience.”

In addition to recommendations for making standard EF tasks culturally meaningful, the new guidelines from GEFI include considerations for working with children of different ages and in various spaces, strategies for training assessors, and procedures for processing and analyzing the data. More standardization and transparency in how data is processed will also advance scientific understanding. “We also offer cautionary notes for how not to misinterpret findings,” says Obradović.

Obradović and her colleagues also recently launched a major survey of educators, parents, and researchers around the world, seeking out examples of everyday experiences linked to EF skills – common activities that require children to do things like wait their turn, pay attention, remember lengthy instructions, or work on a project with others. In the United States, for instance, a typical children’s household task that requires focus and persistence could be folding laundry or putting away groceries; in Bangladesh, tying up bundles of rice paddy as part of farm work might be more familiar, or in Malawi, walking to collect water.

GEFI has begun piloting its tools in more than a dozen countries in the Global South, and GSE doctoral students are among the researchers involved in developing and evaluating the resources, including Kavindya Thennakoon working in Sri Lanka, Mateus Mazzaferro in Brazil, and Ishita Ahmed in Bangladesh.

“In rural Bangladesh, children are constantly learning from their parents and using EF skills while they work on the farm or at a local business,” said Ahmed, whose doctoral research is focused on developing culturally relevant measures of learning, particularly in low- and middle-income countries. “Measuring these skills is important, to shed light on how policy is effective. But I’m not going in with assumptions about what the measure should look like. Measures should represent local experiences.”

By advancing research into ways to measure these skills in different cultural settings, Obradović hopes that GEFI’s work will help identify programs and policies to support EF development worldwide.

“We need rigorous, open-source, scalable assessments to understand all children’s learning capacities and needs – not just those in Western, high-income countries,” she said. “There’s much more work in this space to be done.”

The Global Executive Function Initiative at �� has been supported by funding from the Jacobs Foundation.

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Faculty mentioned in this article: Jelena Obradović

��-led DREME network celebrates a decade of progress in early math

Carrie Spector — Sun, 19 May 2024 20:55:42 +0000

��-led DREME network celebrates a decade of progress in early math

Carrie Spector Sun, 05/19/2024 - 13:55

Deborah Stipek (right), director of DREME, leads a panel on building early math into state policies at a conference celebrating progress in the field of early math education. (Photo: Marc Franklin)

Early Childhood | Events | Teaching

A national network led by GSE Professor Emeritus Deborah Stipek has advanced the field of early childhood math with innovative tools and research.

May 23, 2024

By Carrie Spector

Ten years ago, Deborah Stipek set out to assemble a team of scholars who shared her interest in research into how young children, especially preschoolers, develop mathematical skills. As it turned out, there weren’t many.

“So we had to create some,” said Stipek, a professor emeritus and former dean of �� Graduate School of Education (GSE), who was working with the Heising-Simons Foundation to build a national network of researchers focused on early math learning.

“We turned people who focused on literacy into ‘math people,’ ” she said. “[And] we convinced people who studied teaching and learning in elementary school that they needed to stretch down to littler kids.”

Their efforts worked — and soon the Development and Research in Early Mathematics Education (DREME) Network was born, with members and affiliates from 12 universities around the country. Over the past decade, led by Stipek, the network’s scholars have advanced the field with basic and applied research on early math development and innovative tools to promote math skills in young children.

“Early math is now on the map,” said Liz Simons, chair of the board of the Heising-Simons Foundation, which has supported DREME since its launch in 2014. “We’ve seen a huge push to develop curricula that is rigorous but developmentally appropriate and culturally responsive…. We’ve seen math show up in classrooms and playgrounds and books, in cultural settings, in communities. It’s just really exploded.”

On May 3, DREME celebrated the progress in the field at a conference hosted in collaboration with the �� Center on Early Childhood (SCEC), one of six initiatives of the �� Accelerator for Learning. The event also marked a transition in the life of the DREME network, which is scaling back the volume of research it initiates.

The free conference, held at the Li Ka Shing Learning and Knowledge Center on the �� campus, drew educators, researchers, policymakers, community advocates, and others working in early childhood from around the United States and beyond.

From playful strategies to state policy

The day featured panels on a variety of issues in policy and practice, including helping families engage young children in playful math activities, broadening and deepening the ways in which math is introduced in the classroom, and supporting the professionals who prepare early childhood educators.

One panel focused on ways for school districts to address the disconnect between preschool and the early elementary grades, bridging the gap between what have historically been two separate systems. Creating continuity in learning requires more than just adding a preK space to an elementary school campus, said Cynthia Coburn, PhD ’01, a professor at the School of Education and Social Policy at Northwestern University, who chaired the panel. “It’s also a task of aligning these different systems so they’re not competing against one another – that they’re mutually reinforcing and supporting teachers in teaching kids as they move across the grades.”

