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Imitation, age-mixing and informal learning situations

It is almost so obvious that it becomes invisible - children observe and imitate others in their surroundings. But is this something we facilitate and use as a valuable aspect of learning?

Recently one morning we were sitting outside in the sun, reading and drinking coffee. After sitting there for a while, our neighbors’ six year old daughter walked out on her balcony about fifteen meters away from where we were sitting. She had brought a little chair, a book and a pencil, and sat down to draw or write. I had never seen her do this before, so I am quite confident that when she did this, she was imitating what we were doing in some unconscious way.

Take any ordinary Montessori classroom. One basic element in such classrooms is that there is some form of age-mixing. Children in a class are within an age span of at least three years, and teachers avoid forming any groups according to age. At any given time, the children are all doing different things, investigating different subjects and topics, and it is rare that the whole group assembles for a lesson, other than for read-alouds, group discussions, or announcements. I would claim that such a classroom is full of nice stories of children observing and imitating each other, sometimes observed by the adults, but more often not. We have probably all seen this while observing in different Montessori classrooms, and I think that one of the strengths of the Montessori method is that it focuses on the importance of this kind of learning, and facilitates it.

A Montessori teacher told me about a day she was sitting in the classroom making cloth bags while the children were working. After a while a girl of eight came and asked her if she could learn to make such bags. The girl got to learn it, and she sat making these bags for a while. Later in the day, without having shown this to anyone else, the teacher saw some of the youngest girls also making these bags, having been instructed by the first girl. Some researchers have referred to this form of informal learning as a “transmission chain” (Flynn & Whiten 2008), and it is wonderful to observe, if you’re lucky enough to catch it in action. 

When children in mixed-age groups play, work and learn together (three words that really should be synonyms), and are given the right environment and the freedom to interact, you always find this kind of imitation and informal learning.

Research

There is a lot of research on how small children imitate other children and adults (see for example Tennie et al. 2014; Tomasello 2019; chap. 7 in Lillard 2016; Gray 2011; see also chap. 22 in Montessori 1988 ), but there seems to be less of this kind of research on older children. In addition, even where there is research on different age groups, it is often done to see how three year olds imitate each other, compared to five years olds, and so on, and not how a three year old imitates a five year old, or how a six year old imitates an eight year old. 

Source: Meltzoff & Moore 1977

Melvin Konner mentions the fact that we largely focus on interactions among similarly aged children, as we are used to seeing in the modern school, but we forget that in the longer history of humanity, this in the exception, and not the rule: “In man [...] relations between and among peers are of small importance compared with relations among non-peer juveniles. Observations of human behavior development in the anomalous circumstances of the advanced industrial state have given investigators an exaggerated sense of the importance of peers per se in development.” (Konner 1975)

Peter Gray supports this claim, when he writes: “Same-age play became common only with the rise of age-graded schooling and, still more recently, with the proliferation of age-graded, adult-organized activities for children outside schools. Over the history of our species, as natural selection shaped the brain mechanisms of play, children’s social play usually occurred among individuals of different ages, often widely different ages. [...] Most researchers who study children’s interactions of any type continue to do so in schools or in other age-segregated settings.” (Gray 2011, p.501)

That there is less age-mixing in children’s play and learning today, I assume to be an uncontroversial statement. School has become an ever bigger part of the lives of children, and most of the time spent in school is in age-segregated classes. Small country schools where several ages of children are taught together in one classroom are getting ever rarer.

Preschools in Norway have traditionally been more age-mixed, but also here we see a growing tendency towards so-called age-homogenous groups. The main argument for this is usually that it makes it easier for older children to become “ready for school”, and there seems to be general agreement about it being easier to organize and plan pedagogical efforts in age-homogenous groups.

Since the early days of schooling it has become the norm to divide curricula content into subjects and students into age-groups. The main argument for this has often been teaching efficiency.

But if it is correct, as stated by Konner above, that age-mixing has historically been the norm, what do we stand to lose by relying increasingly on age-segregating? It might well be that this makes it easier to organize the teaching in the schools, but it should be possible to question this logic. Could it be that we are doing what we are doing today simply because this structure makes it easier to continue the same methods of teaching?

Small children apparently imitate adults more than their peers (Tomasello 2019, p. 145), but little by little the peers start to play an ever more important role. Much of the reason why we are not more aware of the learning effects age-mixing can have is probably because extremely little research on this topic exists. Maybe this is because so much of the research on school-aged children happens in school, which is age-segregated. If this is the case, this constitutes a kind of catch-22 for school and education research, and should be acknowledged. Is age-mixing so rare because we do not know that much about age-mixing, and do we know so little about age-mixing because it is so rare? 

