Vivian Paley: Culture and Play

A reader recently commented on our blog and mentioned a writer and teacher I had not heard of before. Then, thanks to @FSSimon, I saw her name again - Vivian Paley. And I'm glad I did. Thank you, Fran, for introducing me to my new favorite education writer!

 

Her research, based on tape recording her students daily, provides a rare window into the minds of young children. She has called "play" the love of her life and her book, You Can’t Say You Can’t Play, A Child’s Work: The Importance of Fantasy Play, discusses how her students grasp to understand community and acceptance, and its opposite - exclusion. These are incredibly hard concepts to understand -  even for adults - and here she is discovering how children do it at 4 years old!

Paley has said, "Every species practices being young." Humans practice the same way other species do, with the added dimension of imaginative play. Children practice pretending to be someone else, somewhere else. They step outside of themselves and invent abstract thought. Children are inventing learning as they play with ideas.

 

"I am intended to have my own ideas," Paley says, speaking as one of her subjects in this video. "That's why I play the way I do, to show myself what my ideas are and how necessary I am to the community."

When our at-risk students come to Head Start, we don't have the luxury of time. In many circumstances, we are trying to pack three years of play into nine months of school. You can't do that and just play in a classroom. So we try to find balance and "teach" some basic readiness skills like recognizing letters, numbers, colors, shapes, and make our lessons as "fun" as possible. But there is a difference between play and fun. Play occurs in children naturally when they are ready, teaching happens when the teacher is ready, and it will never, ever be as powerful as a child "inventing learning" for themselves.

Image: http://www.curry.edu/Academics/Majors+Minors+and+Departments/Education/Features/Vivian+Paley.htm

Fueling the Pre-K Fire

If you are already a supporter of publicly-funded pre-k, you know why researchers and reporters use the phrases, "mounting evidence", "growing body of research", and "well- documented benefits" of pre-k. They are all ways of saying, "We both know that pre-k makes sense. Why are we still talking about this?"

Every once in a while a study or report is published that is less than positive about public pre-k. These reports are like rocks thrown on a bonfire when you consider the quantity and quality of studies that support the benefits of pre-k for children and communities. Sure, some sparks fly when a study that is less than positive is published but that is all there is, sparks. When a bonfire is really burning, you can't put it out with a rock.

 

Pre-k is a fire is built on a foundation of research with a 50 year history.

 

If you want to read an overview of the wide range of recent pre-k research, check out this Public Policy Forum early childhood research chart. The matrix outlines the long and short-term benefits of pre-k for children, along with cost-benefit studies. And the field of research supporting public pre-k keeps growing. On the National Institute for Early Childhood Research (NIEER) web site, I found five studies published last year that support findings that high quality pre-k has substantial benefits.

Just this month, Pre-K Now's very own Albert Wat published the report, The Case for Pre-K in Education Reform: A Summary of Program Evaluation Findings. With his keen understanding of the field, he describes six separate evaluations of state funded pre-k programs published since 2005. These studies found that students who enrolled in pre-k were 30 to 50 percent less likely to repeat a grade in the years after. Students were also 49 percent less likely to be referred for special education services, which can cost twice as much as mainstream education. So read this report and pickup some fuel for the fire. Know why pre-k matters.

Image from: http://gardeningwithchildren.files.wordpress.com/2009/11/bonfire.jpg

The Brain Motor Accountability Connection

Pre-k educators who began teaching before the dawn of the No Child Left Behind era remember some important concepts that have since fallen into disuse. Developing skills like thinking, feeling, talking, manipulating, and moving are no longer as important as knowing the answer to a narrow set of questions such as "What letter is this? What number is this? What color is this?" When I began teaching in 1995, the five domains of child development were actually considered to be equal to one another. The different fields include cognitive development, social emotional development, speech and language development, approaches to learning, and physical - motor development. Pre-k educators were able to develop the whole child through the natural flow of the school day. The social emotional domain was so integrated into the day that it was not difficult to address. Fine motor development was easily incorporated because we drew pictures every day and did at least three crafts per week. Reinforcing gross motor skills was easy, we would just sing, dance, run, jump, around and have fun.

Then the push for accountability took such a hold of the political consciousness that we had to become more focused on reading and, at least in the beginning, that was a good thing. We devoted more attention to emergent literacy (speech and language development) and I believe overall the children in our classes benefited from the increased effort. Over time however, cognitive development became the only thing administrators and policy makers outside of the classroom cared about, possibly because it was the only thing that was measurable. Over the past 15 years, pre-k has become more about testing and less about learning. Here is a recent rant from a pre-k teacher in Texas:

We are testing things that I used to test in first grade, so that is how the curriculum has bumped down. It is a waste of instructional time to ask our kiddos 40+ phonemic awareness questions, when they don't even know simple rhyming words or nursery rhymes. [At my school], Kids don't come with much home literacy experience, but many have the potential to learn in the right environment.

