Category Archives: Investigating Choice Time: Inquiry, Exploration, and Play

early childhood education, children, play

Common Sense

Yesterday, Julie Diamond and I met with a few members of an early childhood team at the New York City Department of Education. They’re adding resources to Department of Education’s Common Core Library website. They heard that we, along with some other kindergarten teachers, have been working on materials for kindergarten and thought that we might share some of our resources with them.

Kori Goldberg, Bill Fulbrecht, Susan Kotansky and Chrissy Kouklotis, all dedicated and knowledgeable kindergarten teachers in New York City public schools, have been meeting with Julie and myself to see if we can put together a developmentally appropriate alternative to the rigid and unrealistic programs that are recommended on the DOE website. We decided that we would not ignore the common core standards for kindergarten. Instead, we would look at them with some common sense.

Our intention is to show that most of the standards can be addressed when children have opportunities to play, explore, act, build, run and…. well, basically have a well-rounded, developmentally suitable kindergarten experience. In the case of standards that seem inappropriate, we will show how the kindergarten curriculum can build the foundation for meeting those standards in the future.

It’s unclear whether or not the decision-makers at the DOE will accept our work but we are going to keep working on our project nevertheless. At our meeting yesterday, we firmly made it known that we only would allow our curriculum plans to be posted on the Department of Education website if it was explicitly written that they are presented as an alternative to other recommended programs and NOT as a supplement to them.

Perhaps we are being unrealistic in hoping to have the Department of Education share our work. However, we feel too passionate about teaching, too depressed about what is happening to the profession and definitely too upset about how children are being harmed by the present state of early childhood education to give up on this project.

Our work addressing the common core through a developmentally appropriate lens is not yet ready to be shared with you, but I would like to give you a chance to read Bill’s wonderful introduction to the project. This is in a first draft state and doesn’t contain the footnotes that will be added when it is in the final state.

We would all love to read your feedback! Here’s Bill’s introduction:

Common Sense and the Common Core

Introduction

As educators of young children, we have become increasingly concerned over the direction our schools have taken in seeking to improve student outcomes in relation to standardized testing and meeting the New York State Common Core Standards. More and more, we see classrooms for young children that do not meet the developmental needs of young children. Kindergartens that are not places for kindergarteners. Opportunities for young children to explore, experience, and wonder about the world have been replaced with pencil and paper drills and a focus on rote learning with a hyper-awareness of one’s place within a rubric. In many classrooms, block building, pretend play, and outdoor recess have been all but eliminated. Discipline issues for young children are on the rise and teacher morale is low. We firmly believe these changes will not result in lasting improvements. On the contrary, there is increasing evidence that these changes may result in a further erosion of student outcomes and may increase the achievement gap between advantaged and disadvantaged students that the Common Core Standards seeks to narrow. We do not believe, however, that the Common Core Standards are necessarily to blame. Rather, we feel that there has been a failure to apply what we know about young children to our implementation of the standards. In implementing the Common Core Standards we need to apply Common Sense.

In the following pages we will outline a course of action for administrators and teachers that will demonstrate how kindergarten classrooms can be filled with intellectual rigor and joyful learning. We intend to show that activities like block building and pretend play, when implemented with thoughtful planning by involved teachers, provide children with critical thinking skills, opportunities for social growth, and practice with oral language skills that are crucial for literacy development. Studies and articles that support our arguments may be found in the footnotes.

Who is a kindergartener?

It may be useful to be reminded that the average kindergartener has only been alive for four to five years. In that time they have had to acquire an enormous amount of information about the world. Their brains have been growing exponentially since birth and are still creating intricate neural connections at a break-neck pace. They will, in fact, transform in a myriad of ways before our eyes over the year they will be with us in kindergarten. Of primary importance in the hierarchy of development are language skills. Kindergarteners are moving from a world of pure sensation toward a world that is filtered through human language, where every object, action, and feeling has a name, a history, an explanation, a culture, and a cause. Mastering this growing universe of words and ideas requires practice, and, of course, a constant flood of new experiences. Add to this the demands of a growing body that is developing its own set of neural connections and you may begin to get a sense of the flux, motion, confusion, elation, excitement, frustration, wonder, and thrill that make up the world of a five-year-old.

As teachers of four- and five-year-olds, we need to keep in mind the following key characteristics that define this age.

• Kindergarteners are not good listeners. This is not a criticism – they simply are not equipped at this stage in their lives to attend for very long to adult talk. They are still trying to master basic linguistic rules (think of how often a five-year-old will mix tenses and misuse pronouns, or how many false-starts they will make when attempting to give explanations or retell events). It takes a lot of mental energy for a five-year-old to process language successfully, and like all of us, they have a limited supply.

