Goldilocks Goes to Daycare
Finding the Right Zone for Learning
It’s early afternoon on a preschool playground in the Hyde Park neighborhood of Chicago. Four-year-old twins, Rhiannon and Sasha, have noticed that they can’t see their shadows on the playground at noon, when they go out for recess right after lunch; but later in the day, when they awake from their naps, the shadows have returned. Three-year-old Trey is digging in the sandbox with a stick and wants to share an important discovery: the wind can blow the dry sand around on the edge of the sandbox but not the sand that is wet, which stays put. “Here’s some glue!” he beams, pouring Charlie a stream of the wet sand to hold his zoo enclosure together. Over by the play structure, five-year-old Natalie is explaining to her teacher why no one wants to go on the “baby” slide: “You go much faster when it’s really steep, like see if you put a little rock on this one, it gets down.” Nathan notices that the ants “always come and pick up their dead people and stick them down their ant hole, and they can lift, like, twenty or fifty or a thousand more times than the humans can.” “They don’t ever come back when you’re dead,” Alisha states flatly. “Yeah,” Liam agrees, “except when you go to church. Then God, he can bring them back.” Liam pauses. “But just people, not the ants, I don’t think.”
Anyone familiar with a scene like this one knows that children are intuitive scientists and armchair philosophers, brimming with such startling observations that it’s hard to believe they’ve come from people barely out of diapers. Philosopher and novelist Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, recalling her young daughter’s unexpected awareness of a Cartesian mind-body dualism, explains that young children’s natural affinity for metaphysical thinking stems from their free-ranging minds uncluttered by “the conceptual schemes [adults] get locked up in.”1 But, along with their Talmudic wisdom and intellectual acuity, preschoolers can surprise, equally, with their undeveloped motor skills, atrocious impulse control, and venal self-interest. Like teenagers, whom they closely resemble developmentally, preschoolers are a complicated mix of competence and ineptitude. The problem with American early education is how often the grownups misread, and even interchange, those two attributes completely, and at such critical moments for learning.
Step into a four-year-old’s shoes and what will you find when you walk into a typical American preschool classroom? First, we’ll bombard you with what educators call a print-rich environment, every wall and surface festooned with a vertiginous array of labels, vocabulary lists, calendars, graphs, classroom rules, alphabet lists, number charts, and inspirational platitudes—few of whose symbols you will be able to decode, a favorite buzzword for what used to be known as reading. Add to this mix the reams of licensing regulations required to be posted in plain sight—hand-washing instructions, allergy procedures, and emergency exit diagrams—plus all the store-bought aesthetic hokum, the primary-colored plastic chairs and jaunty autumn-leaf borders that scream “craft store clearance aisle.”
If an adult office space bore any resemblance to this visual cacophony, OSHA might get involved. There’s growing evidence that the material clutter in early childhood classrooms can negatively affect learning. In one study, researchers manipulated the amount of clutter on the walls of a laboratory classroom where kindergartners were taught a series of science lessons. As the visual distraction increased, the children’s ability to focus, stay on task, and learn new information decreased.2 One can only imagine how this paraphernalia affects emotions. But in the early childhood education world, the clutter passes for quality.
And environment is more than what’s on the walls. Once you get your coat and backpack stashed, don’t get too comfortable, because we’ll be asking you to make dozens of transitions in a school day, often with little warning. Don’t expect much privacy or downtime even if you went to bed too late or miss home. We expect you to arrive with good eye-hand control and motor coordination and to be ready to attend quietly in large groups, too. Maybe you’ve found something to do over in the blocks corner? The fun stuff is often in short supply, so we might harangue you to be a better sharer. Does the easel look inviting? No one has taught you the basics of holding a paintbrush properly, so it would probably be a frustrating experience even if the paint containers hadn’t already dried out. It might take you a while to settle into a rhythm, but just when you’re finally getting engaged in something special, like Legos or drawing, we’ll make you put it away and hurry you along to get your snowsuit on, which will consume at least half of your already limited outdoor time. Hungry before snack time? Tough luck.
If there’s a run-in at the sandbox, you’ll be expected to admit wrongdoing and to say you are sorry even if you’re overcome with feelings of hurt and anger, and to show generosity and cooperation in situations that might well prompt an adult to road rage. And we expect to see this otherworldly maturity spring, on its own, without the benefit of unhurried time to practice the art of relating to others. This is a real shame considering the fact that relating to others is arguably the central developmental challenge of early childhood.
If you can’t follow the tedium cooked up by (and for) adults, we might just slap a label on your behavior: developmental coordination disorder, or sensory processing disorder, or attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, a diagnosis handed out every year to thousands of children as young as two or three years old.3 These labels reflect judgments that could be real or that might be figments of your teachers’ imagination. But in either case, at your tender age, they are hardly scientifically predictive of your long-term success or failure in school, not to mention in life.4 Of course, the label “problem child” works, too. And my favorite diagnosis du jour (you really can’t make this stuff up)—sluggish cognitive tempo disorder, for the subversive child gazing out the window when she’s supposed to be pasting cotton balls to a blue construction-paper sky.
It’s enough to make your four-year-old head spin.
But don’t think preschool is busy beyond your abilities. On the contrary! Preschool can be boring and brainless, too. We ask an awful lot of children logistically, physically, and emotionally. At the same time, we woefully underestimate their cognitive capacities, insulting their intelligence on a routine basis with foolish and unimaginative curricula. It’s not really a surprise that the brightest little children are often the most badly behaved. Early childhood classrooms with rigid schedules and fixed curricula tend to devalue children’s intelligence, as well as their prior experiences and background knowledge, so we might need to interrupt your funny story about your new pet hamster because this week’s curriculum theme is covering rainbows and clouds, not rodents, and there’s a specific vocabulary list that has to be learned. Your teacher who’s introducing the letter b on a Wednesday may miss the spark of recognition we might have seen on your face when you notice the resemblance to a lowercase d, because that letter won’t be introduced until next Friday.
