Over the past six months or so,
I’ve heard questions and/or concerns about the role of social emotional
learning, play, homework, and assessment in early childhood education. So I
decided to find out more, recently meeting with Melrose’s Franklin Early
Childhood Center (ECC) Director Donna Rosso.
Social Emotional Learning (SEL)
Social emotional learning is the
foundation on which education at the ECC is built. The Massachusetts
Standards for Preschool and Kindergarten (http://www.doe.mass.edu/kindergarten/SEL-APL-Standards.pdf)
are used as the basis for this teaching and learning, but the actual standards
applied at ECC are higher than what the state recommends. The New Second Step Social-Emotional
Skills for Early Learning curriculum
is employed at the ECC and teachers and paraprofessionals have received
training in its implementation
throughout the 2015-16 school year. A Social Worker supports the staff
and students 1 ½ days/week. All children at the ECC can benefit from SEL
learning and practice – whether they have an identified disability or not.
(For my other post referencing Second
Step, please see 10/21/15.)
Play and Learning
There are different theories about
teaching children, and the ECC in
part uses a “constructivist”
approach, which means that learners “construct” knowledge from their own
experiences, applying their own interests. At the ECC, staff uses “intentional
play” as a teaching approach. In
all classrooms children have
opportunities to engage in intentional play
experiences throughout the day with many classes beginning their day with a 45
minute to an hour choice time. Among the many thematic
play centers constructed each month in
classrooms, students brainstorm together and talk about what their center should include. They agree on themes and find ways to
explore them. For example, one classroom’s theme is outer space, so the
children made a space ship out of a large appliance box, complete with inner
workings made from a variety of household items (include everyone’s favorite
household item – duct tape). Their art is space-themed and the books in the
reading area follow the theme. One class decided to explore a “pet hospital.”
Another class tackled a writer’s workshop, with one pair of students authoring
and illustrating a book. Ms. Rosso says: “It is in play that children explore and learn about the real
world.”
The outdoor playground is also focused
on intentional play. Prior to its recent overhaul, staff observed that children
were acting out behaviors they had seen in media. (Ms. Rosso commented that in
America too much play is dictated by consumer driven media companies
that focus on consumption of goods as opposed to productive play experiences,
i.e. purchase a meal and receive a toy that already has a story to go with it;
then the toy becomes stale because there is no imagination needed and a new toy
must be obtained, at a cost, to replace the first). The playground was
reimagined and built with each piece of apparatus designed to support the developmental needs of the whole
child. There is a mini-theater where children can play at putting on a show, taking tickets
or making popcorn. There are developmentally appropriate risk-taking
experiences available that allow gross motor skills to be tested and improved
(like apparatus that challenges balance in a safe and age-appropriate way).
In her community outreach, Ms.
Rosso’s booth at the recent Birth to Five-sponsored New and Expectant Parent
Expo provided “Alien Writers” to all children. On a bookmark-sized card attached to green net sparkly streamers, children could pinch the printed “alien” on
the card between thumb and forefinger and use large arm motions to depict
letters in the air, their movements waving the streamers. An engaging,
developmentally appropriate, hands on writing activity like the “Alien Writer”
is an example of play and learning together that is meant to avoid introducing
young children to writing instruments and worksheets before they are
developmentally ready. At the ECC, children are also provided opportunities to write letters in the sand, make
them from Play-Doh, or “draw” them on a friend’s back, another way to use gross
motor skills to learn until children are developmentally able to hold a pencil.
These types of eye-hand coordination activities support the foundational skills
of reading.
Unlike the past, many students
now come to early childhood education with significant literacy and math
knowledge but not all children have the same levels of understanding (and aren’t expected to). Whereas in the
past, teachers held the philosophy that waiting until they were “ready” was the
best approach to learning, the research shows that a better strategy is to
employ “errorless learning,” where teachers help children find answers, then
ask them again to assess recall and ensure understanding which reinforces
content. Student use of letters and letter sounds is critically important to
literacy growth. The phonics curriculum is Lively Letters, which
incorporates a multi-sensory approach to letters and letter sounds and allows
students to learn and show what
they know in different ways. (ECC staff seeks and employs various ways to teach
letters and recently parents got into the act. They dressed up as “vowel
superstars,” with costumes including capes, star-shaped-sunglasses, etc.
Students loved their active and engaging presentation, and eagerly had their
programs autographed by the “vowels.”) Separately, when asked about homework
assignments at the ECC, Ms. Rosso promptly responded: “reading every day for 20
minutes.”
Assessment
When students enter the ECC, they
experience different kinds of assessments, but not in the traditional way we
think about assessments for older children. Ms. Rosso along with her Instructional Leadership Team has developed an Assessment Map, in
other words, the baseline from which educators can target growth. In their constant interaction, ECC
educators observe things like
whether a child recognizes letters, whether they recognize all the upper case
letters enough to begin learning about lower
case letters and letter sounds, etc. Simultaneously, educators look for
patterns in social skills, pretend play, speech, and more. Progress reports
(twice per year) reflect student understanding and progress, and ECC staff
conducts conferences twice per year, partnering with families to support
students in all areas of learning.
In sum, Ms. Rosso states that “the
foundation of reading is through the
development of oral language which often happens during play and social
engagement,” and teachers and paraprofessionals are trained in this theory and
practice through professional development funded by tuition and grants. By
integrating social emotional learning into children’s days, students are
developing routines allowing them to navigate classroom activities skillfully
and more independently in order to improve their learning of content, and
exercise more control over that learning, resulting in a more positive and
productive transition to their next learning adventure: kindergarten.
