A Real Life Story Problem

Math was never a favorite subject of mine.  I think it stems back to a difficulty with story problems throughout my elementary school years.  I attended a Math Institute this past week put on through the MN Department of Education.  I am pleased to say that we are incorporating many of the strategies in our classrooms already – always a good sign!

 

What was more interesting was to look at standards for mathematics at the early childhood level.  There is a slight difference in our state standards, or Early Childhood Indicators of Progress, and those put out by NAEYC (National Association for the Education of Young Children). 

 

As we discussed these standards and indicators of progress, our group was split pretty evenly.  One third of the programs represented were required to follow the standards and assess students to show progress.  One third used these indicators as a guide for their curriculum and used their own assessment model.  The final third were learning about these standards for the first time, although they include most of them in the programming already. 

 

As our state gets closer and closer to mandates related to Early Childhood Education, it will be interesting to see how programs respond to new or more strictly enforced standards.  Our director is currently researching curriculums, programming options and student contact time.  Quality rating systems are starting to play a role in funding and the choices parents have for early childhood opportunities. 

 

So now the story problem reads like this: 

 “Karissa is a teacher in an urban setting.  She has been told her 20 students need to show progress in all the areas of mathematics or her school will receive 3 stars instead of 5.  90% of her students start school without any knowledge of the English language and they have 6 hours of contact time a week due to budget cuts.  What would you do next?”

Vertical Alignment

The School Readiness and some of the Early Childhood Special Education teachers had the opportunity to host a “vertical alignment” inservice last week.  We met with the kindergarten teachers in our district.  This was not only an opportunity to meet each other and share curriculum ideas, but also an opportunity to show them our classrooms and give them a chance to see what we do every day. 

 

Our meeting started with a tour of our classrooms.  They were impressed to see a word wall, a break chair, and opportunities for students to work with their name, readers and writer's workshop.   They were pleased to hear we are following our state standards and encouraging our students to play! 

 

After the tour we settled into a conference room for discussion.  Surprisingly, their questions were not about our curriculum, teaching strategies or philosophies.  Instead, they were eager to compliment our programs while quickly asking, “How can we get every kindergartener to come to you first?”  I replied, “What a great question!” 

 

Some of the teachers were concerned about the screening process.  Students are required to complete an Early Childhood Screening within the first thirty days of starting kindergarten.  As with most things, it is encouraged that children participate in this screening at age three years, six months.   This way we can suggest various pre-kindergarten or special education opportunities as needed.  However, it seems that when a child comes to kindergarten after the beginning of the year, and does not pass their screening, they should be referred to our pre-k programming.  But, because enrollment is always an issue, this sometimes doesn’t happen.  In addition, it is sometimes hard to convince families that a 2 hour program, without breakfast, lunch or transportation is actually going to be better for their family.  

 

Our program is growing with leaps and bounds and with the recognition of key members of our district it has such great potential to reach even more families.  Now all I have to do is hope that our governor and our state's legislative bodies will see the greatness that is happening one four-year-old at a time!  

Preparing the Way

 
It’s that time of year again!  The nights are getting longer, there is a slight chill to the air and the “Great Minnesota Get-together,” otherwise known as our State Fair, is coming to an end.  I love the back-to-school time as much as any other teacher.  There is great excitement, anticipation and a tremendous amount of work!  I have tried my hardest to be organized and prioritize but it is amazing how much work has to be done. One of my goals as a professional is to work on my delegation skills.  I have learned to let my assistants help me with labeling, student packets, and project preparation.  In order to delegate these tasks, I have had to be proactive and ultra-organized.  I have to have materials ready to be assembled and a framework or example for how I want each task to be completed.  Although initially a lot of work, this system has helped me focus on bigger and better beginning of the year tasks. 
 
During our workshop time this year I was able to spend the bulk of my time with other collaborating teachers.  We discussed curriculum and our strong desire to make sure our learning experiences were aligned with the Minnesota Early Childhood Indicators of Progress.  These goals are research based and comprehensive.  I am excited to be a part of a team that has committed to providing opportunities that are proven to prepare and support a student as he or she starts a lifetime of learning. 
 
