Transcriber: Isabel Pozas González Reviewer: Luis Javier Salvador
So, public school kindergarten in the United States today
is a public relations nightmare. You might ask why.
Many adults believe that young children
should learn concepts and skills in very direct ways.
With high-stakes tests today, school administrators pressure teachers
who then pressure children with drills, and passively sit
for whole groups sitting with paper and pencil tasks.
So we can compare 19th-century child labor
with 21st-century child labor.
Now look, many people will look at 21st century
well, there's nothing wrong with that, they are sitting at desks, right?
They've got shoes on, for the most part.
In any case, we need to consider
that young children learn in quite different ways.
They learn by comparing physical experiences.
They learn by comparing their interactions
with other people and with their own feelings
and they learn an enormous amount
through their imagination and pretense.
So, let us take a moment together to pretend and use our imaginations.
Imagine that these keys are yours
to the automobile of your dreams.
Price is no object,
think of the make and close your eyes if you need to.
Think of the color, brand new.
It even has a full tank of gasoline -- (Laughter) -- at this economy --
Okay.
But, you knew there was a but,
there is no lubricating oil.
Without the lubricating oil
all the parts will not work together.
And pretend social play for young children
is the lubricating oil, the lymphatic fluid
that pulls together the logical parts
and the creative parts of the brain.
And we know our brains
are built to make connections constantly.
So, let's look at what happens
when children engage in pretense.
You, be the physician.
I broke my arm, OK?
Right away the planning
takes part of the logic of the brain.
The becoming is the creative part of the brain.
One child might respond to my broken arm:
"Poor dear, I'll get you a bandage".
A different child might respond to the same situation:
"Hold on, I'll call 911, I'll get help".
A third child might respond:
"Bad child, I told you not to jump from that table".
So, in each case we have a chance to assess:
What is the experience that the child brings to school?
And children from one another begin to understand
different perceptions of the world.
What they are doing in that situation
is they are engaging in oral collaborative playwriting.
Say that again, oral collaborative playwriting.
And that is on the continuum between
talk, write, write, writing into reading and reading.
Since we entered this room
there are likely a half dozen new books
and maybe a dozen new articles
on the research values of pretend play
and they are four.
It helps social competence.
It helps language development.
Statistically significant improvements in IQ.
And even connection making and problem solving.
And there is very important research that high-fantasy children
whose families pretended with them when they were little
have the capacity to be more patient,
more perseverant and better with connection making.
Another condition for learning is physical interactions in the world.
So, when children are building with the beautiful kindergarten
floor blocks or any three-dimensional materials,
they're creating the spatial perceptions
that they will need to understand concepts
in mathematics, chemistry, physics and geography.
Still another condition for learning
takes place when professional teachers create conditions for surprise.
We have an expectation, we have a real experience.
Surprise!
That's where learning is evident
and that's where teachers can assess learning.
You can see four-year olds predicting that
the large horseshoe magnet will attract more paper clips
because big is stronger, it should happen.
Surprise. The smaller one does.
When Albert Einstein was four years old
and his uncle gave him a compass,
he was intrigued and claims that event
as an important starting point
to his scientific imagination
because he had to imagine an unseen force.
So, in these days what happens is we have a society that
tells us we need hundreds of thousands more people
to do science, technology, engineering and mathematics.
On the one hand, there are all these jobs going begging.
On the other hand, when my colleagues and I, and when teachers bear witness
and visit hundreds of kindergartens around the country,
they say the children aren't engaging in the interactive physical activities
and social activities that can give them the imagery to learn
science and technology and engineering and mathematics.
And then there are reports that there are school administrators
who are actually throwing out these valuable blocks in the garbage.
So, is it possible that these high-stakes tests
are contributing to a form of sanctioned child abuse?
Wow!
Listen.
Professional kindergarten teachers are always
assessing children for a particular purpose.
They need to figure out how to challenge them to the next steps
that they are ready to learn, to provide just the right balance
between risk and success.