Peter Gray and Jay Feldman (and later Gray on his own) looked at the research published in two leading journals for developmental psychology, Child Development and Developmental Psychology on children’s interactions with one another. From 1990 to 2000 they found 234 articles that talked about “interactions among children less than twenty-four months apart in age", and only four that included an age span larger than this. For the period between 2000 and 2010 Gray found 213 articles about the narrow age span, and 19 that included a bigger age span, fifteen of which focused on relations among siblings. (Gray 2011, p.502) 

Just what to conclude from this remains uncertain, but at least it seems clear that research on real age-mixing is lacking. One of the main reasons for this is surely that the education world is not asking for this research to be done. It is more or less irrelevant, given how school is organized.

So why am I so interested in age-mixing? One reason might be its evolutionary and biological aspect. Throughout human history, age-mixing was always an important part of children’s lives, and this surely did not end the moment they entered school, given that for the longest time no such thing existed. These kinds of age-mixed groups have a broader span of variation, and this gives each individual child more opportunities for observation and learning. The effect of this should not be underestimated. In a book reviewing anthropological research on childhood all over the world, the authors state that, no matter where in the world the child is, and no matter which culture, “The single most important form of learning is through observation.” (Lancy et al 2010, p. 6)

Age-mixing in the Montessori classroom

Maria Montessori was very clear on the point that age-mixing undoubtably provides a benefit for children. “To segregate by age is one of the cruelest and most inhuman things one can do, and this is equally true for children. It breaks the bonds of social life, deprives it of nourishment.” (Montessori 1988, p. 205) As a Montessori teacher, you get to work in classrooms that contain children within an age span of at least three years, with hopefully rather little focus on which grade each child is in. 

Obviously, Montessori did not invent age-mixing, and it’s luckily not the only pedagogical space where it is practiced. Peter Gray’s favorite reference when talking about age-mixed schools are not Montessori schools, but so-called Sudbury schools, where children from four to eighteen are all in the same environment without any age grouping. (See more about this in Gray 2013, chap. 5) Age-mixing of a different kind, in the span of twelve to eighteen, happens at North Star, in Massachusetts, and other schools in the Liberated Learners network. (See Danford 2019 for more about this school). 

Still, given that age-mixing in childhood is relatively rare, a Montessori classroom is a good place to observe this kind of age-mixing; a fact that probably can be acknowledged no matter what one might think about the Montessori method in general. 

An important reason why I am adamant about the importance of age-mixing is my own and other teachers’ experiences with it. What do we observe in these classrooms? Children inspire each other even more than we adults habitually assume, and we regularly see children teaching other children activities and skills. There is less focus on competition and comparison because of the great span and variation within the group. There is also little focus on which grade each child is in, giving ample room for being ahead or behind without this leading to stigma.

I would claim that age-mixing, no matter the specific approach, offers dynamics of learning that might be fully unknown to anyone who has only experienced ordinary age-segregated classes. It is also not the case that you can quickly get an insight into this form of learning by mixing up the ages now and then for projects and special events, because these dynamics and interactions take time to establish themselves. As mentioned, we lack research on this, which tends to make policy-makers hesitant to try different approaches. Instead we do as we “always” have done, and have a hard time imagining thing being done differently.

But when you see a six year old starting something she recently saw an eight year old doing, or when you see a seven year old become calm and adult-like while showing some six year olds something, it is not hard to see the learning potential of age-mixed groups. In a 6-9 classroom the youngest children seem immature compared with slightly older children and are less able to think abstractly. They spend a lot of their time drawing, watching, and talking. But at different times these children mature and gradually participate more and more, initiated by the older children or even more often, just inspired by informal observation of them.

This also comes out very clearly in play: “Older children are closer in age, interests, abilities, energy level, and available time to younger children than are adults, and therefore older children are more likely to behave, for prolonged periods, within the younger children’s zones of proximal development than are adults. When children play in age-mixed pairs or groups, the older, more skilled participants naturally, often unconsciously, provide scaffolds that raise the level of the younger participants’ play.” (Gray 2011, p. 504 ) The younger children participate in types of play that they would not have been able to do in more age-segregated environments, and the older children get a lot of social training while including and teaching the younger ones. They are often way better at explaining rules and procedures to children than adults are. 

In the Montessori classroom, there are also many examples that show how children teach each other academic skills like math, reading and writing. This often happens indirectly, through observation of what other children are doing. This was something that Maria Montessori pointed out in her first book, from 1909. Everyone can recall a time a child wanted to do something another child did, especially if the other child was slightly older, someone they looked up to. But for this to happen we have to dare to give children freedom, time, and a suitable environment.

