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Tending the Garden

As we start the 2018-19 school year, we’re reminded that our job as educators is not to shape particular kinds of students; instead, our job is to provide caring, exhilarating, and safe environments for students to explore the world around them and to flourish as unique learners and engaged citizens.
Good educators should focus on the process of learning rather than fixate on the outcomes that result from their directed guidance (scores, test results, grades, etc.). Alison Gopnik, Berkeley professor of psychology and philosophy, suggests in her book The Gardener And The Carpenter that when raising children, we should be more like gardeners than carpenters. Gardeners, Gopnik writes, cultivate plants that constantly change as they adapt to the circumstances of weather and the seasons; whereas, carpenters craft products that fit static, pre-planned schemes. So we can best help your children by crafting garden-like social and physical environments, as well as time and space, for them to explore. 
 
Gopnik ‘s book presents new research suggesting that too much guided, deliberate teaching can often reduce how much children learn because that style of teaching tends to inhibit students from exploring the subjects themselves. Additionally, guided, deliberate teaching tends to prevent students from learning any more than what the teacher had originally pointed out. At TVT, we know that if we want to build creative thinkers, we must create conditions that allow students to craft ideas and solutions stretching outside the boundaries we create. In the long run of the garden model, Gopnik says, students will emerge more robust and more adaptable than they would within the precise and static world of the carpenter who looks to create a finished product. Yet one of the great ironies of educating children is that when we focus on the process of learning rather than on our desired outcomes, the end results are often students who leave us better equipped to lead, to innovate, and to achieve great things.
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TVT Community Day School is a TK-12 Independent Community Day School in Irvine, CA
Founded in Loving Memory of Naomi Gelman Weiss