The final session of the day, led by Stipek, explored ways to build early math into state policies, given their influence in determining student learning standards, teacher credential requirements, how resources are allocated to districts, and other issues that affect how children learn. Panelists discussed the development of California’s new pK-3 teaching credential, the state’s recent rollout of universal transitional kindergarten, and ways to ensure accountability and effectiveness once state policies are implemented.

Ted Lempert, a former California State Assemblymember and current president of Children Now, emphasized the importance of advocacy from stakeholders at all levels. “[When you] leave this conference, you all can make a huge difference,” he told attendees. “It’s not just who you elect…. That one email you send to your legislator saying ‘Prioritize early math’ can make a lot more difference than you think.”

Finding energy and motivation

The conference also featured exhibits on research and tools supported by DREME, such as the DREME Math Observer, a mobile app to help coach teachers in early math; play-based math activities to support math and executive function skills; and storybook guides to help parents and caregivers talk about math with their children while reading together.

Attendees spoke of the value of DREME’s research and tools in their own work, many having traveled some distance to attend the one-day event.

Yusuf Koç, an associate professor of mathematics education at Kocaeli University in Turkey, said he regularly looks to DREME for resources and welcomed the opportunity to gather with fellow scholars and practitioners — even thousands of miles from home. “I design and implement [professional development] programs for practicing and preservice teachers, and early math is my passion,” he said. “I met new people, and found energy and motivation here,” he said.

Phyllis Nakama-Kawamoto and Stacie Kaichi-Imamura, colleagues from the Office of Curriculum and Instructional Design at the Hawaii Department of Education, have also long sought out DREME’s resources online and were eager to learn about new research at the conference.

Kaichi-Imamura, who also serves on the board of directors for the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM), was particularly drawn to the event as the NCTM develops a position statement on early childhood. “Everything that’s been shared here solidifies our thinking about how children should be engaging in mathematics,” she said.

At the close of the event, Stipek reiterated the need to work at all of the levels the conference addressed, from families and classrooms to school districts and state government. “We can’t just work at one, because one level can undermine — or support — whatever we’re doing at another level,” she said.

While she pointed to great progress in building attention and access to early math over the past decade, improving the quality of these math experiences remains a steep challenge, she said. “We had a lot of conversations today about how we might get there — working with teachers, working with parents, developing state policies, district systems and reforms,” she said. “We have some work to do to put what we learned today into action.”

Recordings of each session from the conference are available on the DREME website.

When Deborah Stipek set out 10 years ago to build a network of scholars focused on early math education, she found there weren't many. “So we had to create some,” she told attendees at a conference celebrating progress in the field.

Liz Simons (center), chair of the board of the Heising-Simons Foundation, and Philip Fisher, GSE professor and director of the �� Center on Early Childhood, look on as panelists discuss challenges in early childhood math education. (Photo: Marc Franklin)

Kendra Davey of Pima County Public Library in Tucson, Ariz., discusses strategies for bringing early math concepts into library storytime. (Photo: Marc Franklin)

From left: University of Denver professor Douglas Clements; Linda Platas of San Francisco State University; and Susan Levine, professor at the University of Chicago, discuss ways to deepen and broaden math teaching in the classroom. (Photo: Marc Franklin)

Dale Farran, professor emerita at Vanderbilt University, discussed the DREME Math Observer, an app to support math instruction in the early grades. Also pictured: Diana Zaragoza (left), director of the UC Davis Mathematics Project, and Angela Turrou, senior researcher at the UCLA Department of Education. (Photo: Marc Franklin)

From left: Steve Kellner of California Education Partners; Abigail Stein, postdoctoral researcher at Carnegie Mellon University; Kristin Whyte, a visiting assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison; and Cynthia Coburn, a professor at Northwestern University. (Photo: Marc Franklin)

From left: Ted Lempert, president of Children Now; Stephen Propheter of the California Department of Education; and Mary Sandy, executive director of the California Commission on Teacher Credentialing. (Photo: Marc Franklin)

Bethany Elston, a researcher at Northwestern University, shares her team's exhibit on how districts can move toward greater preK-3 alignment and continuity. (Photo: Marc Franklin)

Allison Monday of the Wisconsin Center for Education Research shares work on "math moments," ways to incorporate math in any setting throughout the day. (Photo: Marc Franklin)

DREME Network members and affiliates who appeared on panels or hosted exhibits gathered after the event on the �� campus. (Photo: Marc Franklin)

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Faculty mentioned in this article: Deborah Stipek , Philip Fisher

Gift advances the work of the �� Center on Early Childhood

Carrie Spector — Thu, 07 Dec 2023 19:48:30 +0000

Gift advances the work of the �� Center on Early Childhood

Carrie Spector Thu, 12/07/2023 - 11:48

Professor Philip Fisher was recruited to �� to serve as founding director of the �� Center on Early Childhood. (Photo: Ryan Zhang)

Announcements | Awards | Early Childhood

Support from the Saul Zaentz Charitable Foundation will help the �� Center on Early Childhood chart a better future for young children.

