Choose Your Words by Carol Garhart Mooney

Author:Carol Garhart Mooney
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781605545271
Publisher: Redleaf Press
Published: 2018-03-03T05:00:00+00:00

Respond to Classroom Conversations

When you ask most teachers or parents what the role of a preschool teacher is, the majority will answer that it is to help children get along with other children and to learn the things they need to know before going to school. If asked for clarification, the same groups would say, “You know—how to share, get along, follow directions, and know their colors, shapes, and the alphabet.”

As a supervisor of student teachers for many years, I have repeatedly heard students complain that I always managed to observe their program during transitions or mealtimes rather than their group time. Many teachers who are new to the field believe that the real learning goes on when they are front and center with a book or flannel board activity to share with the children. Too often curriculum is evaluated as successful in terms of whether the children enjoyed the activity or sat quietly and attended during the teacher’s presentation. However, every day we have opportunities to deepen and extend children’s learning and understanding of their world. And too often (because of time, numbers of children in a class, lack of appropriate training, and so on) we don’t acknowledge or act on these opportunities. It is an understandable piece of decision making on curriculum content in a community to want expectations to be up to date and forward thinking. Yet some of the fundamental ways that young children have always learned—ways that have been documented and reproduced decade after decade in reputable research studies—are violated on a regular basis in our preschools and primary grades.

In her 2016 book The Importance of Being Little, early childhood educator Erika Christakis writes that “preschools worried about not meeting expectations—typically the lower-performing programs and those serving disadvantaged students—embrace . . . comprehensive curriculum packages in the vain hope that they’ve landed on the magic bullet that will cover the standards and lift achievement scores without any guesswork” (101). As pointed out in chapter 3, however, the situations where teachers are just not quite sure what they should be doing with today’s little ones are far more pervasive in all schools than most of us want to acknowledge. Well-funded, upper-middle-class private schools suffer ambivalence just as much as inner-city Head Start programs. This is the result of so many things that, as mentioned in chapter 3, most of us don’t even know where to begin. If teachers have not had solid academic training in prereading skills, they are more likely to offer benign activities that children enjoy but are not challenged by. Misunderstanding of developmentally appropriate practices created situations twenty years ago that caused preschools to prevent teachers from hanging alphabet posters in their kindergarten classrooms. This was as absurd as some of today’s push-down curriculum that expects children to be reading when they enter first grade.

R. F. Dearden (1984) outlined four criteria for curriculum relevance that can be used to evaluate the kinds of learning opportunities we share with children:

1.Immediate applicability of the topic to children’s daily lives

2.

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