Is it safe? Is it kind? Revisited

Little people are learning so much about their world, and just like they hammer on play dough to see what will happen, just like they endlessly build ramps for their cars, just like they swirl paint colors mixing across paper, they are figuring out how to play with each other. They are figuring out what happens when they invite a friend to play, when they tell a friend their idea, when the follow a friends lead, and, yes, when they tell a friend "You're not my best friend anymore!"
This socialization is perhaps the most complicated work of a preschooler. The Ooey Gooey Lady, Lisa Murray tells a story about a parent meeting where families were very concerned about their preschoolers academic progress. She asked the families for a show of hands: "How many of you know all you colors?" and everyone raised their hands. Her next question also resulted in a full show of hands: "How many of you have trouble getting along with someone at work?"
The work of social development is particularly rich in early childhood, as young children work within their ego-centric phase of development to figure out how to play with other children. This starts, of course, in what my friend Carol Wolf calls the "Sharing is stupid" phase of development. "I have it," (whatever it is), "and you can't have it." Slowly slowly two and three year olds start to figure out that other children are doing cool stuff, cool stuff that they could do too. They play alongside each other, copy ideas and play schema. They make offerings, sharing a play dough tool, or adding a sprinkle of sand to their friend's sand cake.

And pretty soon, they are engaging in the most wondrous of things: cooperative play! And here is where a teacher's job gets really tricky. How do I support their play, helping them gain the skills without imposing my adult ideas, without squashing the joyful exploration? Betty Jones, a brilliant teacher and professor from my graduate school Pacific Oaks College, literally wrote the book on teachers' roles in children's play. According to Betty, teachers are the stage managers, mediators, players, scribes, assessors, communicators, and planners. Most of these are pretty self-evident, but the one that I come back to again and again is being the mediator. Each year in my classroom, I hear the loud declaration, "You can't come to my birthday party!" or the even more dangerous quiet hiss, "You're not my best friend anymore!" Sometimes there has been a provocation leading up to this exchange, sometimes not. But in just about every case, the child doing the declaring looks vaguely triumphant, the other child crestfallen. The thing that is true about three and four year olds is that for the most part, they are not yet the mean girl bullies of Rachel Simmons. Just like they are experimenting with the physical properties of sand as they sift it through their fingers at the sensory table, they are trying to figure out how friendship works, and so as mediators we have to figure out how to support this development.

At this point, it is often tempting as the teacher to step in with the blanket statement, inspired by Vivian Paley's wonderful book,"You can't say you can't play."  (For exceptions to this rule, check out Teacher Tom's post, Sometimes, you can say you can't play.) If I have laid the ground work with the group of children, this reminder will sometimes work. (The groundwork often includes many interactive and overly dramatized puppet shows.) Other times, it involves conversations about how that makes the other child feel, probing into what the cause of the problem is, and sometimes even a trip to the Peace Table. At Morning Meeting, I introduced the ideas of three simple questions: "Is it safe? Is it kind? Does it build community?" and the first two questions have been picked up by many kids in the class. The trick that I have to remember is that I am also bound by these same questions, and that in my mediation, in desire to help the crying child or to right a perceived wrong, I also should be kind.

Learning to Play

So today unfolded like many days in the busy life of the Turtles: the older threes and fours immediately dove into an active dramatic play game acting out the roles of cats and caregivers. As some of the newer players started to arrive, they would watch the experienced players easily take on role, negotiate scripts, and work through different ideas. I sat down on the floor to watch, and soon I was surrounded by my youngest Turtles, also watching the play. The cats and caregivers game morphed into a restaurant game with the fluidity of young imaginations, and I joined the game, with two of my three young Turtles following me. They sat down at the restaurant, becoming the "babies" and the "customers" according to the other Turtles who declared themselves the waiters and the cooks. The waiters and the cooks played out a sophisticated script of making and bringing menus, asking for orders, bringing food, clearing plates, bringing a check and receipt, and even making a to-go box for the "left-over chocolate cake." The customers happily followed along the lead of the master players, and towards the end, one "baby" even asked for the chocolate cake for her "treat." I talked about the game later with one of the younger kids, and she said that next time, she wasn't going to be a baby. She was going to be a "big girl!"
It was so neat to see the ways that the older children scaffolded the younger children, and to see how the older children were truly the "master players," that Betty Jones describes in her book The Play's the Thing. Sometimes people are skeptical about mixed-age groups, worrying that the older children won't have the stimulation they need, but in my experience, it is just the oppostie: mixed age groups bring out the best in all the kids. Just like when my brothers and I were playing elaborate clubhouse games with all the kids on the block, the older ones figured out ways to teach the younger ones, and the younger ones got to learn from them.