• Kindergarteners have a need to talk. In order to master spoken language, it must be used and practiced. Children don’t think about practicing their language skills, however, they simply use them. The need for practice and repetition is natural and a big part of learning. They also need to practice their oral language skills in meaningful, real life situations that involve lots of give-and-take with their peers. And, of course, oral language is the basis for written language – children will only write as well as they can speak.

• Kindergarteners learn best through “doing.” Five-year-olds are endlessly curious about the world and they have a need to interact directly with it. They learn better through the use of their hands, eyes, and ears during active engagement in meaningful activities than they do from listening to adult explanations. Active engagement sparks curiosity and fosters questioning – the basis for creativity and problem solving.

• Kindergarteners have a need to move their bodies. Sitting still for more than five or ten minutes at a stretch does not feel natural to a five-year-old. Growing bodies demand to be exercised and the demands of the body cannot be ignored. If these demands are denied, children who are unable to comply will often be seen as “oppositional,” “defiant,” “distracted,” or worse.

• Kindergarteners are just beginning to develop a sense of shared community. For many children, pre-k and kindergarten will be their first experience of a larger shared community outside of their homes. How they negotiate within that larger community will play a large role in their future success, not only in school, but in life as well. The social life of school is real and becomes an increasingly important factor in learning as children grow older. The things we learned in kindergarten truly serve us well as adults. Sharing, caring for others, learning to take responsibility, and learning how to work within a group are skills we use throughout our lives and often determine our ultimate success or failure.

If, as educators of young children, we can keep this vision of the child in our minds as we plan our curriculums, we should be able to design classrooms and activities that respect the nature of five-year-olds. We should be able to create classrooms that are places where five-year-olds feel welcomed and safe to explore, create, question, negotiate, discuss, experiment, and grow. And, as we hope to demonstrate in the following pages, we should be able to do all of this while meeting the Common Core Standards. We simply need to apply a bit of Common Sense.

Scream!

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Today, when I opened up the administration site on my blog, I found the saddest note from a new teacher. I have no idea of how to respond to her. Perhaps one of you might think of something to say. I have to think deeply about how to respond. Maybe it’s because this is the end of a long day, but somehow I’m having a very hopeless feeling. I have a great desire to scream.

I truly welcome any of your thoughts and suggestions.

Here’s Sarah’s comment:

Hi Renee,
I am 37 days away from finishing my first year of teaching first grade! My whole life I have dreamed of being a teacher. It wasn’t until college that I fell in love with the Reggio style of teaching. I was blessed to visit Reggio Emilia during the summer going into my senior year of college! It was AWESOME!
I was hired a week before school started back in Mid August of 2012. I was so excited! The school I teach in is the epitome of a data driven school. We have a data wall and data meetings and each child is colored red, yellow, or green. In fact, the principal is talking about displaying quotes regarding specific data data data on the wall next year. The more I become engrossed in the data driven mentality, the more discouraged I become. It’s so sad that watercolors were requested on our supply list but have stayed in the closet due to the high demands of test after test after tests. Not only do these children have to take the test on paper and pencil, but also log them into the computer.
Is their any advice you can offer? As a first year teacher I feel trapped by numbers. Have we forgotten about creativity and student choice? I yearned to be mentored by a Reggio or Reggio-inspired educator.
Thank you!! Your blog is so inspiring!
Sarah

TEARS!

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How can a bird that is born for joy
Sit in a cage and sing?
How can a child, when fears annoy,
But droop his tender wing
And forget his youthful spring?
William Blake from Songs of Experience

A skinned knee. A quarrel. A stomach ache. A parent-child standoff at bedtime. Refusal to leave a playdate. Saying goodbye to mommy at school in the morning.

These are some possible reasons for the tears of a six-year.

Why would a six-year old be standing in the school hallway, sobbing beyond control? That’s what I wondered when I saw her last week, standing by the water fountain, tears streaming down her face. I recognized her from one of the first grade classes that I visited earlier in the day and I tried to comfort her but the sobs wouldn’t stop. You probably know what it’s like when a child cries so hard that it’s impossible for her to even pause to catch her breath.

These sobs sounded like tears of agony. I was looking around the empty hallway, wondering who was responsible for this small child, when a teacher came out of a classroom, extended a friendly arm and said, “Come with me.” Over the child’s head, she whispered to me, “It’s the math assessment. It frightened her and she ran out of the room crying.”

I’ve been haunted by this image for days. A six-year old, crying hysterically because of a math assessment, should give us pause. What are we doing to our children and why in the world are we doing this?

I am not opposed to assessing children’s social and academic progress. When I taught kindergarten and first grade, I informally made note of what children knew at the start of the year, mostly through my written and unwritten observations, interviews with parents and also informal and formal discussions with the children.

Throughout the year, I kept notes on each child’s progress or struggles. This documentation helped me determine what kinds of lessons I would teach, who needed extra, individual help, and what kinds of special topics my children were interested in pursuing.

