Tag Archives: Deborah Meier

Educators Thoughts On Teaching the Way Children Learn

A group of educators recently decided to meet on Zoom to discuss what we could do about the disturbing direction of Early Childhood education in the New York City public schools. Years that should be filled with opportunities for exploration, inquiry, social interaction and play have turned into days filled with scripted, direct instruction. This leaves very little, and in many cases, no, opportunities for joyful, engaged learning and informative, insightful and fulfilling teaching. We have composed a proposal that we will present to Mayor-Elect Zohran Mamdani and to his eduction transition team.

Ideally, we would like our proposal to be circulated as widely as possible. To this end, we hope that you will share it with anyone who is particularly concerned with the education of children, 4 to 8 years old.

We would also love to have your feedback.

Here is who we are .

Anna Allanbrook (retired principal, The Brooklyn New School)

Nancy Cardwell Ph.D (faculty member, Graduate Program in Early Childhood Education, School of Education , The City College of New York)

Renee Dinnerstein (Early Childhood Literacy Consultant)

Beverly Falk Ed.D (director, the High-Quality Early Learning Project and Professor/Director Emerita, Graduate Program in Early Childhood Education , The School of Education, The City College of New York)

Deborah Meier, (founder and retired director , Central Park East schools)

Lauren Monaco (early childhood educator and activist)

Gil Schmerler, Ed.D ( retired director. Leadership for Educational Change, Bank Street College of Education)

Our proposal
We are a group of NYC educators – founders/principals of learner-centered schools, faculty of the City College School of Education and Bank Street College of Education, and teacher/parent activists for learner-centered education. We write to share some of our thoughts/concerns/recommendations for the NYC Public Schools that we hope the Mamdani administration will consider and put into action. While there are many structural/budgetary issues that need to be addressed, we are especially concerned with early childhood education and will focus on this – our area of experience/expertise. What follows are some of our concerns with recommendations for how to address them.

1. We believe that the NYC Public Schools (NYCPS) view of early childhood is too narrow.

Currently, early childhood – and the central administrative team overseeing it – considers early childhood to be birth – 4. The nationally recognized professional standard and developmentally-based age range for early childhood is birth – age 8. It is widely accepted in the fields of education, medicine, psychology and neuroscience that during the first 8 years of life optimal development is supported by active learning/play where children have extensive periods for choice and inquiry facilitated by teachers’ responsiveness to children’s questions, interests, and understandings. Young children learn through active involvement with materials and relationships with children and adults. Unfortunately, in too many classrooms there are no opportunities for this: no choice/work time, no materials with which to engage in educative play. Kindergartens throughout the NYC Public Schools do not have choice/work centers, blocks, dramatic play areas, trips, and/or recess. Work sheets and didactic teaching dominate the day, with brief periods of ‘playtime’ given as a reward at the end of the day. The absence of educative play opportunities in kindergarten through 2nd grade is resulting in increased incidences of anxiety and depression. Some pediatricians have noticed a significant enough pattern to call this ‘play deprivation’.
We recommend instead:
– Align the NYCPS early childhood definition with national, professional, and global standards, birth to age 8 years, specifically to include kindergarten through 2nd grade.
– Give responsibility for young children’s learning in K-2 to the NYCPS early childhood team.
– Ensure that choice/work time be a prominent part of every early childhood classroom where children can make choices, engage in inquiry.
– Ensure early childhood classrooms be amply provisioned with materials for active learning, including (but not limited to) blocks, manipulative materials, dramatic play equipment, books, and art supplies.
– Ensure all children have at least an hour of outdoor play/recess each day

