In episode PHQP_0030 More Knowledgeable Others, Jeff talks about More Knowledgeable Others and misses his grandma.

Watch Now: PHQP_0030 More Knowledgeable Others

Welcome to the Playvolution HQ podcast. I’m Jeff Johnson. Thanks for pushing play.

On with the show. So I was baking bread the other day, which I do once a month or so, and I had a grandma recipe realization. Every summer when we’re on family vacation, we would go to my grandparents’ farm in north, north central North Dakota, um, 50 miles or so from the Canadian border.

And one of the things that happened every trip besides going fishing with my grandpa is we would, I would bake bread with my grandma and something she did like maybe once a week, once every week and a half or two weeks through decades and decades of being a farm wife. And I love the experience and I loved being at her elbow. And I had this realization that every time we baked bread together, she had this recipe card out and we were going through the card step by steps by step.

And I realized that she didn’t need that card, that card. I’ve baked bread enough to know that you quickly memorize your bread baking recipe. There’s not a lot of ingredients.

Um, she had that card out for me. It was a teachable moment for me. It was a chance to learn to follow instructions for me.

I don’t, I don’t know if she intended it that way, but to, to some degree I’m sure she did because there’s no way she needed to dig that card out every time she baked bread because she’d been doing it for 40 years by the time I was at her elbow helping. Um, and that got me reminiscing and feeling sad about not having her in my life anymore. She was born in the late 19 teens and grew up in the twenties and, uh, lived through the depression and World War II and was a wonderful, caring, loving woman.

And that’s not what this episode is about. So, um, love you grandma to grandma if she happens to be listening from any place. But what we’re talking about is the more knowledgeable other, which she was an example of.

A more knowledgeable other. Um, well first, let’s look at Lev. Lev Vygotsky is the dude who came up with this concept.

He was born in 1896, lived, uh, 37 years, died in 1934 of tuberculosis. He was born in Belarus, which was then a part of Soviet Union. And for decades after his death, his work was suppressed by the Soviets.

Um, not just suppressed from the rest of the world, but suppressed within the Soviet Union. And then in the sixties, when relations with the West were starting to thaw, his, uh, his work was shared. And, and so we went decades without knowing some of the, the ideas this man had.

And the more knowledgeable other and the zone of proximal development and other things that he worked on, uh, have daily impact on the lives of hundreds of thousands of children around the world. And one of his ideas was the more knowledgeable other. And so short definition, a more knowledgeable other is anyone or anything with more expertise, skill, understanding, experience than the learner.

And this can be kind of a wide range of, uh, of, of entities. It can be parents, which are probably the primary, more knowledgeable other in the lives of, of especially young children. It can be caregivers, excuse me, and teachers, peers, near peers, siblings, but beyond that books, videos, and even pets.

I’ll, I’ll give you an example in a moment. Um, people in the communities, uh, relatives, uh, just about any, I mean, literally anybody who might have more knowledge or experience or information than a child can serve as a more knowledgeable other. Um, and just an example, you know, to the extent this goes, we’ll look at pets.

So let’s, uh, transition here to this video and see how this goes here. So dog gives the ball to the baby, baby kicks the ball a little bit. Not quite as far as the dog wants it to go, but the dog brings it back.

Baby tries to throw the ball, ball doesn’t move very far, kicks the ball. Oh, then we get a decent throw in. The dog brings it back as quick as can be.

This dog is teaching this baby how to play the game of fetch. The dog had more knowledge about this game because the dog has played with, with more skilled fetchers, but is very skilled at teaching, at teaching the game to, to this little human, right?

So more knowledgeable others can be this, this wide range of things. Uh, books, for example, if you are a dinosaur kid and you’re five, six, seven, eight years old, and you’re really into dinosaurs, um, a stack of dinosaur books are going to be very useful, more knowledgeable others in your seat, in your efforts to seek more information about dinosaurs.

So there’s this wide range. Um, the MKO’s primary role is to guide the learner through the zone of proximal development. Uh, and we’ll end up doing another episode with, uh, digging into the, the zone of proximal development, but ZDP, Zone of Proximal Development, is that space between what someone can do independently and what they can achieve with a bit of help.

And it’s so, so there’s, it’s this little gap, and what more knowledgeable others do is they help, um, the learner over that gap. And so like, like the dog in that video, the dog was, was helping the, the little one understand that you got to get the ball to go a little bit further if you want this game to work. And then the game worked for both of them, and then the dog and toddler, mobile infant, both got to enjoy the game of fetch.

So more knowledgeable other helps bridge that gap in the zone of proximal development between what someone can do independently and what they can achieve with a little bit of help. Um, MKOs, more knowledgeable others, what they, what you, what you’re doing as a more knowledgeable other is you’re, you’re, you’re modeling, and you’re providing hints, and you’re offering encouragement, and you’re maybe providing some direct instruction, and you’re engaging in dialogue. And it doesn’t have to be much more than, than that.

