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.

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.

Saying Goodbye

This time of year we begin the process of transitioning from pre-k to kindergarten.  We must prepare our students for the move out of Pre-k 114 and the reality that many of the adults and peers they have come to know may not be moving on with them.

My class started this process earlier than usual, because Ms. Bimba, the woman who comes each week to work with the children on social skills, had her last day today.  Saying goodbye is not easy for many people, both young and old.  How we handle goodbyes for young children can be particularly delicate depending on their emotional development and past experiences.

Here are some ways we facilitate the process in Pre-k 114:

1.    Start Early – We leave enough time to prepare students, mentally, for change. We engage students in a dialogue, plan special events like the pizza party we had for Ms. Bimba, and give students other outlets to express themselves.  Our conversation with the children about Ms. Bimba’s departure began a week before she left, and we have already started our conversations about the larger transition to kindergarten.
2.    Invite Expression of Feelings in Many Forms – Children, like adults, express feelings in different ways.  For Ms. Bimba’s departure, we not only discussed our feelings but wrote, sang, and danced about them, too.  We focused the conversation on how we felt about Ms. Bimba throughout the year, not just about our feelings about her leaving.
3.    Integrate Transition Process into other aspects of the Curriculum – Thinking  strategically, we incorporate “saying goodbye” activities into other lessons.  For instance, we did a whole-class letter to Ms. Bimba using interactive writing,  explored water color paints to make a piece of art for Ms. Bimba, and read a book with similar “goodbye” themes to help the children practice relating the characters’ experiences to their own lives.
4.    Consider Individual Children and their experiences – Some children have a particularly difficult time with goodbyes because of their own experiences with adults or other children having to leave them (e.g., I’ve had students separated from family members because of custody issues and incarceration).  We think proactively about how to help these children deal with their feelings; for example, we recognize that some may not like to talk about such experiences in a large group.

We as educators must ask ourselves, what messages are we sending to children during transitions like these and what are they taking away from the process?  My children have a sense that sometimes people we care about cannot stay and that it’s okay to feel angry or sad.  They also have ways of constructively dealing with those feelings, whether it be writing the person departing a letter or talking about the fun things we did with that person.  As they move forward to kindergarten and beyond, they will need these tools to remain calm and focused, even in times of change.

Coping with the Bad Days

Like adults, pre-k students have good days and bad days.  How we as teachers deal with the latter can significantly impact our relationships with individual students, their academic and social growth, and our overall classroom culture.

Just as we differentiate instruction to meet the needs of all students, we must also individualize our approach to motivating them.  Karen, though upbeat and highly participatory throughout the day, periodically comes to school in tears, clinging to her grandmother.  She is quite comfortable using writing and drawing as a creative outlet, so  I suggest that she write a note or paint a picture for her grandmother during choice time.  This helps her remain connected even when she cannot be with her family.

Her grandmother and I have also worked on stressing responsibility with Karen.  I thank all of my students for being responsible when they correctly follow our morning routine as they enter.  Karen’s grandmother and I use that same terminology when we are trying to stop her from crying.  This process usually takes a few minutes.  She then calmly puts away her belongings, washes her hands, and is eating breakfast with her friends in no time.

Awana occasionally comes in sobbing and lethargic, particularly if she has been absent or we are returning from the weekend.  If she says anything, it’s usually a very quiet, “I want to go home.”  Her mother is not nearly as present or supportive as Karen’s grandmother, nor does she use writing and art in the same way as Karen.  She does, however, respond well to good old-fashioned hugs.  I usually ask her how she feels, let her know how I would feel, remind her of our classroom routines, give her a hug, and send her on her way to “have fun and learn with her friends.”  Kevin or David sometimes chime in with their own hugs and a “We missed you when you were out, Awana.”

Aniyah often arrives late and upset about something that happened with her brother on her way to school.  Despite our daily “fresh start,” she sometimes carries over some baggage from behavioral problems the day before.  I am quite familiar with her affinity towards cheer leading and use this knowledge to motivate her.  I often greet her with a cheer to her name or ask her to help me out with a cheer for one of her friends.

Understanding and effectively addressing mood fluctuations is an important part of my job, and through this process my students gain self-confidence and the trust in me they need to be engaged members of the classroom community.  When we as teachers succeed in this role, disruptions to the class are minimized and children are less likely to use negative behavior to get attention.

Becoming Social: Karen's Journey into our Community

Karen's grandmother told me from day one that she was concerned about her granddaughter's social skills.  She had never been to school before and spent most of her time around adults: uncles, grandparents, and cousins.  Karen already excelled in basic literacy and math skills after working with her great grandmother, a retired school teacher, one-on-one for the past year.  Her transformation into a highly sociable member of our classroom community highlights the benefits of pre-k, even for those children who can attain academic readiness at home.

