Foundation Principles in Early Childhood Education

It's nice to be with you. And I've thought a lot about how to use the time and I've decided to focus on what I call building a good foundation. Several years ago I was asked to give the opening address at a conference at Oxford University and as you probably know, in Britain they don't use the term preschool or even nursery school anymore. They call it the foundation stage. And the theme of the whole national conference was building a good foundation. And they asked me if I'd give the opening address. And I said, oh, sure. You know, it takes about 18 hours to get there or think of something. Anyway. I didn't do much. I was busy doing other things and about two nights before leaving, I turned to my husband, who's no longer with us, unfortunately, but his whole career, he was a structural engineer and his whole career was designing buildings. And I was sort of walking around trying to think of what am I going to say and what shall I emphasize and so on, and I turned to him and I said to him, When you design a building, when you design the foundations, what are the principles that you use? And he said, first principle, you have to find out everything you can about the nature of the soil you're building on. And he went on for about an hour. And questions like, how deep do you have to go to get to the rock? Is it slushy, slimy, sandy, on and on and on and on, oh dear. But, you know, it's a fairly useful sort of metaphor that we have to know as much as we can about each child, what experiences has this child had, experiences has the child not had, the families, and so on and so forth. So the first principle then is finding out everything you can about the soil you're building on. Then he said the second principle is you have to be very clear about what kind of structure you want to put on it. Is it going to be tall, thin, round, wide, long, short, and so forth and so on. And that's rather interesting for us. Are we clear? And I got this from listening to Vivian just now and so on. We have a lot of thoughts about what kind of structure we are wanting to build in the children we teach. What qualities do we want them to have now as well as in the future? And we need to know how to ensure that they will continue, for example, throughout life, to seek important knowledge and understanding and so on. The second... The third principle my husband gave me was you have to find out everything you can about the forces that will be acting on that structure. Will there be hurricanes or tornadoes or earthquakes? His main specialty was earthquake resistance design. And I think that's relevant for us that we must talk about some of the important influences that impact on our children. And there is a... A note, a publication in your bag about the impact of technology, television and so on. A lot of work is being done. I think it's really important, not only for us as teachers, but to help parents to get a sense of the forces that are and will continue to impact on our children. Finally, he said the fourth... and last principle, and that was if you don't build the foundation properly, it can be very dangerous and extremely expensive to repair. This principle reminds us that if we don't make sure that the early years are really good ones for children's development, it can be very expensive and maybe even not possible to make repairs. And I want... to sort of end this framework with the suggestion that we must resist the temptation to start children on the third floor. I don't know if it's what it's like in your schools where you're teaching, but I'm all over this country and I'm telling you there is a tendency of, especially people who don't know children, but they're making state decisions and so forth, to try to push down. what we probably shouldn't do later and do it earlier. And so starting children on the third floor, sometimes the fourth floor and so on. So our teaching then should be developmentally appropriate for the age and the experience that comes with age. And starting formal instruction earlier is not good for the children and I'm going to come back to that. I propose then, in this semester that we have this morning, to address these issues with ten basic principles of how to build a solid foundation. And it's based on recent research as well as extensive experience. So let me start with anyone who has to design a curriculum, it doesn't matter what subject, whether you're going to teach... nutrition or engineering or history or foreign language, whatever, has to address four basic questions. The first question, what should be learned? And the answers here must include the aims and the goals and the objectives for which a curriculum is a plan. And please keep in mind that the definition of a curriculum, the classical definition, is a plan for learning. Second question, When should it be learned? Answers to this question address the nature of development as well as sequences in which things are best learned and you all know that from your own experience. The third question is once we've decided what should be learned, the third question is how is it best learned? And the answers to this question are a mix of the first two. Depends on what and when. There is a fourth question that we just don't have time for today, but it's a very, very important one, and that is how can we tell how well we have answered the first three questions? That's called evaluation and assessment and the effects we have. And there is now, I'm not sure about New York, but I live in Illinois, and I've been involved in many... I was going to say nice ways, but I won't. I'll say in many ways. In the development in Illinois of standards, and sometimes called outcomes. And I was having this discussion with my colleague, Sylvia Chard, one day, and I said to her, you know, I hate this term outcomes, because it's based on an industrial metaphor. In an industry, you put raw material on an assembly line, and you run it through a sequence of... processes and outcome identical shoes or chairs or cups or whatever you're making and she said to me it's not an industrial metaphor it's a digestive metaphor i wouldn't have thought of that of course she said the purpose of food is to nourish the body not to produce the outcome so I wish we would go back to the habit, or if you haven't had it, develop the habit of talking about what effects do we want to have on the children, and then talk about how effective we are. I think it's a better analogy than outcomes and standards. In fact, I'm trying to write a piece now, I haven't finished it yet, in which I'm proposing that instead of talking about standards of outcomes, we talk about standards of experience. and answer the question, what experiences should all children have much of the time? Not every minute, but much of the time, and I will come back to that in a little while. The other big question about this fourth question of assessment and so on, is when do we see the really important effects of what we do in the early years? And I will come back to that one. So, I'm going to present my answers to some of these questions based on, as I say, recent research and lots of