December 7, 2023

By Vincent Ingram

A generous gift to the �� Center on Early Childhood will advance the center’s work in early childhood and accelerate the exchange of expertise among researchers, policymakers, and front-line practitioners.

The Saul Zaentz Charitable Foundation is providing funding to expand a valuable large-scale data collection tool called the RAPID Survey, which tracks the experiences of young children, their families, and caregivers and is used by practitioners, government systems, and other stakeholders to address critical challenges for young children and the adults in their lives.

The foundation is also providing core support for the center and establishing two fellowship programs at �� aimed at preparing future leaders in early childhood learning: the Zaentz Fellows and the Zaentz Community Fellows.

“Advancing discoveries that shed new light on early childhood requires a holistic, multidisciplinary approach,” said �� President Richard Saller. “This gift will help �� bring knowledge to bear from across fields such as education, medicine, and psychology. We are thankful to the Saul Zaentz Charitable Foundation for working with us toward our shared goal of better understanding this critical period of human development.”

“Early childhood experiences set the foundation for all future educational outcomes,” said Daniel Schwartz, the I. James Quillen Dean of the Graduate School of Education (GSE) and Halper Family Director of the �� Accelerator for Learning. “The Saul Zaentz Charitable Foundation’s generous support will further enable the �� Center on Early Childhood to advance research and innovation in the field, while simultaneously increasing its ability to share the state of the art with stakeholders and providers. Additionally, the new fellowships will provide resources to �� students pursuing careers in early childhood. It is a catalytic gift for the center and for the field of early childhood education.”

The Saul Zaentz Charitable Foundation is named for the late Saul Zaentz, a successful record company executive and independent film producer whose films earned multiple Best Picture Academy Awards. The foundation’s philanthropic activities focus on educational advancement and include programs to advance early childhood education and improve K-12 graduation rates.

“��’s entry into the early learning space in America is a welcome and important addition to the growing recognition that as a nation, we must all come together and fully support our youngest learners and their families if we are to achieve our goal of building a society in which everyone has an opportunity to prosper. Saul Zaentz Charitable Foundation is thrilled to collaborate with �� University on this important work,” said Elliot Steinberg, president of the foundation.

The �� Center on Early Childhood launched in November 2022 following a multi-year effort to develop a world-class hub on early childhood at the GSE. This effort was led by Schwartz, who is also the Nomellini & Olivier Professor of Educational Technology. As a part of the �� Accelerator for Learning, the �� Center on Early Childhood benefits from the GSE’s cutting-edge expertise in learning as well as ��’s globally recognized strength in innovation and collaboration across disciplines. �� recruited Philip Fisher, the Excellence in Learning Professor of Education, to become the founding director of the center prior to its launch.

“What happens in early childhood has lifelong effects on learning and behavior,” said Fisher. “The Saul Zaentz Charitable Foundation’s support will allow SCEC to expand its focus on equity, community leadership, and partnership with front-line practitioners and families leading change in their communities. It will allow us to bring the very best minds together in service to caregivers and the needs of young children everywhere.”

Joan Lombardi, adjunct professor and co-chair of the SCEC Leadership Council, added, “Families with young children and those who care for them are facing uncertainty and increasing challenges. They both need our ongoing support. Communities all across the country are stepping up to create more responsive early childhood systems, and innovation and new leadership are emerging around the world.”

The RAPID Survey Project

The foundation’s gift will allow the �� Center on Early Childhood to continue elevating the value of the RAPID Survey Project to the field of early childhood, focusing on the lived experiences of families and childcare providers.

The RAPID Survey Project launched nationally in April 2020 to gather information about the well-being of young children and their caregivers during the COVID-19 pandemic. With its ability to capture and widely share monthly snapshots of families’ experiences, RAPID represents a major shift in early childhood research, which has too often been difficult to understand and access. The project has generated invaluable data and insights for policymakers, nonprofits, and researchers during the pandemic and become a key resource for addressing achievement and resource gaps in the pandemic’s wake. To date, more than 19,000 families from all 50 states have shared their experiences through RAPID.

The �� Center on Early Childhood sees even greater potential for the platform. Increasingly, RAPID is being sought by community and state leaders who are invested in understanding the real-time experiences of families of young children and the early childhood workforce to develop and improve responsive early childhood systems of care.

Preparing a new generation of early childhood leaders

The foundation’s gift will also establish two complementary fellowship programs aimed at preparing future leaders in early childhood.

The Zaentz Fellows Program will support GSE master’s students who are preparing for careers in early childhood, initially in the areas of policy and organizational leadership, with fellows selected from incoming classes of graduate students beginning in 2025. The second program, the Zaentz Community Fellows, will recruit multi-disciplinary, early childhood practitioners from community-based organizations, media, government, philanthropy, and the early childhood education sector and support their professional development.