Karen's experiences made her quite focused on reading, writing, and interacting with Ms. Morrison and me in the fall.  She chose to read in the Library, play with Table Toys, or paint by herself during Choice Time.  Like David she was quite hesitant to join her fellow four year olds in more social areas such as Dramatic Play and Blocks.  Yet she listened to and comprehended stories read on the rug, could write her name, and was starting to make connections between letters and their sounds.  While I kept challenging her with her academics, I knew the real challenge for Karen would be developing relationships with her peers.

I exposed Karen to the same community building lessons as David.  But whole group songs about our friends and puppet role plays did not motivate Karen to socialize with her friends.  She would cheer on her friends and participate in role plays at the rug, but then continue to play on her own during choice time.  I needed to use a more proactive and involved approach that both reflected Karen's current comfort level and built on that comfort level to further her social development.

Karen gravitated toward and listened to me because I was an adult.  So, I invited her to play with me and then suggested we either join her peers or invite them to play with us.  She agreed and, over time, discovered how much fun her friends could be!  I remember her laughing with Samar in the Discovery Area while they tested magnets with various materials.  She even started problem solving independently with her friends in December.

Karen has come a long way since September.  Just this week, she chose to go to Dramatic Play and was soon taking her friends' orders at our pretend restaurant.  She and her friends joked about changing their names in the Sand Area last month.  She still sometimes prefers "alone time," like when she became adamant about separating the seal and the alligator in the Water Area so the seal would be safe, as shown in the picture.  Yet she frequently experiences the very social interactions that will help her build and nurture relationships for years to come.

Ready for Take-off: David's Story

Four months ago David’s mother remarked that she wants her son to go “sky high in life."  Now, as he begins to transition to kindergarten, David shows tremendous social and academic progress. His story shows how high quality pre-k supports multiple facets of childhood development.

Socially, David adjusted to our rules and routines fairly quickly back in the fall, but he tended to avoid playing with others and participating actively in large group activities.  He was reluctant to sing along with the group or respond during a read-aloud. He preferred playing with dinosaurs by himself in the Discovery area to playing with his friends in more populated areas such as Blocks and Sand. The challenge was to have him go beyond just following all the rules as an individual and begin collaborating more with his peers and participating during whole group lessons.

To help his growth in this area, I encouraged David and his classmates to support their friends by cheering them on with individualized chants (e.g., There is a friend who’s in our class and David is his name-o, d-a-v-i-d, d-a-v-i-d, d-a-v-i-d, and David is his name-o).  I also used stories and puppet role plays to facilitate discussions about how we can help each other solve problems (e.g., if our friends are struggling with a task, we can help them remember the “Little Engine that Could” by saying, “I think you can, I think you can” or if a friend does not get picked for something we can say, “oh well, you’ll get it next time,” just like “Susan the Squirrel” puppet did for her friend, “Danny the Dog” puppet).   

David soon started having breakthrough moments.  He expressed pride in himself by informing his mother of his “purple” status (a reward system I use) the moment she picked him up.  The next day, David would let me know how proud his dad was when he told him.  He also started contributing more on the rug.  Just this week David got to purple for his active participation throughout the day.  In terms of playing with others, David often travels between play areas with friends, most notably last week when he and Tyrique together made newspaper hats in the Art Area and drew a pirate adventure on the chalk board in the Writing Area. 

Academically, David came in to pre-k knowing some letters and was starting to write his name, but he had difficulty counting, making connections between letters and their sounds, and forming letters.  I soon made him the snack manager, which required him to count his friends every day.  We also worked with him in small group on name puzzles and exposed him to print and letter sounds at every opportunity.  His mother was also quickly responsive to my efforts to invest her in David’s progress; his father soon followed.  They worked with him on writing the sight words we learned in school, labeling pictures he drew with the beginning letter of each objects and person, challenged David with opportunities to count with everyday routines (e.g., the number of dishes needed for dinner or shirts in the laundry), and, as they noted in their New Year’s Resolution, read with him every night.  His father remarked at one of our conferences that David was so excited about books, he would stop his father repeatedly during stories to make comments.  I kept them updated on specific strengths, weaknesses, and ways they could move him forward.  I could tell from looking at his writing and hearing him explore letter sounds that his parents were using the strategies at home. 

David can now write short sentences with little guidance and is starting to sound out words.  Furthermore, he not only counts to twenty, usually without mistakes, but also suggests using counting to figure out the answer to a question (e.g., how do we know that more students voted for apples as their favorite fruit?).    

