On Teaching "Content"

In my new role as an educator outside of a traditional classroom setting, I am teaching children about gardening and nutrition.  This is the first time I have had a focus in my teaching, and it is a learning experience for me to think about the "stuff" that I need to deliver to kids.

I'm not struggling with the idea that teachers do deliver content.  But in my experience, I have planned environments and exploratory experiences for children and then observed and supported as they interact with prompts and people.  Even with preschool "content", like phonemic awareness and numeracy skills, children gain that knowledge over time with exposure to great stories, well planned free play environments, and teachers finding the moments to make those connections.  Content in this setting has been known to include worksheets and posters.

A day like Thursday, at our summer camp, found me sharing baby turkeys with the children and answering questions about them.  I'm thinking about how I feel about this shift.  It is an important part of what I will be doing for the coming year.

I've made lesson plans, and I have followed them.  Before now, my lesson plans were about the materials and how they might be presented and what I as a teacher might focus my language on.  Jumping into this work in the garden, I find that I need to convey specific information rather than focus on exploration.  For example, while looking at eggs that turkeys hatched from, children have questions about everything possible.  The way that the planning has been in the past does not necessarily allow for long periods of exploration, and with something this "scientific, there are lots of facts and we want the kids to gain some understanding of that.

There is a lot of value in children holding baby turkeys.  They have curiosities, and I'm happy to share my understandings and knowledge.  I suppose what I am more used to is children with more open ended materials, and me using my language and resources to support those explorations.  When I have a big poster in front of a group of kids that shows the different parts of a worm's body and we're talking about what worms do for the earth, things don't feel so open ended.

Something for me to remember is that I am still helping children learn.  I'm also not trying to meet any standards or benchmarks with this content.  And just because this is the way that teaching has happened in this garden in the past does not mean that it needs to be static.  I was brought on because I am a competent teacher.  I might still need to teach about worms, seeds, plant parts, and baby animals, but I think that a shift can be made to include more exploration and scientific thinking on the children's parts, rather than me delivering knowledge.

It is not my role to make the curriculum, but I can help with best practices.  I believe in the power of play and exploration, and I imagine that this older crowd might not always get those experiences in their classroom.  Its time to plan for more exploration and experimentation.

Expectations, Power, and Facilitation

I'm noticing some trends in my posts.  I'm clearly thinking about power and engagement.  Those are things that are an umbrella over every moment I have as a teacher.

Last week, I talked about expectations.  We need to suspend those as much as possible.  We can have inklings or guesses or pictures in our heads, but we cannot be frustrated when children approach something differently than we do.  We're adults - we've been in training for decades, and we are creatures of habit.  Just the other day, I had put up the children's names next to a sign up sheet at the easels - we are embedding more name writing into out days, and signing up for popular activities is a way to make those marks.  One girl walked up to the list, dipped the paintbrush into the orange paint, and basically highlighted her name on the list of names that was thee as a reference.  Why not?  She saw her name and painted on it.  And in her mind, it is a valid way to show that she wants to paint.  Her name is literally covered in paint.

As teachers, we can have ultimate power if we want it.  Children also know how to get the power if they want it.  We all have our ways.  I have my agenda, and each child has their own as well.  Who am I to say that mine is better?

You can picture a room where children are doing whatever they want - jumping up and down on tables, painting on the floor - whatever.  The classic image is from Miss Nelson is Missing:

That is one extreme.  The other extreme is children being forced to do things that they are not interested in at all.  But most of what happens is somewhere in the middle - especially when it comes to preschool.  There is no one way for it to look.  I've never had two environments that were set up just the same; I've never dusted off last year's planner and put it all into action again; and I've never expected one group of children to be the same as another one.  Not only would that be boring, but it would make teaching monotonous and repetitive.  

I like that children paint in random places and have different funny names for the baby dolls and a million different stories to dictate.  But I also like the common things that children do on their own, without instruction from me.  Play dough with popsicle sticks always turns into a birthday cake, three-year-olds always draw people like tadpoles, and four-year-olds put more weight on the word "friend" than any other word they know at that point.  Our job is to connect with children and make decisions based on that, with the input of the children.  We can try to make all the decisions as teachers, but it is not going to work.  But we have to facilitate and stay sane.  The better we are at seeing and listening and adjusting and listening some more, the better the experience is for the children.  I am thinking about preschool, but this probably applies to education in general.

I do not claim to be an expert at this - I'm writing about it because it is a challenge.  We need to be able to work with children, not create a free-for-all.  There would be no point in school if kids just ran around.  That middle ground is my ultimate goal.  Children engaged in the things that interest them, and teachers facilitating that work to help build on it and make it deeper and more meaningful.  Some might call it the Project Approach, some might call is Reggio Inspired, some might call it unproductive.  Call it what you wish.  Engagement might be children in a forest Kindergarten, children conducting science experiments, painting planks of wood, or making bread.  All of those things are able to happen because adults facilitate them.  

I'll end this rambling with a quote from The Hundred Languages of Children that describes the curriculum of the early childhood centers in Reggio Emilia: 

 "The curriculum is not child centered or teacher directed.  The curriculum is child originated and teacher framed." - Forman and Fyfe

Everyone in a classroom plays an important role.  And if we're teachers because we want to provide positive experiences for young children, that is exactly what we should do - and we should try to make those positive experiences engaging, explorative, meaningful, and personal.