Decades of sparse investment have created significant challenges in the early childhood field, including a lack of career ladders in the policy and nonprofit sectors; difficulty filling critical leadership positions at the local, state, and national levels; and a dearth of high-quality training for practitioners. Both the community and graduate fellowship programs will contribute to growing a diverse, experienced pool of talent for the early childhood sector.

Fellows from the two programs will have opportunities to collaborate with each other and faculty members, deepening their learning experiences and accelerating the exchange of ideas between academia and the broader early childhood learning community already underway at the center.

“This philanthropic support will allow the �� Center on Early Childhood to expand the urgent work of incorporating community voices into research and policymaking while growing a network of talented, diverse early childhood professionals,” said Miriam Calderon, chief policy officer of Zero to Three and member of the �� Center on Early Childhood’s Leadership Council. “These are key ingredients for strengthening the alliances between communities, researchers, and policymakers that are crucial for improving early childhood outcomes.”

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Faculty mentioned in this article: Philip Fisher , Dan Schwartz

New center at �� addresses the forces shaping early childhood

Carrie Spector — Thu, 27 Oct 2022 19:27:16 +0000

New center at �� addresses the forces shaping early childhood

Carrie Spector Thu, 10/27/2022 - 12:27

The �� Center on Early Childhood is “about creating place-based, science-informed partnerships,” says director Philip Fisher. (Photo: Rawpixel / Shutterstock)

Early Childhood | Events

A November 3 event marks the launch of the �� Center on Early Childhood, led by GSE Professor Philip Fisher.

October 28, 2022

By Carrie Spector

The science of early childhood is, itself, relatively young – and growing fast. Recent advances in neuroscience are providing evidence of how experiences shape the foundation of learning, and just how rapidly young brains develop: Scientists now estimate that children, in their first few years of life, form more than 1 million new neural connections per second.

But there’s still a lot we don’t know about how children learn and develop during their formative early years – including the long-term impact of their experiences during that time, and the kind of interventions that can help them thrive.

Enter the �� Center on Early Childhood, a new interdisciplinary hub advancing research and strategies to support young children’s learning and development. Led by Philip Fisher, a professor at �� Graduate School of Education (GSE), the new center brings education together with neuroscience, pediatrics, law and policy, developmental psychology, business, and other fields to address the issues that intersect in early childhood, from the prenatal stage until age 8.

The �� Center on Early Childhood was established this year as part of a new initiative at the GSE focused on early childhood learning. It is also part of the �� Accelerator for Learning, a university-wide initiative to develop more equitable and scalable learning solutions.

As the center’s founding director, Fisher brings a career-long commitment to mitigating the effects of prenatal and early life stress on children’s physical and emotional health. Leveraging research on early brain development, he has developed and evaluated family and preschool interventions with a particular focus on socially and economically marginalized communities, translating science about healthy development under conditions of adversity for use in social policy and programs.

On November 3, the �� Center on Early Childhood will mark its official launch with a daylong gathering of leaders in the field to share new ideas and research. The event will be livestreamed, and anyone can register to attend the event virtually.

Here, Fisher talks about why early childhood research is so critical now, how the unpredictability of our world can influence children’s development, and the kind of interventions that can help address early harm.

Philip Fisher, GSE professor and director of the �� Center on Early Childhood

Why are the first few years so important to study, separate from childhood in general?

Starting in early childhood, one developmental period builds on another, and domains of development are highly integrated. So what happens in those early years has lifelong effects on learning and behavior.

Young brains develop rapidly during the first eight years of life. Historically, we’ve made our best efforts to put resources into what we understood facilitates children’s ability to learn – to read, to do math, to become productive members of society. Now we can be much more precise about how the brain develops, and we’re beginning to really understand how learning occurs.

But a lot of research on child development has focused on specific internal processes – not an integrated understanding of the whole child in context, which often includes trauma, poverty, and racism. We need a better understanding of how these contexts influence the course of development.

What do we know now about the impact of these experiences?

For one thing, we know that structural inequalities based on factors like income and race are at the root of the disparities we see in health and learning. These disparities emerge very early in life and increase over the course of development, and they’ve been widening in the United States in recent years.

Obviously we’re also coming out of a time when we’ve had tremendous disruptions to children’s learning. It’s been a time of massive unpredictability and uncertainty. There’s a great deal of neuroscience and developmental psychology showing that chronic unpredictability in the early years fundamentally alters human development.

The world continues to face conditions of uncertainty – not just the pandemic, but the climate, social upheaval, geopolitical conflict. This is the new normal that we’re all facing. We need to address the reality that this is affecting children and families.

How can research address these circumstances?

