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Read your page before your child reads theirs

Part 2 of 5 · For parents and tutors

  1. Where your child is stuck is the whole brief
  2. Read your page before your child reads theirs
  3. The game has no AI in it
  4. Session two
  5. If you are the tutor in the group

Every package has two sides, written to two different people. The child’s side is the game, the lab or the page to read. Yours is a page of its own, and it is the one to read first: what you need, how the session goes, what to say, what to skip, which slips are normal, and under every step one line of why. It is written so that by the third session you are saying it in your own words. That is reclaimed cognition: the preparing is taken off you, so you can put your attention into what only you can do.

What is on your side of the page

Open Megan and Liam’s page. They are made up: Megan homeschools, Liam is eleven, the subject is adding fractions with different bottom numbers, and the hook is baseball. The page has two tabs, “For Megan” and “For Liam”. Stay on Megan’s. It has five sections: “Up next”, “What we’ve learned”, “The steps”, “When it’s tricky” and “Tell us & ask”.

“Up next” is the session itself. It opens with “Your turn to learn — first ten minutes”: Liam knows what a box score means and Megan does not yet, so he leads and she asks. Then come “What you need”, “How it goes” in five numbered steps, “What to say” in four lines you can read aloud, and “What to skip”, which includes “Don’t correct his explanation in step 1. Ask questions instead.” Under every numbered step sits a line beginning “Why this works”. Step 1: “he cements the concept by explaining it, not by watching you explain it.” Step 3: “finding the wrong answer first makes the right one stick.”

“When it’s tricky” names the slips before they happen: he adds .2 and .2 and writes .4; he decides 7.6 is right; he goes quiet after a wrong answer. The page says why: after session two, Megan worried she was “doing it wrong” when Liam slipped, and its answer is that “each plan now names the normal slips.”

Le Stade des Fractions is the same idea in French, for a made-up eleven-year-old who loves football and running, with a parent beside him. Its Guide tab opens “Cet onglet est pour vous, le guide” (this tab is for you, the guide). Each of its seven steps carries the same blocks, translated by us: the aim, what you can say, questions to ask, what to watch for, an activity without a screen, and the answer key, where every answer comes with its reason. The introduction ends: “C’est une façon de faire, pas LA façon. Vous connaissez votre enfant : gardez ce qui l’aide, laissez le reste.” One way of doing it, not THE way: keep what helps and leave the rest.

Why a “why” matters

A step you understand is a step you can change. If Liam is tired and will not explain, the line under step 1 tells you what the step is for, which is Liam doing the explaining. Keep that, drop the exact words. A step with no reason can only be followed or dropped.

The same logic lets the lead swing. Vygotsky described the zone of proximal development as what a learner can reach with “adult guidance” or “in collaboration with more capable peers” (Mind in Society, 1978, p. 86). The phrase is wider than the adult: it leaves room for whoever happens to be ahead. We use “guide” in that spirit, for whoever is a step ahead, right now, on this; the definition is ours, not his. For the first ten minutes of Megan’s session, that is Liam.

Jason Jeyanandan, who set the Foundation up, writes in his post on human delta value: “I call it reclaimed cognition: the attention a person gets back when a system takes cognitive labour off them.” The same post is clear about where that attention goes. A page can tell you what to do when a child goes quiet; noticing that he has gone quiet is yours.

How much is taken off shows in the first run (27 September). A model sat in the chair of a teacher building a course and a simulated adult was the learner, so it proved nothing about people. But its report set out the teacher’s side as twelve stages, from knowing the learner to reviewing what comes back (it labels that reasoning a reconstruction), and the post above says the lesson plan arrived defaulted, each decision a small adjustment to something already there. Your page is the same kind of preparing, done for one child. That you reach your own words by session three is how the page is written, in a made-up family; nothing has been measured yet, and the first real families are the first measurement.

What to do this week

Read your page the night before, your side only. Not to master it: when Megan loses track of the outs, her page says “You working through it beside him is more useful than having it figured out ahead of time.” You read to know the shape: where the child leads, what to skip, what a normal slip looks like. Then mark the one step you would skip, and read the “why” line under it. If the reason still holds without the step, skip it. If not, keep the step and change the words. The block called “For your own AI chat” is for you alone: “This is for you — Liam isn’t part of it.”

This is part two of five. Where your child is stuck is the whole brief comes before it, on the brief a page like this is built from; The game has no AI in it comes next, on the child’s side. The teacher’s workflow is in the first run, reclaimed cognition in Jason’s own words, and the whole page we have been describing is Megan and Liam.

Which step would you skip, and why?

Sources

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