Language vs. Literacy

One thing that my position as a child development specialist has given me is a deep respect for different styles of educating young children. Each day when I walk into a classroom, I observe the strengths, weaknesses and distinct individuality of various teaching approaches – especially when it came to building children’s language development and literacy skills.

 

Over time, I became aware of how the state-certified teachers I supervised in public school settings had certain strengths that made them extremely effective in their surroundings. Most notably, they had excellent behavior management skills and a strong understanding of the literacy curriculum. Their instruction styles differed, but they all implemented systematic, meaningful, and explicit literacy instruction to hone their emergent literacy teaching. The outcome was that the scores on their students’ emergent literacy screenings were generally high. The two areas of weakness that seemed to crop up in their students’ testing were vocabulary development and social-emotional development.

 

I also observed that in the child care partner sites, where teachers have a bachelor’s degree or a child development associate’s degree, they spend lots of time talking with their students. The students primary language was often the same language that their teachers taught in. These teachers had fully embraced the idea of developmentally appropriate practice and child-directed learning.  It was really inspiring to see them in action developing the language skills of their students. However, their literacy screening scores were not where they could have been yet they had the same materials, and for at least one year, the same training as the school-based teachers.

 

Recently, in my research I came across an article that explained the discrepancies I was noticing in the classroom. In the study, Quality of Language and Literacy Instruction in Preschool Classrooms Serving At-risk Pupils (Justice, Mashburn, Hamre, and Pianta, Early Childhood Research Quarterly, 2008), the researchers compared the effectiveness of teachers using both scripted curriculum and child-directed teaching.

 

The study found that the quality of instruction received was more important than fidelity to a procedural literacy curriculum. This has huge implications for a teacher or director trying to help kids become successful readers. It suggests that what those child care partners were doing, in supporting their students and honoring their social emotional development, is just as important as what the school-based teachers did – implementing a scientifically based reading curriculum.

 

If we are to support language development and emergent literacy, both linked to student achievement in later grades (PDF), we have to support both, even though this means subscribing to more than one best way to teach.

Caught on Tape: Professional Development

When I hear teachers describe how they wish they had more patience, I cringe. There’s something about the phrase that doesn’t feel right to me when coupled with our chosen profession. For years, I have tried to figure out what it is was and then, the other day  it occurred to me: Teaching in pre-k doesn’t require patience, it requires perspective.
In so many interactions, pre-k teachers must step back from a situation and and ask themselves, “What is really going on here?” This stepping-out-of-the-present moment needs to occur again and again, all day throughout the activities and interactions in a day. It is how you figure out what questioning strategy is the best way to push a child’s learning, it’s how you deduce who stole the truck from whom, and it’s how you to determine when it’s time to just put the book down and get up and wiggle for a while. If a teacher doesn’t have the ability to distance themselves from a situation, they don’t have the ability to make the best decision within that a particular moment in the classroom.
Not every teacher has the ability to step outside of themselves and reflect all of the time. This is why video can be such a powerful professional development tool in pre-k classrooms.Through watching oneself teach, educators are able to observe themselves and consider how they teach from outside of their immediate experience.

Using video enables teachers to really observe themselves and consider how they teach from outside of their experience. It can be a powerful professional development tool in pre-k classrooms because our interactions with students are both quick and constant. 

If you have never tried video taping yourself teaching, I highly recommend it. I learned more from the process than any other professional development activity in my entire career.

Image: http://www.thespacereport.org/store/

Thank You, Dear Reader

Dear Reader,

 

You have made this space a valuable forum for connecting and sharing what is important in pre-k education. I have very much enjoyed writing for you, to you, and about you on this blog, which has been a part of the Pew Center on the States’ Pre-K Now campaign

 

My term as blogger for Inside Pre-K and the blog itself will be ending on August 1. The content will remain up as a resource and reminder of the importance of pre-k, and I will continue to blog at the early learning website, Emergent Learner.

 

Inside Pre-K began with Sophia Pappas, a Teach for America pre-k teacher in New Jersey. She wrote each week about the marvelous and intricate world of a public pre-k classroom. After Sophia came Vanessa Levin, an inspiring, seasoned pre-k professional. She wrote with great passion about how awesome it is to be a pre-k teacher. We still get more referrals from her website, Pre-K Pages, than any other site. Simultaneously a young teacher who, much like Sophia, Karissa Oren, shared her on-the-job learning, discoveries, personal and professional growth within her Minnesota pre-k classroom.

 

Jennifer Rosenbaum and I joined Inside Pre-K at the same time.  Also from the Teach for America fleet, Jennifer had a knack for bringing her students’ voices into her writing.

 

I think it’s safe to say writing for you has helped us to better understand early childhood education, teaching within the profession, and how to further the pre-k agenda in the classroom, at our schools, in our districts -- and even at the state and federal levels.  Not to mention, it has helped us to learn more about ourselves.

 

Before my last blog entry, I’d like to publish a list of the top posts in Inside Pre-K history, and I need your help. If you have a moment and remember a post from the past four years please leave a comment referencing it below.

I look forward to your responses.