On the playground the other day, two of my older kids were tearing around the patio on the tandem bike. An almost three year old from another class watched with excitement, following them and wanting to try their bike. They started to get annoyed with him, and then I pointed out that he was still figuring out how to play, and maybe they could help him learn. It was like switch had been flipped. Their faces lit up, and they glibly told him, "You can have a turn in five minutes." The little one beamed, and the big boys sped off, now not minding the company, understanding that he was waiting his turn, and maybe, could even be part of the game.
I feel like I am just scratching the surface of the many ways that younger and older children can learn together. I want to think more about leadership opportunities for the older ones, and ways to help the younger ones feel powerful and important too. I want to observe how this naturally happens and consider how I can scaffold it. I want to think about how to talk about these growing skills in Morning Meeting, drawing on the reflection skills of the older ones and the observation skills of the younger ones. I am excited by the taste of this that I am getting this year, and excited for next year, when I will have an even wider range of ages!

Outdoor Joy in Learning

Yesterday was a perfect preschool day, and very little of it was spent at the Preschool. We went into the woods! I have been enjoying teaching a mixed-age group of children, from almost three to already four, and this outing brought out the best in all of them. The older children familiar with the ropes, were buddied up with younger children and made sure to follow the edict made famous in our made-up song, "Don't Run Your Buddy Into a Tree!"

We found road signs to interpret and read and insects and logs and leaves and mushrooms and mysteries. We were walking the Abington Art Center's Art Trail, so there were also many sculptures to explore. The greatest glee was had rolling down huge hills or jumping high into the air. After walking through the woods for a long time, I even corralled the little people into an impromptu Meeting for Worship with a Concern for the Sounds of Nature. Our classroom Moments of Silence have been far from silent this year as they have been busy testing boundaries, but, somehow, in the middle of the woods, with woodpeckers and the wind whistling in the trees, we had a long pause of still, quiet listening. Afterwards, they each shared what they had heard, and I was so gladdened to hear how many of them had recognized the woodpeckers distinctive foraging. While Nature Deficit Disorder is a very real thing, these young children, at least, are not suffering too much.

At the end of our trip, we ran into another class from our school, The Little Frogs, and then joined them in climbing hills, playing peek-a-boo in the "Bears' House," and leaping from the outdoor stage. When we returned to the classroom, we talked about what our favorite part had been, and the almost unanimous answer was, "When we saw the Little Frogs!" Now, one take on this is that it was the last thing that happened, but I like to think that it is because these young children have already developed such meaningful bonds with their friends, that seeing them in an unusual place was really exciting!
So now I've bragged about what a great day we had with the children, I'm going to brag some more (and then get to the point, I promise). Today was a Faculty In-Service Day, and we joined the Lower School in a field trip to Briar Bush Nature Center. The Lower School (where I will be teaching next year with a new mixed-age pre-k program) is in the process of developing an Outdoor Classroom with The Arbor Day Foundation, and so we got to frolic, I mean, learn in the woods about outdoor education. After spending the morning in the woods, we were all energized and excited about the possibilities. There was a palpable buzz as well as a deep, grounded feeling in the group.
And so the moral of the story: people, big and small, need experiences in nature. There is oodles of research on how important this is, how the brain synapses fire better, more creatively, etc when exposed to outdoor experiences. Even our eyesight is better! And while many many experiences from the classroom can be moved outside to optimize the learning, the open-ended exploration, the still quiet moments, and the jubilant jumping, rolling and running are all deep and joyful learning experiences in themselves. So I invite you to go play outside!

Is It Kind? Is It Safe? Does It Build Community?

My friend Carol introduced these three queries to the school community. They were the only "rules" set by her son's sleep-away camp, and they have since gone viral through our school community. They resonate deeply with the Quaker values of my school. Early in the school year, I shared them with my students, and they loved them. The children remind each other to think about safety (in sometimes funny ways, as one child is jumping from a chair and making another fear for his block construction). As three and four year olds, they are also experimenting a lot with the boundaries of friendship, which all to often looks like unkind behavior (like the ever-popular "You're not coming to my birthday party!") And so the kindness is a work in process. The community aspect is still a little murky for their young minds, but they are chewing on it.

Today, however, I realized another profound application of these rules: my own behavior as a teacher. I aspire to be the kind of teacher who speaks quietly and is listened to, who asks open-ended questions to draw out children's learning, who reflects on what the children know and are learning, who understands children's development and acts to support their growth, who loves her students and is loved by them, and who finds joy in learning alongside her students.

Today, I was not that kind of teacher. I was the kind of teacher who feels like she needs to be in control of the classroom, the kind of teacher who calls a student from reading in the book area to put their shoes in the right spot, the kind of teacher teacher who tersely shushes the restless children at nap time, the kind of teacher who repeats her demands for good behavior frequently while helping children follow through infrequently. To be fair, everybody has off days. When this happens to me, I understand that I feel like I need to be controlling children's behavior, and sometimes, in the moment, I can even feel how futile this is, how much it is stressing me out, and the effect it is having on the children. Today, it felt like I was being unkind in my effort to enforce kindness and safety. It felt like I was harming community by seeking to impose artificial rules (Did I really ask, "Do you remember the rule about shoes?" Is there even a rule about shoes? Or had I just made that up on the spot?)