Interested in nature? We can offer you some plastic bug manipulatives on a laminated pattern grid or ask you to count off the legs of spiders and ants with tally marks on a bug chart. Did that butterfly on the windowsill capture your attention? Or perhaps you’re wondering how a cocoon got up in a tree? You can ponder the miracle of metamorphosis while sticking fake butterflies on a felt board.
In these sorts of heavily scripted environments where curriculum often comes, literally, from a box, children’s brains can seem like little more than empty tanks waiting for a teacher to pump them with information; the children aren’t seen to have their own source of fuel. This filling-station perspective ignores the extraordinary hardwiring of young children to be curious, to explore, to connect, to feel, and to solve—all of which are skills that predict the academic outcomes most adults want for their children.
The early years can feel disorienting with such mismatched adult expectations. And young children are especially vulnerable to our misfires of under- and overestimation because many teachers lack the training or experience (or time) to find the just-right learning zone for each child. In the teacher’s defense, another part of the problem is that children’s development is not linear, and so children can surprise us with what they can and can’t do, even from one day to the next. For example, growth spurts in one area are often accompanied by stasis or even regression in others, as any parent of a newly articulate and raging toddler knows all too well. In other words, it’s not sufficient to be versed in the general outline of child development—although even that low bar is not a given for all early childhood teachers. We have to pay really careful attention to children, and this is hard to do in the absence of normal, unhurried interactions.
For almost a year, the only activity our three-year-old son reported from preschool was eating what he called “snackers.” I knew he had to be doing more than eating saltines, but that was all the information he wanted to provide. Most of us send our kids off each morning to daycare or to kindergarten or even to a close relative’s house, and it’s not entirely clear what on earth their reality is all about. It’s hard to imagine spending as much money as we do on childcare arrangements (almost 20 percent of a family’s monthly income in some states for the care of just one child)5 and knowing so little about what we’re buying, but that’s yet another paradox of preschool: something visible and seemingly ordinary is actually quite opaque. Parenting books tend to focus on parents’ experiences more than on children’s, and teachers and school administrators veer from vague pedagogic goals to curricular nitpicking. Older family members aren’t much help either; they can’t even remember exactly how they raised their own children.
Children have always been interested in the minutiae of grownup lives, but the reverse is generally less true. As a child, I couldn’t get enough of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s butter churning, dressmaking, and hog butchering. I was fascinated by the relentless and frightening responsibilities of adult life. It didn’t matter that pioneer parents’ lives bore no resemblance to those of any adults I knew; it was the minute-by-minute descriptions of grownup behavior, more than Laura’s childish experience, that interested me most. Rereading the Little House books as an adult, I was jolted to discover the dim prose and creepy anachronisms (Pa performing in blackface, Ma’s simpering passivity). But old-fashioned books like Laura Ingalls Wilder’s, and the only modestly more realistic What Do People Do All Day? by Richard Scarry (in which animals served as human proxies), have a persistent hold on modern young children because they explain, in often numbing detail, the mysterious industry of adulthood.
If only adults were so curious about young children!
The overestimating/underestimating dance can make early learning frustrating for many children, and even for many adults. When it’s unclear what young children can and can’t do, the resulting frustration can lead to the kinds of problems we saw in the excessively rigid DI classrooms, where teachers tamp down children’s spontaneous behavior too much of the time, or the equally unhealthy permissiveness when adults have thrown up their hands in defeat and have put children in charge. Neither approach leads naturally to the good learning outcomes we all say we want.
Four-year-old Omar has been working laboriously for ten minutes to write the word “community” on a piece of paper. His pincer grasp is still shaky and Omar can barely make a firm mark on the page, but he toils away because the word is on this week’s vocabulary list. He may have missed the irony of writing a word like community in quiet isolation, but he eventually produces a reasonable facsimile, and, as a reward, his teacher gestures to a small, desultory housekeeping corner containing a few pots and pans with missing handles: “Good job, honey; now go have fun.”
What makes Omar’s story more puzzling is that in the teachers’ lounge next door, a giant bin of beautiful wooden blocks sits, shrink-wrapped in plastic, unused and untouched. The teachers have attended workshops about the benefits of block play to promote all kinds of skills. They are familiar with recommendations from the National Association for the Education of Young Children to make block play a centerpiece of the early childhood curriculum.6 Yet the blocks have found no place in their preschool classroom. When asked why, the teachers say there is “no room” in the curriculum for that kind of learning. The formal curriculum they are using “doesn’t cover blocks.”
From a preschooler’s perspective, this idea of curriculum “coverage” is a bizarre one. I was recently asked to review a widely used preschool curriculum to try to align it better with what educators call “developmentally appropriate practice.” On the surface, the materials seemed like a good fit for a curious young child. The curriculum features thematic units on pets and dinosaurs and going to school and other topics that generally fascinate small people. The curriculum comes in a big box the size of a coffee table, with each thematic unit paired to a list of vocabulary words and the key concepts preschoolers evidently need to know before they reach kindergarten.
