Kindergarten: A Teacher, Her Students, and a Year of Learning

by Diamond, Julie

  Of course, developmentally appropriate work is not a goal or objective mandated by local or state education authorities. In fact, were we to judge elementary-school kindergarten programs by the standards of authenticity and appropriateness for the age group, the majority of them would fall short. Not only that. The current emphasis on “standards” distracts teachers and educators from the job of looking at the valid educational questions: How do children learn? Where do we see learning occurring? How can we plan for learning?

  I have found, in fact, that when children are genuinely engaged with content, when a study begins with their responses and concrete experiences and respects their thinking, the learning that results far exceeds the conceptual outcomes listed for the grade. Themes that arise in children’s actual environments or their imaginations and that are pursued in open-ended ways will lead to far-ranging conclusions. The belief that high-quality work results when children’s intentions and ways of thinking are respected has been articulated by various progressive educators, who have been warning for many years now of the current tendency to see children as, essentially, scores. I am thinking here of Vito Perrone, an educator associated with the North Dakota Study Group and with the Harvard School of Education; Patricia Carini, who documented children’s work at the Prospect School and the Prospect Archive; and Deborah Meier, founder of Central Park East School. These educators have made the case that standards should be dynamic and evolving, and necessarily connected to children’s ongoing efforts.13

  “I Love Sea Horses!”

  I always want to say something in my Friday letters that will help parents see learning as I do—see the role motivation plays, see the feelings that children bring to the things they care about. I want parents to see that you can’t separate the social and emotional aspects of children’s functioning. You can look at these aspects, describe them separately—but they occur mixed together.

  Real learning is inspiring, particularly when it appears unexpectedly, as if out of nowhere. What does it tell us about the students or the content? In the fall, the class had studied patterns. Since the children were also studying and sorting leaves, we made up a “tree pattern”: sycamore, sycamore, oak, oak, oak. This pattern was the class favorite; the children had generated more than a dozen patterns, and then had voted. The children then made a beautiful frieze of this pattern along the back wall, printing the sycamore and oak leaves with black paint on construction paper. In the spring, on our way to the Museum of Natural History one day to see the undersea-animal exhibit, children spontaneously broke into patterned chants as we walked: “octopus, octopus, squid, squid, squid.” Others took up competing chants, exuberantly championing their favorite undersea animals, “sea horse, sea horse, sea horse, jellyfish!”

  The exuberance that children bring to such moments is also not listed anywhere as an educational objective. To me, it’s a vital mark of successful teaching: not something constantly present, but something that is visible from time to time. The real world matters to young children, something that’s usually forgotten by the bureaucrats and educational planners, who look at them from afar.

  Young children’s ability to identify with almost anything is a striking characteristic. I watch my two-year-old grandchild pretend to feed her doll, and as she moves her hand to the doll’s lips, her own lips move, chomp chomp. That readiness to identify is, I believe, one strand in what motivates children’s learning.14

  As teachers, our job is to see that children’s feelings of intense and personal connection are maintained and extended. We can make space for their passionate involvements. We can allow the block builders to sign up for the blocks as often as possible; we can follow up children’s desires to learn about those animals—sea horses or dolphins, sharks or giant squid—that particularly intrigue them. By ensuring that children’s feelings about content are a central consideration, teachers integrate children’s affective and cognitive selves, and curriculum is immeasurably richer. When teachers also ensure that a curriculum provides a multiplicity of approaches, children can make their own sense of a topic, and the topic is likely to appeal to more of them. Their discoveries and conclusions, their idiosyncratic juxtapositions, their eccentric observations and conclusions, and even their public challenges to what we know to be so add unplanned dimensions, layers, and extensions to a study.

  More Questions

  Eva is studying owls with her first-grade class, and came into my room with a question about how to organize the study. I was chatting with Theresa, who studies birds every year with her second-grade classes. Eva said, I don’t want to do it the way I did it last year, where each group just produces a book on one kind of owl; how much does that really mean to the kids? Theresa and I agreed. We said, You don’t want to just have a collection of facts, whether about all owls or about each kind. You need to have some way of organizing the information so you’re helping the kids see what’s important—the way animals survive in a specific setting, the way their body structure helps them survive, the way they rear their young. Theresa said that when her second-graders had discussed birds this year, the kids compared their own lives with those of the birds they were studying, and it added depth to the discussion.

  My own list of goals for teachers includes something else that’s not in the lists of standards: when children’s thinking moves in unexpected directions, teachers must attempt to see the connections. This returns us, of course, to Karen Gallas’s requirement that we see children as working to comprehend their world. Years ago, I looked at a piece of writing that a boy was working on, a mess of squiggles and dashes. I would have dismissed it, seen it really as a lot of scribbling, but he was proud. “A food fight!” he said, and I saw it. Mandated curricula don’t prepare us to recognize ideas we haven’t considered. The emphasis in mandated programs on teaching toward predetermined outcomes militates against unpredictability, as does the teacher’s use of prescribed questions and artificial phrases.