Here’s one example from my own work: For many years, my colleagues and I have studied brain activity in children coming from high-adversity environments, particularly the foster care system. One thing we’ve found is that, when these children make mistakes while they’re completing a task and we give them feedback about those mistakes, we see a very limited neural response. Typically there’s a burst of brain activity, but with these kids, it’s as if the information just isn’t getting through.

That’s probably a very healthy and adaptive response to the unpredictable environments in which they’ve been raised, where it doesn’t make a lot of sense to pay attention to the information that’s coming in. But it creates tremendous challenges when these kids enter the formal school system and they struggle, not only academically but also in terms of social-emotional learning. Understanding that this behavior might be tied to a diminished neural response has allowed us to specifically design programs that target those exact mechanisms.

What will it take to advance interventions like these and see them more widely adopted?

One thing we need is greater alliances among communities, researchers, and policymakers. It’s not enough for science just to document how things work – that knowledge needs to be deployed, and we need to think about strategies that are oriented from the get-go to both impact and scale. That sounds straightforward, but it’s not necessarily common sense. It requires having people from a lot of different disciplines at the table.

We hear a lot about incorporating community voices into research and policymaking, but unfortunately many of those efforts end up seeming rather anemic and performative. We need to build relationships in a way that’s meaningful – fully partnering with parents and caregivers, schools, pediatric clinics, advocacy groups, and others responsible for delivering opportunities to children – to identify, design, evaluate, and accelerate new tools and strategies.

That’s key to how the center will operate. First and foremost, it’s about creating place-based, science-informed partnerships. Then we have all of the active ingredients we need to build something new and transformative.

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Faculty mentioned in this article: Philip Fisher

Supporting kids from cradle to career in Central Harlem

Carrie Spector — Fri, 24 Jun 2022 21:34:58 +0000

Supporting kids from cradle to career in Central Harlem

Carrie Spector Fri, 06/24/2022 - 14:34

Image: GuVi Design / Shutterstock

Early Childhood | Parenting | Poverty and Inequality

Child advocate and researcher Geoffrey Canada talks about a model program he founded to help break the cycle of intergenerational poverty.

June 24, 2022

In the 1990s, Geoffrey Canada set out to improve one disinvested block of a Harlem neighborhood as part of a mission to help children and families get out of poverty. The initiative he founded, the Harlem Children’s Zone (HCZ), has been so successful that it’s now expanded to a 97-block zone of interconnected neighborhood services, and serves as a model for similar programs in other cities.

In this episode of School’s In, Canada, named one of TIME magazine’s Most Influential People in 2011, joins �� Graduate School of Education Dean Dan Schwartz and Senior Lecturer Denise Pope to discuss how wraparound services, including education, wellness, playgroups, and home support, have ensured the continued success of the HCZ and the families it serves.

Getting parents on board is the first step, says Canada. He credits his own mother and her purchase of an encyclopedia set for starting him on his path. “That kind of parental intervention absolutely changed our lives,” he says. “We're sitting in this urban slum; the plaster is falling from the ceilings, nothing is working, and we're reading about Afghanistan.”

To develop one of HCZ’s signature parent-support programs, Baby College, Canada partnered with the famed pediatrician T. Berry Brazelton, operating under the principle that parents need more than pamphlets during the crucial first years. Canada was struck that while new research on early childhood development was generating high-profile media coverage around the world, the science had not reached Harlem.

His team posted flyers encouraging parents to attend the first meetings of Baby College, but turnout was slim – until they came up with the idea of giving away free diapers at the sessions. Then, the line went around the block.

Canada recalls his staff members griping that the content of the program wasn’t enough to get parents to attend. “Get over it,” he said. “If they don't show up, we can't help them. Let's just get them there and save your moralizing for another time. Our job is to make sure these parents know what they need to do to protect their children.”

And HCZ provides comprehensive services and education that go far beyond babyhood – from cradle to career, Canada says. “The way you're going to ensure those kids have even a modicum of a chance to be successful is you’ve got to stay with them throughout their whole childhood.”

You can listen to School's In on SiriusXM, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher and Soundcloud.

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Early childhood expert Geoffrey Canada to deliver annual lecture at ��

Carrie Spector — Mon, 16 May 2022 20:57:30 +0000

Early childhood expert Geoffrey Canada to deliver annual lecture at ��

Carrie Spector Mon, 05/16/2022 - 13:57

Geoffrey Canada, founder of the Harlem Children’s Zone, will deliver the keynote address at �� Graduate School of Education’s 2022 Cubberley Lecture on May 24.

Early Childhood | Events | Race and Equity

The visionary advocate and founder of a groundbreaking educational initiative in Harlem will give the keynote at the May 24 event.

May 16, 2022

Acclaimed children’s advocate Geoffrey Canada, founder of a legendary initiative to break the cycle of intergenerational poverty in Harlem, New York, will deliver the keynote address at �� Graduate School of Education’s (GSE) 2022 Cubberley Lecture on May 24.