A goal of the Under the Sea unit states, for example, that children should “understand the role of the ocean in keeping us healthy,” and teachers are instructed to teach a list of specific vocabulary words that includes “exoskeleton,” “scallop,” “blubber,” and “tube feet.” On its surface, this stuff seems fun and educational, and the accompanying teacher’s guide contains sound developmental principles.
But, on the other hand, can’t we also see that this extremely narrow articulation of key concepts feels a little . . . off? What’s so special about blubber, anyway? Why not “gutters”? Or “convection oven” or “dashboard”? We know that children thrive academically in all manner of different cultures, whether they learn aquatic or any other vocabulary. Academic failure in the preschool years should not be defined as the failure to identify the names of cetaceans or root vegetables; it should describe the failure to ignite the flame of inborn curiosity.
So what are some key concepts that a child needs to learn at age four or five to be successful in school? Creativity is one important feature of early learning that doesn’t really get its due. When I speak of creativity, I don’t mean aesthetic creativity per se, though it can manifest itself that way, but, rather, a sense of generativity. One of the great twentieth-century psychologists, Erik Erikson, described generativity as a trait typical of middle age, when the desire to produce something meaningful and to look after new generations become paramount life goals. However, I think a version of generativity might also apply to very young children when they show an authentic desire to be productive. Creative, generative children feel confident that they can create meaning—whether from an idea or a thing or even a relationship—because they see a world of possibility and see themselves as capable of unlocking that promise.
This generative orientation complements other complex cognitive and interpersonal skills that are important for preschoolers to master. These essential skills include, according to early childhood expert Ellen Galinsky and others: self-regulation and self-direction; perspective taking; communication; forming connections; critical thinking (the buzzword of the moment); and a willingness to try new challenges.7 In particular, as I’ve argued, the ability to converse freely about different things to different people is a key feature of early childhood learning. I would also add a curious mind-set, without which children can’t be truly active learners. And, finally, I would add humor. A good sense of humor is an elixir that heals psychic wounds and promotes self-awareness and can also be used as a vehicle to understand confusing ideas. (Recall the way Abby and I joked about the birds of prey sprinkling salt on their food and flying around in boxer shorts.)
The good news about key conceptual skills is that young children can cultivate them through hands-on experience in their social environment, and not just through specific lesson plans. These skills—even humor and curiosity—aren’t just “got ’em or you don’t” features of the hardwiring of temperament either. They can be acquired through context and coaching. In fact, one of the most famous scientific experiments ever conducted with children, the Marshmallow Test, demonstrated clearly that certain sorts of environments or previous experiences make kids more or less likely to behave impulsively (i.e., in the experiment, they contributed to their propensity to grab one marshmallow right away rather than waiting a few minutes longer to receive the promised reward of two marshmallows).8 A child growing up in a family where resources are scarce and adults are a continual disappointment might conclude that it makes sense to snatch a toy from a peer rather than wait patiently for a turn because a bird in the hand sometimes makes sense. But in a different environment, the ability to delay gratification can be cultivated. That’s why social learning is so incredibly powerful. Through relationships, which are never static, young children can constantly adapt to new challenges.
I understand the sincere pedagogic impulse behind scripted curricula and other attempts to oversimplify skills acquisition. Many of us feel real anxiety about the world our young children will inherit, and it’s hard to argue against building “increasingly complex vocabulary” or “describing characteristics of living things.” But there are so many more authentic ways to do this than we find in a standard, canned curriculum.
Let me illustrate. It’s a wintry morning at the Calvin Hill Daycare in New Haven, Connecticut, and the kindergartners are about to start their morning meeting. The children know the routine and gather with minimal fuss, forming a tight cluster on the floor and on two small benches. Winnie Naclerio, the lead teacher, starts the meeting with a question:
“Some of us have noticed our fish moves back and forth in its tank, and we’re wondering if it has bones inside its body,” she explains.
Hands shoot up with a vocal mix of yeses and nos as her simple prompt unleashes a flood of hypotheses.
“Yeah! Yeah!” Ben volunteers, “A long time ago it just happened, I mean, I don’t know where it happened or in which country but, uh, like, seventy people went into the water and maybe eighty or ninety piranhas came up and bit them on their legs! With their teeth!”
“Wow, yes,” Winnie responds. “That’s interesting because teeth are a kind of bone, aren’t they? But we wouldn’t have a piranha fish in our fish tank,” she reassures the nodding faces.
“Eels don’t really have bones,” Ava comments.
“Oh?” Winnie asks. “I wonder if we all think that’s true? Why do you think eels don’t have bones?”
“Because for them it’s easier for them to slither, like snakes,” Lucas observes.
“Oh? Hmm. Do snakes have bones?” Winnie continues.
“NO!” Ryan pipes up.
“No way,” shouts Margot.
A collective murmur of arguing begins to spread through the group.
“I’m just asking,” Winnie explains. “I didn’t say I know the answer. We may need to get out our books and do some research to figure this out. Do snakes have bones?”
“No. No,” several children murmur.
“Yes, but really long bones!” Gavin interjects.
“Like anacondas.”
“Well then, how do they slither around?” a girl asks, a little plaintively.
“Okay,” Winnie summarizes, “so we’re saying that some people think that snakes do have bones and some people say they don’t have bones. Angie’s asking if they do, how can they slither, you know, how can they move their body from side to side like this”—she mimics a slithering snake with her hand—“if they have a hard bone that doesn’t move inside their body?”
Winnie notices that Sophie has been quiet and asks her to join in.
“Um, at my house I have this goldfish, and I can see its fins and they get kind of black.”
“Can you see any bones in your goldfish, I wonder?” Winnie probes.
“Uh-huh,” Sophie nods, “I can see them through the clearish body a little.”
