In 2018 I had the very exciting experience of traveling to Hong Kong to work with the educational staff of the Hong Kong Dalton School. Larry Leaven, who was director of the school at that time, had introduced my book on Choice Time as a professional study text to his staff. I had my first experience doing a professional development session over Skype and then Larry proposed that I come to Hong Kong in August and spend a week working with his staff. What an exciting experience I was in for.

The teachers were all interested and so engaged in their work. I went into classrooms to work with them and we also had one full day dedicated to professional development. Teachers from other schools in the city were invited to join us. Nancy Du was the assistant director of the school at the time (She is now co-director with Shaun Porter) and she and Larry had the wonderful idea of translating my book into Mandarin. The Beijing Normal University Press was interested in the idea. They all believed that the teachers in China were eager for information on how to bring more inquiry and play into their classrooms.

Over the next few months, Nancy worked on the translation, occasionally asking me to clarify some points in the book. And so, at last, the Mandarin version of the book was published and went into the hands of many teachers in China!

One evening in New York, (morning in Hong Kong,) Larry, Nancy and I met via zoom to discuss their experience of bringing Choice Time, the book and the ideas in the book, to China. Here’s a bit of their personal  backgrounds. 

Larry Leaven, most recently the Founding Principal of the Dalton School Hong Kong, has worked in education for 32 years. He earned a degree in elementary education and in music education from Houghton College, Houghton, NY and received his master’s degree in education and a certificate of advanced study in educational administration from the State University of New York College at Buffalo. Before moving to Hong Kong in 2016, he served two years as the principal of the Beijing International Bilingual Academy in Beijing, China. Prior to that, Mr. Leaven served in various capacities in New York State, including: teacher, principal, adjunct lecturer, and assistant superintendent. In addition to his teaching and leadership roles, he has presented at international education conferences and has served on various non-profit boards.

Dr. Nancy, Lijuan, Du grew up in Beijing, and studied at the Beijing Normal University, the Hong Kong Polytechnic University and the University of Hong Kong. She has degrees in Pedagogy, Teaching Chinese as a Foreign Language and Assessment. Over the past 20 years, Dr. Du has been working in different international school settings in Beijing and Hong Kong, and has been serving in many leadership roles. She is currently the Co-Principal of Dalton School Hong Kong. She is super passionate about education, and is a great advocate of Chinese culture, dual Language program and child-centered philosophy.

“Let children touch nature because that which is untouched is unloved.”  (Emma Morris)

John Allgood, a very dedicated kindergarten teacher, observed that when he brought children  into the natural environment, they quite naturally become engaged in collaboration. Although there were still disagreements, they were of a different nature than those that took place in the classroom and children more naturally learned to resolve them. He said that the hierarchy that often exists in the playground, where students with the greatest physical facility  become dominant, was devalued when children are playing in parks and in the woods.

On Thursday, December 10, 2020, I met, via zoom, with John and three other early childhood teachers, Bill Fulbrecht, Amy Binin and Merril Miceli. All four of them have found ways to incorporate bringing children into the natural environment into the lives of their classrooms.

Here is our very informal and engaging discussion,followed with a link to Emma Morris’s TED talk, and also a link to an exciting early childhood program in China, Anjiplay.

Emma Morris’s TED talk – https://www.ted.com/talks/emma_marris_nature_is_everywhere_we_just_need_to_learn_to_see_it

Anji Play – http://www.anjiplay.com

200205_Beginnings

In his book “Play: How It Shapes the Brain, Opens the Imagination, and Invigorates the Soul,” Stuart Brown writes, “Joy is our birthright, and is intrinsic to our essential design.” However, it is probably obvious to many people, now and before this devastating pandemic, that joy been put on a back burner in many classrooms around the country. Joy, as an important priority, has been taken over by the anxious drive to get young children ready for upcoming high-stakes standardized tests.

Thank goodness we have educators like Kristin Eno and Richard Lewis. They both prioritize joy, wonder, poetry, art and music when they work with children and they don’t forget about how important parents are in this equation.

On the afternoon of Wednesday, December 9, 2020 I had the delightful opportunity of taking part in a conversation with Richard and Kristin. The discussion became so exciting that we decided on making plans for a part two. But that is still in the works. For today, here is part one of Living by Wonder: The Imaginative Life of Childhood. After listening to our talk, you can view one of Kristin’s studio lessons for the preschoolers that she works with at Beginnings Nursery School at the bottom of this post.

When I began teaching in the late sixties and early seventies, I heard about the new public school in Harlem, Central Park East, and its foundation of progressive education. At the same time, I was reading Charles Silberman’s magisterial anthology, The Open Classroom Reader. These possibilities for creating schools and classrooms that honored children’s innate intelligence, desire and need for play and exploration filled me with an excitement for teaching.