2. We are concerned about the damaging effects of the mandated, scripted curricula implemented in all grade levels.

Developmental and neuroscience research have established the importance of educators’ responsiveness to children’s interests, questions, cultural and linguistic backgrounds. A scripted curriculum does not allow opportunities for the “serve and return” exchanges that neuroscientists point to as critical for optimal brain development. Further, the scripted, generic curriculum doesn’t provide the necessary responsiveness to the diversity of children’s and families’ backgrounds, because the mandated, scripted curriculum does not connect to the children’s backgrounds/contexts/languages. Children and teachers are required to be passive recipients of external forces, rather than dynamic and active participants in their learning as promoted by neuroscientists, psychologists, and pediatricians. Additionally, millions of dollars are being spent on purchasing and enforcing use of these curricula that could be better spent in ways we suggest below.
We recommend instead:
– Center curriculum development around national/state/district/professional standards, for example, those of the National Association for the Education of Young Children
(NAEYC).
– Collaborate with community-based teachers’ and parents’ groups to choose/shape/develop their own curricula that is relevant/connected to the contexts of children’s lives.
– All curricula should be mapped to demonstrate the coverage and alignment with national/state/district/professional standards.
– Offer ongoing, substantive professional development to support educators’ content and pedagogical knowledge to sustain young children’s learning and optimal development.
And/or
– Offer pre-developed curricula, as guides, that integrate young children’s diversity of experiences/languages/cultures, making it clear that the curricula are guides, not mandates.
– Offer ongoing professional development to assist educators in how to be responsive to children’s interests, questions, different strengths and modes of inquiry, cultural/racial/linguistic backgrounds
– Provide active learning/play-based environments that will develop young children’s academic skills, content knowledge, social emotional learning and critical thinking skills to help them distinguish between facts and misinformation.
– Provide time in the school day for young children to exchange ideas, learn to listen to and be respectful of others, and reposition children as well as the teacher as resources for learning in the classroom.
– Provide time for conversations and relationships in the classroom to support the development of empathy and understanding toward others that are critical to learn about and sustain a democratic community in the classroom in preparation for life-long, active civic engagement. For example, in Denmark all children aged 6-16 years have a period in their school day focused on the development of empathy toward others. This contributes to the fact that they are ranked internationally as the happiest society in the world.

3. We are concerned about the reading programs that do not reflect the consensus research from developmental psychologists and neuroscientists about how children learn to read.

We are further concerned about the lengthy periods of time spent on worksheets, passive instruction on phonics, phonemic awareness, and decontextualized skills at the expense of meaning making and other elements of literacy development. Neuroscience advocates for a dual focus on meaning-making elements (content and experience-based knowledge, children’s interests, culture/linguistic backgrounds) in addition to decoding elements (phonics, phonemic awareness, alphabet knowledge etc. See chart below.
We recommend instead:
– Expand the notion of reading development beyond phonics by adding the extensive rich supply of children’s literature to skill instruction in order to capture children’s interests and excitement that has been proven to enhance the literacy learning process.
– Infuse literacy learning into active, project-based learning experiences across all content areas, both fiction and non-fiction. We also urge the use of ‘functional literacy development’ that includes making signs in the block area, writing lists, letters, and labels in dramatic play areas, using charts to document children’s comments, questions, ideas and understandings, and pointing out awareness of environmental print, etc.

4. We are concerned about the overuse of testing that does not support children’s learning and that consumes inordinate amounts of educators’ time.
We recommend instead:
– Encourage and support educators’ use of professional development standards-based performance assessments and multiple forms of data collections mapped to standards. This can include portfolio collections of children’s work, documented observations, and the use of developmental continua mapped to professional, national, state, and district standards. This approach was developed in NYS in the 1990s and early 2000’s and has data to back up its efficacy.

5. We are concerned about the overuse of screens and artificial intelligence in schools.

Developmental and neuroscience psychologists along with pediatricians warn against screen time for children, especially young children under 9 years old. Neural connections that are the brain structures that support learning are consolidated quickly and effectively with ‘serve and return’ relational and in real-life interactions rather than through abstracted online/digital encounters. Additionally, artificial intelligence can be deceptive and keep children from developing the social emotional and relational intelligence necessary for sustained relationships throughout the lifespan as well as developing the skills they need to be critical thinkers and distinguish reality from misinformation.
We recommend instead:
– Limit screen time and the use of artificial intelligence to encourage real-life, in-person interactions that support learners to learn how to be critical thinkers and to distinguish fact from fiction. Limiting screen time is an important support to help children develop social emotional learning to support interactive and project learning.
– Provide ongoing professional development to help educators develop ways to harness technology in developmentally supportive ways to nurture healthy brain development and learning.

6. We are concerned that large numbers of children and families in NYC schools are unhoused, suffer from food insecurity, and/or are in need of comprehensive supports to survive.

Additionally, we see a need for schools to attend to the voices and concerns of parents/families/caregivers in the community and involve them in the learning life of the school.
We recommend:
– Reintroduce the community school model that utilizes the resources of community-based organization such as the Children’s Aid Society to provide the necessary supports like access to food, housing, health screening, vaccines, dental care, hearing exams, eye exams all critical for children’s academic success.
– Create collaborative governance structures that give voice to parents/families/caregivers/community concerns in decisions about the education of their children.

Respectfully submitted (in alphabetical order):
Anna Allanbrook, retired principal, the Brooklyn New School
Nancy Cardwell, Ph.D., faculty member, Graduate Program in Early Childhood Education, School of Education, The City College of New York
Renee Dinnerstein, early childhood literacy consultant
Beverly Falk, Ed.D., director, The High-Quality Early Learning Project and Professor/Director Emerita, Graduate Program in Early Childhood
Education, The School of Education, The City College of New York
Deborah Meier, founder and retired director, Central Park East Schools
Lauren Monaco, early childhood educator and activist
Gil Schmerler, Ed.D., retired director, Leadership for Educational Change, Bank Street College of Education

A YEAR OF KINDERGARTEN INQUIRY

Can Learning As Play Make a Kindergarten Comeback ?