Here are some of the ideas we have brainstormed so far:
 
Oral Language:  Each classroom has a song time in which we will practice nursery rhymes and finger plays to support the language and literacy development indicator.
 
          Morning Meeting:  Students will participate in a large group time where they will
greet each other using eye contact and polite words.  In addition, they will participate in a sharing time activity and news and announcements.  This helps to support the social and emotional development indicator. 
 
Math Manipulative Small Groups: At least once a week, students will meet in a small group.  They will work with numerals, simple patterns and one to one correspondence.  This supports a portion of the cognitive development indicator.  

Fellow teachers: What creative, but important, classroom activities can you recommend to other teachers? 

Standardized tests in kindergarten?

As a pre-k teacher, I've always been a little bit thankful that my students don't take high stakes tests.  I know that my students learn a tremendous amount of information in school, but I also know that a formal assessment is not always the best way to measure what they know.  I rely heavily on observational assessment to track my students' progress and guide my instruction.  My observational assessments are mostly in the form of daily anecdotal notes -- I write down brief, objective accounts of what my students do and then at the end of the day I reflect on my notes, correlate them with my standards, write "next steps" for individual children and/or my whole class, and use all of this information to inform my instruction for the upcoming days and weeks.  This process takes time, but I've found that it really helps me provide differentiated instruction that is tailored to the needs of each of my students.

I believe firmly that assessments of any kind should be used to guide instruction at all grade levels.  When teachers feel comfortable with their assessments and they are an accurate measure of students' abilities, they can be an invaluable tool in the classroom.  However, when assessment is structured inappropriately or administered in an unfamiliar manner, it can yield inaccurate results.  For this reason, I worry tremendously about relying on standardized tests in early childhood classrooms.  They are not the most accurate way to gather data about what a pre-k, kindergarten, or even early elementary student knows, and inaccurate data is not helpful to the teacher.  Because I feel so passionately about this issue, I was a bit skeptical when I read the New York Times article explaining New York City's new yearlong pilot program to administer standardized tests to children in kindergarten through second grade.  I laud the city for recognizing, and seeking to quantify, the hard work that goes into early childhood classrooms, but I question their methods.  Is standardized testing really the best way to go about that?  Wouldn't it be better to give early childhood teachers -- who teach not only math and literacy, but also social skills, problem solving, creative thinking, emotional regulation, approaches to learning, and more -- a more holistic option for assessment?  I read recently in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution blog, Get Schooled, that Georgia seems to be grappling with this same issue.  I will be curious to read more about how their new assessment initiative, GKIDS (Georgia Kindergarten Inventory of Developing Skills), works for students and teachers. 

Don't get me wrong, formal assessments can -- and arguably should -- be one component of an assessment plan in pre-k through second grade classrooms.  I complete a brief formal assessment with each of my students once a month and more comprehensive assessment once a quarter, simply to gauge their progress on more formal academic skills.  This data is invaluable as I plan my small groups and figure out new ways to teach material that my students are finding challenging.  But I do not consider these assessments in isolation; I take my anecdotal notes, as well as my students' portfolios, into account when I am analyzing the data from these assessments.  Together, I feel like all three sources of information give me a holistic view of where my students are and where they should be going next.  I worry that if a district moves to gauge the success of its early childhood programs purely through standardized tests, that they will fail to see so much of the progress made by these young students. 

Wait Listed

A recent article in the Landcaster New Era, Wait list grows along with state preschool funding, describes a growing trend in early childhood education.  Although funding has been increased in some states, the need and interest in programming for our youngest learners has increased even more! 
 