experience. So the first question then is what should be learned in the early years? And I want now to suggest some principles of practice. In my list I've got ten principles. I'm not sure that you'll all still be awake after the fifth one, so I'll stop. But anyway, there are, and I've made them up. so you can make up your own principles. I always make them up. And by the way, I think Fred has said that there is available here a book that I wrote with my youngest son, Steve. It's called Intellectual Emergencies because ever since he learned to talk, he would raise questions and I would make up an answer. I mean, that's how I am. And eventually the answers made me, I'll mention some of them as we go along, what made me think again about important issues. And the 12 issues, I'll give you an example of an intellectual emergency. If you haven't had it with your children yet, you might. Steve is a musician. He's a cellist. If you've got a child going in that direction, do what we didn't do. Indicate that playing music is what you do on the weekend. but during the week you get a job. But anyway, so Steve went to the University of Illinois, where, of course, I've been working for all these years, and did a bachelor's degree in music. But he didn't live at home. He lived with a friend in the neighborhood. But on Saturdays, when the weather was nice, about four times a year, he would come to do his laundry at home. And while the laundry was drying, he and I often would go for a walk and talk. And he'd talk about the classes he's taking. He's taking conducting and trumpet and composition and on and on and on and on. And it was very nice, and I enjoyed it. One day we're walking along, and he's about 19 by that time, and he's talked about his classes. All of a sudden, he changed the subject. Hey, Mom, he said, how do you decide whom to marry? That's called an intellectual emergency. Now, I wanted to say to Steve, in your case, it had better be somebody wealthy. Oh, if only. But of course I didn't say that. I had to make up something in a hurry. And you can borrow this if you want. And I said... Steve, I think you have to decide whether or not the two of you can go on growing in each other's company. I really thought about that before, but this is an emergency. He's our middle child. He's 16 months younger than his older brother and 15 months older than his sister. So he's in the middle, but he was the first one of the three to fall in love. Oh boy, did we suffer. And the first girl, she was an excellent violinist, just what we needed because we all played quartets together and so on. But she would just look at him and breathe at him and that was about it anyway. So I said to him, I think you have to decide whether or not the two of you can go on growing in each other's company. And by that I mean that all relationships have to have content. You can't just relate to somebody, you have to relate about something. And after the walk, I thought about this some more, and I do a lot of visiting of schools, working with teachers, and a lot of work in Head Start, preschool, kindergarten, and I began asking this question myself when I'm observing, what's the content of the relationship between teachers and children? And I'll come back to that in a little while. But that came out of the emergency with Steve. And that's a typical example of how he challenged my thinking. But anyway, so I want to say the first principle then is what we teach and how we teach changes with the age and the experience that usually comes with age. For example, we all agree we want our children to learn to read and write. But we don't all agree about when they should learn all these things. And I travel all over the U.S. I've lectured in all 50 states. And I just came back Sunday from a five-city tour in England. And it's the same issue there. They seem to think that whatever you have to do later, start earlier. And English is a ridiculous language anyway to read. But that's another semester. Anyway, so the question then is what... should young children be learning? And by the way, if you're taking notes, keep this in mind. Children always learn, not necessarily what you want them to learn. And I give you my strongest example. I had a graduate student did her PhD with me many years ago, about 25 years ago, and she got a job teaching at a university in southern Illinois, and she did fine, and then retired. and decided that she would volunteer in the local Head Start program where she lived, just twice a week, to be helpful and so forth. One day she's there in the Head Start program, and a mother comes with her four-year-old holding his hand, and the boy lets go of the mother's hand, comes right over to her, points at her like this and said, Hey, you're an old white whore. We have absolutely no idea what he thought that was. was. But he learned it. And by the way, when the mother came to collect him, Eileen said to the mother, I think you should be very careful about what you say with your friends and family when your son is around. And the mother said, don't you dare tell me how to raise my son. So you get a picture of what that was like. So please remember, we have to be very careful to keep in mind that children always learn and not necessarily what we want them to learn. I want to suggest that it helps to think about this first question in terms of four different kinds of learning goals. And I put at the top of the list knowledge, not because it's more important than all the other goals, but because if you're an educator, it is high on the list. That helping the young or your students, whatever age, to acquire worthwhile knowledge, important, significant knowledge. But I've added since then the term understanding, and this came out of an experience I had with one of my six grandchildren. I've got six. I have ordered six more. But my daughter said to me when I talked to her about it, look, Mom, I'm having hot flashes and I'm growing a moustache. Forget it. But my husband and I, my daughter lives in Cincinnati, it's a little over 300 miles from where we are in the middle of Illinois, and we drove down there to be with Charlie for his sixth birthday. He's my second grandson, he's now 20 and 6'6", but he was six years old, and we went down there to be there. And we'd go into the driveway and Charlie comes running out, Grandma, Grandma, it's my birthday, and I said, that's why we're here. So it's your birthday, and he said, yes, it's my birthday. And he said, and I'm going to be six. And I said to him, you're going to be six? And he said, yes. And I said, six what? And he said, it's my birthday. I'm going to be six. And I said, well, are you six books? And he said, no, no, it's my birthday. And I said, well, what are you six of? And at that point, his older brother, who was nine, showed up. And whispered very loudly into Charlie's ear, you're going to be six years old, stupid. So Charlie said, I'm going to be six years old. I said, that's right, that's why we're here. And that was Friday, Sunday was the birthday party. And you know just what that's like with the cake and the ice cream and the candles and on and on it went. But the children sitting around the table