  How can teachers manage to remain open to possibilities that we can’t even imagine? Where do we find the intellectual resources and the resilience to look and listen so intently? How do we go on weighing the intention behind children’s confounding formulations, figuring out what question to ask next? My earlier example of missing Max’s logic, when he insisted that newborn humans don’t open their eyes, shows how easy it is to forget to ask the kinds of questions we need to ask.

  In the early 1990s, I met weekly with colleagues with whom I’d initiated an alternative program within the public schools. We talked about everything: about individual children, management issues, curriculum. It was staff development at its purest, because no one was doing it to us. The meetings gave us a place to speculate , together; a place to ask questions rather than answer them. Unfortunately, reflective methods are uncommon. The dominant model of staff development is the “coach,” whose role is to train new teachers in applying mandated programs.

  Trust in children, trust in teachers: teachers must bring trust to their work with children, but teachers also require it from those who run schools. My school allows teachers initiative as to how objectives are met, how studies may be implemented. The science standard for grades K–2 asks that “students . . . gain the understanding that animals are adapted for survival in their environment” without specifying how the concept is to be taught.15 However, in many school systems, teachers lack the opportunity to plan curriculum. Not only are the general learning objectives mandated, but so are the specific topics of study and the sequence of activities. In some cases, the guides that teachers are handed and expected to implement use scripted lessons that are to be followed word for word.

  Yet teachers require something in addition to faith and encouragement. Just as the children in my class need to think out loud, so do I. This—talk that is public, recorded, and used toward further work—is where curriculum planning begins. Practice in this kind of talk—exploratory rather than goal-oriented—should begin in graduate school and continue as
a standard practice in schools. If we want discussion of ideas to be a learning standard for children, it should also be a standard for teachers.

  5

  The Uses of Literacy: Constructing Knowledge

  Talk: What’s the Point?

  Francie’s question—Will a tree die if you pick a leaf?—has to be seen as coming in part out of things we’ve been looking at and talking about. She wrote it with my help: WL A TRE DI FU PK A LF? We put it on the wall, near the drawings of the rabbit.

  In my elementary school, in the 1950s, every inch of the playground rang with talk—conversation, questions, opinions, insults, arguments—the topics as important as life itself: who liked whom, what someone had said about you. And there was the organizing of games, and the formal language of play, the jumprope and ball-game rhymes and chants (A, my name is Alice . . . ), which were passed year after year from older kids to younger. Classrooms were not for talk. You got in trouble for talking “too much.” You got in trouble for “answering back.” You could and should answer the teacher’s questions—raising your hand, waving it, even whispering, “Ooh! Ooh!” You had to know the answer. There always was an answer. What characterized talk then (and in most schools in the world today) was the absolute line between permissible talk—the responses that depended upon your knowing what the teacher wanted to hear—and the words that spilled out when we were free.

  If the classroom is to be a setting in which children’s language will be lively and robust—a central goal, I believe—teachers must find a variety of occasions for talk that children see as purposeful. One year, when my class had a pet snake, the children arrived one morning and discovered that the snake was dead. The night before there had been a severe thunderstorm, and as we sat and talked about the snake’s death and the possible causes of it, the children referred again and again to the storm. Perhaps the window had been left open, and lightning had entered the room and struck the snake? Perhaps the noise had killed the snake? The connections seem absurd to an adult, but it mattered to the children to puzzle out a possible tie between these two natural phenomena. Both the loud nighttime thunderstorm and the snake’s sudden death were consequential events to the children, and both were inexplicable. Because inexplicable, both events demanded explanation and therefore, possibly, were connected. It’s a general rule that young children can’t sit still for very long, but this discussion—and others like it over the years—kept the class riveted as the children explored their ideas.

  The task for teachers, in addition to providing the forum for these discussions, is to recognize when subjects command this degree of attention, for individual children or for a particular group of children. Some talk catalyzes children’s listening, hooks them, perhaps because it is related to their experiences and to topics they deem significant. One day, the class began to talk about dreams:

  Natasha said, I dreamt about Scooby after I saw the movie and it was the movie, and it made me really happy. They all said dreams seem real.

