Preschool Needs

 This week's article summary is What Kids Need From Grown Ups (But Aren't Getting).

To me, it’s a great start-of-the-school-year reminder of why and how we teach at Trinity.

The article reminds us that kids are innate learners and like baby animals (think of kittens and puppies or any nature show you watch) they learn through interactive and collaborative play—a little instinctive behavior and a little emulation of the adults they see. 

We are fortunate that Trinity’s reputation and brand are understood and esteemed by prospective and current parents. 

Our mission, program pillars, and curriculum are replete with child-centeredness. As I repeat in faculty/staff meetings, Trinity’s special sauce is finding the intersection of celebrating childhood while simultaneously developing a strong academic and character foundation in our students. What’s the norm for Trinity is often elusive for other schools.

We embrace our students’ natural inquisitiveness and build upon it through meaningful educational experiences and challenges that further engage, excite, and inspire them.

I hope as you read the article you are filled with the same pride I was: we’re a great school and we do what’s right for kids!

Thank you for great start to the school year! 

Enjoy your weekend!

Joe

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Erika Christakis' new book, The Importance of Being Little, is an impassioned plea for educators and parents to put down the worksheets and flash cards, and exotic vocabulary lessons, and double-down on one, simple word: Play

That's because, she writes, "the distinction between early education and official school seems to be disappearing." If kindergarten is the new first grade, preschool is quickly becoming the new kindergarten. And that is "a real threat to our society's future."

It is the reality that science is confirming on a daily basis: that children are hardwired to learn in many settings and are really very capable, very strong, very intelligent on the one hand. On the other hand, the paradox is that many young children are doing poorly in our early education settings.

We have very crammed preschool schedules with rapid transitions. We have tons of clutter on classroom walls. We have kids moving quickly from one activity to another. We ask them to sit in long and often boring meetings. Logistically and practically, lives are quite taxing for little kids because they're actually living in an adult-sized world.

On the other hand, curriculum is often very boring. A staple of early childhood curriculum is the daily tracking of the calendar. And this is one of those absolute classic mismatches, because one study showed that, after a whole year of this calendar work where kids sit in a circle and talk about what day they're on, half the kids still didn't know what day they were on. 

We're underestimating kids in terms of their enormous capacity to be thoughtful and reflective, and, I would argue, that's because we're not giving them enough time to play and to be in relationships with others.

It's incredibly weird — this fake dichotomy. The science is so persuasive on this topic. There's all kinds of research coming not only from early childhood but animal research looking at mammals and how they use play for learning.

There are two answers. There really has been tremendous anxiety about closing achievement gaps between advantaged and less advantaged children. You know, we're always as a society looking for quick fixes that might close those gaps. Unfortunately, it's had downstream consequences for early learning, where we're going for superficial measures of learning.

The other problem is that the rich, experience-based play that we know results in learning — it's not as easy to accomplish as people think. And that's because, while the impulse to play is natural, what I call the play know-how really depends on a culture that values play, that gives kids the time and space to learn through play.

Playful learning is embedded in relationships and in things that are meaningful to children. Meaningful to them is when they have a chance to learn through relationships—and that happens through play. But a lot of out curriculum is organized around different principles.

It's organized around the comfort and benefit of adults and also reflexive: "This is cute," or, "We've always done this." A lot of the time, as parents, we are trained to expect products, cute projects. And I like to say that the role of art in preschool or kindergarten curriculum should be to make meaning, not necessarily things. But it's hard to get parents to buy into this idea that their kids may not come home with the refrigerator art because maybe they spent a week messing around in the mud.

Preschool teachers are very interested in fine motor skills, and so often they think that these tracing and cutting activities are important. I would argue that those are not the most important skills that we need to foster.

The No. 1 thing is that children need to feel secure in their relationships because, again, we're social animals. And children learn through others. So I think the No. 1 thing is for kids to have a chance to play, to make friends, to learn limits, to learn to take their turn.

The research base is pretty clear. I'll start by telling you what it isn't. We start by looking at two variables. One set are called "structural variables" — things like class size, student-teacher ratios, or even the square-footage of the classroom and what kinds of materials are in the classroom.

And then there are so-called process variables, which are different. They tend to be more about teaching style. Is the teacher a responsive teacher? Do they use a responsive, warm, empathic teaching style? And then the other key process variable is: Does the teacher have knowledge of child development? And is that teacher able to translate that child development knowledge into the curriculum?

There are many good measures — things like: Is the teacher on the floor with the child? Is the teacher asking open-ended questions? 

But here's the thing. The structural variables are easier to regulate, and it's much easier to focus on the structural variables.

Boredom can be a friend to the imagination. Sometimes when kids appear to be bored, actually they haven't had enough time to engage in something. We quickly whisk it away and move them along to the next thing. And that's when you say, "How can I help the child to look at this in a new way? To try something new, to be patient."

You've really kind of adultified childhood so kids really don't have those long, uninterrupted stretches of time to engage in fantasy play. And because we've kind of despoiled the habitat of early childhood, a lot of times they don't know what to do when given that time. So we kind of have to coach them.

I think there's a little bit of a repair process that we need to engage in. Because if you've got a kid who's used to going to a million lessons and only uses toys that have one way of using them and then, suddenly, you put them in a room with a bunch of boxes and blocks and say, "Have fun!", the kid's gonna say, "Are you kidding me? What?!"