“You can? That’s interesting. So how do you think the fish might move with bones in it?”
“Um . . . I think it just moves its tail fins and then it can really move fast.”
“Okay, Sophie was saying that she has a fish and she can see its bones and also that it moves with its tail fin. Is there anything on a snake that would help it move if it had bones? I think we’re going to have to do some research on this because I don’t know. . . . Hang on, I’ll come back to you,” she assures a child. “Alma, what do you think?”
“They just have bones that, um, look like fish, but I’ve been wondering how people eat fish if they don’t take the bones out of it already and also the dinosaurs do not have hands.”
“You’re right the dinosaurs did not have hands. But I wonder if they had bones in another part of their body. Did the dinosaurs have bones?”
“Like fossils in the ground from a long, long, long time ago, and it’s hard like a rock that you have to dig up,” Matthew explains.
“Okay, so we’re remembering that dinosaurs have these big, hard bones that can become fossilized, like stone. Fossils.”
“Jayden’s looking at the book,” someone tattles.
“I know, I saw that,” Winnie nods.
A few children begin to complain that Jayden isn’t following the class rules.
“Yes, I saw Jayden pick up the book. And it looks like some of our friends are wondering why I didn’t tell him to put the book away, since we don’t allow that in meeting. But I could see that he picked up the animal encyclopedia book and he’s looking for the picture of the snake, so I thought that would be a good idea.”
Another child complains that Jayden was flipping through multiple pages, and not just looking at the one snake page.
“Yes, I saw that, too,” Winnie patiently observes. “But you know, it’s hard sometimes to find the page you are looking for, so I was noticing that Jayden was trying to find the page in the book with the snakes. It seems like he is doing some research to help us. Is that right, Jayden?”
Jayden nods.
“Okay, so I think we can all stop worrying about the book. Now . . . Mason, you looked like you knew the answer. Tell us your thoughts. We’re still talking about snakes and bones.”
“Well, snakes have little square bones,” Mason explains, as he forms a circle with his hands. “It’s like one bone, one bone, one bone, one bone, one bone.” He gestures with karate chops, suggesting a series of bones attached to a spine. “And they can move because that’s how the bones are so small and it just moves like that.”
Hands shoot up again.
“Okay, so we’re wondering if it’s ‘one bone, one bone, one bone, one bone,’ like Mason says”—Winnie mimics his karate gestures—“all the way down the snake’s body in a line, and that’s what helps them move and slither?”
“Yes!” several children declare in unison.
“Well, I think we are going to have to find out a lot more.”
There are many striking aspects of this conversation: the children’s verbal sophistication and observational powers; the important role of the children’s own prior experiences; the highly social nature of learning; and of course the passionate struggle to reconcile what the children already know about bones—that giant dinosaurs have them and that they are hard as rock—with the perplexing ability of bony fish and snakes to move fluidly.
Another surprise is that not once in this dialogue does Winnie ever actually “teach” the children anything specific about snakes and fish bones. (As I was observing the conversation, I had to fight the temptation to yell out “Cartilage!”) She also goes well beyond the kind of bromides we’d find on a classroom poster (“Take care of ourselves and others!”) and coaches the children to think as an organic whole, which we see when she diverts the children from hectoring a child who has violated the class norms. Winnie respects the children’s indignation by carefully explaining her decision to allow Jayden to continue looking at his book, but, unlike other teachers in so many bleak Circle Time meetings, where rules and regulations seem to drive curriculum, Winnie is flexible enough to recognize why his infraction is a sign of research, not disobedience.
The ability to see oneself as a researcher is what we call a transferable skill; it can serve as a template for learning in all settings and about any topic. Transferable skills are the most efficient ones to teach children because they can be applied to novel situations requiring new solutions. Being a researcher is the kind of skill we want children to hone early in life so they aren’t dependent on others to spoon-feed them. A researcher’s mind-set is key to most scientific and artistic endeavors, and in fact, there’s increasing evidence that preschoolers who don’t learn to think like researchers (who, for example, are too dependent on the top-down direct instruction model we saw in Chapter One) show fewer problem-solving skills and less curiosity than children who learn in a more investigative, collaborative fashion.9
Researchers rarely work in isolation these days, of course, and in Winnie’s class, each child is elevating the discourse to a new level, even when (as with Sophie’s description of her goldfish’s fins that get black or the initial talk about piranhas) their comments appear tangential. Where other teachers might have tried to stem the river of thoughts, some deeply inchoate, bubbling up from the children, Winnie works instead to keep it flowing, knowing as she does that each child’s perspective waters the ground of another’s mind.
Mason is probably the only child who has actually seen a snake’s skeleton; he, alone, is struggling to explain how the small bones can move flexibly while fixed to a backbone. But even Mason needs Winnie’s supportive guidance, which we see as she repeats and demonstrates his “one bone, one bone, one bone” idea to make it clearer to the others.
Winnie understands that early learning is fundamentally social in nature and that, in kindergarten, there is no zero-sum trade-off between group and individual goals. Later, she told me, the children did a full investigation about animal bones. Winnie has a good relationship with Yale’s Peabody Museum curators and was able to borrow a codfish spine and a complete fish skeleton for the children to explore. But fish anatomy was not her goal, critical thinking was.
