Routines make active learning possible. Organization and structure are especially necessary in classrooms where teachers value student-initiated activities. By communicating an expectation that the care of room and materials is children’s responsibility—to whatever extent is realistic given the age of a specific group—adults convey a message about their belief in children’s capacity for responsibility, their vision of children as capable, and their understanding of education as a social process.
From the first day, my plans include teaching children to know this new room, to know where to find things and where to put them away. We play treasure-hunt games: I give out objects, and children work in teams to find one of the same things, or to find where the objects are put away. As children learn where things belong, they are also being introduced to the division of space into areas that have distinct functions. The rug is the social (though not the physical) center of the room, the place the class returns to at intervals throughout the day, the place where the class gathers for any important discussion. As the year progresses, the rug becomes the area where certain kinds of group construction projects arise, projects that mix materials and allow for participation by a diverse group of children.
When the teacher asks children to clean up, everything that the children know about the room and materials comes into play; and everything the children do, as they clean up, tells the teacher who they are, how they function, and how they see themselves as part of a group. Despite the seeming confusion, the cacophony of voices, the hectic swirl of movement, much of importance goes on that teachers can constantly observe and assess. Which children get into the swing of things and move with focus and efficiency? Which children jump in but become distracted? Which children are unable to function in the openness and relative freedom of a cleanup period? Which children consistently ignore requests to stop working?
At the beginning of the year and periodically throughout the year, I demonstrate the “how” of cleanup: constructions are to be taken apart, not knocked down; materials are put in bins, not tossed. The arrangement of the room and the organization of supplies can facilitate cleanup. When a problem occurs repeatedly, I look for routines to deal with that problem: because the children frequently have to hunt for missing marker tops, I keep a basket just for “extra pen tops.”
The adult’s expectation is crucial: children who work in an area are responsible for that area and for the materials used; no one walks away. A child who complains, “I’m the only one cleaning,” is asked to round up the others who were in that area. Jobs are distributed: “Who’s putting the scissors away?” Everyone helps: the statement “It isn’t my mess” is not given a hearing; it’s everyone’s room. When a child asks, “Where does this go?” I turn to other children, “Who knows where this goes?” Teachers pitch in, too. When some children continue working, reluctant to end their drawing or block building despite repeated requests, the adult’s physical involvement and statement—“Look, I’m helping!”—contribute to an atmosphere of participation. As children work together, getting the room ready for the next activity, they gain the experience of organizing tasks: sorting objects, putting away objects that go on the same shelf, throwing away scraps. They work with a sense of purpose and accomplishment—a sense of what they can accomplish as a group. Yes, “routine” implies the dull and dreary, the opposite of the unexpected, the impromptu, the conscious, the expressive. But when children fully engage in routine tasks like cleanup, these activities can have their own expressive quality, their own energy: they mobilize the group, pulling everyone together to create order.
Organizing the Day
Amina has just said good-bye to her mother. Amina still doesn’t talk to me, but we sit together on the rug and look at Alphabatics, that great alphabet book where the letters turn into things—the H becomes, in three pictures, a house with a chimney. Adam joins us. After a while, I reluctantly tell them to put stuff away. The beginning of the day is often so lovely, I hate to end it.
The organization of the day is another way that routines make children’s experiences manageable. On the first day, the children are introduced to time divisions that continue throughout the year. Each of these times has its own character, and it is through manipulating the differences that a day can have wholeness, balance. By this I mean that the divisions of the day reflect the distinct ups and downs of children’s energy and focus.
Every morning, when children come in, there is a time to put their things away, look around, catch up with friends. After several weeks, perhaps by late October, I introduce “assignments,” tasks that require attention but also allow for a certain flow. When children finish assignments, they can draw, do a puzzle, sit with a book. These assignments differ from day to day: Monday, guessing the number of objects in a jar; Tuesday, writing numerals; Wednesday, decoding a “secret code” word, and later in the year, signing out class library books; Thursday, doing a journal entry; Friday, finishing work that’s piled up in the work basket. By late fall, these first ten to fifteen minutes can have the appearance of controlled chaos, as children eagerly rush in to greet friends, to see what the assignment is, to check out something from the day before. In the first half of the year, the parents bring children to the room. This time helps me catch up with them and gives them a chance to tell me something. The looseness of the period allows me to observe the children, or to sit with someone I might not find the time for later in the day.
Morning meeting is the day’s official start. Meeting is an anchor in the day: the children begin together. Meeting alerts children to the day’s events, and allows for the introduction of topics by teacher or students. Much of the business of meeting has to do with divisions of time: looking at the schedule, at the calendar and events to come, keeping track of the number of days of school. It’s also the time of day when children air individual concerns or topics: a child exhibits a loose tooth, tells the others about an ill grandparent, shows a beehive found over the weekend.