5 Replies

(Urban Matters) September 21, 2016

Can ‘Learning as Play’ Make a Kindergarten Comeback?

By Lydie Raschka

One day last school year, a girl in Fanny Roman’s kindergarten class at PS 244 in Flushing, Queens arrived bubbling with excitement about her new shoes. With Roman’s encouragement, she began tracing classmates’ feet on paper and constructing “shoes,” using pipe cleaners for laces. Her enthusiasm proved contagious; in response, Roman read poetry and picture books about shoes and students set up a play shoe store of their own, with different-sized shoes in boxes, labeled “Jellies” or “Sneakers”, as they categorized by size and even priced their wares. In their writing, they started using words such as “Velcro,” buckles” and “shoelaces.”

Welcome to “choice time.” In a number of New York City elementary school kindergarten classes, it revives, in modified fashion, the once-common play-as-learning “free time” that’s been driven almost to extinction in favor of whole-class instruction, textbooks, worksheets, and other elements of more rigorous education in the Common Core era.

Nationally, the amount of kindergarten time spent on reading and math instruction has substantially increased, according to a recent study published by AERA Open, titled, “Is Kindergarten the New First Grade?” Authors Daphna Bassok, Scott Latham, and Anna Rorem found that some 80% of a national sample of teachers now believe students should learn to read in kindergarten, compared to only 31% who thought that in 1998; only 40% reported at least an hour of student-driven activities per day in their classrooms.

While there’s no question that early education is critical, there’s also a growing number of researchers, educators, and parents questioning whether the formal academic approach now rooted in many kindergarten classrooms has gone too far.

Academic expectations and play don’t have to be mutually exclusive goals, some early childhood experts say. Lilian G. Katz, author of Lively Minds: Distinctions Between Academic versus Intellectual Goals for Young Children, argues that while “bits of information,” such as learning the sound of the letter “s,” do matter, they may not warrant as much time as schools increasingly give them. She and other prominent educators, including Deborah Meier and Nancy Carlsson-Paige, are part of a nonprofit group called “Defending the Early Years,” intended to help early childhood educators combat an increased focus on academics over the discovery, inquiry, and play that stimulates the mind in a fuller way and is often called “choice time.”

Another highly respected, now retired, elementary school teacher in New York City, Renée Dinnerstein, believes that a way to stimulate a rich choice time is to “make the classroom into a sort of laboratory for children – to create a science center where they really feel like scientists; an art center where they really feel like artists.”

“The challenge,” she says, “is to plan inquiry-based, explorative choice time, acknowledging important elements of free play within the high standards expected” in the Common Core-era classroom – even in kindergarten.

Dinnerstein expands on these ideas on her blog, Investigating Choice Time: Inquiry, Exploration and Play, and in a new book, Choice Time: How to Deepen Learning through Inquiry and Play, Pre-K – 2 published by Heinemann Press. In recent years, she also has helped develop kindergarten choice time at various local schools.

“The teacher’s prepared environment is essentially what differentiates free play and choice time,” Dinnerstein says. That can mean, for example, creating a classroom “construction area” replete with kid-sized safety goggles, vests, blocks, hard hats, sign-making materials and mini-people or animals. Teachers introduce items of interest based on what kids say and do.

PS 244 principal Bob Groff says that for his students (drawn from a heavily Chinese immigrant neighborhood where some 70% start school with little or no English) “choice time is a great opportunity to develop language socially and academically at the same time.” It also encompasses reading, writing, and math learning goals. “This blends all of that together,” he said. “It’s natural, not forced. It’s going to have more long-lasting success.”

Kindergarten teacher Fanny Roman is a believer in choice time, too, and has put it at the start of the school day. “I liked it first thing,” she said. “It made me so excited every day to come in.” Nevertheless, choice time also takes time—time that isn’t easy to find. “Every minute counts,” said Roman. “It’s all about the testing grades and what we have to do to get them ready in kindergarten.”

Dinnerstein thinks those minutes could be used better—to create an intellectually stimulating kindergarten that promotes reasoning, analyzing, predicting, and questioning. “When kids are pushed to read early, they’re not pushed to do a lot of thinking,” she said. “It’s not like I’m against children learning to read. [But] I don’t think the goal is that every child leaving kindergarten has to learn to read. If you have two children in one family, they’re not learning everything at the same speed—crawling, pushing up, standing—but they all end up walking.”

