Facilitating Dialogue

The block area was very popular this morning, and I sat down to observe all the goings-on. I recently visited the TriBeCa Community School in Manhattan where one of the teachers described their approach to problem solving saying, "We don't negotiate turn-taking; we facilitate dialogue." I loved this framing of the issue, and so I sat down with the intention to try it out. It turns out there was a lot  of dialogue to facilitate, and that with very little help, the Turtles are able to really navigate some of these conversations. Instead of asking directive questions like "Who had it first?" I ask questions like:

What is the problem?
How can we solve this problem?
How did that make you feel?
Did you tell your friend?
How did that make your friend feel?
What's your idea?
What's you friend's idea?

With a little bit of support, a couple different dyads worked happily and constructively for almost half an hour! They built castles, garages, and a highway.

Spreading the Joy of Outdoor Learning: Greening Urban School Yards

I was so lucky to be a part of an amazing Collaborative Design Charrette and Public Presentation today in Center City. I am so excited about this initiative which brought together experts like landscape achitects (including my talented friends at Viridian Landscape Studio) with community members, educators, parents, students, and school district officials. Our mission was to generate ideas and ultimately master plan sketches for the greening of two Philadelphia schoolyards: John B. Kelly School (a K-6 school just down the street from my Germantown house) and Lea School in West Philadelphia. I was able to draw on the research and conversations we have had here at AFS as we have planned the new outdoor initiative AFS Outdoors, especially around the ways that connections to nature foster deeper learning for people of all ages. The process and results were simply amazing, and it was so inspiring to be a part of this important work!

Diversity Everyday

Recently, a few blogs popped up in my feed on the importance of talking about race with young children. This is not always an easy topic for families or educators, especially white families and educators. As a white teacher, I have had a long journey of coming to understand race and diversity in my own life and in the life of the children in my classroom. Critical to my understanding of how to talk about these issues with young children is the book, Anti-Bias Education for Young Children and Ourselves, and the older Anti-Bias Curriculum. They outline a very simple and developmentally appropriate (which are, of course, the magic words) to developing all children's ability to recognize and counter bias in our culture.
This can be hard for parents to think about, and harder still for them to talk to young children about. But it is very necessary. In the somewhat tongue-in-cheek blog post, How To Raise Racist Kids, Jonathan Liu points out that the single best way to perpetuate bias is:

Don’t talk about race. Don’t point out skin color. Be “color blind.”

He offers evidence and reasearch to back this up, and then point us on to five tips for talking about racism with kids.

The other day, I was having a conversation with a prospective parent (who was white) about the importance of a diverse environment for young children to learn, "especially in today's world," a refrain I often hear. I enthusiastically agreed with him, adding, however, that simply being in a diverse environment does not teach young children to understand and resist the prejudice that subtly (and not always so subtly) infiltrates our society. We must do what we may not have been taught do to (especially if we are white), and talk about it, everyday, even if it is awkward, or we don't get it just right the first time. Because Black history isn't important just one month of the year, and understanding identity, diversity, and bias don't just happen magically.

What about you? What messages did you get about race as a little person? Was it okay to talk about?
If you have kids, what happens at your house? Does your child talk about race? Do you feel comfortable talking with them about race? Do you talk with other families about race? 
If you are an educator, do you feel comfortable talking with your students about race? Do you get support for these conversations?

What is Meanness? Jumping into the Unknown with Emergent Social Curriculum

So for a while, my assistant teacher and I have been working with our class of 3 and 4 year olds to find ways to solve problems, and to be kind to each other. As is very typical for three and four year olds, however, many children have been experimenting with inclusion and exclusion and what it means to be friends. It seemed like we had been handling the incidents on a case by case basis, often stepping in as adults to resolve the problem. As the teachers thought about this, and how it was affecting the mood of the classroom, we decided to take a new and different approach. We decided to bring the problem to the children, and see if we could investigate the problem. We are calling it: The Meanness Problem. Like many of our projects, this undertaking is not one that we have done before, so we do not have a concrete map of where we are going. Rather we have guiding research questions that we have presented to the children:

What is meanness? How do you know if something is mean? Where is all the meanness coming from? 

We started the project today with a GIANT piece of paper, to symbolize how this was a big big problem. On this paper, we will write our observations about meanness. In our first discussion today, the children sat with rapt attention, and had many ideas about meanness. They clearly had experienced the meanness, and knew many many ways to say mean words. We studiously wrote down the children's ideas. "Meannes is liek when you say, 'You can't come to my birthday party,'" "When you say that you're not my best friend anymore," or "When somebody tells somebody that they are not gong to play cars anymore." They suggested drawing a mean face so we would know what the writing was about, and so we drew a mean face with slanted eyebrows and "mean teeth." We asked them to help us do the research together, and anytime somebody said or did something mean, we would write it on the paper to gather our data on meanness. In our next meeting, we will ask the children how we can learn more about the meanness.

This is a different approach to the social issues of three and four year olds than we as teachers typically take. My assistent and I have had discussions about the best way to talk about this problem with the children, and we have spoken with other educators as well. She is eager to do a corollary niceness project, while I am interested in following the thread of meanness to see if we can uncover more information about where this problem is coming from. We will find ways to pursue both avenues, finding ways to document both the problem, and how the children are thinking about solving it through teamwork, cooperation, and kindness. I want to figure out how they understand the meanness in the room, and how they think that we can dispell it. I want the children to own this problem. Only then can we start to figure out how to get it out. One child said, "Where is all this meanness coming from? It's a mystery!" And there is nothing that this class loves move than a mystery to solve!
As adults, it can feel uncomfortable to dwell on the negative emotions that exclusion in play can bring up for us, and it can be tempting to jump to the opposite of kindness. This exploration of exclusion is a fundemental part of child development, and it feels like we have a group of children with the social intelligence to tackle this problem head on, dealing directly with the "mean" and think about how it is affecting the individuals and the group. We are interested to see where this goes and how the class will figure out how to solve the problem. We also encouraged the families to have conversations with their child about the subject and to share any thoughts that they have with us so we can add it to our research.
What about you, dear reader? Do you remember being mean as a young child? Or someone being mean to you? Can you help us with our research on meanness?