Meeting talk can range widely: We have a discussion of ice/ snow/water—because they have seen ice outside—it is the first day of temperature in the twenties, and streets have frozen puddles. A few say, the ice melts, and that makes snow. I write down their comments and also suggest that we can bring in some ice and watch it melt.
The day proceeds, alternating periods in which children’s choices are fewer, when they must accept limits and directions or listen to others, and periods in which they expend energies outward, imposing their will on materials by building, coloring, or gluing, periods in which they can collaborate, disagree, argue, start something new. Big muscles, small muscles; action, containment. This rhythm was described by Sylvia Ashton-Warner, who taught young children in New Zealand schools for decades. In her book Teacher, first published in 1963, she writes of time for children to “breathe out” (“conversation, painting, crying, quarrelling, creative writing, blocks, clay, sand, water”) and time for them to “breathe in” (“key vocabulary . . . standard reading”).2 The patterns that teachers impose can complement the rhythms of children’s engagement. However, teachers will do well to remember that any schedule imposes hardships: children normally prefer to continue a given activity until they deem it completed; they prefer not to be interrupted; and they don’t like having to sit still and listen to others for any length of time.
The making of time-space distinctions points toward a further educational function of routines. In carrying out routines, children continually search for and find pattern and order; they discern similarities and differences. Routine classroom actions—lining up, finding materials and putting them away, changing a door sign—all necessitate the making of categories. When, for example, children hang their jackets in the closet, they are utilizing such categories as right, left, top, bottom, small, large. Categorizing is a primary intellectual function, a base of cognition in all fields, according to Hubert Dyasi, who for many years directed the Workshop Center at City College of New York, which focuse
d on science education. Dyasi defines science, in part, as “a continuing search for underlying commonalities in apparently disparate phenomena.” 3 Thus, through their physical actions as they carry out routines, use things in the room, and move through their day, they think and make decisions, sort and create categories. These experiences aid them throughout their school lives when they confront more strictly intellectual tasks, when they write up science experiments, learn rules of punctuation and grammar, or grasp mathematical patterns.
Protecting Group Life
Much of what I plan is intended to help children make sense of their world. I assume the world is knowable, at least enough of it; I assume agency—that individuals can be active, can think, conclude. I assume that the world is ultimately social. My planning has as its goal children’s development of the ability to govern themselves.
In thinking about routines, teachers should be concerned not with maintaining classroom order per se, but with engineering a social space in which certain activities can be pursued. This formulation of the teacher’s role has a theoretical basis in the ideas of the American philosopher John Dewey, particularly as laid out in Experience and Education.4 Dewey wrote extensively about education and was associated in the early part of the twentieth century with the Laboratory School of the University of Chicago. He describes education as “essentially a social process” 5 and goes on to define social control as the many ways in which a group regulates the behavior of the individuals who are part of it. The group, Dewey asserts, has “common purposes” that lend it power to regulate social behavior and enforce norms: “It is not the will or desire of any one person which establishes order but the moving spirit of the whole group.” 6
Illustrations of this process are found in the work of Vivian Paley. Paley, who taught kindergarten for many years at the University of Chicago Laboratory School, produced vivid narratives of classroom life in books including White Teacher,7 Wally’s Stories,8 and The Boy Who Would Be a Helicopter.9 Paley writes of Tanya, a child who could be “tyrannical.” When Tanya disrupts the playing of a recording, Paley asks the other children for solutions. One child suggests, “Keep changing the record until you find one Tanya likes.” Paley comments, “In the record corner the children said: we like you, Tanya, and you can stay. They did not withhold friendship or impose hardships, and Tanya stopped teasing.” 10 It is worth pointing out that Paley steps in here to discuss the matter with the children. On another occasion, Paley intervenes more directly. Tanya has splattered paint on another child’s picture, and Paley sends Tanya out of the area. Reflecting on the incident, Paley sees no useful result of her involvement: “I . . . made her leave the art table.... [Tanya] shouted, ‘I’m never going to paint again!’ . . . After lunch she returned to the painting table and repeated her mischief.... I had excluded Tanya from the art table and achieved little besides temporary peace and quiet.” Yet Dewey argues that intervention is justified when “it is done in behalf of the interest of the group.” 11 Dewey’s only proviso is that teachers limit their interventions: “The teacher reduces to a minimum the occasions in which he or she has to exercise authority in a personal way.”12
As is true for social control, teachers’ enforcement of routines protects group life at the same time that it protects the individual. To put it concretely, routines make it possible for these twentyodd children to achieve their goals. While Paley didn’t succeed in making Tanya care more about others’ feelings, she took a stand on the side of respect for others’ work, protecting Tanya as well as her victim.
The teacher’s responsibility for safety, for putting in place and monitoring routines that protect the group’s interests, is, in fact, as necessary for the more impulsive children as for the child who might be the object of willful aggressive behavior. These individuals, the children whose internal controls are less well developed (children who may be labeled “mean,” “bad,” “sneaky”), need the teacher’s protection from their own impulses.