Then, as the years went on, the educational landscape changed. Testing and rigid standards that didn’t take into account all that we know about children, how they develop and what they need to become creative thinkers and future adult citizens, took over what was happening in classrooms across the country.

Some, however, stayed strong and true to their ideals. Deborah Meier and Anna Allanbrook are two of the shining examples of progressive leaders in education who did not give up and who keep fighting for what they know education should stand for.

I’m honored to have had a conversation with these two noted educators and inspired thinkers. I hope you enjoy this important dialogue.

During this frightening and sad time in our history something personally disturbing happened to me. While I stayed practically locked up in my house with my husband, I saw so many people busy at their important work. We live near a hospital and in addition to the painful sound of ambulance alarms, day and night, I was so aware of all the brave people who were working in the hospital, always facing personal danger of catching the virus themselves.

Teachers were quickly learning the technology that would allow them to reach out to their students, hoping that they could soothe, assure and instruct them at the same time. Parents were working from home while simultaneously becoming home-schoolers, teaching their children how to manage often-confusing technology and helping them to stay focused on this new mode of instruction.

In my own family, my husband,  whose time had been taken up with some exhibitions of his work, was now back in his studio, totally immersed in an exciting new painting. My daughter  saw her entire year of piano concerts get cancelled one by one. After a few months, she pulled herself out of an understandably depressed state and began recording CDs, teaching students, via Zoom, as far away as Asia, and performing concerts that are being streamed on the internet. My son-in-law took on a huge project, with the help of my grandson, and built a magical, screened-in summer room in their garden. Now he’s back at work, teaching 4th grade students at P.S. 321. My grandson, who has been studying acting in London, auditioned and was given an important role in a new Netflix film about a group of teenagers who attempt to start a heavy metal band. He’s now in Portland, Oregon filming Metal Lords!

That leaves me. I seemed to be faced with a personal, existential crisis. Where is my place during this unusual time? As an early childhood consultant, focusing on exploration, play, Choice Time and inquiry, my work disappeared for now and possibly in the future. I seemed to have no constructive purpose and I felt, to put it mildly, useless.

My daughter wondered why I wasn’t writing on my blog. How could I? I don’t have an authentic voice. I’m not working with teachers or children now. I’m not parenting a young child. Why would anyone have an interest in what I would have to say?

Simone, forever wise, suggested that I interview interesting people and post the interviews on my blog. I thought about her suggestion and came up with a twist to her idea. Instead of interviews, I am going to record conversations between people who have very interesting and provocative contributions that should inspire refreshing thinking about the education of young children.

Perhaps these ideas might guide us in taking hold of education and assuring that something positive will grow out of this challenging, distressing time.

Here is the list of the upcoming blog post conversations:

• Richard Lewis and Kristin Eno – Living by Wonder: The Imaginative Life of Childhood

• Deborah Meier and Anna Allanbrook – The Interplay of Democracy and Play in Education

• Nancy Du and Larry Leaven – Bringing Choice Time to China

• Bill Fulbrecht, Amy Binin, John Allgood and Merril Miceli – Bringing Children Into the Natural Environment

• Lella Gandini and Cathy Topal – Beautiful Stuff: The Gift of Discovery

• Dr. Peter Metz, Peter Rawitsch, Nakoley Renville and Anne Haas Dyson – What Price Do Children Pay When Play Disappears?

• Christy Ziegler, Melissa Toogood, Katie Rust Brown, Sheldon Brown and Pier Imbriano – Parenting Young Children During the Pandemic

• Kathy Collins, Matt Glover, Vicki Vinton and Aeriale Johnson – Nurturing Young Readers and Writers During the Pandemic and Beyond

It was August, 1976. My husband, Simon, my daughter, Simone, my dog, Lucky, and I were just about to leave our apartment in Brooklyn to spend a year at the American Academy in Rome. At the time we didn’t realize that the year would be extended to almost three years. Just before we left, my friend Connie stopped by with a gift for Simone. In addition to a lovely picture book, she also gave her a portable transistor radio. For my almost four year old daughter, this radio was an  exciting new possession and she couldn’t wait until we arrived in Rome so that she could play it all by herself.

After what seemed like an incredibly long trip to Rome (our dog had to be sedated and she nervously chomped on my finger when I gave her a piece of hot dog with a pill inside of it, my husband got a major toothache while we were on the plane and calmed the pain with many glasses of Scotch, Simone realized she could get as much soda as she wanted from the lovely stewardess and I was so exhausted that I didn’t put a stop to her increasing sugar high) we finally arrived in Rome! When we got to our apartment in Monteverde Vecchio, Simon and I were eager to take a nap and Simone was eager to turn on her new radio. We left her in her charming bedroom, went into our bedroom and immediately fell asleep until…

There was a wail of horror coming from Simone and we rushed in to see what the problem was. “My radio! Somethings wrong! It’s an American radio and it’s talking Italian!”  Her world was crumbling. She was in a new country, a new apartment, a new bedroom without all of her toys from home and now to make everything unbearable, her radio didn’t know how to talk right! Her almost four year old world seemed to be falling apart.