In the mid-1990’s, my school, P.S. 321, began a New York City pilot program using The Primary Language Record in our early childhood classes. The London-based Centre For Primary Education developed this formative system of assessment for literacy in primary education. We began by interviewing each parent about his or her child. (Of course, who is more knowledgeable about the child?) Then we interviewed the child. Over the course of the year, we observed the child in different social/instructional situations – self-initiated activities, teacher-initiated activities, small group and whole group interactions. Completing these reports involved a good deal of work. However, I can truly say that I never understood each child as well as I did while implementing the PLR. This is a wonderful tool for viewing and understanding , as it is so unhip to say these days, the whole child, recognizing the child’s strength’s and also learning where the child needed the most support. I used the observation templates throughout the year and also wrote two formal reports for each child.

Along with the Primary Language Record, we used the First Steps Reading Developmental Continuum and the First Steps Writing Developmental Continuum. These two wonderfully helpful documents provide a diagnostic framework for mapping students’ progress in writing and reading. It was so helpful to look at the children’s reading and writing progress through a developmental lens. Each continuum includes a bullet-pointed list of indicators describing each developmental stage. The phases in Reading were Role Playing, Experimental Reading, Early Reading, Transitional Reading, Independent Reading and Advanced Reading. Each phase is supported with a list of the major teaching points for the teacher to emphasize, preparing the child for transitioning into the next phase. There is a similar continuum for the road that children take towards becoming proficient writers, with illustrated examples of what writing might look like for each phase.

These continuums are not judgmental. They don’t assume that each child will need to reach a specific benchmark by a certain age. The assumption is that, with proper instruction and encouragement, children will all, at their pace, become readers and writers.

By guiding teachers through this assessment process, these reports have the added “perk” of supporting the teacher’s professional growth. I learned so much about how to look at children’s work with a greater understanding of developmental and academic benchmarks. In addition, it became so much clearer to me how I could individualize and plan instruction that was truly based on my student’s performance in reading and writing.

Compare this humanistic approach to instruction and assessment with the following list of assessments taking place in a New York City public school kindergarten class.

This startling list came to me from a teacher who is working in a school in the South Bronx . Most of the children in her class are second language learners. It’s the teacher’s professional belief that the children would benefit from opportunities for inquiry, exploration and play. Unfortunately, as you can see by the list of assessments, there’s not much time left for any active learning to take place during the school day.

***********************************************************************************************
Required Assessment for Kindergarten:
Reading: parts of ECLAS
Phonemic awareness strand
*Phonics strand
*To be recorded in *Assessment Pro

*Running records (November, January, March & June)
*High frequency words
Total: 84 assessments (for 21 students)
Writing
On demand writing assessment at the beginning and end of each unit (of which there are 7)
For each on demand piece, for each student, we must grade the sample with a detailed rubric (9 categories). In addition, there must be a
published piece for each unit which needs to be assessed with the same rubric.
Total: 441 assessments (21 x 21)
In addition, during reading and writing workshop we are to have
individual conferences with each child every week and keep and submit
notes of said conferences. (21 x 2= 44) 1 on 1 conferences weekly.
Math
Initial and summative unit assessments (5 units)
Baseline/mid-year/end of year assessment and performance tasks
Total: 210 assessments (10 x 21 )
Portfolios
To include:

Goals for each student in each of five subject areas 105 (5 x 21)
A self-reflective piece for each student for every subject area

*In addition, any work displayed on a bulletin board is required to also be accompanied by a rubric, common core standards, task and post-its with individualized comment for each student.

Grand total: 840 (plus conferences, bulletin boards, 3 report cards, 2 interim progress reports)

***********************************************************************************************

Would you believe that all of the above is taking place in a kindergarten class over the course of a school year? There’s little opportunity for joyful teaching or for joyful learning. There are mainly opportunities for stressful teaching and for stressful learning! According to the child psychologist Brenda Bryant, professor of human development at the University of California, Davis, and “if stress is really interfering with development, that is a problem Sometimes with too much stress kids get immobilized. It starts as soon as kindergarten….It turns the joy of learning into a struggle to excel.”

As I was reading my description of the Primary Language Record to my husband, he made an important observation. He said that it sounded to him as if the PLR reports were descriptive whereas what is happening in schools today is that reports are numbered and data driven. I recently had a conversation with a lovely woman who is an official in the U.S. Office of Management and Budget. When I mentioned my concern with assessing a child or a school by looking at numbers on a test her response was, “Well how else will we know if there’s success?”

If we value children based on the numbers they score on their assessments, aren’t we shirking our responsibilities as educators. There are smart ways to teach and assess children. Perhaps the “smart” instructional and assessment methods aren’t the easiest, but what they lack in ease they more than make up in validity and appropriateness.

