Expanding My Impact

This time of year is always bitter sweet. I must separate from the students and families with whom I have built relationships for the past ten months, and yet those students leave me with a social and academic foundation that will facilitate their success in the future.

Those mixed feelings are particularly pronounced this year, as I’ve decided to leave the classroom and take a leadership position with Teach For America.  Rather than preparing to receive a new class of four year olds this fall, I will be working to bring cohorts of new teachers to pre-k classrooms across the country as the Director of Growth and Development for TFA’s Early Childhood Education initiative.  Placement sites range from Camden, New Jersey and New York City to Houston, Texas and South Dakota.  Teach For America’s focus on early childhood supports our overall mission to close the achievement gap.  As we select, train, and support teachers committed to laying a strong academic and social foundation during a crucial stage in their students’ development, we hope to expand those students’ opportunities for success in school and beyond. 

I will certainly miss directly impacting my students with a supportive classroom culture, individualized instruction, and a print-rich classroom environment.  But my success in room 114 has taught me both the incredible prospects of high quality pre-k and the need to bring more intensely driven, passionate teachers to pre-k classrooms.  The TFA position affords the opportunity for me to do just that, and will expand my impact and take my passion for early childhood education to the next level.

In the end, my work is about kids and their ability to be successful in school and the larger society.  I taught my class both basic skills and the ability to think and problem solve.  I also instilled in them the confidence needed to take risks and, in turn, grow as learners in the future.  Now, I can be part of a larger effort to ensure that life circumstances at birth do not define and limit the life prospects of children in low-income areas.

This blog has been an invaluable outlet for my own reflections and a source of growth for me as a teacher.  Though I’ll no longer be writing for this blog, I look forward to reading and commenting on the experiences of the next person with that privilege. Perhaps that will be you or someone you know?  As policymakers and the public continue to consider and evaluate high-quality pre-k for all, the voices of teachers are never more needed in this discourse.

A Fair Shot

As my children prepare for pre-k graduation and the move to kindergarten, I cannot help but wonder about their futures.  Will Karen become a doctor?  Will Awana have the chance to choose between being a ballerina or a doctor?  Will Aniyah’s behavior regress and threaten her academic progress?

I have worked to introduce school to my class as an exciting and fun place where they can make friends, learn, and be successful.  Anecdotal evidence and various forms of assessments suggest that my students have already started to realize their potential and are on the path toward high achievement in school and beyond.  Parents’ strong attendance at our class events and interest in enriching their child’s learning over the summer also bode well for my students’ academic prospects.

Yet my students still have many years during which their attitudes toward school, themselves, and their peers could change for the worse.  Most of them will continue to live in unsafe neighborhoods and struggling school districts.  The research showing that students in inner city schools who have had high-quality pre-k do better than those who have not gives me hope.  I know that my instruction in the classroom and the active support of family members during this critical stage in children’s development will have life-long benefits.  I also believe innovative changes are occurring in the K-12 system, many of them spearheaded by my fellow Teach For America alums.  But, on an individual level, it is still hard to predict how high each child in my class will build on the pre-k foundation he or she gained this year.

My time in the classroom has been, above all, about providing the kinds of opportunities for my students that they deserve.  The playing field is not level, even for three and four year olds.  High-quality pre-k teachers alone cannot ensure that a child won’t face educational and societal inequities down the road, but the vibrant and challenging learning environments we provide are the first step toward giving all children an equal chance at success.

Summer Learning

The retention of skills and knowledge from one school year to the next is crucial for students of any age, including children transitioning from pre-k to kindergarten.  Since I teach in a school-year, not full-year, program, I make extra effort to get my class’s families committed to summertime learning.

I’ve seen first-hand what can happen when that effort and commitment are lacking.  After my first year of teaching, I ran into a former student and her mother on the bus, right before the new school year began.  In our conversation, I discovered that the child had regressed both academically and socially.  Subsequent discussions with some of my school’s kindergarten teachers revealed that this child’s experience was not unique.

Once I moved past the initial frustration and disappointment, I began thinking about how best to ensure that the learning foundation established in my classroom did not crumble after Pre-K Graduation Day.  My first thought was to recommend to families some summer programs for young children.  It turns out, though, that my district does not offer such programs for pre-kindergartners, and affordable non-school-based options are scarce.

