Brain Rules for Baby (John Medina) / quote 43 of 91
Inside a Tools of the Mind classroom
Most Tools of the Mind classrooms look like the equivalent of a late-Christmas-morning living room. Legos are scattered everywhere. Sandboxes are sprinkled around the room. There are jigsaw puzzles to figure out. Blocks with which to build entire new worlds. Clothes for dress-up. Places for crafts. Boxes! Lots of time—and space—for interaction with other kids. The combinations of situations in which individual imagination and creativity could be deployed are seemingly endless. Many other activities occur in the course of a Tools of the Mind day, and we don’t yet know which combinations work best. We also don’t know about the long-term effects of the program. As of this writing, no fewer than four long-term, large-scale studies are under way to answer these questions. But we do know this about the program: It works. Kids in the program typically perform 30 percent to 100 percent better than controls on just about any executive function test you throw at them. That means better grades, too, as high executive function is one of the two greatest predictors of academic success that exist in the research literature. And it means the many benefits we described earlier, most of which come from studies of the Tools program.