We need to stop, catch our breath, and really think hard and strong about what this obsession with number-crunching assessments is doing to the children in our care.

“Trust” revisted

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Since my last posting, “Trust”, I, along with five other early childhood educators, had the opportunity to meet with the Deputy Chancellor of the New York City Department of Education, Shael Polakow-Suransky. We found the meeting to be quite productive. We’ve been invited to return for a second meeting in a few weeks.

I’m feeling positive and hopeful. More to come after our next meeting!

Trust!

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Trust:“assured reliance on the character, ability, strength, or truth of someone or something; one in which confidence is placed”

Trust: “reliance on the integrity, strength, ability, surety, etc., of a person or thing; confidence. Confident expectation of something; hope”

Can trust exist in today’s tense educational climate, when teachers and administrators rightfully feel as though someone is always looking over their shoulders?

Yes! Trust does exist in classrooms where teachers have the confidence and administrative support needed to follow their understanding of what children need rather than the proscriptions of a teaching program or pacing calendar. For an example of a teacher’s trust in children, let’s enter Marta Quinones’ first grade classroom at P.S. 142.

The children are studying subways. They’ve gone on underground and over ground rides, interviewed workers, and attended a talk given by Paul Steely White, the director of Transportation Alternatives. Because of their particular interests and the involvement of the school art teacher, they visited various stations to see the displays of subway art. There are plans for the children to visit Tom Otterness, the sculptor who created a wonderfully whimsical piece that is on the platform of the 14th street A train station. They’ve read nonfiction and fiction books about subways and written stories and fact sheets about turnstiles, vending machines, motormen and Metrocards. Subway stations are being built with blocks, Legos, and all kinds of recycled materials. Two girls preparing to turn a large cardboard box into a Metrocard machine are discussing how the inner mechanisms might look and work before beginning on their construction.

In one corner of the classroom, near the sink, a group of children are clustered around a table covered with bowls, flour, salt, yellow paint, and various measuring and mixing spoons, Three of the children are reading aloud from a recipe chart as one child slowly pours a cup of water into the bowl.

I sat down and asked them why they were making their playdough yellow. The water pourer looked up and told me, “We’re making a subway station and the tracks are with yellow playdough. We need to make more playdough so we can finish the tracks.” “Next we’re going to make the platform and then a subway train,” piped in the girl holding the recipe chart. They pointed to a nearby table that held a large piece of cardboard with subway tracks made from yellow playdough weaving around the perimeter.

Where was the teacher? Why wasn’t Marta sitting with them?

I looked to the side and saw, a few feet away, the very calm Ms. Quinones, taking notes and smiling. When I went up to her to ask her about this potentially very messy activity, Marta answered, “I trust them to be careful. I’m looking on to make sure that it goes okay but they don’t need me to stand over them and tell them what to do.”

Trust.

This Thursday, five kindergarten teachers and I are going to the former Tweed Courthouse, now home of the New York City Department of Education for a meeting with the chief academic officer of the New York City public schools. We want to give voice to the many kindergarten teachers who are being silenced by, what some have described to me as, an insidiously oppressive atmosphere of intimidation in the schools. There seems to be a fairly widespread belief that it’s safer to be quiet and not complain rather than taking the risk of speaking up and possibly losing a job.

We want to give voice to the many children who are missing out on an important kindergarten year because a developmentally ill-suited curriculum is imposed on them. It’s not uncommon to hear it said that kindergarten is the new first grade.

Among the six of us, we calculated that we have a hundred and fifty cumulative years of experience teaching the early childhood grades. Our meeting was prompted by our professional discomfit with the present direction of early childhood education in New York City public schools, most specifically in kindergarten. An ever-increasing number of assessments are filling up the day. Kindergarteners are often given “busy work” so that their teacher can sit with one child to administer an assessment, often one that has no practical use in classroom instruction.

“Performance tasks” that do not, in any way, relate to most five-year olds “zone of proximal development” are imposed by bureaucrats who have little or no experience with children of this age and little obvious knowledge of child development. Even though the common core-aligned task for kindergarten English Language Arts described on the DOE website states that children should “use a combination of drawing, dictating, and writing to compose informative/explanatory texts in which they name what they are writing about and supply some information about the topic” many administrators (perhaps in response to outside pressures) are insisting that teachers must not take any dictation. Five year olds are, in many schools, expected to do their own writing in this task. This might be possible for some children, but for many these become stressful, frustrating and humiliating experiences.

Our visit is a response to an email that I sent to the Deputy Superintendent a few months ago. I had just received a note from a depressed and frustrated kindergarten teacher who was bemoaning the way that her day was co-opted by a variety of administratively assigned assessments, Teachers College lessons and pacing calendars and hours of clerical record-keeping. All of this, she wrote, was preventing her from providing her students, mostly English Language Learners, with the kindergarten experiences that they so desperately needed.

