When something makes sense, pay attention to it.
I recently read the terms “load-bearing learning” in our WI DPI publications and the words stuck. They are not a new concept. We have spoken in the past about essential learning, enduring concepts, and required instruction. Those terms made and make sense. Load-bearing, though, provides a new way of envisioning the importance of essential and required learning as building blocks for later learning. Architecturally, load bearing structures, like footings, must be strong enough to support the weight and wear of designs that subsequently are built upon them. Strength, solid security, and built to last characterize load-bearing structures. And, selectivity. Not everything is load-bearing. The need to acquire load bearing learning helps to explain why some children are efficient and effective learners in the intermediate and secondary grades and some children are not.
Let’s use literacy as a way to decide what is load-bearing.
A traditional definition of literacy is “the ability to identify, understand, interpret, create, communicate and compute, using printed and written materials associated with varying contexts”. One of UNESCO’s goals is to grow and promote literacy in every country.
http://gaml.uis.unesco.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2018/12/4.6.1_07_4.6-defining-literacy.pdf
For our purposes, let’s use a different definition. “Literacy is a competence or knowledge in a specified area.”
https://www.yourdictionary.com/literacy
Using this definition of literacy, I posit there are five literacies in elementary education that are the load bearing learning all children must master. These are
- Reading and writing phonetically
- Computing four mathematical operations
- Reading music
- Collaborating with others
- Fine motor skills
A child who masters these five literacies, has achieved competency and knowledge in these specific areas, by the completion of grade 3 has a solid load bearing foundation for learning all school curricula in grades 4 -12 and beyond. We can build wonderful structures of content knowledge, detailed skill sets, and elaborated pursuits of personal interests when a child is foundationally literate.
How do we build load bearing learning? By design, with unwavering commitment to its achievement, and with targeted resources.
Reading and writing are not innate skills, like speaking and listening. Because each child must be taught to read and to write, our design must create technically effective and efficient skill sets using a phonics-base. Children who master the ability to translate sounds into letters and letters into sounds and both sounds and letters into meaning can learn to read anything. The ability to read and write must not be left to chance, to the “let’s see how this develops over several years”. Beginning in 4K, we must purposefully teach and ensure that each child learns a scaffold of phonics-based reading and writing skills that lead to a sold capacity to read and write by the end of third grade. Certainly, reading and writing skills will continue to grow throughout grade 4 – 12, yet the evidence is clear and profound that children who have not established “load bearing” reading and writing by the end of third grade will be challenged to do so later.
Why would we create a design that leave any child with predicted challenges for later learning success?
The same approach to technical teaching and learning applies to each child’s mastery of addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division. Mathematical numeracy and literacy are the load bearing basis for the math that follows. I heard a retired neighbor speak about his career. He said, “I was lucky. My teacher taught me how to add, subtract, multiply and divide so well that Algebra and Geometry made sense to me. Unbelievably, I used math and Geometry, specifically, almost every day I worked.” He repeated, “I was lucky.”
No child should think that their education is a matter of luck. We control the design by which each child builds their load bearing learning.
I add reading music, collaborating skills, and fine motor skills to the list of five literacies that result in a load bearing early education.
Music is not an elective in education or a special subject out of the mainstream. Music is foundational. Just listen to the world around you – music is everywhere. Music and rhythm and tempo surround us, permeate us, and move our souls. The choice of music may be a personal choice, but the core of what music is is universal in all of us. Literacy in music begins with our teaching children to read music. The ability to read music opens the doors of capacity to perform, interpret, explain, and create music.
Stand in the crowd when the National Anthem is played and everyone is singing. You will know who was able to read a note of music, interpret that note into sound, and repeat that sound with confidence and fidelity. And, who cannot. Not being able to read and perform music does not diminish our enjoyment of music. It limits us to being consumers only. We watch others who are able to do.
No child’s education should limit their future to one half of an experience when the whole is completely possible.
The succession of generations and evolution of networking that connects every part of our lives only makes collaborating skills more essential as load bearing learning. While stalwart Baby Boomers touted individualism and personal initiative, Millenials and Gen Zers are defining the essence of community membership and collaboration. Donne’s “… no man is an island…” has ever been more true.
“Playing fair in the sandbox” is not innate to a specie born with fight or flight impulses. Some children are socially inclined and intrinsically motivated toward cooperation, collegiality, consensus, and collaboration. Others bare their teeth. Schooling should teach “out” individualism. It should teach “in” the social constructs of togetherness.
We purposefully implement group activities in secondary education because we have learned that collegiality and collaboration are strong instructional models and cause improved learning. A child in high school or college or in later career should not be caught up short in a group work project saying “I don’t know how to work with others.” This is a load bearing skills that begins in 4K.
Lastly, fine motor skills are hugely load bearing and and just as hugely ignored in traditional school education. A conversation about personal motor skills points us to physical education where they are drowned out by fitness, strength, and stamina and life-long recreational activity instruction. Touch and feel and delicate movement are not units of instruction in elementary school. Yet, students in art, technology education, “maker labs”, science labs, and baking and cooking labs need very fine motor skills. Try painting with large muscle groups or creating slides for microscopic viewing or measuring ingredients without fine motor skills. Or, try playing a music instrument without touch and feel. If a child has these, it is not the result of schooling only their natural gifts. However, we can assist every child to develop improved fine motor skills and be better prepared for education and life.
Wrongly, we don’t address fine motor skills in the mainstream, only as a specific therapy for children diagnosed with physical or occupational training needs.
Fine motor skills, like phonics-based reading and writing, operational proficiency in math, reading music, and collaborating with others, create and expand learning opportunities for children. Take any of these away from a child’s foundational learning experiences and that child is not equipped for new learning in the future.
Load-bearing learning is a powerful construct for envisioning the full extent of a school education and informing how and what we prioritize for every child’s learning success. For one, the concept will change how I consider issues of elementary school teaching and learning and how I speak with parents regarding the most important outcomes of 4K to grade 3 education.