The Importance of Preschool

This week’s article summary is Why Preschool is the Most Important Year in a Child's Development.

As we are all ambassadors of Trinity, this is an apt article to read: it outlines the essentials of quality early childhood classrooms and the reasons why parents should send their 3-5 year olds to a preschool program in general and to Trinity more specifically.

But as I read the article I also found myself being able to substitute any grade level for PreK. To me, the article reinforces that good teaching is good teaching regardless of the age of the child; it affirms and validates what we believe and how we teach at Trinity from our earliest to oldest grades.

I particularly liked that the author advocated for the middle road between the extremes of highly traditional, teacher-led classrooms and free-for-all, self-discovery, child-led ones. For Trinity, a child-centered classroom includes intentional and deliberate teacher planning, evaluating, and facilitating.

A few of us are reading the book the article’s author just published, so it might be one of next summer’s book options.

Joe

Publicly funded pre-K programs enjoy broad public and political support, largely because of research suggesting that preschool graduates enjoy both short-term and long-term benefits, including improved academic and school readiness and higher graduation rates.

In 2016, enrollment in state-funded preschool programs reached an all-time high of nearly 1.5 million children in 43 states.

“We are at a really critical moment for pre-K in the United States,” said Suzanne Bouffard, an education researcher and author of the newly published book The Most Important Year: Pre-Kindergarten and the Future of Our Children. “We need to look at how we do pre-K, not just whether we do it,” said Bouffard. “Quality really matters.”

Pre-K is a foundational year because, for most children, it provides their initial exposure to school and sets the tone for their educational career. “They develop certain feelings, perceptions, and ideas about school. It’s a great opportunity to get kids off on the right foot,” Conversely, she noted, a sub-par experience in pre-K has the potential to create “enduring negative emotions about school.”

When Bouffard talks to parents, she tells them, “The most important things to look for is how the adults interact with children. You want to see them engage with children in a way that is positive, nurturing and genuinely curious.”

The best pre-K programs are staffed by trained teachers who know how to build students’ self-regulation skills, nurture their creativity and curiosity, and foster an environment of playful learning.

According to Bouffard, self-regulation — the ability to manage one’s behavior and emotions in a given situation — is the most important skill to foster at this age.

These classrooms teach children “how to be learners,” including how to deal with difficult emotions, how to pay attention, and how to be peers who listen to and interact positively with their classmates.

Bouffard said that rewards and punishment are not effective tools because they do not teach kids how or why to behave. Rather, “it just emphasizes that you want them to do something.” Ironically, she said, “Kids who have the biggest struggle with self-regulation are those most damaged by these strategies.” When they are unable to earn the reward, they may feel frustration or shame or simply decide to stop trying.

Effective pre-K classrooms also engage students’ natural curiosity and creativity. In these classrooms, said Bouffard, you will hear teachers using open-ended inquiries such as:

• “How do you know that?”
• “How did you figure that out?”
• “Explain to me what you are doing.”
• “What do you think will happen if we . . . ?”

This dialogue between teacher and student focuses on the process of learning. “In pre-K everything should be process focused and not outcome focused.” For example, art projects should be more about exploring materials and techniques than about producing a replica of what the teacher made.

Much of the public debate around early childhood education comes down to which matters more: academics or play. That’s a false dichotomy, said Bouffard. “Play is really the way that young children learn. It’s a way that they experience the world, and it engages them and helps them learn more deeply.”

Bouffard is concerned that the “skill and drill” approach to teaching academics is most frequently used in classrooms serving at-risk preschoolers, in an attempt to close the gap on school readiness. Unfortunately, these teaching methods can “turn young kids off to school and introduces the possibility of shame and anxiety. Skill and drill doesn’t teach kids the curiosity and critical thinking skills that they need to develop in early childhood.”

However, pure free play — an approach she hears advocated more frequently by wealthier cohorts — also misses the mark. “I hear a lot about just ‘free play classrooms.”  But, Bouffard said, if it only involves setting out materials and not thinking about learning goals, there’s a real missed opportunity. For example, she said, researchers have found that children used more sophisticated language about building activity when they had a goal in mind.

What effective preschools aim for is “guided play” or “scaffolded play,” in which adults create a purposeful play environment that encourages student exploration. “For example, in setting up blocks, a teacher might put up pictures of buildings to inspire kids. They may ask students, ‘What are you doing?’ and gently push kids’ thinking by offering new information or nudging them to experiment,” said Bouffard.