The Teacher and Curriculum

"The teacher neither brings the curriculum to the school nor is he or she solely the creator of such. Rather, the teacher is only one of the contributors to the creation of the relationship they call 'school'."

--Carol Brunson Day, in The Unscripted Classroom by Susan Stacey 

This quote inspires me as I consider all the ways that learning happens with young children. In so many ways, the role of the teacher is that of the facilitator. We are opening up and shining light on the explorations that young children naturally encounter. We are creating environments to provoke and engage young children's creativity and imagination. We ask questions, tell stories, laugh, and ponder alongside your children. In short, we engage in "relationship" and together make school.

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?

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!

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.

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.