spontaneously began to talk about who's already six and who isn't. And one boy said, well, I'm six and a half. And Charlie said to him, six and a half what? And the boy said, well, I don't know. And then Charlie said to him, well, what are you six and a half of? And the boy said, well, I don't know. But another boy at the table pointed at him and said, wait a minute. When were you a baby? That's a different level of understanding. Interesting. And the boy said, I don't know, 10 years ago? So, we have, as teachers, as you know, a really important role in helping children to gradually understand what they know. Now, I know that airplanes can fly. I've got 5.5 million miles on American Airlines alone, but I don't understand it. And by the way, it doesn't make sense. I mean, the wings don't even flap. Come on. So, I have this strong need to understand it. People have tried to explain it to me, but... Alright, we want to help young children to know things and also we have a role in helping them to gradually understand things like time and... year. And I was visiting a nursery school in London. This was not this visit, but because I've been there four times this year. And I got to one nursery school. And unfortunately, due to this, that and the other, I was late. So most of the children had already left. But there was one little girl sitting on the carpet, waiting for her grandma to come and get her. And she was tired. It was a long day. But so I got there. She was the only one there. And next to her was a big black girl. and a big calendar leaning on the blackboard. And so I said to her, well, it looks as though you talked about the calendar today. And she said, uh-huh, we did. And I said, so what day is it today? And she looked at the calendar. She said, raining. I've talked about this before. I won't go into it in detail. But a lot of children, I know you don't do this, but a lot of three- and four-year-olds waste a half an hour a day on the calendar. And you know, unless you're the one who pays the bills or you're worried about being pregnant, what do you need it for? I better move on. But anyway. Principle number two in my list. The overall goal of early education is to help young children to make better, fuller... deeper and more accurate sense of their own experience. When they get older, we want to help them to make better, deeper, fuller understanding of other people's experiences, those far away in time or history and those far away in place or geography. But when they're young ones, up through about the age of five, six, from a developmental perspective, a major learning goal is to help them make sense of their own first-hand experience, of their own environment, and at the same time, and I want to underline this, help them to acquire a lifelong disposition to make sense of their experience. And I was thinking about this before I went to England. I left the week before the election. I'd been contemplating. This idea of writing a paper in which I'm going to, I'm not going to do it, but I thought then I'd write a paper which said we shouldn't teach children fairy tales because when they grow up they vote for them. But anyway, I gave that one up. But again, one of the main purposes of involving young children in what we call project work is to support their natural disposition to make the best sense they can. of their own environments and their own experience. And let me... Are you there, John? I'm going to show some slides. Don't leave me. I want to show just a few slides. You said you would help me. Are you there? Okay, here we go. This is a very short but simple example. It's not up there. What? Well, I'll go on. We tested this and it was working. Oh, there we go. That's what I want. Okay, let me explain. I had a student in one of my classes and taught in a small town about 30 miles or so southwest of Champaign where we are, and she had to do a project. She said, oh, there's nothing in our environment, in our little town to study. I can't tell you how many times teachers have said that to me, no matter what town they're in. And I said to her, and I will say to any teacher, take a walk from your school in any direction for ten minutes. And as you walk, look around and say, is there anything that comes into view that the children I teach should understand about, should know more about, and so on and so forth. So she said, oh, okay. Across the road, literally across the road, From her kindergarten were these grain elevators, that's what they're called. We're in the middle of the cornfields of Illinois, thousands and thousands of acres of corn. And these are grain elevators and the corn is poured into there and it's very complex apparently. And then the trains come along and the corn is loaded into them. It was across the road from the school, they'd never looked at it. Not the teachers, not the parents, not the children. But I said, well, there must be lots to learn about it. Here's another view. There's a crane back there. You can't see it very well, but this gives you an idea. And across the road here is the school. And I don't have time to go into the whole project, but she went there, and it turned out one of the grandfathers had worked there for 50 years, so he became the in-resident expert for the children. So she took the children out to draw what they were looking at, and this is one of my favorite. Lessons from Reggio is the value of drawing and looking and noticing and saying, what's that? What is that called? Why is that there? What is it made of? Who did this? And so on. And this is what began to happen to these children. I'm just going to show a few simple examples. Evan, a young kindergartner, had never drawn anything from observation before. But she got the children out there with their clipboards and drawing pens and so on. And he drew, well he was looking at, and he drew the corn elevators or the grain bins from the top rather than sideways. But this was the train. And by the way, there's smoke he put in his picture. Our kids don't see smoke in our trains, but they read these silly books with steam engines that have smiling faces and smoke. Anyway. Three weeks later she took the children out across the road to draw this again. Oops, sorry, pressed the wrong button, didn't I? Three weeks later, this child, Evan, is drawn. He's still got the corn dust here, but he put railroad tracks in there and he told the teacher, there's the smoke, which it wasn't, but anyway, the wheels, the wagons and the train tracks. But what is even more interesting to me is Evan could sit and look at his own drawings, one by the other, and not say, that's bad, this is good, but say, hey, see, I left out this there. Now I've got it in there. And this is the disposition to evaluate your own work and your own progress, which should be a lifelong disposition. One more example, I think. Rusty's first drawing, never drawn anything from observation before. But he tried to draw the locomotive and the freight cars and the train tracks. Three weeks later, they didn't get art lessons, that wasn't the point. But they had a visitor, they asked questions, they were curious, and they went out there and he said to the teacher, first is