In the chapter titled “Social Development" in The Absorbent Mind (This book is based on a course for teachers that Montessori held in Ahmedabad, India, in 1948, see Trabalzini p. 170), Montessori describes how this might look:

Each has its appointed place but it is not isolated: one can always go for an intellectual walk! A child of three may see another of nine using beads to perform the arithmetical operation of extracting a square root. He may ask him what he is doing. If the answer makes no wiser, he will return to his own room, where there are things of greater interest. But a child of six may comprehend a little of what the nine year old is doing, and may stay to watch, learning something from it. Freedom like this enables the observer to note the limits of understanding at each age. In fact, this was how we came to realize that children of eight or nine could understand the square root operations, which they saw being done by children of twelve to fourteen. In the same way, it was brought to our notice that children of eight can be interested in algebra. The child’s progress does not depend only on his age, but also on being free to look about him." (Montessori 1988, p. 207)

In the same chapter she also writes: “What matters is to mix the ages. Our school allows that children of different ages help one another. The younger ones see what the older ones are doing and ask for explanations. These are readily given, and the instruction is really valuable, for the mind of a five year old is so much nearer than ours to the mind of a child of three, that the little ones learn easily what we should find it hard to impart. [...] [A] child of three will take an interest in what a five year old is doing, since it is not far removed from his own powers. All the older ones become heroes and teachers, and the tinies are their admirers. These look to the former for inspiration, then go on with their work. [...] People sometimes fear that if a child of five gives lessons, this will hold him back in his own progress. But, in the first place, he does not teach all the time and his freedom is respected. Secondly, teaching helps him to understand what he knows even better than before. He has to analyse and rearrange his little store of knowledge before he can pass it on. So his sacrifice does not go unrewarded.” (Montessori 1988, p. 206-207)

This kinds of imitation and learning is rare in ordinary schools. There are surely many reasons for this, and I will discuss a couple of them here.

Allowing indirect learning through observation requires a different mindset of adults in the classroom. If we really want to see the effect of these tendencies in children, we have to give children more control over their own activities. By letting children wander around the classroom, as long as they do not disturb each other too much, they will observe each other in different activities. Numerous Montessori teachers tell similar stories about children who pretend to be reading or doing their own activities, but are actually observing a group of children at work nearby. The observing child sometimes learns just as much from this situation as some of the children who are doing the work. Maybe this is because the observing child had a strong urge to understand what the others were doing, especially if they were slightly older.

Why is such learning through observation almost impossible in ordinary classrooms? Maybe mainly because whole classes follow a common work rhythm, with everyone more or less doing the same activities at the same time, leaving little to no room for diversity of activity. And even if an individual child admires another child in class, imitation would probably happen less frequently and less openly, due to the embarrassment of being caught copying your peer in the same way that a younger child imitates an older one.

All this should be discussed even more, but as it stands today, a more comprehensive discussion of these questions is hindered by the fact that age-mixing and the learning it makes possible has been the subject of very little research.


(This article is written from a Norwegian perspective, but most of what is argued here applies to schooling and learning anywhere in the world.)

Author contact: sandakerlars@gmail.com

Sources

  • Bandura, Albert, (1977), Social Learning Theory, Prentice Hall
  • Danford, Kennet, (2019), Learning is Natural, School is Optional. The North Star approach to offering teens a head start on life, Golden Door Press
  • Flynn, Emma, og Whiten, Andrew, (2008), "Cultural Transmission of Tool Use in Young Children: A Diffusion Chain Study", Social Development, Vol.17, No.3 August 2008, pp.699-718
  • Gray, Peter, (2011) "The Special Value of Children's Age-Mixed Play", The American Journal of Play, volume 3, number 4, 2011, pp.500-522
  • Gray, Peter, (2013), Free to learn: Why Unleashing the Instinct to Play Will Make Our Children Happier, More Self-Reliant, and Better Students for Life, Basic Books
  • Konner, Melvin J., (1975), “Relations Among Infants and Juveniles in Comparative Perspective,” in The Origins of Behaviour, vol. 4, Friendship and Peer Relations, Michael Lewis and Leonard A. Rosenblum (red.), (1975), pp.99–129
  • Lancy, David F.; Bock, John; Gaskins, Suzanne, (2010), «Putting Learning in Context», in Lancy, David F.; Bock, John; Gaskins, Suzanne, The Anthropology of Learning in Childhood, AltaMira Press
  • Lillard, Angeline Stoll, (2016), Montessori. The Science behind the Genius, Oxford University Press (3rd edition)
  • Meltzoff, AN, og Moore, MK, (1977), "Imitation of facial and manual gestures by human neonates", Science, 1977 Oct 7;198(4312), pp.74-78.
  • Montessori, Maria, (1967), The Discovery of the Child, Random House, [1909]
  • Montessori, Maria, (1988), The Absorbent Mind, Clio Press [1949]
  • Tennie, Claudio; Walter, Victoria; Gampe, Anja; Carpenter, Malinda; Tomasello, Michael, (2014), "Limitations to the cultural ratchet effect in young children", Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 126 (2014) pp.152–160
  • Tomasello, Michael, (2019), Becoming Human: A Theory of Ontogeny, Harvard University Press. Kindle Edition
  • Trabalzini, Paola, (2011), Maria Montessori through the seasons of the «method», The NAMTA Journal, Vol.36, No.2, Spring 2011

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