And so this afternoon, as I was breathing through yoga class with my colleagues, I was reflecting on my day, releasing the tension from my shoulders, and realized, that today, I had not lived up to the values that I hold at my core. And realized that as a kindness to myself, and to my children, tomorrow I would try again to live up to the kindness and love that I want in my community. And because I am lucky enough to work with young children and caring colleagues, I know that they will give me as many chances as I need to figure out how to build this community with safety and kindness and love. And I hope that I can return the favor.

Taking Risks

As a teacher of young children, I often extoll the virtues of taking risks as a crucial way of learning. It is easy to see how a child attempting to balance a block on a tall tower, jump from high step or speak in Morning Meeting can lead to learning and growing.
It is scarier to think about taking risks as a teacher. Some people expect teachers to be an authority, to know for certain the answers. But that is not the kind of teacher I am, nor is it the kind of learner I want to model for the children. I know that through taking risk, I learn and grow and that the dialectical process of reflection and action that Paulo Freire calls praxis takes place.

So what does it mean for a teacher to take risks? What are the conditions that need to exist for teacher, children, or any kind of learner to take a risk? To take risks means that I will try new things, new ways of teacher and learning, and that I will reflect and learn from the new experience. To take a risk means that I will fail, that I will make mistakes, and that I have the chance to learn from these mistakes. It means that I have to have the support of my colleagues and supervisors and the trust of the children's families. And I have to trust myself.

This summer, I attended a conference at the Boulder Journey School in Boulder Colorado. Several of the teachers at the school gave presentations about how taking risks had lead to professional growth. For some of them, this meant trying new things in the classroom, like painting a huge wall with magnetic paint, only to realize that the magnetic paint wasn't strong enough to hold the magnets they had planned to use to make ramps and tunnels with the children. For another teacher (who was used to actively engaging with the children and directing play) taking a a risk meant sitting back and observing the children more closely to see what they were learning and exploring without her intervention.
At my school, we work on an emergent curriculum, which each year at the beginning of school, this feels incredibly risky. New families, nervous about their child's first school experience or their kindergarten readiness, don't have the reassurance of a prescribed curriculum, and while I can offer them the knowledge that we teach all the necessary skills during the course of the year (and follow the PA Early Learning Standards), I cannot tell them that we will be studying pumpkins in October and rain forests in January. I trust that we as classroom teachers will observe the children's interests, foster their curiosity, and spin these pieces into new explorations, studies, and projects.

With this blog, I hope to take risk another kind of risk. I hope to share my learning process with a community of families, teachers, thinkers, and learners. I hope to be candid about my risks, my successes and failures, and my learnings.

On Your Mark, Get Set...

 Francisca and I are busy getting ready for the opening of school. We are so excited to welcome our class of Turtles! Each year, the teachers get together to think about how to welcome the children, to create the classroom environment and to start planning curriculum. We are filled with questions, "Who are these little people coming into our classroom?" "What will we do together?" "How can we welcome new families?" 

 As I prepare the classroom, carefully putting together learning centers around the classroom, I ask myself, "Is this a place that I would want to play?" and I keep working until it is just right, inviting investigation, provoking experimentation, creating relaxing place and stimulating places, and joyful places. And once it is just right, it is like the whole room is holding its breath, just waiting for the children to come, play, learn, laugh, discover, and build the new community that will be the Turtles 2011!

Wonder and Academics

A friend recently shared with post with me. What a Four-Year Old Should Know
I love the ideas presented here. Early childhood is a time when wonder and magic and investigation are the daily currency of learning. And I love that as educators, we get to draw on children's natural curiosity to learn about language and writing, scientific investigation and mathematical processes, and difference and negotiation.
I often get questions from families about how we are teaching traditional academic topics like reading, handwriting, and mathematics. There is an underlying anxiety, "Will my child be ready for pre-k or kindergarten?" And I smile, assure them that yes, we are rigorous in our teaching, assessment, and documentation of traditional academics, and then launch into one of my favorite topics: how young children learn.
Young children learn through doing, through the active manipulation and interaction with their environment, teachers, and peers. And what they learn is definitely about academic skills, they learn standard and non-standard measurement techniques as they fill cups of sand in the sensory table,  fluid dynamics as they pour themselves milk at snack (and the relative powers of absorption as they try to mop up the spill with tissues, then paper towels), counting skills as we gather the class for a walking trip, phonemic awareness as we sing silly rhyming sounds, investigation skills as they build ramps for their cars, negotiation skills as they discuss the dinner menu in the dramatic play area. And, even more importantly, they learn the skills and habits that will help them be life-long seekers of knowledge, compassionate friends, helpful community members, stewards of the earth, leaders, followers, and thinkers.
As teachers, it is our job to observe their learning, scaffold them to their next discovery, document their learning, plan for next steps, and build curriculum. And in early childhood, all this learning, all these academics, all this doing, takes place in the context of play and active exploration, with us, their lucky teachers and parents, along-side them to marvel at their discoveries, delight in their connections, guide them to next steps in learning.