I was so upset by this note. In the heat of the moment, after reading and rereading it, I decided to pass it on (without the teacher’s name) to the deputy superintendent, challenging him to respond to this sad message. To his credit, he very shortly afterwards responded, inviting us to come and speak with him. I asked if we could include a few other teachers and this was approved.

A representative from the deputy chancellor’s office has emailed me several times to confirm the details for this meeting. She made it clear, on more than one occasion that we will only be allowed thirty minutes to present our thoughts. Thirty minutes! Does the Deputy Superintendent not trust us to share the sincerity and wisdom of our experience with him?

We want to explain to him our belief that kindergarten is a year for building a strong foundation, which will support the academic learning for the years ahead. If we can speak fast enough, we would like to say that in kindergarten the child should develop a sense of himself/herself as a learner. There should be experiences that strengthen the child’s sense of curiosity, exploration and self-regulation. The child should be feeling secure enough to take risks without the fear of failure. The teacher of five-year olds should intentionally be providing rich first-hand experiences that are connected with children’s interests, opening up many opportunities for talk, questioning, creating, and experimenting. Kindergarten children need time to engage in unstructured outdoor play. When children’s free play occurs under the watchful eye of the teacher, there are many opportunities that present themselves for scaffolding conflict resolution strategies, so necessary for all aspects of life.

I’m hoping that the deputy chancellor will understand the reality of a kindergarten child’s school day in NYC – highly-structured programs that are heavy in academic instruction, lack of time to learn through exploratory activities, and in many schools, no opportunities for children to play outdoors other than a few minutes at lunchtime. This does not match up with what we know is best for developing self-motivated and confident life-long learners.

I am putting a lot of trust in the sensitivity, respect and interest of the deputy superintendent. I’m trusting that he will understand that this discussion is all about the children. I’m trusting that this visit will be the start of a long and serious conversation that will, ultimately, have a positive impact on the lives of the kindergarten children in the New York City public schools.

Trust. “Confident expectation of something; hope”

The Beat of a Heart

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“…the most humbling part of observing accomplished teachers is seeing the subtle ways in which they build emotionally and relationally healthy learning communities – intellectual environments that produce not mere technical competence, but caring, secure, actively literate human beings.”
Peter H. Johnston, Choice Words

Trust. Belief in children. Community. These are that buzzwords that have imprinted themselves in my thoughts since my last visit to the preschools and new elementary school in Reggio Emilia. Coming home, after my inspiring trip, was like crashing back to earth from a wonderful float in space. Common Core Standards. Rubrics. Performance tasks. Bundles. High- Stakes Tests. Assessment. All of these words have become the jargon bantered about by politicians and the educational bureaucracy. They do not represent instruction based on teachers’ observations and assessments of the children in their classes. Education today is functioning like a body minus a heartbeat.

However, last Thursday, I walked into Steve Wilson’s third grade classroom at The Brooklyn New School, and I finally heard the thumping of a heartbeat. This time it was my excited heart beating with enthusiasm as I saw that those Reggio buzzwords are alive and well again…trust – belief in children – community.

Steve’s class has spent the last few months intensely studying China and the children were getting ready for their China Museum day that would take place next week. The room, a large space for a New York City public school classroom, was filled with traces of the various explorations on the topic. High up on the front wall hung a huge red kimono. Posters with photos from trips and projects were inside and outside the room.

Mainly, though, children were working in groups on a myriad of projects. On the wall was a chart stating the project rules…Everybody helps. We help each other do things for ourselves. We explain by telling how.

By the sink, I saw four children taking turns scraping the fat off a huge bone. Perplexed by this activity, I went up to Steve to ask him what was happening there. “Don’t ask me Renée, “ Steve responded, “Ask the children.”

How right he was. The children were eager to explain all about the history and use of the Oracle Bone. They were getting this bone ready to be inscribed with important questions that they would pose.

Last year, in anticipation of their next year’s China study, the second grade teachers took their classes to see the exhibition of the Terracotta Warriors from China. This year Steve gave children opportunities to build on that experience in class discussions and individual research.

Hearing the Mary Pope Osborne book Day of the Dragon King read aloud gave the children many ideas for topics to research.

They raised silkworms in class and the day that I visited, a group of children were using beet juice to dye the silk. Another group showed me how the “rice paddy” that they planted was finally germinating. A small group of children were painting a story onto bamboo sticks while another group sat on the floor constructing the Great Wall of China. Mirrors and stones were used to recreate the Chinese Scholar’s Garden that the class visited at Snug Harbor in Staten Island.