So the children can feel competent because we know that
if children feel competent, they feel the possibility they can move forward
and they can deal with an occasional setback.
However, if we look at what teachers can do,
we know that they can assess children in these many ways,
just by looking, by listening, by seeing their drawings,
by seeing their writings. I hate lice, OK?
And looking at all -- and that's a kindergarten writing --
and looking at their constructions
because the constructions become more complex.
The writing becomes more complex.
So you see assessment developing over time, OK?
Children need time to percolate.
What the standardized tests are doing now is categorizing.
There is no evidence that it makes a difference in learning.
And frankly, if we weigh ourselves in the morning,
will it make a difference during the day
unless we change how we take nutrition.
So, who benefits? Let's look and follow the money.
Large global corporations and publishing companies are making
a profit with many millions of dollars of public funds by printing all of these tests.
And then, they make many more millions of dollars creating scripted programs
that they expect teachers to read out at the children who sit passively.
OK.
So, what's to be done?
We have a cascade of principals fearful of their jobs,
other administrators fearful of their jobs,
teachers fearful of their jobs, who then dump on the children.
For young children, school for many of them
may be the most stable part of their lives.
They want to please adults, they want
to comply even with the most ridiculous requests.
But then, there are some children who are truly honest.
They are called problems.
Right? They might act out or simply withdraw.
They might lose their trust in schooling. OK?
So, where are we with all of this?
The cost to school resources and to human civil life is not worth it.
We read about all this bullying that's going on, more and more. OK.
Enough said on that. There's other fallout that we need to consider.
And it is the case that many school districts
recognizing the additional pressure on children
are raising the age of entry to kindergarten.
Currently, we have children between 57 and 62 months of age
in different states, receiving entry to kindergarten.
They have just hatched, OK.
In some states, they're raising the age as much as two months
and over the next few years, four to five months.
Another fallout is that families are leaving their children out of school
for one whole year additional, recognizing this pressure.
Listen, folks.
The contracts have been written,
the testing movement for high-stakes tests
is an enormous conglomerate quite powerful.
But there is research that can give us a little bit of help.
And that is there is research that points to the fact
that kindergarten children do better in standardized tests
when their teachers have professional certification
and preparation to work with young children.
So, let's look at what that means.
Most states in the United States
have some provision for early childhood teacher certification.
40% of the states, however, have a general certificate
kindergarten through sixth grade and most of those people
have never been prepared with how to match teaching
with the conditions for learning in kindergarten, or Pre-K or BI.
100% of school administrators have absolutely no requirement
to prepare, to match kindergarten teaching with the conditions for learning.
How can we expect people to walk in and knowledgeably observe a kindergarten classroom,
then, coach the teacher, supervise the teacher and then evaluate the teacher for the job?
In our society, we need people who can make connections,
who can be flexible thinkers, who can work collaboratively,
who can deal with the predictably
unpredictable nature of our future.
So, we know that teacher and administrator education
means that we need good scholarship.
Scholarship is important, research tells us that.
For example, in 1935, my colleague tells me
that her mother in the Middle West finished
her first year of college, came back to her farm community
and was immediately installed as the teacher
because she was the most educated person in the community.
For our 21st-century teachers,
we need to have people who can translate
adult understandings into the concrete,
active experiences that young children can perceive.
The teachers and the administrators
need a repertoire of such experiences coming out
of the social sciences and the sciences,
so the children have reasons to represent with drawing, with construction,
with writing, and have reasons to read and measure and calculate.
We need to engage with families in advocating to state policy makers
and maybe even the federal government
to see that school administrators, where it all begins to filter through,
have particular preparation
in understanding how to match teaching
with the conditions for learning of young children.
Then, they would be better able to observe
and coach, and supervise teachers.
So, to quote philosopher John Macmurray:
"All knowledge is for the sake of action
and all action is for the sake of friendship".
So, let's be friends with young children,
let's make sure that the people who work for them
are highly qualified to match teaching with learning,
so that the young children can have great expectations
in their lives. Thank you.
(Applause)