Watching a child decipher something that most adults can admit to spending hours figuring out is always a source of amusement and evidence in discussions of a child’s ability to adapt to, and conquer, new challenges easily. However, wizardry with an iPad and a keen sense of direction in cyberspace don’t always translate well when applied to subjects in school such as mathematics, geography, or science. Someone approaching the situation with three or more decades of life experience might begin to pull their hair out when attempting to explain why a child might struggle with concepts they deem easy.
In most instances, it is because children don’t have the same experience applying the concepts learned in school to the world around themselves, especially in a way that allows them to adapt what they know to new interactions as they arise. In short, they know how to do the work, but don’t know why they’re doing it, which makes it pretty difficult to draw parallels between school and the real world. We believe that the process of drawing those parallels can be made simple if your child is engaged and entertained by the experience. This helps by allowing them to develop at their own rate, while mastering the concepts given so that they can apply them to any situation, not just the ones they were given as examples.
Most people view the Stanford-Binet as a test of intelligence; one that gives its taker a place on the IQ spectrum, as to imply where they fall with regards to the people around them. We believe in improvement, practice, and development, which is why we use the Stanford-Binet for more than just boosting or crushing one’s ego, but rather as a method of identifying where a child needs improvement. We use the test to present children with various concepts of evolving difficulty so that they grow comfortable assessing situations from many angles. If a child with greater self-confidence stands a greater chance at succeeding at school or work, then we should have no reason for neglecting to explore that avenue.
Instead of reinforcing concepts for specific scenarios, we test and develop skills in fluid reasoning, knowledge, quantitative reasoning, visual-spatial reasoning, and working knowledge. This will all aid your child in figuring out any problem they come across to the best of their ability, because they will be able to apply all five of their freshly sharpened skills to assess situations from various points of view. It has been shown that self-confidence and self-efficacy are better at predicting student success than the amount of repetitive work completed on a certain subject. Teaching a child to visualize a problem, and thus visualize many potential solutions to the problem, will not only lead to a more successful solution, but a child that is confident in their ability to conquer any problem they find.
For those wary of what the future holds for their children, teaching them to become adaptive in the face of change will almost guarantee their success in being able to traverse the challenges of the future. Higher education, and the inevitable career path will be forged more easily if founded on transferable concepts and ideas. In an era where technology advances at an ever-increasing pace, and the opportunities of the past are evolving into brand new fields for the future, it is important to make sure that the children we are sending into those fields are not afraid to perform, or incapable of facing the challenges that arise.
For us, we find it effective to leverage the boundless creativity that children possess as the driving force behind our work. Adults often put boundaries around certain concepts, limiting the creativity they can apply to attacking an issue, because they are fighting years of being told that there are certain ways to accomplish specific tasks. Abandoning fluid creativity for a rigid set of principles might have helped us make it through a work week without much grief. However, it can make it hard to grasp how channeling a child’s creativity and curiosity towards developing solutions can be of more use than exchanging creativity for rules. If instead of teaching a child to exclusively follow a set of rules, they were taught to consider why those rules were required in the first place, they might notice a way to improve the entire system, not just continue it.
From providing an engaging environment, to generating practice materials depending on what your child needs to improve on most, we can help foster the unique methods of investigation that children use to examine the world around themselves. We don’t focus on giving you an IQ score, we focus on helping your child develop the skills necessary to never find themselves surprised by what the world holds. We want to see a future full of people confident in their ability to make their environments better, and we are confident in our ability to help make that happen.