A boy who had been working in the hallway outside the classroom, brought his black and gray ink brush painting inside to share with Steve. Looking at it thoughtfully, Steve asked him to talk some about what he was aiming for in his image. After taking a minute to think about it, Steve explained how the blacks in the image could be used against the grays to give a greater sense of depth. He suggested giving it another try. Without any hesitation the young artist, who had been listening seriously to Steve’s suggestion, took another large sheet of paper, returned to his spot in the hallway, and began to work on his next painting.

Because there was so much work to get ready for the China celebration, adjustments were made to the usual daily schedule. Project Time began at 9:20 in the morning and children were working until 11:20 a.m.. Sometime in the middle of the work time, Steve gave the signal for children to pause in their work. They were softly asked to take a deep breath, and were reminded to stay focused on their group’s project. At 11, it was time to clean up. Steve very softly announced, “Clean up is not separate from Project Time. It’s the last part of Project Time and needs to be taken just as seriously. If you finish cleaning up your center, don’t forget to see who else needs help” With thirty-one third graders sweeping, washing, organizing materials, moving projects to storage space, picking up pencils, washing brushes, it was quite a scene! Eventually, the room was clean, children were grabbing coats and lunchboxes and somehow they all made it out of the room in time for their 11:20 lunchtime!

What is it that allowed Steve to have so much trust in his children’s ability to work independently on those in-depth projects? How could he have so much belief in their potential to learn through these explorations?

Steve generously gave up his lunch period so that he could meet with me to discuss the multitude of questions swirling about in my mind. First of all, he explained, he has the luxury of working in a school where children learn through inquiry and exploration starting in pre-kindergarten and going up through each grade. This is not new to them when they enter his class in September.

During the first part of the year, Steve told me, he focuses on building a strong and respectful classroom community. Later, when he began the China study, they worked on whole-class projects like making lanterns and raising silkworms. This supported an understanding of how to follow through on a project from the early stages, through the middle and to the culmination, thus allowing children to ultimately work in small groups without his close supervision.

What stood out to me was Steve’s confidence in the children. He gave himself permission to take the time to do what he knew was needed to support his work. As I heard in all three trips that I took to Reggio Emilia, Steve used a road map for his instruction rather than a train schedule telling him when to start and stop.

After our meeting, I went downstairs and ran into Anna Allanbrook, the school principal. I asked her if she could spare a few minutes to answer some of my questions. My main question to Anna was, “What do you do about the Common Core, Performance Tasks, and all of the mandates that are coming down from the city, the state and the national Department of Education.? Anna chuckled. She seemed to be anticipating this question. Perhaps it is something that she is often asked.

Anna pointed out to me that all of the inquiry work being done throughout the school fits so well into the intention of the common core standards. In fact, Brooklyn New School has had an emphasis on reading nonfiction texts for years because of how important they are in the inquiry research. She also explained that the staff has plans to meet at the end of the school year to codify their various inquiry projects, showing where and how they align with the common core standards.

As part of their project work, the children are doing a lot of authentic, intentional writing. They’re asking questions, analyzing data, responding to information in many using a wide variety of modalities, collaborating and problem solving.

What more can we ask of our 8-year olds?

After speaking with Anna, I stopped by Steve’s classroom to say goodbye and thank him for a wonderful morning. It was independent reading time. There was a hush in the air as children, scattered around the room, were quietly engaged with their individual books. Sitting on a bench at the side of the room, Steve was head to head conferring with a boy. I looked at the chart that hung on the wall over their heads and read these words . “Talent is what you have. Effort is what you give.” These few words say so much about the spirit of this classroom . We all have our own special talents and we also all have a commitment to giving something to our community.

A Wise Voice in Education!

The Safest Space

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I’ve often talked about my own classroom as a studio and laboratory where children could find a safe place to experiment and take chances. Creating this risk-free environment was a priority for me. It was important in school and also at home for my daughter, Simone.

Now an adult with her own 11-year-old child, Simone has become a world-renown pianist. She realized her passion for music at a very young age. When she was almost nine years old we enrolled her in a pre-college Saturday program at the Manhattan School of Music. She studied solo piano, played in ensembles, learned ear training and music theory, sang in a chorus and attended a performance class. She thrived in this musical world and never missed one Saturday from when she began in third grade until she graduated high school.

Not all of the students were as serious as Simone about their music instruction and an important part of each Saturday was also spent in play…running through the halls playing tag, giggling about boys when the teen years hit, sitting around talking…generally just being children having a good old time. After being at Manhattan School for a few years, many people who were seriously involved in music suggested that we transfer Simone to the Juilliard pre-college division. This was a more career-driven program with higher professional standards that the students were held to. I vehemently refused to agree to this change. I wanted Simone to have the freedom to find her own way and to take chances in a relatively low-risk, playful and nurturing school.

In describing the importance of the work environment, the Pulitzer prize- winning author, Jhumpa Lahiri, said, “ My holy space is my studio. That’s the safest space. An artists studio is the place where the artist feels most protected because in that space he or she is the most vulnerable and invulnerable at the same time because that’s what one has to feel in order to make something.”