Interestingly, this pedagogic model is being adopted at the college level, too. Professors like Eric Mazur, a Harvard physicist who’s received international acclaim for his teaching innovation, are upending their traditional, top-down lecture format through the use of a highly collaborative and lateral model of peer-to-peer education where students coach each other through complex problems, with support from the professor.10 The students’ messy struggle with ideas becomes a strength in the learning process, not a liability. The contrast between this fruitful learning style and the isolated seatwork endemic to so many kindergartens and preschools is as painful as it is perplexing.11
It’s clear that children do not learn in a social vacuum. But how is the learning context put into practice in a classroom? Let’s imagine for a moment a typical alphabet-learning strategy in which the teacher introduces a new letter each week, a preschool curriculum chestnut that is still surprisingly common despite its limitations. And let’s imagine the letter of the week is B. The teacher would want to introduce her students to all kinds of B-themed words. She might put out blue paint at the easel and place bubbles in the water table. She might offer some activities at the writing center with lowercase and uppercase B’s to strengthen a child’s hand-eye coordination and pincer grasp. She might read some books about balloons or balls or bears. She might set out a sorting game with different kinds of bugs. (Have I annoyed you enough? Imagine being a preschooler bombarded by this sort of busy-ness.)
I suppose these might be engaging activities for some children, but if the goal is to teach kids preliteracy skills, the letter-of-the-week strategy is a wildly inefficient one. It would take twenty-six weeks to get through the alphabet. Half a year just to learn one measly alphabet. Think back to how much Winnie’s children taught themselves about fish and snake bones, group dynamics, and even the Socratic method, in just thirty minutes. And why structure an alphabet curriculum with no appreciation for letter frequency? Wheel of Fortune contestants know that an S is more valuable than a Q. And even after all that labor, not every child will know all her letters, or even the functional purpose of an alphabet. And the reason is that there will always be a small subset of children who will at some point need specialized support in the form of intensive one-to-one instruction (not “DI-lite” that’s pitched indiscriminately at the whole crowd) in order to acquire meaningful letter awareness. This one-size-fits-all approach is not only inefficient but also surprisingly ineffective.
There is no scientific evidence to support the teaching of single letters in isolation in a preschool curriculum or the introduction of letters in alphabetic order. This is simply a cultural practice that seems to make sense because it’s the way we’ve always done things.12 There is, however, an “own-name advantage,” according to reading experts Judith Shickedanz and Molly Collins.13 Children pay attention to letters that mean something to them. Consider how quickly children learn the alphabet in preschool programs where they feel motivated to recognize the letters in their own names and the names of their friends because they have a compelling reason to learn the alphabet. In those types of classrooms, the children learn, for example, to put their name on a waiting list for a turn to be the classroom line leader or to have a turn at the sand table. Their teachers might announce that the children whose names end with M, A, or R could be in the first group to get ready to go outside or feed the class pet.
This works in the same way with mathematical activities. How fast do you think three preschoolers can perform fractions if you give them nine cookies and tell them to divide them so that everyone gets exactly the same amount? I’ve done this experiment in my classroom and I can tell you the answer: pretty damned fast. In fact, they can divide ten or even eleven cookies into three equal parts, too. When skills are embedded in a higher purpose, or at least in a human purpose, like wanting to get a fair share of cookies, children learn faster and better. A hankering for cookies appears to concentrate the mind.
The point here is not that readiness skills such as letter awareness and simple fractions are unimportant. Children who fail to develop these preacademic skills are statistically more likely to have academic trouble in elementary school and beyond.14 But we must understand that these skills, while necessary, are not sufficient for success. They should be seen as the natural by-products of a rich curriculum, not the end products themselves. This distinction between way stations and end points can be hard to discern, however, in classrooms where teachers are not properly trained to embed small, cumulative skills, such as memorizing a vocabulary list, purposefully within a bigger-picture goal, such as performing a play based on a favorite story. Without adequate teacher training, children may not acquire those skills, and it’s easy to see why a pedagogic model like direct instruction tends to assume such disproportionate prominence in the preschool teaching tool kit. It feels safer.
But these missed opportunities to acquire complex skills through multistep activities such as drama and block building are generally a failure of tactics, not strategy, and the failure could be addressed through improved pedagogy, not abandonment of the larger goal. There are times, of course, when DI is entirely appropriate and even necessary, even in a classroom like Winnie’s. Sometimes children need a direct lesson in hand washing or the procedure for going outdoors or the sound made by th. But top-down teaching is far too pervasive, and it’s too often directed at academic topics that preschoolers don’t really need to master yet. Sometimes it’s employed to produce parroted responses to things that children only appear to understand fully. The latter is a big trap to which a surprisingly large number of teachers and researchers, including myself, have fallen victim.
For example, a near-universal feature of today’s preschools is the dreaded daily tracking of the calendar, a too hard/too easy task that even toddlers are now being subjected to as preparation, apparently, for a lifetime of clock punching: “Point to what day we’re on,” the teacher says. “What day was yesterday?” “Show me where we start the week,” these poor put-upon creatures are hounded. Calendar work is another embodiment of mismatched learning expectations, and one study showed that even after months of flailing and confusion, only about half the class of preschoolers could figure out the expected answer.15 A handful more can probably be trained to repeat, “Today is Monday, October fifteenth” at the appropriate prompt.
But what are they actually learning? It’s hard enough for adults to remember whether March has thirty or thirty-one days, or whether last week’s dentist appointment was on a Tuesday or a Wednesday, but it’s even harder for small children, who also have to contend with mysterious two-day gaps that crop up from time to time. Calendar activities consume an enormous amount of a teacher’s time even though there are more effective ways to help a young child learn number sense and patterning. There are alternatives to the status quo. But these alternatives require teachers to learn a new script, and most American teachers don’t learn that kind of pedagogy or have chances to practice it.