the locomotive, new word for him, then the other cars, and a couple of cars. Couplers, look at these, the couplers that connected the freight cars. And he said, when he saw them, what's that? What's it called? Why is it there? and learned a great deal. Are you holding up some warning? Is that what that is? Oh, I got your questions. Okay. Anyway, so, but again, imagine Rusty sitting there looking at his own drawings and saying to his friends and maybe to the teacher, maybe to the parent, See the first one? I left this out, but I've got it in there now. And now I know what couplers are and what they do and why they're there and so on. And this was Aaron's first drawing and he drew the grain elevators from the top down, but he wasn't interested in the freight cars. He was interested in the one passenger train that they saw and that's what he drew. But again, I want to just say that the children are asking. What am I looking at? Why is it there? What is it made of? Who does this? How do they make it work? And I'll come back to that in a minute, but I don't know how we got to that. Did we talk about learning goals, skills as the second learning? No, first is knowledge and understanding, okay? Thank you, John. Second learning goal is skills. Skills are different from knowledge and understanding. They are small segments of behavior, usually direct. observable although you often have to infer that a child has addition skills or subtraction skills but most of the skills we're concerned about in the early years can be observed there's small segments of behavior usually directly observable and there are many verbal skills social skills physical skills depends on how specific or detailed you want to be hundreds of them to be learned in the early years and on my flight from O'Hare to LaGuardia day before yesterday, he was sitting next to a young mother with a nine-month-old. Oh, he was so cute. And he spent, I don't know, maybe ten minutes trying to figure out how to make the tray at the back of the seat in front of him fall down and put back. Nine months old. And luckily I succeeded in getting the mother to let him try by himself. But anyway, a lot of skill there. Unlike knowledge and understanding, skills are units of behavior that usually require some practice to achieve skillfulness. Which skills should we emphasize in the preschool years? And I was thinking about this also when I got into LaGuardia, because I don't get to New York that often, but I used to come quite often because I was a consultant to Sesame Street years ago. And one of the specific topics that... I worked with them on was social skills. And I was remembering an incident we developed in which Big Bird and Elmo decide to go to the park to play hide and seek. And you see them going off into the park. And Elmo turns to the camera and says, we're going to go to the park where we're going to play hide and seek. But I'm not going to hide there because Big Bird knows that that's where I'll hide. I'll go somewhere else. So you see him going in another direction. And then He says to the camera, yeah, but Big Bird knows that. I know that he knows that. So he goes in a different direction and so on. But the important thing is that social skills require and involve a great deal of anticipatory thinking. How do you think, what do you think will happen if? Or how do you think so-and-so will feel? Or what part of this would your friend like to do? These are important, and there are many, many social skills. Next time we'll spend a whole... semester on them. But the evidence is pretty clear that they have to be learned by about the age of six, but I'll come back to that. Learning goal type three, I call dispositions. I think many of you are familiar with the work I've written on this. Very difficult to define. It helps to think of them as habits of mind with intentions and motives. Not the same as attitudes, but I don't have time to go into all of that. you to think of the distinction, for example, between having reading skills and having the disposition to be a reader. You want both, obviously. But there are many children, not in your schools, but believe me, in some parts of the city, for whom learning to read is so unpleasant that the disposition to read will not be learned. What we want to do is both. Not much use having the disposition to be a reader if you haven't got the skills, obviously. So... We have to think about that with each child. Am I helping the child to learn to read or whatever skill it is, and the disposition to use it? Every once in a while, a teacher tells me that she's teaching her children listening skills. By the way, most kids have them. Just try whispering. But there's a difference between having listening skills and having the disposition to be a listener, to the habit of listening to adults and teachers and so on. Well, anyway, I better get on. But let me say some of the main points about dispositions. They cannot be learned from instruction. In fact, they can be damaged by instruction, especially if instruction is too intense, too early, and too formal. The most important dispositions, by the way, are inborn. The disposition to learn, by the way, as I've already said, not necessarily what we want them to learn. The disposition to make sense of your experience, though these are, of course, stronger in some individuals than in others. I happen to be a twin. I'm not recommending it, but I didn't have any choice. I'm the older one, ten minutes, but my twin sister's an artist, and we had an older sister, was also an artist. Both my sisters won a scholarship to the Hammersmith School of Art in London. I didn't. The only giftless one in the family. But my mother used to complain that I was born with a question mark on my face, because I was always asking questions. And that was obviously my disposition. But I was evacuated during the war, so I was away from my mother for nearly three years, so that helped a bit. But anyway. And let me mention to you, as you already know, not all dispositions are desirable. Have you ever worked with somebody who had the disposition to be quarrelsome? No. But let me tell you, it can be very annoying. No matter what... I had a colleague, no matter what we said, and the... Staff meetings, he always said, we did that, it didn't work, or you can't make that work here, or it's not going to happen, or no matter what we said, but I plotted. And I got my colleagues together and said, when he says that, let's just say calmly and slowly, I take your point. And he didn't know what to do with us. It's so very interesting, and I want to remind you, I mentioned this yesterday to some of you, the literature research on bullying, which I don't have time to go into, but that's a disposition. If it's girls, we call it bossiness. Do you have those around sometimes? What they show in the research is that children who are bossy or bullies select victims who will resist slightly. They don't want anybody who caves in. immediately because there's no real power in that. They want to find somebody who just resists enough to let them show their capability for being bossy and bullies. So as I say, not all dispositions are desirable. Some