David, like all of my children, came to me in September with strengths and room to grow, both socially and academically.  I responded to these complexities with a multifaceted approach that reflects and addresses the needs of the whole child.  His progress highlights the potential of pre-k to impact several developmental areas positively and the important, collaborative role parents can play in laying a strong foundation for their children.

Awana's Struggles and Successes

This time of year can be bittersweet, with many students demonstrating remarkable growth and others still struggling with some basic skills.  Awana, uniquely, can do both, depending on the day or even the hour.

I recognized her needs early on and have been working intensely with her one-on-one in addition to our small and large group lessons.  Awana started making connections in December when she wrote her friends’ names in the Writing Area.  She recalled the formation and order of the letters for most of her friends and had developed the fine motor skills needed to write those names.  She could not, however, identify the letters or the sounds in their names.  That “wow” moment taught me the importance of Awana’s friends as a reference point for her further growth in literacy along with the need to build on that foundation with instruction that helped her make connections between words, letters, and letter sounds.  If Awana chose to draw and write about dogs, we thought about the sound in dog.  Awana thought about the dog, listened for the /d/ sound, said, “like in David’s name,” and then wrote the letter D.

As I worked with Awana with this plan in mind, I noticed that her friends’ names weren’t the only useful resource.  Our transition chants involving letters, which we sing every day, also helped her make connections during choice time and small group.  For example, we move from the daily schedule routine to a letter exploration activity by chanting, “Big ‘L’!  Little ‘l’! What begins with ‘L’?  Lunch, lunch, /l//l/ Lunch.” Recently, the class wrote a letter to the mayor about the littering problem in Newark as part of our study of the environment.  To help us get writing, I thought out loud for the children, saying, “Hmm…litter, what do you hear in litter.” Before I could “struggle” with the difficult challenge, Awana’s hand shot up.  She responded, “/l/, Big ‘L’!  Little ‘l’! What begins with ‘L’?  Lunch, lunch, /l//l/ Lunch.”  She then proudly came up to the board to add the letter “L.”

And yet Awana does not always retain the information.  Many times during the day she responds by shrugging her shoulders and remaining silent or just calling out random letters (or sometimes numbers).  I realize some of the inconsistency may be developmental, but I have never seen such dramatic differences in the same child within the same day.

There is also the issue of her mother.  Awana receives the least amount of support from home out of all of my students.  I hope to send my class off in June with a toolkit filled with games their families can play over the summer to help them retain the skills they have gained.  Awana will need this support the most, but given the difficulty her mother has had in keeping appointments with me this year, I fear that Awana won’t get it and these hard-won skills may fade.

Investing in Pre-K Teachers and Parents

[This entry was contributed by guest blogger Marissa Castro Mikoy, the director of the Universal Pre-Kindergarten Incentive Program at CentroNía, an educational community-based organization in Washington, D.C.]

As a pre-k program administrator, it can be easy to think, "I have a great curriculum, classrooms full of top-notch materials - we are all set." Experience has taught me that providing a high-quality program takes much more, from the cultivation of parent involvement to professional development that meets the needs of each teacher. Many components must converge and be fostered to achieve "high quality." Here are my thoughts on a couple of these key pieces.

Teachers: Just having "great" teachers does not necessarily translate to a high-quality program. It is imperative that programs invest in teachers and nurture their professional development. Through the program I lead at CentroNía, funds are available for all teachers to continue their education. In fact, we have a number of teachers who have gone back to school to obtain an associate's or bachelor's degree in early childhood education. Our program benefits not only from having better-prepared teachers but also from having teachers who reciprocate and invest even more of themselves in our center.

Families: The development of a strong family involvement plan is just as important. At CentroNía, we host monthly Family Nights, a time when parents share food and conversation while teachers and staff help them learn about the program curriculum, child development, parenting strategies, and more. Through these events, our families begin to view each other, not just our staff, as resources and supports. I have seen parents of different cultural and economic backgrounds develop relationships at these meetings, and one parent I know of organized a weekend play group based on relationships forged at Family Night.

At an even deeper level, Family Night helps us identify parents interested in serving on the city-wide Parent Advisory Council. Parents from each of D.C.'s 17 Pre-K Incentive Program organizations sit on the council, and among other things have helped organize written testimony and support for the city's publicly-funded program, igniting greater family involvement and advocacy at many pre-k centers.

When families, teachers, and program staff have opportunities like these to interact, form bonds, and grow, I believe the result is a strong, collaborative team that works energetically to sustain the high quality standards all parties desire.

My thanks to all of you readers and Sophia for letting me share a little about CentroNía and the D.C. Pre-K Incentive Program with you over the past week. I look forward to reading your entries and comments and responding with more of my own stories.