The great thing about this article is the awareness it brings to the need for well-supported and funded pre-kindergarten programs.  After one year, Pre-K Counts states its participants have made “tremendous growth.”  Great!  Now, the frustrating part: the article mentions that the funding, although increased, is not enough to support the families that need and want these services.  It doesn’t make sense that a program with numerous life long benefits would be inadequately funded.  The money spent early in a child’s life will be saved in the coming years.  It is a classic example of a good investment that will mature over time.  Some of the comments associated with the online posting of this article were also frustrating.   It is frustrating to me, as an early childhood educator and as someone who respects children, to hear skeptics question which children need pre-k education.  The answer is EVERYONE!  Although there are higher risk students, every child has a right to be involved in early educational experiences.  Not every student is an English language learner, and not every student has developmental delays, but each child needs to practice interacting positively with their peers and developing good learning habits.  Early childhood classrooms provide a safe environment to develop those skills that are not always easy to assess.  Again, the pre-k issue comes down to closing the opportunity gap.  Parents need affordable and consistent programming that will support their child as he/she begins a lifetime of learning.  

Raising Pre-K Standards Part II

Recently I wrote about the proposed revisions to the Texas Pre-K Guidelines. The Texas Education Agency has posted the proposed revisions on its website for the public to view and comment on until April 15th. Be forewarned though, the document is a lengthy read totaling 115 pages in its entirety!

The good news: most of what is being proposed is both appropriate and achievable. A few of the revisions, such as “Centers should have certain basic equipment and an ever-changing variety of materials to intrigue the children,” seem a bit utopian given their dependence on funding. Overall though, I'm extremely pleased.

For the most part, the proposed changes are realistic and provide plenty of research to support the provided recommendations. In my opinion, the standards have been raised sufficiently while still managing to maintain the integrity of pre-k programs. I have outlined some of the high points of the revised guidelines below.

Full Day Pre-K: This year's revisions included a well-known fact, in the early education community, some pre-kindergarten programs out there are full-day (page 25)!  Most public pre-k programs are half-day, but as a full-day pre-k teacher myself, it was important to me that we were finally acknowledged as a part of the early childhood education community.  Notable progress included:

• Providing a sample schedule for a full-day classroom
• Suggestions regarding the recommended number of read alouds per day: 3 for full-day programs, 2 for half-day programs

Physical Space, an area previously neglected in earlier reports that is sorely in need of being addressed, included guidelines on how classrooms should be set up and organized. Suggestions provided were:

• Traffic patterns
• Materials placed within children's reach
• Organized storage
• Adequate equipment and supplies
• Clearly defined areas
• Centers
• Small and large group areas

Parental Involvement is a crucial part of any successful pre-k program because parents are a child’s first teacher. Among the highlights:

• Informing parents about what their children should learn in pre-k
• Keeping parents informed about their children’s progress
• Giving parents specific ideas about how they can help out at home
• Using home visits, teacher conferences, and parent training classes to keep parents informed

Assessment: I found the section on assessment very interesting and timely.  It states, “Children with mental, physical, or emotional difficulties that may require special services benefit greatly from early detection and diagnosis. For such children, diagnostic assessments can be very helpful.”

We are currently struggling with an increase of pre-k students who need special services on my campus. However, since we provide no screening services before school begins and are not required by law to do so, it is a tremendous undertaking trying to get students the proper services needed to maximize their success in the classroom. The process is so long and arduous, it often takes until kindergarten for our students to be identified, tested, and to begin receiving services.

Literacy: The literacy section was right on target including helpful examples of the different stages of writing. The requirements for alphabet knowledge have increased from “identifies 10 letters” to:

• Recognizes all letters when named by someone else
• Child names all upper and lowercase letters
• Child recognizes 10 letter sounds

Math: While I’m a little leery of the changes to the math section, I'm certainly willing to give them a try.  With a little extra effort and music, I'm sure both my students and I can meet these new challenges.  Interesting additions included:

• Oral counting to 30
• Addition word problems to 5
• Subtraction word problems to 5

Science was one area that was beefed up considerably with new additions including teaching 4 year olds about the solar system and energy.  Other notable concepts mentioned:

• Energy (light, heat, electricity)
• Organisms
• Life cycles
• Earth materials (rocks, soil, etc.)
• Sky (sun, planets, etc.)
• Weather

Sadly, these are only “guidelines,” and pre-k programs in Texas are not required by law to follow them. I have already identified several areas that I can predict with some certainty my district won’t be persuaded to follow, such as the diagnostic assessment piece.  Any diagnostic tests would have to be administered in the student's native language - a real challenge when you have as many languages spoken as we do in our district.  In addition, increased testing and earlier diagnosis would likely result in overcrowding within special ed classrooms.