There’s another reason teachers rely on preprogrammed curriculum and top-down teaching methods. Prefab curriculum from a package can look superficially very appealing compared to the alternatives. As we’ve seen, there is a pronounced mismatch between the skills that teachers think are important, on the one hand, and those that parents think are appropriate for preschoolers to acquire, on the other, and it doesn’t help simply to lord it over parents that research shows that most preschoolers are better off examining actual beach sand through a microscope than counting cartoon sand pails on a worksheet. This happens to be true, but teachers in the trenches probably need to do a much better job showing how this is so (which they themselves may not truly understand), so that parents who are attracted to by-the-book alphabet, calendar, and math exercises might come to value alternatives that give their children a more active learning role.
Active learning can lead to some strange classroom obsessions and the payoff requires a long horizon. In my experience and in talking with colleagues, there’s a sizable camp of parents who are genuinely skeptical about the benefits of a play-based, exploratory curriculum for their preschoolers. I think parents can be forgiven for not immediately grasping why a preschool class might labor for weeks on a quilt made from plastic garbage ties, for example, or spend an entire winter studying plumbing. From my perspective, it’s perfectly clear! Four-year-olds are natural engineers and love pipes and fixtures and rushing water and, of course, toilets. What better way to acquire vocabulary and measurement skills than looking under a sink?
For parents who didn’t themselves have the benefit of attending a preschool that valued personal relationships and active learning, this approach can seem alien. We see politicians and certain educators using these differences in what parents want as an excuse to push punishing schedules and draconian expectations on very young children, especially children with vulnerabilities such as poverty. There’s a noxious zeal behind some of the teaching practices that are cropping up these days to keep at-risk young children in line: requiring a teacher to attend to her “carpet expectations” may sound like a good idea, I guess, but it’s really just a creepy Orwellian defense for not allowing little kids to stretch out on the rug or hold a friend’s hand while listening to a story.16 And that’s only the beginning: some elementary schools now keep extra sweatpants and underwear in the supply closet for children who wet their pants while taking practice tests for which they weren’t allowed bathroom breaks.
Parental anxieties and aspirations are not to be trifled with, mind you, but we are doing a real disservice to families by failing to educate them about the science of child development or to advocate for all children’s real needs. The young children who need active, play-based learning the most are usually the ones who are least likely to get it from preschool. Meanwhile, affluent children who have plenty of advantages at home become doubly privileged when their preschool environments exceed the average. Society’s message seems to be that those kooky, hands-on experiences are nice for affluent children, but the poor and disadvantaged ones need the “real” teaching.
Indeed, they do. And here is the problem.
Mrs. L. is reading a preschool favorite, Polar Bear, Polar Bear, What Do You Hear? to the class of four-year-olds at the Sunny Farms Children’s Center. She reads the story in an oversized book format, with a supersized text perched on an easel, but the way Mrs. L. is reading may sound unfamiliar to those who enjoy listening to a good Eric Carle story, or any story. “Polar Bear, Polar Bear, what do you hear question mark,” she says rhythmically, as she taps out the words and punctuation on the page. It’s startling for an adult to hear the phrase “question mark” spoken out loud in the midst of the whimsical sentence, but the children seem neither particularly confused nor engaged. Mrs. L. pauses several times to ask questions: “Where’s the front of the book?” she asks as the children methodically point to the front cover. “Which direction do we read?” “This way!” the children answer, waving their hands from left to right. “Where’s the author’s name?” she asks. “There!” The children point. “What’s the story’s main problem?” she probes. No one answers.
Mrs. L. is pushing to an odd extreme a technique called shared reading, where the teacher reads a predictable text multiple times over the course of several days, pointing to words and punctuation as she goes along and encouraging children to join in where they can. Typically used in kindergartens and first-grade classrooms, shared reading can be an important part of a comprehensive literacy program for children who are actively learning to read. But, like so many pedagogic strategies that have been pushed down from elementary school to the preschool level, its appropriateness is questionable for younger children who lack a foundation for understanding specific written literary conventions.
This kind of bloodless approach to reading is especially depressing for the children who don’t have books at home and will never get to build a meaningful literacy foundation from the magical, exciting stories that boost vocabulary and memory, engender a love of language, foster the ability to sequence events from beginning to end, and promote all the other critical skills preschoolers learn from an engaging story time.
When asked why she voiced the words “question mark” out loud, Mrs. L. explained that she thought she had to teach that way. Her confusion is understandable: early childhood teachers are under such intense pressure to meet state benchmarks that they are reducing real language to gibberish. This is “teaching to the test” on steroids.
One way to understand a tired phrase like teaching to the test is this: Imagine that a Martian landed on earth and asked to learn a typical human activity before heading back to its home planet. You tell the Martian, “Well, if you want to learn about American life, you should probably know how to drive.” So you spend a whole week with the Martian, teaching it how to operate a car. But here is the catch. You are worried about driving around with a Martian—it might attract awkward questions—so you decide to stay close to home. You teach the Martian all about driving right there in your driveway: three-point turns, parallel parking, backing up in reverse, using the parking brake, changing a tire, the works. And at the end of the week, you merrily inform the Martian, “You can go home now! I’ve taught you how to drive!” And the Martian gets in its fancy spaceship and disappears.
But what would the Martian know about driving? Would it have learned anything of value? The Martian would have no idea why we humans drive cars, no sense that there are millions of miles of roads that lead to beautiful vistas and to the homes of people we love and to our places of work and worship. It wouldn’t know what a map is, or that there are other ways to get around. It would have no idea that thousands of people die every year in car wrecks, or that people earn money building cars in factories all around the world, or that dogs like to stick their noses out the window while driving and children like to squabble in the backseat.