This year’s lecture will center on the importance of early childhood learning, the focus of a new research center at the GSE and a key initiative of the �� Transforming Learning Accelerator, which seeks to create new solutions for the greatest challenges facing learners.

Canada is the founder and president of the Harlem Children’s Zone (HCZ), a nonprofit the New York Times Magazine called “one of the most ambitious social experiments of our time.” Providing education and support services for thousands of families in Central Harlem, the HCZ’s programming includes K-12 charter schools, preschool and afterschool programs, college and career preparation, and “Baby College,” an eight-week workshop for parents and caregivers of children ages 0-3. The HCZ was the inspiration for the Obama administration’s Promise Neighborhoods initiative, which replicated its community-based model nationwide.

Canada was named one of TIME magazine’s Most Influential People in 2011 and has been featured on 60 Minutes, Nightline, the Oprah Winfrey Show, and This American Life. He also figured prominently in Waiting for Superman, a 2010 documentary investigating the U.S. public school system, and was the subject of Whatever It Takes, a 2009 book by New York Times best-selling author Paul Tough. He is the author of Fist Stick Knife Gun: A Personal History of Violence, which draws on his own childhood experiences growing up in the South Bronx, and Reaching Up for Manhood: Transforming the Lives of Boys in America.

Canada will be joined at the Cubberley Lecture for a conversation about early childhood with former California Assembly Member Ted Lempert, president of Children Now; Kitty Lopez, executive director of First 5 San Mateo County; and Jelena Obradovic, an associate professor of education at ��.

We spoke with Canada about his work in advance of the May 24 event.

Why do you think it’s so important to address challenges that children experience in their first few years?

The science is becoming clearer and clearer on brain development in the early years. When I was studying [education] and teaching back in the 1980s, we didn’t realize how intricate the wiring and rewiring of an infant’s brain was. A lot of folks took [babies] as sort of passive, babbling a bit and being cute. You might think, well, I could play with this child or not. But it’s not just arbitrary – we now know there is intentional development of that brain in those first critical years.

When my wife and I had our youngest kid, we had all kinds of mobiles and toys and everything – we thought, That brain’s going to be so fired up! But no one was saying anything to poor people about what they should be doing. If we want children on a level playing field, we can’t give some kids a three-year head start and think the others will catch up.

What role do research institutions play in advancing this understanding?

When we started the Baby College, we partnered with Dr. T. Berry Brazelton, who was creating the Touchpoints model of development [to guide care]. One of the things he looked at was the actual structure of the brain, so you could see what was happening when you used language. And I said, ‘Isn’t there some way we could bring that into Harlem, so my parents can understand that this is not just a set of suggestions but actually causes changes in the brain?’ It’s not just a folk tale we’re telling parents – there’s actual research to back it up.

There are a lot of difficulties children have in acquiring and expressing language. I’m old enough to have been one of the first to start working with kids with autism, when people thought these kids couldn’t learn – they would just put them in institutions and that was the end of it. But then a number of folks started trying to figure out what was actually happening and how you educate children who had this kind of disability. I think we’re just touching the surface of research that could provide valuable clues for all of us on how we can intervene earlier and earlier with children.

As someone who’s worked on both the research and the advocacy side, how do you think the two could work together more effectively?

It’s always frustrated me that there are brilliant people working on these challenges, having theories and writing papers, and so little of it is made into a consumable way for the practitioners. Part of the challenge with the institution of higher learning is that you’re rewarded for publishing often in magazines that most of us don’t read. And often the work just hints at what some solutions might be, but it’s not shared in a way that even some of us who are working hard on this can intuit what it means for kids and families.

How do we remedy that – getting education research into the hands of the people who practice it?

There should be a major conference every year where you mix the practitioners with the scientists, where they talk to each other and give feedback. In medicine, you have to take continuing education courses if you want to keep your license, because medicine changes and they want to make sure doctors are kept up to speed. If it weren’t for medical malpractice [lawsuits] – that’s a real pressure on doctors to learn and to do better.

That’s not the case in education – you could be teaching the way people taught 20 years ago and no one bats an eye. There’s no real push for you to learn the latest science in education. There’s no penalty for failing, and there’s very little incentive for changing.

But you’re not suggesting that we sue teachers, right?

No, no. I’m not suggesting that. This is how I break down the world of education: You’ve got a lot of great schools that upper-middle class and wealthy families know about, where many of their kids go. You’ve got a bunch of schools that are 50/50, where half of the kids are probably going to do OK and half are not. And then you have a bunch of schools that are just failing kids on a regular basis.

That first group doesn’t have to deal with the third group – they don’t have to worry. We don’t all have to go to that school. But we all have to go to the same hospital. [With schools,] the pressure to improve is left with the weakest, most marginalized folks who have the least ability to push the levers of power.