Lydie Raschka is on the staff of the InsideSchools project of the Center for New York City Affairs. She’s a Montessori teacher-trainer during the summer months.
Photo Credit: Fanny Roman
Urban matters home

The Teacher You Want To Be

5 Replies

It’s almost here! On October 22, Heinemann will publish The Teacher You Want to Be, the book that grew out of a 2012 study tour to Reggio Emilia that Matt Glover and I organized. The tour gathered together a group of educators to visit Reggio’s world-famous pre-schools and their new elementary school. We used our observations to jump-start some meaningful conversations that would broaden our thinking about the teaching of literacy.

Our group discussions while we were in Italy, both with the teachers and parents from the Reggio schools and by ourselves in the evening, were thought provoking and exhilarating. We returned to the US determined to keep the conversation going among ourselves and with the public. All of the participants were invited to write personal reflections on their trip experiences. These reflections formed the basis of our Statement of Beliefs, thirteen beliefs describing how children should be learning and how schools and educators can best approach teaching. Each belief is quite descriptive, dealing with what we see as the major issues challenging American education.

Heinemann then got on board and decided that these beliefs were so important that they deserved to be reflected upon by some of our most important minds in education and shared with the public. Now we are almost ready with the final product. The Teacher You Want To Be is a beautiful publication, edited by Ellin Keene and Matt Glover, with an introduction by Alfie Kohn. The book consists of essays written by study group participants (Kathy Collins, Vicki Vinton, Stephanie Jones) and by Katherine Bomer, Deborah Meier, Sir Ken Robinson, Peter Johnston and Gay Ivey, Heidi Mills, Ellin Keene, Dennie Palmer Wolf, Tom Newkirk, Katie Wood Ray, Jose Vilson, and an interview with Simone Dinnerstein, and Jeremy and Adrian Greensmith (my grandson!). This publication was lovingly nurtured from beginning to end by Vicki Boyd and Zoe Ryder White.

I’m so pleased to share the Statement of Beliefs with you and hope that you are as excited as I am to read the essays that these beliefs inspired. I hope that teachers and administrators, book discussion groups, college education classes and anyone interested in improving the state of education, will read this book and keep this vital discussion alive.

Beliefs, Explanations and Issues

Belief 1 (Teachers as researchers)
We believe that teachers are researchers and that instructional decisions are best when based on what teachers have learned and documented by observing and listening carefully to students throughout the day.

Explanation Issues and Concerns
The decision of what should happen in a classroom each day can best be made by teachers who know their students well. Teachers are researchers, engaged in a pedagogy of authentic listening and observation, using what they learn from students today to influence what happens tomorrow. These decisions should be made with intention and with a strong belief in the rights of children to use natural learning strategies such as storytelling and wondering. Teachers, not programs, should make instructional decisions for children. Increasingly we see schools where the expectation is that all students be taught the same thing, same day, at the same time. How can we realistically expect students across classrooms (or even within a classroom) to have the same needs, and therefore, be taught the same lesson at the same time? Even within one classroom, there is a range of abilities and interests. We should expect classroom instruction to recognize and reflect this range of abilities and interests. Education that is “standardized” is not responsive to unique human beings who have particular strengths, gifts, interests and challenges.

Belief 2 (Teachers as learners)
We believe that the way teachers approach their own learning should parallel the way children approach their learning, and school is the place where both teachers’ and students’ learning is characterized by engagement, purpose, and self-direction.

We believe children should be actively engaged in their learning, exploring areas of interest and curiosity. They should be self-directed, be able to work interdependently, and have opportunities for authentic choices that engage them in deep thinking. Teachers, as learners, should engage with their professional growth in the same way. We can’t expect students to learn with purpose, choice, and engagement if educators don’t hold themselves to the same expectations. There should be congruence between how teachers and students approach learning. Educators often hear the call for helping students become collaborative, self directed, inquisitive problem solvers. Unfortunately, in many instances students are in educational environments that don’t foster these habits of mind. It is difficult to create environments that nurture these habits of mind in students if teachers find themselves in a pedagogical climate that doesn’t support their own intellectual growth and development. “Practice what we preach” is more effective than “do what we say, not what we do.”

Belief 3 (Appreciative view of children)

We believe educators should have a positive and expectant view of children, with an understanding that children enter school with personal histories and particular strengths that teachers should recognize and use as the foundation for working with them.

Educators should have an appreciative view of children. Children should be viewed through a lens of strengths rather than deficits and next steps should be based on where they are at that particular moment. Naturally, there will be a range and the pathways to learning will need to be differentiated. Teaching decisions and instructional decisions should be based on a child’s current development, not on the pacing calendar of a program.