Our young students are both vulnerable and invulnerable, just like the artist or writer in the studio. They enter kindergarten sometimes apprehensive, often eager and usually curious. Here is a new world to explore, new people to meet and many new skills and rules to learn.

On my visits to the schools in Reggio Emilia and in discussions with the Italian teachers, my colleagues and I were impressed with the very strong faith and belief in children’s abilities that permeated all that we saw and heard. Teachers encouraged children by sharing meaningful observations, providing interesting provocations and giving children a lot of time and freedom to explore with a variety of materials. Learning was a communal experience and children shared, discussed, explained, argued, mediated and created together in the safety of their school environment.

In 1988 I returned to teaching kindergarten after having spent the last ten years teaching pre-kindergarten. In my school, all of the kindergartens were taking part in the writing workshop under the tutelage of the Teachers College Reading and Writing Project. I was skeptical and reluctant to push my young children into something that they might not be ready for. However, I quickly changed my mind when I saw how inquiry-based the workshop was and how much fun the children were having drawing and sharing their stories.

The writing workshop was a wonderfully risk free time of day, when children could take many chances in exploring some previously uncharted territory. Mark, who came into kindergarten without any pre-school experience, could proudly show me his swirly scribble and talk at length about his ride on the roller coaster at Coney Island.

During the same workshop, Neal worked intensely on his bird poem,

Hiw or Birds ther Color?
How are birds their color?

FlmiNGGows or PiiNGk
Flamingos are pink

BeCis thea eat Shrmp
Because they eat shrimp

CirDNils or Red Becis thea Eat Pstir
Cardinals are red because they eat pizza

Blwjis or Blw Becis thea Eat BlwBires
Bluejays are blue because they eat blueberries

Pekics or Gren BeCis thea Eat Gris
Peacocks are green because they eat grass

Chikings or Briwn
Chickens are brown

Becis thea Eat Dirt
Because they eat dirt

Wit iF a Bird Eats a Rinbow
What if a bird eats a rainbow?

Both boys were experimenting with writing and language. They weren’t in competition with each other. They were both proud of their work and encouraged to keep writing.

Would they have felt as free to experiment if they were asked to self-assess their work against this rubric that I saw in a kindergarten classroom last October?

When the classroom teacher noticed the look of horror on my face, she sheepishly said, “I knew that you wouldn’t like this Renee. Our TC Staff Developer told us that we have to use it.” I thought of how Mark would have been crushed. Perhaps he would not have gone on to become our class “master of the double e”. Later in the year, when Mark felt ready to start adding words to his stories, he discovered “ee”, finding this double letter in all different places, even on a tee shirt that he wore, with great excitement, to school.

I wonder, with great sadness, about the change that has taken place in this wonderful program that at one time valued the stories of all children. Of course it is not only the writing workshop that has lost its way. Somehow, the vision of the strong and able child, a child filled with personal history and great potential appears to have vanished from our school system. Belief and trust have been set aside…no belief and trust in children…no belief and trust in teachers. Teachers are controlled with threats and fear. Children are controlled with rubrics, tests, scripted lessons and unrealistic, uninspiring expectations.

A sweatshop-like factory has sadly replaced the studio and laboratory. Perhaps the children need a union!

Redefining Literacy: Reflections on my trip to Reggio Emilia

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On October 22nd, I traveled to Reggio Emilia with 67 other educators. We had a common focus. We were to visit the schools of this celebrated Italian early childhood program, dialogue with their educational staff and then meet among ourselves to see if we could make significant and enlightening literacy connections between their educational program and current instructional trends in our own schools back homes.

I was driven by a more specific question; one that has been puzzling me for the past few years. How is literacy interpreted in American schools? How is literacy interpreted and supported in the schools in Reggio Emilia? Although this was my third trip to Reggio Emilia, it was the first time that I approached my visit to their schools with such a pointed focus.

For some time now, I’ve been noticing that literacy, in New York City elementary schools, is defined as something that can be framed within a “literacy block” , a specific part of the day when reading, writing and phonics are taught. I wonder if it possible for literacy to encompass a more expansive meaning?

How might an artist define literacy? A scientist? A musician? A mathematician?

When I approached my husband Simon Dinnerstein and asked him how he, as an artist, thinks of literacy, his response was that literacy “would imply the ability to converse about … tone, color value, materials, emotions, expressions, forms, composition, content, …, painting, drawing, …abstraction…and obsession.” For Simon, a high degree of literacy would “consist of backing up ideas with a cogent argument as well as historic and contemporary examples. A super high mode would transform all of these modes into a meaningful personal vision.”