When I read something like this I know how this teacher feels. I have been there. I remember completing an individual developmental screening followed by the Head Start National Reporting System testing, then the state emergent literacy assessment, then the Child Observation Record (COR), and lastly a pre-k report card. Total time spent in assessment: 90 minutes per child in a class of 19 students plus entering and scoring anecdotes in the COR. This all happened in the first three months of school when, as a teacher, I was really trying to develop relationships with my students.

That much assessment can really warp your perception of what you are supposed to be doing in a classroom. But, thanks to the trend in brain research that looks at what happens with the brain while it is learning, we find that good-old-fashioned developmentally appropriate, touching, moving and playing type preschool practices are what kids need for optimal brain development. A recent article on Early Childhood News titled, Optimizing Early Brain and Motor Development through Movement describes "windows of opportunity" in the early childhood years for developing the brain. The authors, Carl Gabbard, Ed.D., and Luis Rodrigues write:

These windows begin opening before birth and then narrow as a child grows older. In theory, there are a series of windows for developing motor control, vision, language, feelings, etc. If a child misses an opportunity, his or her brain may not develop its circuitry to its full potential for a specific function.

 

So apparently, it is OK with scientists if we play in the mud again. Maybe it will be okay with policy makers too, as long as we can tell them, "We're building neural pathways with every mud pie."

Thanks to @balmeras of The Grass Stain Guru for the link on twitter.

Childhood Fading Inside

The playground can be an almost mythical place in our childhood memories. On the playground friendships are forged and broken and mended again (usually stronger). Rapidly beating hearts jump from taboo shocks as mouths mutter words they shouldn't. Games are learned that help kids find the edge of fear, frustration, and anger, all with the knowledge that everyone will be saved by the bell.

Of course, there are trials too. Bullies occasionally use the playground as a sparring ring. Sometimes, those bullies even serve a useful purpose, helping to make us stronger, learn that not everyone is our friend, or just bruise less easily. Most of all, on the playground legends are told, and retold, heroes and villains are born. Monsters, rotten eggs, and "it" lives eternal. On the blacktop, the most basic of survival skills − like avoiding conflict, knowing when to say no, and figuring out who you can trust − are practiced within a pocket of time and space, and with the safety net of a watchful adult.

That's how it used to be. According to noted paladin for play, David Elkind, the playground isn't magical any more. In a New York Times Op-Ed Sunday, Elkind described a new educational position that is gaining support through an $18 million grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The position of "recess coach" is spreading across the country. A recess coach is charged with being a caring adult who helps kids learn and play on the school playground. Elkind, who has long fought for the protection of unstructured play time for kids is actually supporting the new position because, as he says, "recess coaching is a vastly better solution than eliminating recess in favor of more academics."

 

I tend to agree with Dr. Elkind. Many schools continue to react to the current No Child Left Behind law by limiting time kids play outdoors during a time when they need it most. Saturated with computers, television and video games, many of our kids these days don't learn how to play. We must teach them tag, hopscotch, and double dutch, (you should see me trying to model that one) and let them know it's okay to draw on the pavement with sidewalk chalk. What do you think? Is teaching children to play robbing them of their first taste of independence or is it an integral part of molding them into economically viable citizens?

Image: http://www.tvscoop.tv/e4/2.html

Teachers Researching Teaching

The National Association for Educating Young Children has been a resource for best practices with young children since the 1920s. NAEYC can be counted on to publish useful research for people helping little people. Recently, I came across several papers published by NAEYC that show early childhood through the eyes of the classroom-focused researcher. It is a collection of research conducted by pre-k teachers and administrators conducted in their own classrooms.  Right away you can tell the flavor of this research is going to be more like good ol' home cooking than the complicated gourmet usually presented by the economic researchers like Janet Currie and Steven Barnett that we know and love in Pre-K Now.

 

Don't get me wrong, this is serious research about the environment, social justice, and child psychology -- all important issues. But with titles like "Exploring the Forest: Wild Places in Childhood"  , "If I Were President: Teaching Social Justice in the Primary Classroom", "Do You Want to See Something Goofy? Peer Culture in the Preschool Yard", you can be sure that each read will have less of the wonky language prominent in heavier works. 

Here is an excerpt from Anna Golden's "Exploring the Forest" that makes me want to run, not walk, to my local pre-k to see what they are doing with nature.

The preschoolers leave the school building and wait, pressing up against the playground gate. When I open the gate, they take off like horses let out of a stable where they have been shut in too long. I follow behind them, trying to keep up in the bumpy and overgrown forest.

 

All the talk about long-term and economic benefits of pre-k aside, these pre-k teachers remind us that there is something to learn from our youngest students.