Successful learning environments are predicated on the teacher’s knowledge that the vast majority of children don’t benefit from being labeled and grouped. This labeling promotes a “bell curve” mentality in adults. Children are all too aware of where they fall on the curve. Intellect isn’t something we’re born with. It’s something we develop alongside intellectual mentors, both teachers and other children. We increasingly see educational decisions and curricula that assume all students have the same needs and are in the same place in their learning at one particular time. This thinking, combined with high stakes tests and rigid pacing calendars, leads to a deficit view of children and teachers. School communities should engage in a process of value articulation and have regular opportunities to check practice against those values. Time should be taken to consider these goals as a community and to support one another in continually revisiting their image of children.

Belief 4 (Struggle is where learning happens)
We believe children, families and teachers should see challenge, struggling, and mistakes as positive, creative opportunities for learning and growth.

Students and teachers should understand that much learning is involved in the approximations any learner makes toward an ideal practice. When children engage in learning that is meaningful, challenging, and in their zone of proximal development it will lead to children encountering challenges and difficulty, and also works towards understanding. Struggling is a synonym for productive learning as long as the struggle is not overwhelming. The key is to create educational experiences that aspire towards high levels of challenges in environments where children feel comfortable enough to make mistakes.

Neuroscience is clear that optimal environments for learning support a state of relaxed alertness in which the brain is most open to making new connections. This research supports the need to focus on social and emotional intelligences to develop other kinds of intelligences. True inquiry and deep thinking assumes that answers and understanding will not always come easily, and that approximations should be welcomed and honored. Too often, teachers try to make learning easy for children, presenting materials and lessons that don’t challenge students to problem-solve or think out of the box. This can lead to learning environments where the goal is primarily getting a right answer rather than one that supports critical and creative thinking that allows and encourages children to take risks while working out challenges. If our goal is to support deep understanding, then students need to have opportunities to think deeply over sustained periods of time.

Belief 5 (Engagement)
We believe students desire and have a right to autonomy, self-direction, and choice in their development of lifelong learning and engaged citizenship, and that teachers should design learning environments that foster rich opportunities for engagement.

Explanation Issue
Human beings are prewired to explore. Curiosity is a natural state of mind that drives the need to be in relationship with and make meaning of the world around us. School should be a place that supports the sustaining of such habits of mind. Environments should be designed to foster opportunities that support and encourage this disposition. When teachers provide space and time for children to independently problem-solve and orchestrate their strategies for self-chosen purposes, children learn how to transfer what they’ve learned in school to outside of school situations. They become flexible learners who can apply understandings and strategies both in and out of school. The mere acquisition of skills can occur with low levels of engagement, but the skills will not be as firmly embedded if students aren’t engaged in their learning. Increasingly, we see educational systems that promote the attainment of skills solely for the sake of attainment. Students see little meaning of relevance towards long-term intellectual growth. Disengaged children often view schoolwork as something that doesn’t easily cross the border between the school day and their every day lives.

Belief 6 (Ownership of Learning)
We believe both teachers and students should share ownership of the learning experience, whereby they collaboratively make meaningful decisions that impact the course of learning day by day.

This belief isn’t meant to naively suggest that we’re calling for hands off teaching. Quite the contrary. When teachers believe that children are capable of deep thinking and problem solving, they are more willing to share ownership and control of learning with students. Children then develop a sense of agency and a belief that they have important thinking to contribute. There should be a balance of ownership in the classroom that can occur only when actively engaged teachers are willing to trust in the innate abilities of children and share the learning process with their children. The learning process in schools is often controlled by the teacher, the program, and/or the curriculum, leaving little opportunity for children to have any ownership or control over their learning. Instructional pathways that are predetermined for large groups of children allow for few real choices and decisions on the part of the children, and therefore encourage passive, rather than active, learning, and send the message that “learning” is something that one cannot have control over. In life we need individuals and groups to be excited about pursuing different interests and passion. If schools promote conformity and sameness, why would we expect adults to behave any differently?

Belief 7 (Intellectual Stimulation)
We believe children have a desire to interact with challenging questions and inquiries of real importance to themselves, to their community, and to the world.

Children of all ages, even very young children, have the capacity to chew on big questions and are continuously making theories, whether we ask them to or not. By creating environments that support habits of research and collaboration, children will develop attitudes that allow them to sustain a sense of wonder, value multiple perspectives, and develop an increasingly sophisticated capacity for critical thinking and innovation. When students are in environments where they are encouraged to ask and pursue meaningful questions, their learning is deeper and more likely to transfer between home and school and across content areas. Elevating the scale of children’s work from isolated tasks to authentic, significant projects that matter in their lives and communities increases the probability for meaningful learning. Children quickly realize the difference between meaningful, authentic learning situations and contrived situations that only serve the purpose of acquiring a predetermined skill. When schools frequently focus on controlling bodies rather than fostering intellectual growth, school experiences are pushed toward that of discipline, punishment, and compliance rather than questioning, engagement and intellectual growth. The goal of curricular programs and resources should be to stimulate independent thinking, deep and complex questioning and problem solving.