people have the disposition to be suspicious. Some have the disposition to be misers and so on. Long, long list. But yes. We do know that there is research to show that young children who have frequent experience of observing adults reading, it doesn't matter what they're reading, whether they're reading Playboy or the racetrack, it doesn't matter, but children who have frequent experience of seeing adults around them read, learn to read more readily and more easily than children who never do. I don't think you have any of those problems, but a lot of teachers do. So what I'm suggesting here is we should ask ourselves as parents and teachers, can the dispositions we want our children to have be seen by them in us? For example, a child might ask a teacher a question about something and the teacher might not know the answer. So the teacher might say something like, hmm, that's an interesting question, I'll see what I can find out. The next day the teacher goes to the child and says, remember yesterday you asked me about such and such? I was thinking about your question and I talked to my neighbor who knows all about it and this is what I found out. It's the disposition to follow up on a question, to probe and seek more understanding that is illustrated and seen by the children that way. Another example would be if the teacher says to the children, maybe you've got three-year-olds or four-year-olds, you know, I've been wondering if that's the best place to put the bookcase because of that. that maybe we should find a different part of the room. Anybody got any ideas? Don't be phony. Don't ask that question unless you mean it, by the way. But again, you're saying, you say, anybody any thoughts about it? You're modeling, showing, demonstrating the disposition to consider alternative courses of action and children benefit from seeing it. Don't be phony, be genuine, use real instances so that children can understand what it's about. Learning goal number four. It's called feelings. Many feeling capacities are, of course, inborn. You don't have to teach fear, anxiety, or even joy. And I want to tell you, I'm in airports all the time, all over the world, and I have never, ever failed to engage a baby that's about seven months up through maybe 15 months in the real joy of peekaboo. Never failed. And the joy they express in it is amazing. But many important feelings are learned from experience, feelings of belonging. Also feelings of not belonging. Feelings of confidence, high or low, are learned from experience, as well as many other kinds that we don't have time. Feelings cannot be learned from instruction, exhortation, or indoctrination, although adults do have a role, I think. in helping children to learn appropriate feelings. For example, I don't know if you've had this experience where you teach, but every once in a while I've seen a child really act as though it's a major tragedy at the end of the day because he or she didn't get a turn with something. Have you ever seen that? And complain, a three-year-old, four-year-old, I didn't get my turn, and on and on and on. What I'm suggesting here is that the teacher could say calmly, Okay? I understand you're disappointed that you didn't get a turn, but there's always tomorrow. So find something else to do for now, or something like that. And every once in a while when I'm observing, I think it's easier for me to say that, because I grew up in England in the wartime, and we used to ask people for things, and they'd say, well, of course you want whatever it is, but there's a war on, so just get on with it. And that was the end of it. But I watch my own show, my oldest son especially, he has twin boys, they're not boys anymore, they're men, they're 20 now. But he, Dan is just like his father, he's loving and tender and caring and affectionate and warm. And he was like that with these two boys, but boy they had him figured out. And they would press his buttons, and he's a television news anchorman, so the kids know a lot about television from very early on. And every once in a while I would be with Dan and he'd say to the kids, OK, they're young, when they were young, OK, it's time to turn off the TV. It's 7.30 or 8 o'clock. And one of them would say, but Dad, and go on and on. And the other one would say, and my friend, he gets to watch this. And he'd say, oh, all right. So they could manipulate him very well. But I want to suggest that it is better for teachers of young children to be clear about what you think is right, what you think is valuable, what you think is appropriate, and then move on. There's lots more here, but I better move on because I'm running out of time, I think. Yes, keep in mind that children cannot get self-esteem or self-confidence from empty flattery or excessive praise. And there is research now, and I can't remember which journal it was in, and I've got to find it. where they were listening to five-year-old children telling each other that anything a teacher would give you a reward for, nobody in his right mind would do willingly. And I was amazed, but it's true. They say, well, yeah, they gave us this whatever it is because nobody would really want to do this. So what are we teaching children if we reward them for stuff? But it's important, in my view, to speak... to children clearly, honestly, and matter-of-factly, not with high or strong emotion, and then change the subject, change the content of the relationship so that it's focused on what the child plans to do or is thinking about, but there must be something interesting and real to talk about. And that's another one of the reasons why I would like, if we had time, we don't have time today, to talk about the importance of including projects. in the curriculum. It provides many real and important and interesting topics to talk about. Principle number three. I've got several more, but I'll go fast. The younger the children, the larger the role of adults in helping them to achieve social competence. It's a huge topic. I need at least three and a half hours for that. But I want to emphasize that addressing children's social development is a very important... part of building a good foundation. There's a huge amount of research now on the long-term benefits of early social development and of the expense and difficulties of helping children whose early social problems were not solved. And by the way, not all of them can be solved by a teacher. Every once in a while you need to bring in a specialist. We don't have time for that, fortunately. But then evidence now indicates that unless a child achieves at least a minimal level of social ... competence. By the time he or she is about six, he or she is at risk for many kinds of social difficulties for the rest of his or her. Obviously, parents have a large role in helping young children's social development from the moment they are born. We don't have time to go into all that, but just imagine, for example, a mother or father comes home from work and everybody, the kids and Mother are in the kitchen getting ready to serve dinner and the father comes in and says to the mother, hey, I invited my office mate to come and have dinner with us on Fridays. I hope