This is the problem with much preschool education today. Yes, children should start to learn certain skills, but if they’re taught them without context, then they can’t be used in functional settings. When we define outcomes as narrowly as the Martian’s driving lessons, it’s easy to give ourselves an A+ for teaching. “That Martian has skills!” But what’s the point of reciting days of the week if you can’t share something interesting you’ve done on one of those days? And let’s not fool ourselves: these lower-level, stepping-stone skills such as shape recognition have more in common with pet tricks than high-level cognition.
Preschool teachers are not the only practitioners of this compartmentalized approach to knowledge. For the past few centuries, scientists have been purposefully examining ever-smaller parts of nature in an effort to understand the whole. We’ve disassembled animals into organs, then tissues, then cells, then macromolecules, then genes. To achieve this, we’ve disassembled matter into atoms, then nuclei, then subatomic particles. We’ve invented everything from microscopes to supercolliders. But in the twenty-first century, scientists are starting to reassemble the parts—neurons into brains, nutrients into foods, animals into ecosystems, people into social networks.17 The scientific frontier is discovering how we put Humpty Dumpty back together again.
In the early childhood education world, however, we’re still stuck in the old micronutrient paradigm, busily disassembling and disaggregating the big ideas of child development into the educational equivalent of auto parts. And these disarticulated parts are what have come to be known as school-readiness skills. It’s hard to fault the impulse to impart some tangible readiness skills when so many children seem destined to failure without them. But feeding a child a diet of isolated skills is like subsisting on Flintstones vitamins. Most of us know that we’d be better off eating a complete meal of fresh food. Yet we deny children a rich and varied curriculum every day.
So what’s wrong, exactly, with teaching a group of four-year-olds how to identify punctuation marks at the end of a sentence? My answer is that apart from the risk of alienating young children with boring teaching practices, the main problem here is that, with limited time in the day, every moment has to count, as the educational reformers like to remind us, and every minute spent doing rudimentary skills such as alphabet drills or simple addition work sheets is a moment not spent on complex skills such as working collaboratively with peers to build a pulley system or a fort. Simple and complex skills are not mutually exclusive, of course, but, as we’ve seen, the former is a by-product of the latter. It doesn’t work the other way around.
Parents and educators have limited maneuvering room within a system over which they have little control. The teachers may not have a say in their curriculum, or may lack the training to teach in the more organic third-way fashion we’ve been reviewing. Parents may not be able to select a preschool they want, particularly when they are priced out of top-quality programs or demand simply exceeds supply. Sometimes parents have their hearts set on a preschool that’s simply too far away from home and work, and they have to make the sensible (but wrenching) decision to pick a lesser choice for the betterment of the whole family’s routine. Children, of course, have no say in any of these matters. It’s easy to feel hopeless in these circumstances, but it’s important to remember that the effects of the best preschool program are dwarfed by the impact of all kinds of other factors in a child’s life. Parents can be reassured that there are many strategies to be responsive to children, even in less than ideal conditions.
The first step out of the quagmire is for parents and teachers alike to better calibrate their expectations and learn to be good coaches. The two are related, calibrating and coaching, insofar as they both require observing the child carefully and meeting her where she is developmentally at a given moment. It sounds easy, but it takes skill and practice.
Do you remember how you put on your coat when you were a little kid? It’s such a reflexive activity for most adults that it may come as a surprise to hear how complex a task it is for small children to get ready to go outdoors in the winter. But if you watch a child carefully for a few minutes, you’ll see that putting on a coat is the cause of a lot of drama in preschool classrooms in cold climates. In fact, this drama is actually a major reason for the lack of outdoor time in many programs. Early childhood teachers do appreciate the importance of outdoor play, which is often the only time children can enjoy any semblance of big body roughhousing during a school day. But there are few things as frustrating to preschool teachers as trying to hustle a group of squirmy three-year-olds into snowsuits. Herding slugs is more easily accomplished.
Occupational therapists use a concept called motor planning to describe the steps required to plan and carry out a series of movements. Putting on a coat involves more than just sticking your arms through two sleeves. From the moment a young child is instructed to put on her coat, she has to think about how to move her body from one place (say, the block corner) to another (her cubby), without bumping into her peers or knocking over their block tower. Then, she has to position her body so she can grab the coat without pulling her backpack off the hook or pushing her boots to the floor. Then she has to find a big enough space to put her coat on without taking up other people’s space and think about how she can get her right arm into what only appears to be the left sleeve and the left arm into what appears to be the right sleeve. This of course assumes she can see which part of the coat is the front and which is the back and transpose that visual image to her own body. And forget about zippers and buttons and snow pants and wet gloves that have turned inside out. There are probably dozens of motor planning steps required just to get outside.
If you’re still not overwhelmed by that description, imagine instead having to fumble in a spacesuit in zero gravity with a wrench the size of a pair of tweezers and being asked to repair a two-hundred-million-dollar telescope on the international space station before being blown off-structure by satellite debris, like Sandra Bullock in the movie Gravity.
Teachers try to improve these motor processes with posters containing pictorial steps for hand washing, dressing, and going to the toilet, which help break down big tasks into manageable steps. But the child still has to go through the steps, and the fundamental reality is that we ask young children to complete hundreds of small motor planning steps every day which are simply unnecessary and could be easily jettisoned with the slightest exercise of sympathy for the stress they can cause a small child. When I taught preschool, I foisted far too many motor planning steps on children until I observed grimly that I could have spent an entire school year teaching daily living skills, with no room left for more interesting activities, and still a few outliers would need help getting dressed each day! Eventually, I quietly gave up my expectation that every single child should master these challenges and started being more proactive about offering help, while knowing that this violated one of the central precepts of a good preschool curriculum: Foster independence!