This memory returned to me while I was thinking about the children who were confined to their apartments or, if they were lucky, their yards, not able to play with their friends, wisked away quickly from their teachers and classmates, living in a world where people’s faces were covered with masks and where they had to keep a social distance whenever they did get the opportunity to go outside.

One thing that I’m certain of. This is not the time to worry about children falling behind. I’ll write more about this idea of children falling behind in another blog post. It is a time for everyone in the house to respect and comfort each other. Children need respect and comfort and parents need the same!

In an upcoming post, I’ll write about how giving children time to be bored can lead to some wonderful discoveries and creations. I’ll also write about how parents can support children’ in developing higher-order thinking by chosing questions and observations carefully. I’ll also write about the difference between play and playful. These are important distinctions to recognize.

I encourage parents to have confidence that their children are always developing and learning. Watch them as  they  use their powers of investigation and imagination to figure out what they can do with that plain empty box that you were going to toss into the recycle bin. Is it play? Is it learning? 

“Play is the work of the child.” – Maria Montessori

From 2011 to 2015 I had the pleasure of working as a consultant in Katie Rust’s first grade classroom. Katie’s wonderful co-teacher was Andy Mastin. We focused on how to move their instruction from a more traditional teaching approach to one which emphasizes inquiry, play and exploration. We had a blast! Katie and Andy just grabbed any suggestions that I shared, made it their own and ran with it. Now Katie is a second/third grade teacher and she’s writing her own wonderful blog. I’m really eager and pleased to share her latest blog entry with you.

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Experts Everywhere
Posted on July 30, 2020 by Katie Rust Brown

Students learn from experts on pizza, commuting and pet care.

As word of the coronavirus’ spread from one nation to another began to circulate in the news, our 2019-2020 school year was in its glory days. Many teachers, myself included, often note that it can take months for a classroom to fully develop into the type of community that we envision for our students. Routines take time to learn and, by the time the holiday break arrives, the classroom resembles the ‘well oiled machine’ often cited as the ideal.

In February, as we began to anticipate school closures, our class was chugging along in the middle of a study on trains (pun intended). We learned about the communities of New York state, focusing particularly on how different types of communities rely on one another and connect to one another. Rural, suburban and urban communities may differ, but they all need one another to work as an interdependent system. We used the train system as our main topic to weave in these bigger concepts of connectivity and interdependence. Then, as we’d been fearing, our school closed. The train, metaphorically, stopped.

The school I work in, Compass Charter School, understood the urgency of caring for children’s basic needs first. We were offered flexibility in our curriculum, and our grade shifted our study to a focus on resilient communities, which allowed us to utilize some of our previous work plans, but also engage students in learning about current events in real-time. During the following months, our class focused on strengthening and maintaining emotional bonds with families and students, while continuing to encourage curiosity about the world around us.

The question, of course, is how to interact with the world when the world has shut down.

Experts

This post focuses on experts. For our purposes, an expert is anyone who knows a lot about a topic. Sometimes experts know about a topic because it’s something they’ve studied in school. More often, though, an expert knows a lot about a topic because it’s part of their everyday life, either at home or at work. A mechanic is an expert at cars. A chef is an expert at food. But experts have grander banks of knowledge than you may even realize. Birders know a lot about birds, but they also may know about local parks, how to keep bugs away while birding, what boots to wear while hiking and how to pack snacks on the go! Experts may gain knowledge of their topic through their own personal research and education, but most knowledge that our students want to learn is likely to be information that’s been learned through experience.

During our quarantine here in New York, from March through June, our school community utilized the knowledge of experts on multiple occasions, on the small scale level of students calling an expert for information, to larger, full-school interviews with experts. Both for in-school learning as well as remote learning, utilizing an expert is a way to maintain social interaction with others, practice listening and speaking skills, and to encourage learners to explore a topic of personal interest with someone with common interests.

Why experts? The unique value of experiences with experts lies in their personal connection to the material that they share. Experts who share about their daily jobs, their family life or their own cultures have particular investment in the information that they’re sharing. This investment often leads to an emotionally engaging lesson built on the passion of the expert for their topic. Although reading books and watching videos can provide new information to students, experts offer their own unique perspective on a topic and can provide detailed facts in response to student questions. Utilizing expert knowledge also provides validation and appreciation of experts in fields that are often overlooked. Gas station attendants, pet store workers, train conductors and protestors are important parts of our society that deserve to feel recognized for their contributions.