that's okay. And the mother says, oh sure, that'll be fine. And then the father says to the mother, but when she's here, don't mention the word, I don't know, Republican or something. Doesn't matter. Doesn't matter what. What the children are hearing is adults anticipating how someone else will feel. Or grandma's coming for lunch on Sunday, you know how she feels about whatever, whatever. So let's be careful not to talk about it while she's here. You're not saying she's a wicked old thing. You're just saying, you're just teaching children that you anticipate others' thinking and feelings. This is a basic part of social competence. We also have evidence to show that peer-rejected children, with their rejected early, eventually find each other. And they form close groups, which they never did as children, with others who also share with them a bitterness about the rest of society, and we call them gangs. But let me mention to you the summary of Willard Hartup at the University of Minnesota, who spent his whole career studying early social development and following up children, lots and lots and lots of them, and this is what he said. The single best childhood predictor of adult adaptation. It's not IQ, not school grades, and not classroom behavior, but rather the adequacy with which a child gets along with other children. Children who are generally disliked, who are aggressive and disruptive, who are unable to sustain close relationships with other children, and who cannot establish a place for themselves in the peer culture, are seriously at risk. risk for the rest of their lives so it is important. The elements of social competence are not usually learned through instruction or lessons or lecturing or preaching or scolding and preaching about being nice is the wrong content for relationships between adults and children. And again implementing the project approach makes it possible for young children to benefit from having frequent real opportunities to work together, to argue about how to make this or how to build it and resolve the arguments and to work out differences of opinion. And again, this is why I recommend strongly the project approach. And if there is any time, I'm going to show you a project very quickly. There is a second question that I mentioned, like when is it best learned? And this leads to principle number four, which is what children should learn. and should do, must be decided on the basis of what best serves their development in the long term. And we now have wonderful data to show that you can start children on all kinds of learning very early, and they look good on the tests at the end of preschool, but when you follow them up at grade 6, grade 8, grade 10, these kids have now been followed, they don't look... better than children who had high scope or Montessori or other kinds of preschool experiences in which they exercised judgment, took responsibility, solved problems, and so on. And I wish we had more time for that. Another important thing to keep in mind here is that dispositions, about dispositions, is that once they are lost, they cannot easily be put back in again. The disposition to seek knowledge and understanding, if it gets lost early, may be lost forever, and that would be a serious mistake. Principle number five, I'm going to hurry. I suggest that it's very useful. and important to distinguish between academic goals and intellectual goals. And some people in the field of early childhood use the term cognitive all the time. Everything's cognitive except sneezing and a few other basic body processes. But everything else, I think it's useful to make the distinction between academic and intellectual. As children grow older, we must address both. But for the young ones, it's more important to support and strengthen their inborn intellectual disposition. And let me try making a list of distinctions, and I'll go fast. Academics have to do with small bits of information, knowledge, and some skills, the alphabet, phonemes, grammar, punctuation, etc. They are usually items that can be correct or incorrect. They are usually first learned out of context. They involve rote learning and items that have to be memorized. Academic work usually includes things like worksheets or exercises. They're items that don't have an internal logic, but nevertheless must eventually be learned. And I remember with Steve, when he was in first grade, he came home and told... me that he had written, and if you're taking notes, write this down. He wrote this word, N-O-L-I-J. Well, you know, he's a musician. He does everything by ear. And he said the teacher really scolded him. And so I wrote the word knowledge correctly. And he said, what do you need the K for? What do you need the D for? What do you need the E for? And I said, it's history. our language has a long complicated history. Now he's an old man, he can appreciate those sources of various words. But in first grade, he struggled with it because he did everything by ear. Anyway, academic learning is important as children get older. But let me talk about here or define intellectual learning for you. This refers to cognitive disposition such as the disposition to make sense of what you're experiencing. to analyze information, to synthesize information, to theorize about how things happen and how they work and where they come from, to try to figure out cause-effect relationship. What will happen if I do this? If I add another block here? If I put this over there? And so on and so forth. And to predict what they might see when they go somewhere. And if you're taking children at all, I don't know if you can do field trips in this city. It must be very dangerous. If you can, take opportunities for the young children to anticipate what might you see, or when we go here or there, what do you want to see more of, or look at, and so forth. And these are intellectual processes. Or it might be a question like, well, if you do A, then B, what might happen? And by the way, don't be phony. Ask the question sincerely. Which leads to principle number six. Introduction to formal academic instruction too early and too intensely may result in the children learning it, I've already mentioned this, but at the expense of the disposition to go on learning. I've already suggested that this I'll have to pass up now because of the time, but I do want to tell you that there are very good data now to show that early academic emphasis in the preschool years looks good early but it doesn't look good later on if you're interested I've got the references for the the data that have been reported on that so I better hurry question three which I had if you may remember is how is this all best learned and given this view of what should be learned academic dispositions and so on when should it be learned principle number seven in my list is the younger the children the more they learn through interactive experiences, through active rather than passive experiences, and through Interactive rather than just receptive processes. This doesn't mean they don't learn through passive experiences. And this is one of our big worries. How much and what do children learn from television? And I don't