We’re always making little kids do things for themselves on the grounds that they need to develop independence—that holy grail of American preschool pedagogy—but I wonder why we have such an unimaginatively low bar for the kind of independence we think worthwhile. I once watched a South Asian friend hand-feed her two-year-old with what seemed to my American eyes to be far too much adult intervention. “Shouldn’t your kid learn how to hold her own spoon?” I asked rudely. Well, suffice it to say that this codependent toddler is now a medical doctor who also has a PhD in chemistry, and I don’t see any evidence of her enfeeblement or failure to launch into adulthood as a result of her mom’s guiding coriander-scented peas into her mouth. It was my rigid conception of a toddler’s development that needed altering.
Is it really a marker of readiness that a four-year-old can button his shirt? It’s certainly a marker on a lot of educational rating scales that form the basis of fraught parent-teacher conferences. But what if we allowed for a moment that we’d rather spend our precious school time on things other than hectoring children to zip their jackets. Children develop at different rates, and there will always be some small fraction of little kids who are going to spend way too much of their day learning to operate zippers.
If we paid closer attention to the experience of being a young child, I believe we couldn’t escape the conclusion that we have to ease up on certain kids with still-maturing fine motor schools so they can spend their time on more meaningful activity.
So, how to help children find those meaningful activities? We’ve seen the central role of conversation in early learning and, to start, we can ask young children themselves what is meaningful to them. But it’s not always so easy to get a straight answer from a young child! A more reliable approach is to observe the child, to become, in essence, an amateur anthropologist of the growing child, like the very best teachers you will encounter. Great teachers are variable in all ways but one: they are uniformly terrific observers. I appreciated this lesson when a friend babysat for us one afternoon more than twenty years ago. She wasn’t a garden-variety babysitter but my husband’s dissertation adviser and one of the world’s most eminent medical sociologists, Renée C. Fox.
We put Renée in charge of our four-month-old son one afternoon and, foolishly, neglected to give her real guidance on what to do with him or how to respond if he got fussy. (We obviously didn’t know ourselves.) None of us had a cell phone back then, but our supreme confidence in Renée’s people skills was justified—she’d done a lifetime of fieldwork all over the world and knew how to read the most opaque interpersonal scenarios—because, by the time we arrived home, Renée had our baby completely figured out. Without any prior experience caring for an infant, she nonetheless knew when he wanted to be spoken to and which particular kind of playful voice worked best. She knew how long she could hold his attention span, with what particular toys, and what kind of distractions would reengage him. Her uncanny observations made me a better parent in two ways: I learned a lot more about my new child but, more important, I learned the amazing power of observation from one of the world’s great masters of the skill.
But it’s not necessary to be a famous sociologist to cultivate good observational abilities. First, we need to develop a mental state that a British psychoanalyst once described as having “no memory, no desire.”18 This is the art of suspending preconceived expectations and assumptions about a person in order to understand where he is coming from, what he is thinking, and what he is feeling. It’s a useful tool for parenting, which I wish I’d been encouraged to cultivate as a young mother, because, when we suspend our memories and desires, we’re better able to observe the child in the moment, and we see things we might not otherwise have been able to see: a child who is unfocused and sloppy when getting out the door every morning becomes the child who can hold a fragile newborn sibling with the utmost concentration.
To see a child fully, we have to allocate the time and space to observe. That’s easier said than done in an era where technology intrudes on every human interaction. It’s essential to put the gadgets away, dispense with the educational work sheets and the beginner readers we can’t resist foisting on our kids, and simply get down on the floor to watch quietly.
Sometimes it helps to ask open-ended questions instead of closed questions, and by that I mean asking questions that allow the child to take an idea and build on it from his or her own fund of experience, knowledge, and interests. A classic example of a closed statement would be to approach a child drawing a picture and exclaim, “Oh, what a pretty house. Good job!” It’s not a helpful statement because it might not actually be a house, which leaves the child feeling exposed, and, even if it is a house, it shuts down further discussion: you’ve labeled the thing and said you liked it. What is there to add to the exchange?
One step better would be to open up the question a bit, by asking, “What are you making?” But even that kind of question is limiting because a young child might not even know what he or she is making! It presupposes the motive for drawing. A much more helpful opening is simply to say, “Tell me about your drawing.” This statement has no end point; it invites the child to be reflective, and that’s where you learn from your child about where she is developmentally, and what she needs.
Pairing observations with this open style of communication also offers a genuine invitation to let the child drive the conversation. Needless to say, gentle, open conversation is totally inappropriate for the times we need to convey “Get your shoes on right now. We’re leaving!” But it’s critical that we set aside time to interact with a child on her terms as much as we can, and it’s equally important not to be too stagey and obvious about it, or the child will suss out right away that something feels rotten. There’s a difference between being seen, which any child would appreciate, and being monitored, which is a different story.
This relaxed, observational posture takes some practice for adults to learn, but close observation does come naturally to children, and we can take our cues from them. Imagine how a four-year-old might watch a caterpillar moving slowly across the driveway, with patience and a lack of judgment, and also with a kind of bighearted generosity that suggests the bug is something worthy of close attention. If we want to be better parents and better teachers, we need to relearn how to become exactly that kind of observer. Loving, unjudgmental observation can help us guide children into the optimal learning zone, where we can see their vitality and power.