What are some of the solutions you’ve seen that have worked?

I’d say there are a few core components. One is talent. Someone asked me recently whether I see education as a low-value proposition in this country – that folks who feel that they’re smart and talented aren’t going to gravitate toward teaching. They’ll go into tech or medicine instead. But I think teaching is one of the most complicated professions there is.

Another major component is structure. We’ve structured education in a way that if kids are behind, we do not give them additional time to catch up. Places that are successful will do classes during unorthodox times, and an enriched environment educates children all the time. It’s hard to explain metamorphosis if you’ve never seen a caterpillar in a cocoon – it doesn’t make any sense. I don’t think we pay enough attention to [giving kids] the ability to have this kind of experiential education.

Learn more about and register for the Cubberley Lecture on May 24.

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The impact of the early years

Carrie Spector — Wed, 11 May 2022 22:44:33 +0000

The impact of the early years

Carrie Spector Wed, 05/11/2022 - 15:44

Image: klyaksun / Shutterstock

Brain and Learning Sciences | Early Childhood

Jonas Miller, a researcher focused on brain functioning in young children, talks about the long-term effects of early childhood experiences.

May 16, 2022

Research suggests that most children born today will on average live to be 100 – and their early years play a considerable role in shaping the trajectory of that long life, says Jonas Miller, a postdoctoral scholar at the �� Neurodevelopment, Affect, and Psychopathology (SNAP) Lab.

In this episode of School’s In, Miller joins �� Graduate School of Education Dean Dan Schwartz and Senior Lecturer Denise Pope to discuss how rethinking early childhood may help the next century’s senior citizens.

“The evidence suggests that things that happen in early childhood can be compounded over the course of life,” says Miller, whose work focuses on brain functioning in young children, and how adverse and supportive environments relate to neurobiological cognitive and social-emotional development. He recently worked with the �� Center on Longevity in developing the New Map of Life, an initiative designed to guide and enhance the quality of an increasing lifespan.

Traumatic events that occur in childhood, which researchers refer to as adverse childhood experiences (ACEs), can have long-term repercussions for both physical and mental health. Miller says that about 70 percent of kids will experience at least one such event, and, in addition to increasing the risk for psychiatric disorders, ACEs dramatically raise the risk for age-related diseases like cardiovascular disease and Alzheimer’s.

Sending kids to preschool can potentially reduce exposure to negative childhood experiences, Miller says, but the majority of children under age 3 do not attend full-time daycare and preschool. Increasing preschool enrollment, he says, could decrease their exposure to ACEs and help build resilience.

Another important consideration in a lifespan that extends an additional 20 or 30 years is the advantage of expanding the time that kids get to be kids. Often parents are eager for preschool education to “get their children ready for the next stage,” says Miller. Teenage stress and anxiety about school signal a “shrinking” of childhood, he says – a trend that could be countered through changes to the early education experience.

You can listen to School's In on SiriusXM, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher and Soundcloud.

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Leading scholar on early childhood learning joins �� Graduate School of Education faculty

Carrie Spector — Thu, 14 Apr 2022 20:08:03 +0000

Leading scholar on early childhood learning joins �� Graduate School of Education faculty

Carrie Spector Thu, 04/14/2022 - 13:08

Philip Fisher will lead the launch of a research center at �� focused on early childhood learning.

Announcements | Early Childhood | Faculty and Programs

Renowned researcher Philip Fisher will head up a new center at �� focused on the science, policy, and practice of early childhood education.

April 25, 2022

In a major step to advance research that will support children in their first few years, renowned scholar Philip Fisher has joined the faculty of �� Graduate School of Education (GSE), where he will lead the launch of a center focused on the science, policy, and practice of early childhood education.

“Phil Fisher is a visionary, a great leader, and an incredible collaborator across disciplines,” said Dan Schwartz, the Nomellini & Olivier Professor and I. James Quillen Dean of the GSE. “There’s a lot of momentum right now to build a strong body of science and policy around early learning. Phil is ideally positioned to lead this work at ��.”

Fisher joined the faculty as part of a new GSE initiative focused on early childhood education. His research focuses on developing and evaluating early childhood interventions in socially and economically marginalized communities, and on translating scientific knowledge about healthy development under conditions of adversity for use in social policy and programs.

He has a particular interest in the effects of early stressful experiences on children’s neurobiological and psychological development, and in prevention and treatment programs for improving how children function in areas such as attachment to caregivers and relationships with peers. His work also explores the brain’s plasticity in the context of therapeutic interventions.

As director of ��’s new center on early childhood learning and development, Fisher will bring education together with neuroscience, pediatrics, law and policy, developmental psychology, business and other fields to address the complex issues that intersect in early childhood.

The center is a joint project of the GSE and the �� Accelerator for Learning, a university-wide initiative to develop more equitable and scalable learning solutions.