think anybody's done this, but I keep trying to find a graduate student to do a study of how many explosions each child is likely to observe in a week on television. Lots and lots of them, believe me. So that children do learn from passive experience, and of course they learn lovely things from stories and so on. But the disposition to go on learning, which is the goal of all education at every level, lifelong learning, the disposition to master knowledge that is not yet known, requires interactive processes like discussion and argument, and could also benefit from the experience, by the way, and I wish we had time. Another time we'll talk about this, the important potential benefits of mixed age grouping. And there's more research on that now, and of course I have a bias because I'm a twin, and I think children should be in mixed age groups, but that's, you know. Who wrote this? Carl Jaspers, the German philosopher, said there is nothing to philosophy that is not autobiographical. I think it's an interesting point, and I often think of it in my own work, but anyway. Principle number eight is based on new neurological research. Very interesting. A whole bunch of research says that young children in the first six years need frequent experience of what's called continuous contingent interaction. I'm going to say it again. Continuous contingent interaction. This means that very young children from very early in life need frequent interactions that are continuous. Maybe a series of one-to-one exchanges. You hold a baby, it's a week old, and if you're a granny like me, you'll maybe sing, although my mother was a musician and she told me I had a lovely voice, but it was in the wrong key. Shut up, she said. But the baby doesn't know that. You hold the baby and you make funny faces or you sing. Everything in the baby slows down. And for me... Heart rate, pulse rate, breathing rate, except information processing. By the way, that's the origin of the disposition called interest, which means being able to lose yourself in something outside of yourself. But if you do this with a baby and you're singing, if you don't change the sound you make, the baby turns away, causing you to change your behavior. And there's evidence that frequent, I don't know how frequent, but occasional experiences throughout childhood of interacting so that each participant's behavior is contingent on the other one's behavior provokes the development of the connection between the midbrain, where emotions are, and the frontal cortex, where thinking, planning, anticipating, reasoning, and so on is. I wish we had more time for that, but keep it in mind. The best example of continuous... Contingent interaction is a conversation. One person says something, the other one says, oh, come on. The other one says, no, I'm serious. And the other one said, I don't believe you. It's contingent. It's a sequence of contingent interactions. And with babies, you do all kinds of things, and with young children, and certainly with children in the preschool, take opportunities to engage them in conversation. What do you mean when you say such and such? Show me an example. Or what are you planning to do next? How are you going to make that? And so on, lots of ways. And another reason for mixed age grouping is more conversation when the children are mixed in age. But that, we'll have to do it another time. Anyway, not always words in interaction. It might be a smile or it might be somebody says, wow, that's contingent what the other one said. But it's contingent. And that turns out to have a very powerful effect on the development of the brain in young children. It stimulates the neurological connections between the midbrain and the prefrontal cortex. But, if you're going to do that, there must be something of interest to talk about, which again is another reason why project work is so important. Do I have a few minutes more? Where's Freda? I don't know. Anyway. Oh, I have some questions too. Oh, that's good. I want to show you a very old example of a school. This was in Bristol in England, and in the olden days, before they had a certain prime minister whose name I won't tell you, and she messed it all up. But they used to do what Americans called open education. The British didn't call it that. They had other words for it. But this happened to be, I only have 15 pictures that were all taken in 20 minutes, so you can get an idea of what these three, four, and five-year-olds mixed were up to in an old house. They didn't have a proper environment at all. None of us would agree. In fact, no state licensing bureau would allow us to have a nursery school in a building like this because they had to go up and down stairs and so forth and so on. But that's all they had in that neighborhood at that time. And these were very low-income children. But I just took the pictures that morning in 20 minutes. This little girl and a few other children, boys and girls, were reconstructing their neighborhood. And I tell you, when I go into a preschool class or kindergarten class, I always look around and ask, what is going on here that they will come back and do more work on tomorrow? I don't know about New York, but I'll tell you in Illinois it often looks as though they've hosed the place down when the peasants have left every day. But anyway, so these kids are building their neighborhood. And they had the, you know what, a working class neighborhood in a city like Bristol. The houses in long rows are attached to each other. They're also dark gray and black and they also have chimneys. I grew up in a place like that in London. And they have... They've got some curtains. They've got one chimney, but they're going to bring some more. And this little girl is making her front garden. And most of the front gardens are very small, but she's made a pretty big one, and there's one there. Real dirt. In Illinois, you couldn't do that. Some child brought a piece of railroad because they were right near the train tracks. That's going to be a petrol station, a gas station. And somebody brought this for the motorway. And... That was where it was that morning. I didn't go back the next day, but it was interesting. This little girl brought a photograph of her cat to the class, and the children studied it and agreed to build it. And when I took the picture, she stood there to make sure I got the food, because she said, we've got cat food here too. And her friends were inside there. Can you see the fingers? And they would turn the head, and they would say, Another mouse please! And this is, one of the children in the school had had a tonsillectomy and before that child went to hospital, the whole class went to see where this was going to be, talked to the nurses, the nurses gave them empty pill bottles, an old blood pressure gauge, and what do you think, what do you use for that, heartbeat and things like that, and they decided to build a hospital in their school. What you see is the surgeon getting ready for the day's work here. I think if you saw this today, this was 1970. The physician would be a female and the nurse would be a male, but there she's getting him ready for surgery. This is a typical English