This more psychologically complex description of the teacher’s role is found in Susan Isaacs’s outline of the educational principles that governed her school. What’s relevant here is her formulation of the adult’s responsibility in relation to children’s behavior: “One general maxim with regard to the social education of young children is that the educator should act for the child, where the child cannot act for himself.”13 By accepting responsibility for children’s safe and purposeful functioning, Isaacs concluded, the teacher enlarges rather than diminishes children’s responsibility for what is within their control: “In general, we tried to use our parental powers in such a way as to reduce the children’s need for them.” 14 In other words, adult support of children’s exercise of their powers must not come at the expense of adult monitoring of behavior, which is a necessary function we serve as adults in relation to children.
By setting out the environment’s expectations of behavior, routines function as a bridge to children’s development of internal controls. When adults create routines that support children’s activity, social expectations are tied to practical concerns. The general functioning of the room and the teacher’s enforcement of routines is not a matter of the teacher’s personal preferences but of practical considerations, which adults can point to when they regulate behavior. Isaacs gives numerous examples of the ways that adults in her school aimed at helping children govern their own behavior: “we made even the necessary social sanctions always quite specific. ‘If you hit John with the spade, I shall take it away.’ ”15 By and large, Isaacs predicated the framework of routines and adult interventions on “concrete grounds, either of a practical or educational nature.”16 For example, she avoided using language that would be confusing to children, not telling them they “must” do something when she in fact meant that it was something she was requesting that they do, with certain consequences if they failed to do it. In addition, she avoided morally loaded terms: “We never used general categories such as ‘naughty,’ ‘good’ or ‘horrid.’ In other words, we wanted to help the children to realize and adjust to other people’s wishes as everyday facts rather than as mysterious absolutes.” 17
While Isaacs justifies her admonitions on practical rather than moral grounds, moral matters are implicitly at stake. The records of conversations in Isaacs’s school make clear that the adults valued children as individuals; and adults were truthful and trustworthy in their dealings with children. Ruth Charney is more explicit in seeing, in the details of classroom organization and management, a way of giving real and practical form to her ideals and principles. The title of her book, Teaching Children to Care, lays out the ultimate issues here: the teacher has the opportunity and responsibility to teach children concern for others. In general, routines have an impact on children not only because they provide structure and safety, but because, more deeply, they embody social and moral values.
Charney gives an example of the relationship between a teacher’s values and her way of communicating expectations. What’s at stake is the value of trust—her trust in the children, and the children’s trust in her: “Ms. Thompson had just handed out sharp scissors for the groups to share. She carefully demonstrated how she wished to see them held: point down.” Charney describes the teacher going over her instructions, reminding the children of other things they needed to know before letting them begin. Observing the class, Ms. Thompson saw one child walking with scissors held carelessly. “Ms. Thompson beckoned to Michael. She quietly reached out her hand. Without a word, Michael placed the scissors in her outstretched palm. He had lost the right to use the scissors for the rest of the period.... It was not only the safe handling of the tools that was at stake, it was the true handling of her words. Her class believed her. The students . . . learned something about the value of words when they’re used to say important things.”18
This is the ultimate rationale for the teacher’s active role, an activism that may also take the form of listening intently to children as they attempt to justi
fy behavior, of sympathizing with a child who’s been “tyrannical,” and of creating the structures that allow for children’s mistakes as well as their productive and cooperative activity. Young children naturally identify with others and are capable of sympathy and kindness, even if only intermittently, even if their ability to work and play with others is, at times, limited by less social impulses. By identifying with children’s learning, and by placing learning in a social setting (for example, by making groups), teachers help children develop a more consistently social outlook, one that can stand up to more purely selfish desires. This role has a moral dimension: we hope that through our attention to individual children and the social environment, and through their identification with us, children will develop values of concern and attentiveness, toward themselves and others.
Dilemmas
A great discussion yesterday as we read a John Burningham book, Hey, Get Off Our Train. It all started with this digression, on what animals/things you take to bed to help you sleep.
Ideally, routines should exist to protect children’s learning and activity rather than to make life easier for teachers. In practice, this isn’t always the case. Teachers base decisions about routines and acceptable behavior on numerous considerations, not least their own comfort and their wish to feel in control. Who decides what level of noise is acceptable? What message do teachers send every time they ask for the class’s attention, flicking the lights or ringing a bell? Which routines are connected to safety concerns, and which are a function of the teacher’s desire to keep a group in line, to manage a group? Seating twenty-four children in a small space means that forty-eight elbows and knees are pressed closely together, an invitation to squabbles; hence my insistence that hands and feet be “parked,” so that fingers can’t get stepped on and feet can’t trip up children walking past. Still, I wonder at times if I’m insisting on these seating requirements partly as a matter of form, a way of policing children’s physical selves.
Kindergarten: A Teacher, Her Students, and a Year of Learning Page 4
