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Hi, my name is Jason McKenna. Welcome back to the VEX Studio, where it's my pleasure to introduce to you a video series that we did with Dr. Claire Cameron. Dr. Cameron is the author of this tremendous book, "Hands On, Minds On, How Executive Function, Motor, and Spatial Skills Foster School Readiness."

Now, Claire was kind enough to come to our studio. We were able to talk about her book, which you can see right here, and discuss how the book translates into STEM skills. Dr. Cameron is the associate professor at the University of Buffalo in the Department of Learning and Instruction. She is a renowned expert on foundational cognitive skills in early childhood development, and it was really our pleasure to talk with her here.

The first part of our interview focuses on her background, why she wrote the book, and the idea of school readiness, and how the skills of executive function, spatial reasoning, and motor skills all contribute to school readiness. If you're interested in purchasing this book, and I strongly recommend that you do, I've read the book multiple times. You can go to the Teacher's College Press website and use the code CAMERON to receive 15% off and also get free shipping on the book.

Thank you for watching part one of the video series. Again, if you're interested in purchasing the book, you can see how to do that right here. Thank you very much.

Well, Claire, welcome to Pittsburgh and welcome to the VEX Studio. Really appreciate you being here.

Thank you so much for having me.

So tell me a little bit to start off about your background and about your book, why you wrote the book.

Sure, so I have a PhD in educational psychology from the University of Michigan. While there, I studied under Dr. Fred Morrison on a project called Pathways to Literacy, where we followed three and four-year-old children for four or five years and understood, of course, a lot of things go into literacy. The piece I carved out was studying executive function and self-regulation. As a research scientist at the University of Virginia, I broadened my interests to include motor skills and spatial skills.

Very interesting, very interesting. One big reason to write this book was to provide some detail around this umbrella term that we have economists to thank for, which is called non-academic skills. Everyone loves economists, but it's not that helpful to define something by saying what it isn't. This book allows us to expand our notions of school readiness beyond the academic and to say, well, what are some of the non-academic skills, namely executive function, motor, and spatial skills.

Oh, that's excellent. So the title of your book is "Hands On, Minds On," as you can see on the screen also. On page 100 of your book, you have a wonderful quote, which I'm gonna read right now: "The earliest known scholars of infant and child development Jean Piaget, Maria Montessori, Friedrich Froebel, and Rudolph Steiner all share the insight that young children learn first with their eyes, bodies, and hands."

I absolutely love that quote. Can you talk about what it means when we say that children learn first with their eyes, bodies, and hands?

Absolutely. So hands on, minds on means that learning is embodied, and especially for the youngest children, for infants, and in early childhood. That's a primary way that we experience the world. Just to go one more step into the neuroscience, if you don't mind.

Please.

Effective learning means making new neural connections. The more neural connections we can make, the richer our learning will be. If we use our finger to trace a sandpaper letter, as we say, S, that's gonna be deeper learning, richer neural connections than if we just say the letter S when we see the symbol.

Now, the neuroscience behind it is really fascinating. I've done a lot of reading recently on plasticity with our brains and how that even impacts adults. Of course, we always think about that with young kids, but even the impact on adults. So thank you for mentioning that.

Now a big theme of your book is school readiness. Big theme of your work is school readiness. So for our viewers, if you had to define what school readiness is, how would you tell them what that is? So I'll start simple, and then I'll complicate it a little bit. So generally, school readiness is accepted to be what children know, understand, and can do as they start formal schooling. In my book, I take issue with that as placing too much responsibility on the child. And so I, along with big organizations like UNICEF and Head Start, broadened school readiness to also include family support for the child heading to school, as well as the school's readiness to take children wherever they come in and support their learning.

That's had such an impact, as a former teacher reading that, like you said, what the child brings to the classroom with them, having that as being such a large part of school readiness. And that kind of goes into my next question. On chapter one, page five in your book, you have another fantastic quote I'm gonna read right now.

"School readiness is what the child brings to school and the environmental supports, opportunities, and limitations that to how the child does after school entry."

Again, I really love that quote. You go on to say, as a teacher, the child in context view allows you to imagine and carry out changes to that extent to increase the likelihood of new and more adaptive behaviors from that child. Can you explain a little bit what you mean by the child in context view of school readiness?

Absolutely. So if we're always thinking about the child in context, it's a reminder that whatever they know, understand, and can do in this moment in front of us has to do with their past and whatever experiences and opportunities they had or may not have had. And it also is an encouragement to think about, well, what can I, as an educator, do with the current context to stretch learning? And so I think another way to say this is the child in context view helps remind us that if a child doesn't know something or can't do something yet, we should always ask, well, what opportunities have they not had, or had they had, and what can I provide them with?

No, that's a really profound point. I never thought about it in that particular context as an educator. We always talked about what was going on at home. And we always talked about the environment that the children found themselves in, but really considering that child in context view was really, really powerful to me. And that kind of then dovetails into the next question. You make an excellent point in the book when talking about school readiness. You say it impacts how the children see themselves, but it also impacts how the teachers view them. Can you talk about the importance of that? Of the importance of how the students view themselves in schools and also how they're viewed by their teachers.

Sure. So relatively young children, when they start school, most children think they're pretty good at everything. And they can't necessarily distinguish their skills in literacy or math, but for better or worse, school provides a lot of sorting opportunities, comparison opportunities. So children start to pick up on that pretty quickly. And with teachers, one of the points that I wanna make about executive function, motor, and spatial skills is that when these skills need further development, it can look like this behavior. So a five year old, a six year old, seven year old will not say, it feels really awkward to use a pencil because I haven't done it before. And the muscles in my hands aren't strong enough yet.

What they're going to do is resist writing, or resist the activity that they don't have that skill or that strength yet. Executive function is another example. Executive function is how we pay attention, how we control our impulses. Can we follow directions and remember what the teachers asked us to do? And when children don't have those skills developed yet, they might bop around the classroom. They might not follow directions. The teacher may come to see that child as defying or ignoring, when actually what it is, is a need to further support and develop those foundational cognitive skills. It's really, really fascinating.

The point about the pencil not feeling right in a child's hands and the children really not being able to communicate that is a really profound thing. We talk about this here in the office all the time when we try to provide support for teachers. When the student says, "I don't know," what is that really a manifestation of? Are they having a bad day? Did they get in a fight with their best friend before they came to class that day? Are they hungry? Absolutely. Maybe they just don't know. There are all those different layers that you have to try to unpack to really get to the root cause there. But thinking about that also in terms of school readiness is really profound.

To that end, your book and your work identify three foundational cognitive skills. You previewed it a moment ago: executive function skills, spatial skills, and motor skills. Now we're going to spend a lot of time talking about each of those here in the rest of our interview, but if you wanted to kind of summarize those real quick for us, that would be great.

Sure. Executive function is how we learn, make choices, create plans, and carry out those plans. It's not one thing. It's a set of cognitive processes. I focus on three that are distinct by the end of early childhood. Motor skills are the movements of the body and the limbs in space. I also adopt a definition that includes the underlying cognitive processes that allow those movements to happen. Spatial skills are also not one thing. It's a collection of processes that we use to notice and work with spatial information, which have to do with an object and its properties or an object in movement through space or people.

If you have any questions or comments about anything that was discussed in this segment, please go to the professional learning community in VEX Professional Development Plus where myself and other members of the team and other educators would love to engage you in a dialogue about these important concepts. These things that we discussed in this book are so important. So if you want to explore further, or if you just want to explore the book, please put those comments in our professional learning community, and we'd be happy to engage with you in that dialogue about the book and about this segment.

Thank you very much.

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