Belief 8 (Joy)
We believe that learning is based in relationships, and that interactions between teachers, families and students should be joyful, compassionate, and authentic.

School should be a place of wonder, joy, intellectual risk-taking and well rounded fun. The sounds of a classroom should include a balance between teacher and student voices, laughter, and conversations, both formal and informal. We’re not suggesting classrooms without structure or planning. Instead, we believe the learning environment should be joyful and fun because those are conditions that encourage academic risk-taking, vibrant interactions with others, and higher levels of engagement. True learning and deep understanding are often the byproduct of a joyful learning environment.
We increasingly see schools where the experience for teachers and students is primarily one of assessing, evaluating and sorting. In these situations students may reach external benchmarks, but at the unfortunate cost of growth and development, connection and community.

Belief 9 (Teacher Professional Growth and Collaboration)
We believe that teachers develop professionally through meaningful inquiry and collaborative opportunities with colleagues, characterized by sharing observations of students, exploring instructional possibilities, and reflecting on their growth as learning teachers and teacher-leaders.

Schools should be vibrant, stimulating and creative places that support creative thinking for teachers as well as for students, and to this end teachers must have regular and frequent opportunities built into their schedules to meet with colleagues and other professionals so that they can collaborate, reflect and explore the implications of what they’re observing in their classrooms. Professional development is then self-directed and collaborative making use of critical friends as they take an analytical stance towards both learning and teaching. Because learning is socially embedded for all humans, we should build up opportunities for educators to work together as a way to support professional development. Too often teachers’ planning time is spent on the minutia and paperwork that supports a system built on data and accountability, rather than on the needs of children. Additionally professional development time is often devoted to training teachers to implement a program rather than on building their own capacity as thinkers and learning designers. Many researchers have identified capacity building as a critical factor in creating meaningful learning for students.

Belief 10 (Interdependent Learning/Student Collaboration)
We believe children grow theories about the world around them through their collaborations and interactions with one another.

Children need constant opportunities for collaboration and social interaction. A socio-constructivist approach should be embedded throughout the school day. Spaces and routines should be organized to facilitate discussion and social interactions where children are engaged in a collective journey together. To often students look to the teacher for all of the answers, and frequently they are looking for a single right answer. Children should be encouraged to build on their collective knowledge and experiences as they become independent thinkers and learners. A central goal should be to facilitate learning and create an environment where, through collaboration, engaged children become dynamic thinkers and problem solvers who question, interpret, form theories, and find significance in the world around them.

Belief 11 (Family)
We believe positive and integrated relationships between families and educators are crucial and plentiful opportunities for collaboration among students, teachers and families are essential.

Teachers should develop empathy for the struggle inherent in learning and work in solidarity with children and families. Children benefit when schools and families are harmoniously engaged in the learning experience. Learning occurs within relationships when connections are made between children, families, and educators.
The tenor of the language schools and teachers choose to use is important and has the power to invite or exclude children and families from becoming enthusiastic participants in the world of school.

Belief 12 (Head and Heart)
We believe teachers have the opportunity to learn more about children’s ideas, experiences, and interpretations when we offer them multiple means of expression.

We believe that all effective and engaging learning occurs through both the mind and the body. Cognitive thought is embedded in social and physical explorations occurring in inspiring environments. All learning occurs through the body. Constructive experiences engage the whole child, body and mind, hands and heart. Today we see learning, particularly deep, meaningful learning, as embodied, encompassing both thought and feelings. A carefully designed, aesthetically intentional environment plays an essential role in the social and physical engagement of the mind, body, and feelings. With a focus on narrow skill attainment, schools often lose sight of how learning occurs and neglect to foster student aesthetic, artistic, and social development. Children should be seen and nurtured globally due to the interdependence of all aspects a child’s development.

Belief 13 (Time)
We believe children need time, both within a school day and across a school year, to deeply explore topics of importance and interest.

Learners of any age need prolonged periods of time to interact with ideas in order to become fully engaged with them. The time needed also varies from child to children. In order for children to become self-directed learners, children need to have ample time to work on long term projects, as well as have some control over how they spend their time. When children’s days are too fragmented it is difficult for them to stay with an idea if they don’t have the time needed for deep engagement.
When the school year is too rushed, it is difficult for children to stay with an idea or project for sustained periods of time. How the school day flows should reflect what we know about child development and learning, not the artificial structures of pre-packaged curriculum and schedules.