Next, I decided to create summer learning supports for families myself.  In the past, I had sent home books and writing materials for the summer, but had not strategically designed tools to meet my students’ needs.  Sure, I’d given parents their child’s assessment results and general tips for keeping their child engaged over the summer, but this proved insufficient as it meant more work for busy parents to choose and create learning activities based on this information.  So, I now give families a homework packet with specific activities they can do with their children and the materials needed to do them.  There are no dittos in the packet, but rather various opportunities for the children to review and continue to explore letters, words, writing, numbers, and shapes.

Judging by the my class’s high return rate for homework packets distributed at other school-year breaks (over 85 percent!), I am confident that my students’ families will work with their children on these activities during the summer.  And, because of this family involvement, I’m hopeful that my students’ school readiness in the fall will be equal to or even greater than it was on their last day of pre-k.

The Tough Questions

Many of my children, though only four or five years old, have already dealt with difficult situations such as foster care, parental incarceration, and homelessness.  While all of these issues can effect a child’s perspective and ability to trust others, parental incarceration recently posed a challenge for me as a teacher with a responsibility to educate children about the positive role of police in our society. 

Last week, we held Career Day at our school.  To prepare, we discussed possible jobs and as a class composed a letter welcoming the Career Day participants.  During our pre-writing discussion, I asked the students how they felt about Career Day.  Tyrone responded, “I feel angry because the police gonna come and lock everyone up.”  His comment reminded me of an earlier comment from Aniyah that also expressed distrust of the police and suggested we physically hurt the police so they “won’t do that anymore.”

I began to explain the reasons why people go to jail and emphasized the positive role of police officers in making us safe.  I couldn’t help but glance at two of my other students who currently have a parent in jail.  They didn’t say anything, but I wondered what might be going on in their heads.  “Is my mommy wrong?  Is she making people unsafe?  Is it a good thing that the police took my daddy away from me?  If the police are good, is my daddy bad?”

As I considered these thoughts, I began to backpedal.  I talked briefly about people making mistakes and responded to a question about everyone going to jail “for life” by stressing that many times people in jail get to leave and be with their families again.  I then wondered, for Tyrique - who will be fifteen when his mother gets out and is just developing a sense of time - what is the real difference between a life apart from his mother and ten years spent apart from her during his crucial childhood years?

I am aware of the sensitivity of these issues and the larger reality of mixed attitudes toward the police in inner city neighborhoods.  What is not clear is how to deal with them in a way that will both preserve strong ties between children and their families and define the police as a source of protection for the people in those neighborhoods.

The Pudding

The results are in!  After nine months of instructing and assessing in various forms, I have comprehensive data on my students’ growth in literacy.  How did they do?  Each child achieved an average of 80 percent or better on a wide range of literacy assessments!

Because pre-k children often don’t show you everything they know or can do with one type of assessment, I used two types of assessments and incorporated all the objectives from each into my calculations.  One type were performance-based assessments that include anecdotes and work samples collected while the children play and interact throughout the day.  I supplemented these with standardized assessments administered by me to each child to test skills like letter identification and rhyming words.

Overall, 10 children out of 14 achieved 100 percent on the standardized assessments and 9 achieved 90 percent or higher on the performance-based assessments.  I’m especially impressed by the individual gains made by the children, such as:

• Awana, who often struggled to move forward in letter identification and listening skills, in the end achieved 85 percent on the standardized assessments and 83 percent on the performance-based assessments.
• Tanasia, who started off the year too shy to even come to school the first day, achieved 100 percent mastery on the standardized assessments and 88 percent on the performance-based assessments.

I realize some in the early childhood community are skeptical of the extent to which standardized assessments are developmentally appropriate.  I agree that such tests could potentially produce inaccurate results, given the young age of my students.  I try to reduce the potential for inaccuracies by identifying the assessments as “fun games to play with the teacher,” which can help the children feel more at ease and less stressed by the experience.  I ask students if they would like to play with me, and many times they jump at the chance to spend some one-on-one time with the teacher, especially since they get to press the “easy” button (thanks, Staples) when they finish.  I remember Tyrique expressing sadness that he could not play our “game” a second time.

Consistency between the scores given by the two types of assessments suggests that these techniques can help produce more reliable results from the standardized variety.  The results also show general consistency between the two kinds of assessments.

Standardized assessments are necessary in my case because the kindergarten teachers who will have my students next year use them and not performance-based assessments.  This begs the question, of course, why are kindergarten teachers not using performance-based assessments?  I think they should use some combination of the two, at a minimum, to gain a more comprehensive understanding of their students’ strengths and needs.

I am very proud of my students’ growth and know that the combined efforts of Ms. Morrison, Ms. Bimba, each child’s family, and me contributed to their success.