Prior to arriving at ��, Fisher was Philip H. Knight Chair and professor of psychology at the University of Oregon (UO). He founded and served as the first director of the UO Center for Translational Neuroscience, where researchers work to translate discoveries in basic neuroscience, psychology and other disciplines to mitigate the effects of early adverse experiences on children’s physical and emotional health.

“There really is no one like him in the field, between his accomplishments in the basic science and his evaluation and design of interventions,” said Ryan Padrez, a pediatrician and clinical associate professor of pediatrics at �� Medicine. “His ability to straddle both spheres is remarkable.”

Fisher’s research into understanding the impact that environment has on the neurobiology of kids “is extensive and extraordinary,” Padrez said. “But he doesn’t stop there. He goes on to apply his basic research to designing and testing interventions in communities – interventions that are practical, cost-effective, and culturally appropriate.”

Schwartz and Padrez both emphasized Fisher’s strength in collaborating across disciplines as a particular asset for the role of directing the new interdisciplinary center at ��.

“Early childhood learning involves fields that don’t ordinarily talk to each other – pediatrics, education, social enterprise, and more,” said Schwartz. “It will take stronger alignment among these sectors in order to have impact.”

“Leading multidisciplinary efforts is extremely challenging,” Padrez added. “We need a strong leader, and I genuinely believe Phil Fisher is one of the best people on the planet to lead this work.”

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Faculty mentioned in this article: Philip Fisher , Dan Schwartz

COVID-19 and children: What will 2022 bring?

Carrie Spector — Mon, 31 Jan 2022 18:31:17 +0000

COVID-19 and children: What will 2022 bring?

Carrie Spector Mon, 01/31/2022 - 10:31

Aratta_Artbox / Shutterstock

Early Childhood | Parenting

On this episode of School’s In, Yvonne Maldonado, MD, shares the latest science on the impact of the coronavirus on kids.

February 3, 2022

As the COVID-19 pandemic drags on, it may feel like we're still dealing with many of the same struggles and uncertainties we were facing two years ago. But plenty has changed — including our understanding of the impact of the virus on kids.

On this episode of School’s In, Yvonne Maldonado, MD, a professor of pediatric infectious diseases and of health research and policy at �� Medicine, joins �� Graduate School of Education Dean Dan Schwartz and Senior Lecturer Denise Pope to talk about the latest on COVID-19 and children.

Misconceptions abound, in part because of early beliefs about how the virus spread, Maldonado says. Even at the federal level, “people [were] saying that (a) children don't get infected, (b) children don't get sick if they get infected, and finally, that children don't transmit it to others,” she says. “Those are all things that do happen. Somehow in this country and in the western world, people just discounted the pediatric component. Even today, I still hear from people who don't think kids get infected or sick.”

Children also appear to be susceptible to long-term symptoms after an infection, the phenomenon known as long COVID. “What we don't know is what that looks like, how many kids get it and how long it's going to last, because obviously we're only two years in here — we don't know,” she says. “But we do think that kids can have symptoms even three, six, eight months after their primary infection that primarily seem to be neurologic or developmental.”

Vaccination rates for children ages 5–11 have fallen short of expectations, Maldonado says. “The vaccine was approved under emergency use for 5- to 11-year-olds the first week of November, and we saw 10 percent or 2.8 million kids come in to get vaccinated that first week or two,” she said. But after that, “the numbers just kind of flattened out.”

For parents fearful of sending young ones to school during the pandemic, Maldonado points to large-scale studies of school districts showing fewer outbreaks where mask and distancing measures are in place. “We’re hearing, unfortunately, from some people who claim to be infectious disease experts and epidemiologists that masks have not been proven to work, and that’s absolutely false,” she says. “We know that masks work, and we have the data to prove it.”

You can listen to School's In on SiriusXM, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher and Soundcloud.

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Early Childhood

Reimagining education in the age of longevity

New ������������ initiative aims to close a culture gap in measuring kids’ foundational skills

Skills for lifelong learning

Biases embedded in testing

Scaling up guidance

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From playful strategies to state policy

Finding energy and motivation

Gift advances the work of the ������������ Center on Early Childhood

New center at ������������ addresses the forces shaping early childhood

Supporting kids from cradle to career in Central Harlem

Early childhood expert Geoffrey Canada to deliver annual lecture at ������������

The impact of the early years

Leading scholar on early childhood learning joins ������������ Graduate School of Education faculty

COVID-19 and children: What will 2022 bring?

New �� initiative aims to close a culture gap in measuring kids’ foundational skills

��-led DREME network celebrates a decade of progress in early math

Gift advances the work of the �� Center on Early Childhood

New center at �� addresses the forces shaping early childhood

Early childhood expert Geoffrey Canada to deliver annual lecture at ��

Leading scholar on early childhood learning joins �� Graduate School of Education faculty