RETHINKING THE EARLY CHILDHOOD COMMON CORE LEARNING STANDARDS

23 Replies

My daughter was born in 1972, the heyday of the Women’s Movement. It somehow passed me by. When friends and family visited me to see the new baby, inevitably the question, “when are you going back to work” entered into the conversation. I was totally ecstatic about staying home to be with my baby as long as my artist husband Simon, my baby Simone and I could hold out. By some miracle, and with the help of a rent-controlled apartment, I was able to stretch out my home time for two and a half years. We were rather poor but I was happy as a lark. I didn’t care if, as many friends told me, I was being rather retro in my domesticity. Each day my baby surprised me with something new – a smile, a word, a gurgling along with a song.

My problem was that I knew almost nothing about how to care for an infant or a toddler. I was full of questions. Why was my friend’s baby crawling when my little sunshine was content to sit with her toys and play? Baby Jennifer was starting to walk at 11 months. My Simone took one flop at eleven months and decided to put off walking for another two months. Luckily for me, a wise friend gave me the gift of Berry Brazelton’s book Infants and Mothers: Differences in Development This book was a classic presentation of child development and a “must read” guide for new parents in the 1970’s. .In this book, Dr. Brazelton followed the development of three different babies. All three of the children fell under the umbrella of being “normal” but their development and personalities were greatly diverse. Reading this helped me to stop making comparisons. I just concentrated on and celebrated my daughter’s achievements. Now let’s jump ahead to the present and to the Common Core Learning Standards for children in Pre-k through grade 2. Can you imagine how devastated I would have been if there was a checklist of what standards Simone should have mastered at the end of each year? What if the “standard” for year one would say that by the end of the first year, the 12 month old child will be starting to walk? Perhaps I might have considered my beautiful, and bright baby to be a failure! Thank goodness that T. Berry Brazelton’s examples so clearly illustrated, that children don’t develop skills in a lockstep manner.

You might be asking yourself what my examples have do with the Common Core Learning Standards for Pre-Kindergarten, Kindergarten, Grade One and Grade Two?

As an early childhood teacher, I always had high standards for my children. That said, I also understood, that I needed to allow young children a wide berth for growth and success socially and academically. For some children, learning to read and write was as easy as ABC. Others needed more time to put the puzzle pieces of written language together.

The common core learning standards are in desperate need of revision! Whoever is creating and publishing these standards needs to remove the standards for Pre-kindergarten, kindergarten and first grade. Begin the standards with second grade and early childhood teachers will have the big picture of what their students eventually must be able to do in all of the academic areas. Wouldn’t it make so much more sense for the early childhood standard to say that “by the end of second grade, children will ask and answer questions about key details in a text and answer such questions as who, where, when why and how to demonstrate understanding of key details in a text” and leave it at that? It isn’t unrealistic to expect that” by the end of second grade children will compare and contrast the most important points presented by two texts on the same topic.” Some children will be meeting this standard by the end of first grade, just as baby Jennifer could walk at 11 months. Others, however, may need a little more time to reach this particular standard, just as Simone needed a little more time to gain the confidence to start walking. I can tell you for a fact that the adult Jennifer and the adult Simone are doing just fine with their walking, talking, reading and writing.

Perhaps if there were early childhood educators and parents of young children on the committee that drew up these common core learning standards, there would have been more understanding of how young children develop. Perhaps each skill should not be broken down by grade but rather by what we would expect a child to know before going into third grade. This might take some of the stress out of the early childhood classes and allow for a return to classes where children have time and opportunities to explore, investigate, take risks without fear of failure and, (might I add this controversial word?) play! George Bernard Shaw wrote, “What we want is to see the child in pursuit of knowledge, and not knowledge in pursuit of the child,” Let’s not be lead by an unrealistic checklist of skills for young children. Instead, let’s heed the words of George Bernard Shaw and give young children many opportunities for pursuing knowledge in classrooms that respect the diversity of each child. We should be creating educational environments that acknowledge the wisdom and research of Dr. Brazelton and so many other educators such as Deborah Meier, Alfie Kohn and Carlina Rinaldi, who tirelessly advocate for developmentally respectful education practices. Let’s not let a checklist of inappropriately constructed early childhood standards take away the child’s joy of learning and the teachers’ joy of teaching!

DEFENDING THE EARLY YEARS

2 Replies

This is the platform for Early Childhood, presented at the Save Our Schools People’s Convention in Washington D.C..

Educators, parents, and anyone with concerns about the education of young children, what are your thoughts about this document?

DEY Early Childhood Platform
Posted on August 13, 2012 by geralyndeyproject
Note: DEY’s Senior Adviser Nancy Carlsson-Paige and our National Advisory Board member Deborah Meier recently presented our early childhood platform at the Save Our Schools People’s Education Convention, where folks were hugely supportive and helped to brainstorm ways to use the platform as we move forward.