How do I find an expert? The wonderful thing about experts is that they’re everywhere. They’re everyone. Everyone is an expert at something. The challenge is finding an expert at the specific topic that you are researching. As an example, if your class is learning about ponds, you can ask yourself who you may know that has any experience with ponds. Think broadly. Do you know anyone whose job involves ponds? Do any family members have stories they’ve told about ponds (real or tall tales)? Do you know any friends who have visited ponds? Have you yourself ever been to or seen a pond? Are there ponds close by (and if there are, can you call the local ranger’s office or find someone who frequents the pond to answer questions for your students?) Are there pet stores nearby that may have experts on pond animals? It’s likely that whatever topic you’re studying, you know someone who has expert knowledge on that topic and can broaden your student’s knowledge.

If you can’t find a personal connection to a topic that you’re researching, I highly suggest contacting any known expert on the topic. Why not try? I’ve personally throw out flyers to friends, “looking for someone to talk about organizing protests,” I’ve emailed professional chefs, I’ve walked to the local junk yard and Target… all of which ended with offers from experts to meet with students. You would be warmed by the willingness of people to share their knowledge for the benefit of teaching children.

Preparing for an expert experience: Before meeting with or interviewing and expert, you may sometimes want to expose students to the topic at hand or the expert themselves. You can do this by writing or finding short articles about the expert’s topic. Depending on whether this experience is launching or extending student learning on a topic, you may also want to brainstorm a list of questions for your expert. These questions can either be shared ahead of time, answered in written format, or can be asked during a live experience together.

Expert experiences, in person and while learning remotely

Live Expert Interviews and Visits: When teaching in a classroom, experts may be asked to visit in person. You may also want to plan a trip to the expert’s place of work to experience their knowledge even deeper. But, a live interview with an expert is also possible remotely via any video platform. This can be done as a whole class, in small groups, or privately between a student and the expert. A “visit” to an expert, when the expert brings you into their world, is another option for a live experience. Experts may show you what they do at work, they may demonstrate a talent or hobby from home, or can take you on a tour of a location that may not be accessible for the class as a whole. These live experiences have the benefit of allowing questions on the fly that students brainstorm, but may also be more difficult to plan due to time restrictions of students, experts and teachers. These live experiences are not limited only to students. During remote work times, teachers and staff may also learn from experts via video call PD and interviews. This past spring, my staff and I attended professional development sessions with Paula Rogovin, author of The Research Workshop, and were able to learn from her expertise and ask questions about moving forward with the work in our school.
Staff members learn about research and inquiry from Paula Rogovin via an online video call during remote learning

Pre-Recorded Expert Interviews/Videos: If interviewing an expert live is not an option, or you would like to utilize experts with whom you don’t have personal contact or connections, you can utilize pre-recorded interviews or videos to encourage students to learn from those with knowledge of a particular topic. While learning remotely in April, our students were studying resilient communities and were learning about and analyzing the job of essential workers. We wanted students to broaden their view of the word ‘essential,’ and we reached out to a class parent, Heather, who was a veterinarian in our area. While it was difficult to find the right time to interview Heather live, she was gracious enough to film parts of her work day at her veterinarian office to share with our students. In this way, our class was able to learn from Heather and her work in a time that best suited both our expert and our students. You can view Heather’s video an example of this type of pre-reorded expert experience HERE. Additionally, utilizing interview videos or day-in-the-life videos of experts in a variety of fields, found on youtube or other video websites, can supplement student learning.

A class family assists in creating pre=recorded videos for student research

Experts as study resource When researching a topic of interest, students may be encouraged to contact an expert as a source of knowledge. You can list a brief summary of the expert’s experience, list their contact information and the preferred ways of communication (email, phone call) It is advisable to contact with experts first to let them know that students may be reaching out. I also suggest limiting the time that students may be contacting this individual, which helps students schedule their learning during work/school hours and offers the expert the flexibility of answering student questions in times that are helpful for them. Our school has a foundational belief in sustainable living. During our study on resilient communities, it became clear that many systems in New York City (and globally) were becoming strained as a result of the excess of people working from home. As an option, students were able to contact a friend of mine to ask about his job in engineering and how his job had been affected by the quarantine in NYC.

Experts can be found everywhere. They’re your family members, your friends, your teachers, your grocers, your firefighters and your nail technicians. Utilizing an expert promises a personalized and engaging lesson for children and validates the work of our everyday heroes who keep our society moving.

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You can read Katie’s blog here, at www.TeachItOut.com.  You can also find Katie on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram under the name TeachItOut.