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.