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creativity declines in adulthood as we become more aware of the notions of right and wrong answers, she said.

middle childhood

is a time of great cognitive creativity and ambition, when the brain has pretty much reached its adult size and can focus on threading together its private intranet service

dihydroepiandrosterone, or DHEA

Arne Duncan’s proposal to “reward excellence” and push to directly connect teacher and principal evaluation and their income will only increase the stakes in testing, and will likely provide more incentives for cheating.

we may see high performing schools participate in cheating in the future because they now have a reason to want to score well to be rewarded for “being excellent while before they only have to pass to avoid failure, which their students already do.

high-stakes testing

Montessori (36) curriculum does not mention EFs, but what Montessorians mean by “normalization” includes having good EFs. Normalization is a shift from disorder, impulsivity, and inattention to self-discipline, independence, orderliness, and peacefulness (37). Montessori classrooms have only one of any material, so children learn to wait until another child is finished. Several Montessori activities are essentially walking meditation (Fig. 3).

As in Tools, the teacher carefully observes each child (when a child is ready for a new challenge, the teacher presents one), and whole-group activities are infrequent; learning is hands-on, often with ≥2 children working together. In Tools, children take turns instructing or checking one another. Cross-age tutoring occurs in Montessori mixed 3-year age groups. Such child-to-child teaching has been found repeatedly to produce better (often dramatically better) outcomes than teacher-led instruction (38–40).

Children chosen by lottery to enter a Montessori public school approved by the Association Montessori Internationale (AMI) were compared to those also in the lottery but not chosen, at the end of kindergarten (age 5) and the end of grade 6 (age 12) (41). At age 5, Montessori children showed better EFs than peers attending other schools. They performed better in reading and math and showed more concern for fairness and justice. No group difference was found in delay of gratification. At age 12, on the only measure related to EFs, Montessori children showed more creativity in essay writing than controls. They also reported feeling more of a sense of community at school.