Natural = Explicit
Young children have a 'natural pedagogy' that looks like explicit instruction.
An experiment described in The Teaching Instinct:
First, children learned the rules and how to play an inference game from an adult teacher who told them that in order to win the game they had to find the sneezer flower. During the second step, the adult presented the child with two color flowers, one made a monkey sneeze, and the other did not. Both flowers were presented separated and together to the puppet three times, and then, the child had to choose, base on her inference, the flower that made a monkey puppet sneeze. Being an easy game, all children passed these steps and entered the third one; in which, a second 'naïve' adult appeared in the room to play. The adult teacher presented to the new (adult) student the same game, rules and played with two different color flowers. Children observed this person play. She would make a mistake when choosing the flower. The adult student picked the flower that didn’t make the monkey sneeze, and she would lose. After this incorrect decision, the first experimenter left the room with the excuse of looking for more flowers to play. This is critical for the paradigm to work, each child learned and played the game correctly, and now, they had witnessed somebody else making a mistake. They had the 'correct' content of knowledge while this second person did not and, by removing the first adult (teacher) from the scenario, they were set in a context in which they could decide to communicate the rules to the unknowledgeable interlocutor, to teach or not to teach. This set up allowed children to be in a new and significant position, they could switch from students to teachers. As predicted, since the age of 3 years old, children became significantly more ostensive in moments which had pedagogical relevance; they used ostensive cues while teaching the correct rules to win the game, establishing eye-contact, raising the eyebrows and speaking with a different pitch and prosody. . . .
Moreover, when they were exposed to a modified learning experience, which for example, included a minimized use of ostension and gesturing by the adult teacher, these children would adjust their own teaching in order to correct the shortcomings from their adult teachers.