  The topics that engage children most intently may emerge as surprises to adults. Wonderful discussions often start as digressions. One day, I’d been reading Hey, Get Off Our Train, a story in which a child sleeps with a stuffed bear. The children began to talk about the animals or things they took to bed to help them sleep: so many were patient about listening to each other—and genuinely interested. I decided to let the discussion go on because I saw that the children were so involved in the topic. Was their involvement greater because the talk came about as a spontaneous response to a storybook? Whether or not that was the case, a crucial element was my decision to stop reading the story to allow the children time to talk. When teachers decide to let the class pursue a topic, they don’t always know if the digression will prove valuable. But an unexpected and intense interest may sidetrack a planned activity and end up making the curriculum richer. While teachers won’t always know beforehand which topics will prove compelling, planning matters in other ways. When teachers plan for and provide multilayered and stimulating experiences, children will talk, compare, and question with unwavering attentiveness. It was, after all, the children’s immersion in seasonal change—our collecting of leaves, nuts, pods—that led Francie to ask her question about leaves and the death of trees.

  Talk, in this view, is work: it’s what people do to make sense of things. It is both individual and social in nature, because we glean meanings from others’ actions and words. As novelist Michael Chabon notes, “Every universe, our own included, begins in conversation.” 1 Talk is the quintessential human exchange, beginning with babbles and ending with the mutterings of old age. If one of the primary functions of language is to make sense of experience, children’s talk must be viewed as an essential aspect of their development: “The child communicates with himself in and through all his expressive activities. Through this he learns more about himself and the world.... He communicates his feelings and ideas both to children and adults through language and other media.” 2 Teachers, then, should seek to multiply the possible uses of children’s language in a classroom, to think about where and when it occurs and about their own role in expanding the significance of talk. They will take children’s talk seriously, and listen conscientiously. To the extent that teachers see talk as having this central developmental role, they will aim to expand opportunities for this kind of talk throughout the curriculum and throughout the day.

  I listened recently to children excitedly comparing their observations of the behavior of three different liquids: water, oil, and corn syrup. The science guide I was following, Insights: Hands-On Inquiry Science Curriculum, developed by the Educational Development Center, is one that is especially open to student exploration. 3 The children had first investigated the behavior of these liquids in closed plastic jars; they had described what they’d noticed by drawing and writing in their science journals and in lively conversations around the tables. When the class came together, many of the children were excited about the “tornado” that formed when they shook the jar of water. The phenomenon intrigued them, and as they talked about it, although I hadn’t been prepared for the extent of their interest, I was able to connect the “tornado” with their knowledge of other properties of water.

  What is worth mentioning here is not only that children gained information about water’s specific properties, not only that they gained a strengthened sense of their own capacities for thinking about physical phenomena generally, but that students’ construction of knowledge was furthered by the unhindered discussion that was part of the experience. Their talk was exploratory and speculative, it invited participation and associative thinking. This is talk that a teacher genuinely finds worth listening to—and that also allows teachers to know what children actually think: when we discuss the pregnancy of the assistant teacher, Arshea, Sam says a kind of bird comes and brings a baby in a bag. I don’t correct him—in the first place, because I imagine he’s been told this by someone in his family, which necessitates tact from me. But second, if children are always corrected, if discussion is always used to instruct, children will keep what they really think to themselves.

  The Daddies Turn into a Mountain

  I read the title, The Daddy Mountain, and said, Hmm, what does that mean? They had lots of ideas: “Maybe it means the daddies turn into a mountain. Maybe it means . . .” Then someone said, “A daddy as big as a mountain.” The title was so rich because—maybe—it functioned as a metaphor and as something real.

  Why do we care so much about the books we love? What are the questions we ask ourselves as we read, and what do we talk about when we talk with friends who’ve read the same book? Are the reasons that children read essentially different from the reasons adults read?

  Children, like adults, bring their own experiences to the books they read or listen to. When children listen to a book in which a child sleeps with a stuffed dog, and jump in to talk about the objects they sleep with, it’s because the content invites them in, and they speak at le
ngth, with deep feeling. It also works the other way around: something happens, and the discussion that follows can lead the class to think about a book or poem.

  Denay started the day in tears. We’d begun the new routine of lining the kids up outside, saying good-bye to parents outside. It is a big change, and we began it the same day that the kids returned after a week’s vacation. It was a mistake to start a new procedure—especially such an important one that is about the children’s being more “grown-up”—on the first day back after a week’s holiday. In any case, Denay cried for quite a while. I kept her near me and occasionally said, Denay, please be quieter, and I kept focusing on interesting things, other kids’ reports of what they’d done over the vacation, journal entries, things going on in the room. By meeting time, she was better, and raised her hand to report on sledding. Then we had this discussion. Not specifically centered on Denay, but about times anyone felt “miserable.” I’d said, well, we all feel miserable sometimes. Many contributions—about family fights and siblings being mean—led the children to recall the Gwendolyn Brooks poem “Keziah,” which we’d been learning: I have a secret place to go.

  Not anyone may know.

  And sometimes when the wind is rough