Platform for Early Childhood Education

There has been an increasing pushdown of the academic skills to 3, 4 and 5 year olds that used to be associated with 1st – 3rd graders. This results in fewer of the direct play and hands-on experiences that lay the foundations for later academic success. At the same time, there is an increasing over-focus on rote academic skills in the early elementary grades. This includes more and more teacher talk rather than child talk in early childhood classrooms and often involves teacher-led instruction focused largely on memorizing facts and information. Young children need to see facts within meaningful contexts, to invent their own ideas and problems to explore and solve, to share their own solutions. These practices reflect a loss of trust in the intellectual capacities of young children – and an institutionalized crushing of their insatiable love of learning.

We’re forgetting that human beings are, from the moment they are born, experts at learning. Before they enter school, they have already discovered vast worlds of language and knowledge. Human beings are uniquely designed to be makers and creators – artists and craftsmen. And intellectuals.

The majority of early childhood classrooms today are driven by myriad of developmentally inappropriate standards-based tests and check lists that ignore children’s needs, capacities and cultures, and do not honor their uniqueness as learners. This brings great harm to our nation’s children by portraying them as deficient. The heaviest burden falls on those who live in poverty and with the fewest resources. As these trends take hold there has been a dumbing down of teaching and teacher knowledge, which is being increasingly replaced by commercial scripts that can be followed mindlessly. Less prepared teachers who are more willing to follow commercial scripts and manage data are entering the field of early childhood at the same time that increasingly frustrated experienced teachers are leaving. Older mentors who once wisely guided young teachers are fast disappearing.

If one purpose of public education, especially in a democracy, is to develop our capacity to exercise wise judgment when confronted with real world dilemmas, then we need to encourage young children to develop good judgment. They need adult models who demonstrate what exercising judgment is all about and who encourage children to ask questions, apply what they already know to new situations, use their imaginations, and think independently. In classrooms in which skills and knowledge are broken into small skill subsets and factlets and taught directly to kids, such judgment becomes suffocated from the start.

While many of the misguided practices we see in schools today took place in earlier times, especially in the education of poor children, they were not enforced by punitive state and federal policy or driven by frequent, costly, and inappropriate assessment tools, as is the case today—nor begun at such a young age.

What is the answer?
1. Eliminate labeling and ranking of children based on standardized tests. It’s long been known to experts that tests for young children have very low reliability, are dependent on too many random factors, and are impacted by class, race and home culture.

2. Use assessments that are ongoing and evolving and connected closely to observations of children, their development and learning, and to a child-centered curriculum.

3. Provide classrooms where teachers engage in well-thought out and intentional extensions/expansions of children’s play and learning in ways that demonstrate knowledge and respect for each child’s uniqueness.

4. Provide children with literacy experiences that include storytelling, quality children’s literature, and dramatic reenactments that grow out of their experiences rather than activities that isolate and drill discrete skills.

5. See and appreciate what children can do and understand without focusing on learning everything earlier. Offer classrooms where children are not praised, rewarded or criticized because they are slower or faster than others. Research tells us, earlier does not prove to be better.

6. Provide a school environment that respects the language and culture of children and their families, encourages families to take ownership, and insures that their history and experiences are included and valued.

7. Offer school schedules that provide ample time for families and school personnel to meet and work together. Including family members in meaningful ways in the school’s governance structure so that they and children feel their voices are being heard.

8. Realize the critical role of early childhood teachers, whose work is as important as that of those who teach PhD candidates, and compensate them as such. We must reverse the assumption that the younger the children we teach, the less knowledgeable and competent teachers need to be.

9. Implement a school pedagogy that understands that children are intrinsically active learners from the time they are born and that learning happens in and out of a school building in unique ways. Adults don’t need to get children “ready to learn”; they don’t have to reinforce skills and facts stressed in school at home.

10. Provide children and families with access to high quality, affordable child care and after-school care.

What Can We Do?

Take this platform to your neighbor, children’s teachers, parent groups, school board and legislative bodies. As them to support efforts to bring best practice back to the education of young children.

Stay informed and involved with the organizations that advocate for young children – such as Defending the Early Years (deyproject.org), Alliance for Childhood (allianceforchildhood.org), Save Our Schools (saveourschoolsmarch.org) and Parents Across America (parentsacrossamerica.org). (Also check out local organizations such as Citizens for Public Schools in Massachusetts citizensforpublicschools.org.)

Resist reinforcing the school’s agenda – drilling for skills – and replace it with what centuries of wisdom and research has taught us: children learn when they are deeply engaged in self-selected, self-directed and playful activities. Provide young children with space and time to play at home and in the neighborhood. You don’t need expensive toys or technology to support their development. They need the natural world, simple props, good friends and appreciative adults.

Notice and enjoy all the things the children you know CAN do.

Investigating Choice Time: Inquiry, Exploration, and Play

by: Renée Dinnerstein