Mind in the Making by Ellen Galinsky

Mind in the Making by Ellen Galinsky; Special Edition:
National Association for the Education of Young Children.
ISBN: 978-0-06-204129-6

President and co-founder of the Families and Work Institute, Ellen Galinsky helped establish the field of work and family life at Bank Street College of Education in New York City where she was on the faculty for 25 years. Her book, Mind in the Making, is quite readable. Although there are many research studies cited throughout the text (the bibliography is nine pages long and presented in very small font!), there are also anecdotes from her parenting events as well as many short stories from real people, which create a “hook” to help the reader understand the “meaty” information in the book. Moreover, Galinsky concludes her book in such a manner that I didn’t feel too guilty for making some of the mistakes that all parents inevitably do. I didn’t miss my chance: it isn’t too late to fix things, because parents and children continue to grow and learn. What a welcome reassurance for all parents!

Galinsky explores the “essential life skills” that children need to achieve their full potential, take on life’s challenges, communicate well with others, and remain committed to learning. Those life skills are:

• Focus and self control
• Perspective taking
• Communicating
• Making connections
• Critical thinking
• Taking on challenges
• Self-directed, engaged learning

All of these skills involve, in some way or another, the prefrontal cortex of the brain, which oversees what child development researchers call the brain’s “executive functions.” The prefrontal cortex serves as the maker and manager of connections among social, emotional, and intellectual capacities. The executive functions that the prefrontal cortex manages are: 1) self-control, 2) working memory, 3) cognitive flexibility, and 4) reflection. These four executive functions pull it all together so that a child can attain a goal. These essential executive functions only begin to mature at around age three and then develop throughout the life span.

Mind in the Making is a gold mine of information about how you, as a parent, might support these skills in your child. Within each chapter, there are concrete suggestions for home activities. Some of these suggestions may seem a little familiar to you; they reflect the same developmentally appropriate practice that is fundamental to the Music Together program and embedded in our class processes. In fact, if you create a musical context for the suggestions in the book, you’ll find yet another venue for supporting your child’s essential life skills.

I read this book through the lens of the four points of the Music Together philosophy:

1. All children are musical;
    
2. Therefore, all children can achieve basic music competence, which we have defined as the ability to sing in tune and move with accurate rhythm;
    
3. The participation and modeling of parents and caregivers, regardless of their musical ability, is essential to a child's musical growth;
    
4. This growth is best achieved in a playful, developmentally appropriate, non-performance-oriented learning environment that is musically rich yet immediately accessible to the child's—and the adult's!—participation.

Reading it, I felt affirmed in our philosophy and practice; there are many alliances between Galinsky’s suggestions and Music Together’s methods.

If, as you read, you transfer Galinsky’s information to the music-making process, you’ll gain insight into our methods. For example, you’ll understand some of the reasons we ask you to model your enjoyment of music for your child—even if you feel you don’t feel particularly musical yourself. Galinsky offers evidence of how children pick up on parents’ facial cues and intuit their emotional responses to events. In the context of Music Together, these cues will either motivate or inhibit your child’s disposition to make music—and making music is essential to the growth and development of your child’s music skills. Also notable is the information on the power of imitation (pp. 305–308).“ Imitation accelerates learning and multiplies learning opportunities,” Galinsky says. “It is faster than individual discovery and safer than trial-and-error” (p. 306). Just by participating in class, then, you are communicating emotionally with your child, as well as offering an all-important physical model that he can imitate.

Galinsky also points out that consolidating what one has learned is part of the fundamental pattern of how we learn (pp. 336–337). “It looks like for each of the jumps in behavior where we see new capacities emerging during certain age periods, there’s a reorganization going on in the brain that is reflected in changes in brain process.” Because of this, a parent may see a huge jump in performance, then shortly after see a big drop. However, the increase is generally bigger than the drop. “You see a sudden jump, then a drop, then another sudden jump, then a drop. That’s one of the basic mechanisms in development.”

What does this mean, for those of you who are faced with so many choices of programming for your young child? In practice, it supports the notion of repetition. That is, for the child who started Music Together at the age of six months and cycled through the nine song collections by age three-and-a-half, it may not be optimal to “graduate” to formal instruction. Rather, after age three, when the executive functions are maturing, your child needs the repetition of the Music Together song collections to consolidate her developing music capacities and continued engagement in music; in this way, she can have cognitive flexibility within the domain of music. And after age five, the Music Together® Big Kids™ program will continue to support your child’s music development, allowing her to move from basic music competence to basic music literacy.

The importance of the arts and their effect on the brain is highlighted in Chapter Four, “Making Connections.” Says Galinsky, “Michael Gazzaniga of the University of California at Santa Barbara notes that for a number of years, studies have shown that there is a correlation between kids who go into the arts and academic importance.” According to Gazzaniga, an interest in performing art leads to a high state of motivation that produces the sustained attention necessary to improve performance; this training of attention then leads to improvement in other domains of cognition (p.184). Although at Music Together we recognize music as a way of knowing in and of itself, we do acknowledge the power of music to support all learning.

I hope you’ll read this book and share your comments with me and the rest of the Music Together community. Post them on our Facebook Page or send them to us at news@musictogether.com.

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