Variation in Development of 5 Year Olds

This week I had an experience that confirms to me how variable growth rates are in young children. The dilemma is how do we take account of this in environments where prescribed curriculum is used.

I sat at a table where two kindergarten children were doing Lucy Calkin' Writing Workshop, which is the first time that I have seen this curriculum used with kindergarteners. They had been learning about how to create "how to" books in sequential steps over several days. This topic had been going on for several days and the students had completed several nicely designed worksheets that reflected the minilessons that had taken place. Each student worked at their own pace but the worksheets were the same across the class.

The two students were at widely different levels in being able to accomplish the task at hand.

Although the teacher was extremely accepting of the varying output of the two students, one of them was working very slowly as he tried to think about how to write out the items he needed for his how to book. He had been absent from school and was a little behind in the process of completing the task as a whole. His first attempt at writing out the words for his list dissatisfied him so he crumpled up the sheet and threw it in the garbage. He was definitely struggling with trying to figure out the sounds for the words that he wanted to write. He apparently had the option to draw pictures of the items but seemed to choose instead to write out the words. The issue was that his level of phonetic awareness was not quite up to the task. As the teacher said, he will know what he wrote if you ask him, he will be able to "read" his list, which is a plus. Unfortunately, if you did not ask him, you would not remotely be able to decipher his list. So, my question is what was this child learning? He was picking up the idea of a "how to" book that explains how to do a particular task but his development at this point seemed to indicate that he was not ready to complete the tasks as they were designed for the class. The entire class had reviewed several tasks such as how to make an apple pie.

The other child was so far advanced in her phonetic awareness and understanding of how words are put together that she even questioned how she had written the word light, which she had written as "lit". She realized that this did not say "light" so I pointed out to her that there is a "gh" in the middle of the word but it is not heard when you say the word. She was able to incorporate this information and continue with the task.

As the lesson drew to a close, I wondered about how kindergartens are structured and taught today. As the lesson drew to a close, I also wondered about the writing workshop task and how this learning could be differentiated to reflect the developmental differences in language development of the two children and provide a more profitable experience for the little boy who was struggling fiercely to figure out how to write out the words he needed. To do this, does one need to go back to basics about how kindergarten should be structured and review the development of kindergarteners?

Is using Writers Workshop in kindergarten this way appropriate for all? Is there a way to structure the learning in the kindergarten in a way that more closely meets the needs of these two children and all the children? Is this activity an appropriate language activity for the little boy? It did appear to be developmentally appropriate for the little girl.

What's Wrong With Early Childhood Classrooms Today and Why

This week I had an epiphany. After working with college teacher education students and visiting many prekindergartens and kindergartens in New Jersey public schools, I began to realize why so many of these classrooms seem to be missing what used to be the hallmarks of good practice for these grade levels - a tug of war between accountability, student assessment, and what the state of New Jersey recognizes as good early childhood educational practices including the recognition that young children do not develop at the same rate across all developmental domains.

I have observed that many early childhood learning centers and schools that include our youngest learners are led by principals and supervisors who are unfamiliar with early childhood development and developmentally appropriate teaching practices for children of these ages or who have forgotten about what these environments should look like as well as what appropriate early childhood teaching strategies are. For the most part, there are no specialized programs to prepare principals for managing and leading schools that have children in prekindergarten through third grade. First broadly circulated through online reports on the New America Foundation website, a major report about principal preparation for schools with early childhood programs was released by the NAESP - National Association of Elementary School Principals- (https://www.naesp.org/sites/default/files/leading-pre-k-3-learning-communities-executive-summary.pdf).

So, given my experience with early childhood teaching and environments as well as teacher education, I wondered why teachers and principals are not familiar with New Jersey's implementation guidelines for prekindergarten and kindergarten, which can be found on the New Jersey Department of Education site (http://www.state.nj.us/education/ece/guide/) as well as why there is no insistence that the written standards and implementation guides are followed.

What I realized and most people have said repeatedly is that kindergarten is the new first grade and prekindergarten is the new kindergarten. The interesting point is that although everyone seems to realize this, no one has really effectively challenged it. Why? What keeps us from doing the right thing for our youngest learners? What is this doing to the education of young children and their feelings of self-efficacy? What happens when children are being taught in ways that are developmentally inappropriate and ignore the variability in children's development at these ages? Are children deciding that they are not smart and cannot learn at the ripe old age of 5?

We need to go back, take a deep breath, and sit down and read what the NJDOE as well as national education associations, such as NAEYC, have put on their websites pertaining to how young children should be taught and how their environments should be structured to reach the standards that the State has set. We need to have discussions about the conflict between good early childhood practice and the pressure of test scores and teacher evaluation that seem to be pushing early childhood teachers and principals to set up young children for frustration and feelings of failure during their first two years of formal public school education. Let's rethink our push for big data assessment at the expense of what is actually happening in each classroom. Let's make sure that everyone who works with young children has enough preparation in early childhood education before they are placed in classrooms with our youngest children.

Looking at Change and Resistance to New Ideas and Practices

I just read an article that was in Educational Leadership from June 2015, The Tug of War Between Change and Resistance, by Michael Murphy http://bit.ly/2hIpuyN. It reminded me of the professional development that I, along with a colleague, was assigned to implement in a school in NJ.

The issue of resistance to change has been examined for many years but so far, there seems to be no complete solution.

My experience illustrates the tug of war. The school district's Board President was excited about bringing a new philosophical and curriculum model to their preschool but after visiting the program on a monthly basis for a year and one-half to work with the administrators and the teachers, it occurred to us that the enthusiasm that we had for helping the administrators and teachers was not reciprocal. Murphy quotes Michael Fullan (2007) who discusses the three stages of change, starting with initiation, "the process that leads up to and includes a decision to adopt or proceed with a change" (p.69). This first stage is so important and although the school district said that the teachers agreed to and were excited about the "changes" that we were bringing, our experiences did not match that assertion. So, as Murphy points out, resistance reared "its ugly head" early during the "getting ready" stage (Murphy, p.66).

Were we successful? Partially. Will the changes that the teachers actually accepted and implemented be sustained? Maybe. But, if the change process had been designed more carefully, starting with the initiation stage, perhaps we would have had a more sustained impact. Maybe part of the problem was that the district did not have "skin" in the game - no monetary investment. The funds for most of the professional development came from our college through a grant.

In future blogs, I will continue explore resistance to change and my experiences with it along with my thoughts about other issues in education.

Fullan, M. (2007). The new meaning of educational change (4th ed.). New York: Teachers College Press.