The, the dog example was, was engaged in modeling. Another example of modeling is if you want a child to learn how to use a handsaw or a hammer, one of the great simplest ways to do that is to, to demonstrate how to pound in the nail or how to saw through a board, and then put the tool on their, their hand and let them do it. So a little bit of direct instruction in modeling, and kids pick up tools like, like those skills.

Learning to tie their shoes, for example. Hints can come in handy. Say you get a child sitting, they’re painting, and they aren’t rinsing out their brush, going from one color to another color, and then they get frustrated that the, the color that ends up on their piece of paper isn’t the color that they want.

It’s a smeary brownish gray mess. You, I’m getting blurry, see if I can bring the camera back into focus. You might make a simple suggestion or, or notice, hey, I wonder what would happen if you dipped your brush in that water and wiped it off with a paper towel before you picked a new color, and then you move on with your day.

And out of the corner of your eye, you notice you’re, the child experiment with this. They take the, the paint brush that’s covered in a orangish, greenish, brownish, bluish mess, and they rinse it off, and they dip it in the green, and then they paint actual green on their paper instead of this mud color, and you’ve helped them bridge that gap. And the next time they want to change colors, it’s likely that that’s going to stick in their head, and they’re going to rinse that brush out before they move on.

It’s, it’s kind of a fascinating interesting thing. So, more knowledgeable others. An example of that, I mean, literally yesterday, yesterday, was it yesterday? Yeah, it was yesterday.

No, it’s a Sunday, Friday, Friday night, so day and a half ago. I’m, I’m a wild, a wild Friday night here at the Snuggery. I’m doing laundry, and I, I noticed I go to take things out of the dryer, and the things in the dryer are still wet, and I push the button on the dryer, and the dryer doesn’t spin, and I had a bunch of wet laundry, but I, I was pretty sure it was the dryer belt had broken.

I went to a more knowledgeable other, which happened to be an, an AI assistant on my computer, and I, I shared a picture of the information plate for my dryer, and within seconds, the AI assistant looked up the dryer, found the manual, came up with a, a list of possible problems, broken belt being the top one, gave me instructions for how to check this, the, which screws I needed to take out to take the dryer apart, just enough to notice if the belt was there or not. I did that, found the belt was missing and broken, and AI gave me the model number. Within 45 minutes, I had the part ordered, and it arrived right before I started recording.

This afternoon, I’ll use another more knowledgeable other, probably a, a YouTube video of somebody replacing a belt on this exact model of machine, so I can go through the steps, because I, I, I know how to do a lot of this stuff, but not for this specific machine, and so that more knowledgeable other is going to, to help me along. It’s a, it’s a great concept to play with, and, and again, you as a more knowledgeable other for young children can focus on modeling, providing hints, providing encouragement, offering direct instruction. I’ve got some thoughts on that.

We’ll be back with another episode. I think there’s a, a little art to direct instruction. Direct instruction should be active, relevant, and timely, so a lot of, a lot of what happens in early learning around direct instruction is, is misguided, and we can also engage in dialogue with learners.

Another piece of this is to, to be more observant, so we know exactly where kids are in terms of their current skills, so we’ve got a better idea of that gap. We need to help them, help them bridge. Along those lines, I just put together a free half-hour MKO self-study training on my Explorations Early Learning site, if you want to check that out.

I’ll put a link in the episode notes to make it easy to get there. It goes in a little bit more detail than we’ve got, we’ve got here, if you want to check into it. Wrapping up this episode, first, reflect on MKO experiences in your life.

Who have you served as an MKO for? Who were the MKOs in your life? Two of mine, Grandma, Grok, the AI, YouTube videos, lots of them, but think about it, and maybe think about how you could be a more, more engaged, focused MKO in the lives of the kids in your care, but also think about how you, as an adult learner, can take advantage of the more knowledgeable others in your life to fill gaps that you may need to fill. Amazon idea for this month, somebody clicked through from my Playvolution HQ site.

I’ve got a reading list of a couple hundred early learning books, and the School and Society is one of them by John Dewey, and somebody clicked on that link, went to the Amazon, bought the book, and shared a few pennies with me so I can keep the sites and the podcast active.

That’s much appreciated. Lots of good stuff out there on the Amazon. Another thing you can do is you can share the stuff in this podcast or on the Playvolution HQ site if you like it.

You find something you like, you share it with somebody who might find it useful. I mean, you may be serving as a more knowledgeable other when you do that. You might find a gap that somebody needs filling that I’ve created some content that would be helpful with.

Much appreciated when you do that. Next week, what are we going to be talking about? We’re going to be talking about dangerous distractions. I was distracted and broke myself for weeks and weeks recently and got to thinking about distractions and early learning, and we’ll get back next episode and look into that.

Dad joke for this week. This is a banger. I really like this one.

Why did the cow go to outer space? To see the moon. Moon. This has been the Playvolution HQ podcast. Thanks for listening and putting up, especially with my dad jokes. I’ll be back soon. Another episode.

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