I wrote to the composer, Philip Lasser, and described how a public school’s day includes a “literacy block” and asked him what he thought about this and also how he, as a composer and musician, could describe the concept of being a literate person. He wrote, “Whoever is using the term is really bringing it down to the minimum level of the word, i.e. ability to read. That is being literate but it is not literacy!” When pushed to say more, he responded,” I would think in any discipline, literacy involves a clear overview of the history, periods, seminal figures and an ability to converse about the subject adding a few basic specifics like names, or events, etc….”

For a mathematician’s point of view, I asked Paul Lockhart, author of Measurement and
A Mathematician’s Lament for his take on this question of literacy and he replied, “Of course I agree that literacy in the broader sense is the important idea. And yes, of course, there is definitely such a thing as “math literacy.” I suppose with anything, whether it be writing, poetry, music, science, dance, or mathematics, there are a few levels or varieties of literacy. There’s technical literacy: knowing what fifth position is, or what a perfect fourth is, or how to spell ‘ceiling’, or knowing the Pythagorean theorem. I think this is small potatoes, actually. The REAL meaning of literacy (to me) is understanding the meaning and motivation behind these various arts. What is it that poets do, and why do they do it? What is the history and philosophy of the subject? How has it evolved? Why do humans have such a need to make art and meaning and to communicate it to each other? That sort of thing. To develop a sophistication of taste.”

In the pre-schools and the new elementary school in Reggio Emilia I observed exciting examples of a much more expansive interpretation of literacy. Here is one example of what I mean. A group of four-year-old children had expressed an interest in a flowering Jasmine plant that was in the classroom. After carefully listening to the children’s comments and questions about the plant, the teacher provided opportunities for the children to begin an exploration of perfumes. When they talked to each other, the children seemed to be making references to their mothers and to the perfumes that they used. To follow up on this talk, the teacher set up an appealing display of herbs, spices, fruit peels, and other aromatic artifacts on the art table along with graters, peelers, mortar and pestles, paper, colored pencils, pens, markers, watercolors and other tools. As they explored these materials, the children created symbols for writing perfume recipes, making connections to the smells that came from food being prepared in the school kitchen. They experimented with various ways of extracting smells from plants, discussing the variety of smells that they associate with plants and animals, and creating aesthetically pleasing artistic arrangements of plants and herbs. As this was taking place, the teacher was documenting their animated conversations by drawing her own sketches, taking photographs, and notating bits of dialogue. Periodically, she asked questions and made observations to scaffold their explorations.

In the elementary school, the seven year olds were analyzing words in a way that would put a smile on Diane Snowball’s face. There were snails in the school garden and this sparked an interest in writing about them for some of the children. However, they were having difficulty in figuring out how to spell the Italian word for snail – chiocciola. Rather than proceeding with a spelling lesson or strategy lesson, the teacher provided different types of paper, pencils, crayons and markers. She invited the children to draw a representation of a snail. She then asked them to hypothesize on how the word would be written. The children compared their different spellings of the word and decided that it must be a spelling with many letters. To support their investigations, she gave them strips of paper divided into 10 boxes and asked if they could fit the letters of the word into the boxes.

c h i o c c i o l a

They continued their exploration by looking for words within words that might have a connection to the word chiocciola. They made lists of words that had some connection to the word ‘snail’, all the while discussing the meaning of the word snail and the many ways that the word could be used.

In this simple spelling exploration the children were using drawing, discussions, personal connections to prior experiences and even mathematical thinking to come up with “a meaningful personal vision” for the word chiocciola. They were working together to make meaning of the word and of the spelling of the word. There were boxes provided for analyzing the spelling but the children’s thinking was not slotted into a time-box.

The value that is placed on collaboration, analysis, experimentation, wondering, discourse, and the generally lovely messiness of learning is what so touched my teacher’s heart as I spent time in Reggio Emilia. It bothers me when I visit schools back home and see kindergarten children” days divided into little boxes, like the kindergarten schedule shown below, filled with activities that drain away the natural curiosities that they brought with them when they first arrived in school.

Perhaps my search for a greater interpretation of literacy is misguided. Perhaps what I really want is for our schools, like the schools that I saw in Reggio Emilia, to demonstrate more faith and belief in our children. I would like children to have more opportunities to savor their learning and not to be pushed and rushed up a ladder. I would like children to have the opportunity to deeply explore topics that interest them and to be free to explore these topics as artists, scientists, musicians, athletes …basically using whatever part of the hundred or more languages that speak to them and that they speak in.

I also want teachers to have the same opportunities to grow professionally that are given to the teachers in Reggio Emilia – opportunities for professional collaboration and consultation, time to observe children and, with colleagues, to use these observations and documentation to analyze students work and to plan provocative, engaging and appropriate curriculum that is truly based on what children know, need to know and want to know.

Investigating Choice Time: Inquiry, Exploration, and Play

by: Renée Dinnerstein