While the new Texas Pre-K Guidelines are both child-centered and developmentally appropriate, many districts in Texas - including my own - do not have a dedicated person in charge of pre-k program curriculum and delivery.  If the guidelines were mandated, it would benefit all pre-k programs in our state by ensuring the existence of developmentally appropriate standards for all early childhood education instruction.

Spring Ahead! New Bills Introduced!

I was excited to open my inbox today to see a Ready 4 K “Updates from the Capital” email waiting for me! Ready 4 K is a non-profit organization in Minnesota advocating for our youngest citizens and their families. Over the past several years I have worked with Ready 4 K as a key contact. As a grassroots community, we are aiming to support families, improve quality of early care and education, increase access to such opportunities and connect to our greater community.

This recent email is very exciting! Representative Nora Slawick, who chairs the Early Childhood Learning Finance Division for the Minnesota House of Representatives, has authored some bills that would help the early childhood scene here in Minnesota. These bills include standards for School Readiness programming, an at-risk Pre-Kindergarten program, universal preschool for four year olds, and a grant program for collaborative Pre-K to Grade 3 programs.

Ready 4 K has asked its community to review the language in these bills and provide feedback. I quickly noticed that a major piece of the pie was missing. Only one of these bills (the At-Risk Pre-Kindergarten program) contains specific language about pre-k teacher qualifications needed. Quality educators and access to professional development are two of the foundational pillars of successful early childhood programming. It should be expected that individuals working with families have the training, support and licensure or certificate to do so. In addition, for retention, those that are working in these positions with such training should be compensated fairly for their work.

Early care and education is a broad genre that includes many agencies, schools, families and communities. I would hope that many, if not all, in this field would like access to the kind of professional development and training that will make their students and families the most successful.

I replied to Ready 4 K’s Director of Policy and Civic Engagement with an email describing the revisions I feel are necessary to make Early Education and Care the best it can be in Minnesota.  Ready 4 K is compiling this feedback in hopes that these bills will be proposed and funded during the 2009 legislative session.

Raising Pre-K Standards

Recently, the state of Texas has started revising its Pre-K Guidelines. The Pre-K Guidelines are the standards that all public pre-kindergarten programs in the state of Texas follow.  I feel the guidelines are crucial to the success of the public pre-k program in Texas as they provide a foundation from which all pre-k teachers can work.  As part of the revision process, the Texas Education Agency has scheduled public forums in 12 different locations during the month of February to receive feedback from experts and stakeholders across the state.

Personally, I feel the revisions are very necessary and long overdue. For one, the current Pre-K Guidelines in the state of Texas require that students learn only 10 letters and don’t address whether those letters should be upper or lowercase or a combination of both. My students learn 10 letters in the first few weeks of school, and all upper and lowercase letters, in addition to letter sounds, are covered by December! The current guidelines don’t take into account the fact that some districts now offer full-day pre-k. If a student attends pre-k all day every day and learns only 10 letters in a year, that’s a travesty - not to mention a waste of taxpayer money.

The public forums are being held during the day, making it impossible for regular classroom teachers to attend, and this contributes to teachers feeling alienated in this process.  Many pre-k teachers are concerned that the new guidelines will not be developmentally appropriate and may mandate less play and more academics.  The current guidelines provide for plenty of art, music, oral language, and dramatic play so their fears seem somewhat ungrounded to me.  My feeling is this: the old guidelines are just that - old! They need to be replaced in order to move forward and keep up with the pace of education in the 21st century. The current standards are too low and don’t benefit teachers or students. Only those who were able to attend the forums were able to actually see the proposed revisions, but soon there should be a sneak peek on the TEA website.  I would love to hear comments from anybody who attended one of the public forums.  When the revisions are made public I will discuss them further here.

