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.