Thank you,

J.M. Holland

Image: See - Saw or Childhood Revised by J.M. Holland

5 Qs with Fran Simon

 

I recently published a post about the value of Twitter to the pre-k community. I wanted to follow up with a post about one of the great people out there in the early childhood Twitterverse. Fran Simon is a social media marketing guru with a passion for all things pre-k. She has become a hub for pre-k communication around policy, practice, and the profession. If @FSSimon retweets you, everyone knows what you have posted. I asked Fran to talk with us about her passion for pre-k and the intersection between social media and advocacy. Here is what she said:

1. I see that your company ESbyFS (Engagement Strategies by Fran Simon) is a social media marketing company, but most of your twitter posts are about pre-k. Whats the connection between early childhood and social media for you?

Even though my career has evolved away from the day-to-day practice of early childhood programs, it is still my passion. The intersection of early childhood education, business, nonprofit administration, and technology is very important to me.  Throughout my career, I discovered that because the typical early childhood education administrator or non-profit leader is so focused on delivering high-quality programs, and has minimal business, leadership, or technology training, there is a bit of a gap in applying best practice to program administration.  Due to several great experiences working in outstanding organizations throughout my career, I came to understand that good business practice is equally as important as good classroom practice when it comes to delivering great early childhood programs.  I believe it is my responsibility to pass that on to other early childhood educators.

I know from experience that “marketing” is a dirty word for most early childhood education administrators. After all, our programs are great, so they should sell themselves, right? We don’t see ourselves as people who sell anything. We are educators! Wrong. We forget that we sell our programs when we recruit staff, enroll families, and engage board members, community leaders, constituents, funders, donors, and facilities managers. Administrators with thriving programs and non-profit organization managers must know how to engage, and in the 21st century, engagement means adding social media to the communications tool box.

Our field is falling behind when it comes to technology adoption. I see a lot of people working hard to find out how to apply technology in the ECE classroom, but far fewer focused on the implications of social media in the front office. I’ll leave the classroom work to others. My focus is on helping program administrators and early learning-related nonprofit organizations leverage social media as an additional tool for marketing, outreach, fundraising, advocacy, and activism.

2. What made you such a passionate supporter of high quality pre-k and what do you think parents should know about it?

I think there is an important place for the millions of educators who advocate in their daily work by delivering great programs and educating parents and others about their work.  I have enormous respect for what advocacy practitioners do every day. For me, my inner advocate was dying to get out and make a lot of noise, but that only makes my passion more evident than the average teacher or director. My passion is no more or no less important than the passion of the preschool teacher who goes to sleep every night dreaming of what to do the next day and rises with worries about the children in his/her class. I just happen to make a lot more noise.

I’d like parents to realize that pre-k isn’t just about getting children “ready” for kindergarten. It’s about meeting children where they are developmentally and helping them develop the passion and skills they need to be lifelong learners. I’d also like all parents to know they have the power to not only influence their children, but their children’s teachers and schools,  their communities, states, and the nation. Their power is often unrealized on all levels. I’d like to see that change.

3. What has changed about technology in the past five years that you see affecting preschool positively?

I see this through two lenses. From a classroom technology perspective, I would be remiss if I didn’t mention the iPhone and iPad and the new interest in application development. However, for me, the jury is still out. Developers have yet to produce meaningful and age appropriate applications that can be used in the classroom to add value to and not distract from  the important hands-on learning in which young children need to engage. There’s promise there, but I am not very optimistic that we will see good practice win out over profits.

Beyond the classroom ... we now have the tools to easily connect the disparate dots between legislation, curriculum development, funding streams, and classroom practice. We can learn more and do more faster and with more impact than ever before. It is an unprecedented time in the evolution of communication. Far too few early childhood educators have begun to realize the impact social media can have on our ability to continue to learn about and engage on behalf of children and families. All I can say is: “Come on in! The water is fine!” What is certain to me is that we can’t continue to do business as usual. We must use the tools that are literally right at our fingertips or be left mute.

4. If you could change anything about our national or state pre-k policy what would it be?

The aspect that troubles me most is the lack of an integrated and cohesive national policy for ALL funding streams  that brings together Head Start, pre-k, and child care to deliver a real system of programming that meets the needs of ALL children (birth through age eight) and ALL families. Sometimes I believe the early care and education community is its own worst enemy because we continue to allow our voices to be distorted by the fragmented nature of the various organizations at play. I’d like to see us come together. There have been many attempts to bring one voice to the table for policy makers, but to date, there are always outliers on every issue. It’s pretty frustrating to watch. I don’t know the answer. I wish I did.

5. Are there engagement strategies that pre-k advocates could be using to further the national debate on public pre-k that you have found to be especially effective?

The only thing that is more powerful than grassroots advocacy is adding online tools to the mix. I think the 2008 election proved how successful organizations can be at getting the message out when you combine good, old-fashioned grassroots strategy with powerful online advocacy software, mobile messaging, email, and social networking sites. In the past couple of years since the campaign, these tools have only become stronger and more effective, and the public has become more receptive. There are incredible resources available to learn more about how to integrate all of these tactics with traditional advocacy practices, but advocates have to be open to the possibilities, and organizations need to build in the time and resources needed to do them right. There are a number of organizations in our space doing a great job with social media and advocacy integration. My favorite example is The Children’s Defense Fund, but I also admire the social-advocacy work of MomsRising, NAEYC, NACCRRA, and of course, Pre-K Now. There are also many state and local organizations doing a great job.