Snowed Under

No, I’m not digging out from an anomalous May snowstorm, but I do feel quite overwhelmed by end-of-the-year paperwork.  Like other teachers, I have mostly assessments and annual school wide forms to complete this time of year.  My pre-k program has additional sets of the former handed down by the district and the state.

The state mandates the use of ELAS, a performance-based assessment system focusing on six language arts/literacy expectations. Normally, I would not voice concerns about ELAS; despite the tedious paperwork involved, it has been very helpful as a tool for targeting the strengths and weaknesses of my students.  My concern is this: the collection period for ELAS ends in June, but my support person from the Office of Early Childhood has insisted we hand in the paperwork nearly a month earlier. Why? My guess is because other pre-k sites have been delinquent in handing in paperwork on time in the past.

The problem with this creative revision of the ELAS timetable is threefold:

1.    This time of year many pre-k students start to demonstrate remarkable academic progress, especially those who entered pre-k younger than the other students.  If we stop collecting anecdotes and work samples from those children in mid-May (to ensure we can finish the paperwork before Memorial Day), we may fail to capture this growth and, thereby, provide the state, our schools, and parents with inaccurate results.

2.    We are also responsible for a social skill checklist and the district’s experimental assessment forms (requiring the collection of anecdotes covering over 30 expectations) in the same time frame.  Now, I am all for an Amazing Race-style challenge for teachers to balance three assessment systems, simultaneously, while also instructing students.  But, if we are really in early childhood for the children and not just to satisfy the sadistic cravings of paperwork hungry bureaucrats, we should think realistically about how our demands on teachers affect their ability to perform in the classroom.

3.    I have always handed in paperwork on time along with additional individualized action plans for my students.  If the folks at the Office of Early Childhood were as organized and well managed as they should be, they would put additional pressure only on those teachers who need it.  In a sense, they should differentiate their approach to employees in the same way that they require teachers to differentiate our approach for the varying needs of our students.

Well, I have to go now…because this paperwork is not going to fill out itself.

Not all Assessments are Created Equal

Recent debate over Head Start’s National Reporting System got me thinking about the challenges of assessing what three and four year olds know and what they have learned from their pre-k teachers. Early Stories sums up the NRS debate with some great examples.

Not being a Head Start teacher myself, I have never administered the NRS.  I am required, however, to use the Brigance screening in the beginning of each school year to identify developmental delays.  While some of the sections are helpful (e.g., following two and three step directions; fine motor and gross motor evaluations), many of the questions seem to measure a child’s exposure to certain words and objects rather than development.  For example, in one section Brigance asks the child to identify a picture of a tractor.  I personally fail to see how the inability of a four year old from the inner city to identify a tractor indicates any sort of delay in her development.  The test also requires children to identify several body parts including the jaw and ankle, a stretch for any four year old in my opinion. 

I think my ideal pre-k assessment tool would breakdown the four areas of child development (i.e., social/emotional; physical; cognitive; and language) and be able to measure each of those components regardless of a child’s background.  Unlike the Brigance screening, such an assessment may have to be partially or entirely performance-based since a child may not reveal the full extent of his problem-solving or language skills in a single one-to-one interaction at the start of the year.  A teacher can, however, observe a child within the context of play with materials and areas the child has chosen. 

Creative Curriculum’s assessment system is entirely performance-based, uses the “developmental continuum” to assess all four areas of development, and is both the most comprehensive and least biased assessment I have seen.  While it can be quite helpful in providing information about your students, it is not necessarily the most accessible data for kindergarten teachers to use the following year, so I do think the more traditional assessments (e.g., letter identification, book handling checklist) have a role to play.