hospital screen. You can see right through it. There's the sink, but on the table here are the pill bottles, the blood pressure gauge, all kinds of things, and the teacher's helping them to create a... pillow of some kind. But what you see in the back they built is an ambulance. And the English ambulance in those days, it's changed a bit now, were always white with dark windows and a big red cross. This cross looks more religious than medical, but that's the way it used to be. But it took them several weeks to build this ambulance, but they needed it for their hospital. These two chaps said they wanted to make a stretcher. So the teacher said to them, well, what do you need for a stretcher? We need some long sticks, they said. And, of course, they wanted some kind of fabric or cloth or whatever they called it. Anyway, the teacher got some old broomsticks and gave it to these two. And there, by the way, is a patient waiting to be taken somewhere or something. They made this stretcher. And look at the stitching here on both sides and he is saying to this patient stop screaming you ain't dead yet. They're in the front of the ambulance you can see the front is made out of an old piece of staircase and he's turning around saying you're almost there you ain't dead yet. There is the ambulance right there and this is part of a double-decker bus that they built which I'll show you again. But I want you to see the back of the piano. They were encouraged by the teacher to look at different textures. Styrofoam, plastic, milk carton here. There is also tape out of a cassette tape. You can't see it, but it's hanging here. And a piece of cloth. And here is an old matchbox with the sandpaper side facing outward. And there it is, flat. So they've been looking around in their home environment and bringing stuff in. And when they come together as a group, they would show each other what they brought, and the teacher would help them put it up there. And this is the back of the bus. He's the conductor, and he goes around collecting the fares. Tickets, please. Fares, please. And so on. And this is next door to where their school was, was a new house being built. And they studied it closely through the window and so on. And they decided they needed to make some bricks. So they collected egg cartons, stuffed them with newspaper. The teacher helped them to put tape around them to make the bricks. And here's a discussion about how this building is going. But I want you to see this here. It's called the Workman's Hut. And they put their helmets up there and their lunch bags in there because they had investigated it next door. And here they're talking with the teacher about making another brick and how where it's going to go and so forth and here you see the cement truck we would call it a cement truck they called it a brick lorry and the bricks and cement were inside when they went into the truck I'm stopping in a minute they it's it's so tall that they had to be lifted into the driver's cabin so when they made their own you can see that they had a basket here and a box there and a big box there. This was an old door that they used for the side. But the cement and the bricks were in there. And they'd bring them down, weigh them on here, and do the building. I'm almost done, honest. And there is one of the builders. By the way, that painting was really beautiful back there. But that we don't have time for. Before they built their lorry or brick truck, a brick, yes, truck, They did it, one of the children did a painting and they asked the teacher to write, Our Brick Lorry, and there is Andrew the workman, there are the bricks, there are the bags of cement, Larry the driver, and Rodney the builder. And then another child did this painting of Andrew the workman, and this is the workman's hut with the helmets and the lunch bags, and he's going to come down, weigh the cement, and there's the bus. You can see the bus conductor up there collecting the fares, and in those days, the big double-decker bus of London, the driver was in a separate cabin. It's no longer true. There it is. In like 20 minutes, look at what these children were doing together, arguing, suggesting to each other. Turn that off. I'm at the end now. There is a principle, number nine, which is young children benefit from opportunities to work on a topic or an investigation or an activity. activity over extended periods of time, as you've just seen. Oh, well, there's just, next time I'll finish it anyway. Principle number 10 is the last one in the list, and I'd love to go into it in detail, but let me just say, remember that enjoyment is not the goal of education. It's the goal of entertainment. The goal of education is to engage the mind of the learner fully and... And when we do that well, the learners find it enjoyable and satisfying and interesting. And the capacity for interest has to be strengthened and developed throughout the early years. Sorry there isn't more time. But anyway, my last note is somewhere in here, in the last page. Cheer up, it's almost over. Number one. As teachers, all we have at a given moment, in a given situation, is our own very best judgment. Throughout our professional lives, we study and reflect in order to refine that judgment. We exchange with colleagues on occasions like this one. We consider others' solutions to the problems we face and examine available evidence, all in order to improve our judgment. But in the last analysis, all we have... is our own very best judgment. Number two, teaching involves many conflicting pressures, as you well know, and conflicting situations. We can't respond fully and equally to all of them. We have to decide what's worth making an issue over. Don't make an issue over everything. Select the few that really matter to you. Half a dozen issues will do, and then take your stand on them with clarity, confidence, and courage for the sake of the children. And finally, number three, cultivate the habit of speaking to children as people. People with minds, usually lively ones, appeal to their good sense. It's not necessary to be sweet or silly or sentimental at one extreme, or somber and grim or harsh at the other. Let's be genuine, direct, honest, serious and warm with them and about them, and sometimes. humorous too. Thank you very much. I've got two questions here. Do you think pre-K and K kids should learn to read music notation? Is that what it is on a beginning level? I don't know, I haven't thought about it. Give it a try, see what happens. If it doesn't seem to work well, drop it. And I should put in my list of final comments, experiment and try things. And read the results or read the effects and continue or not, depending on your experience. The other question, the world has changed dramatically in the past 10 to 20 years. Do you think the way children develop is different? I don't know. I'm not sure. But I do think we should learn much more than we already know about the effects of the media on children. But it's an interesting question. I don't know what to say. But I'm not sure it's different. And you have to be very careful, by the way. There is a strong tendency, and it's stronger in Britain than here, of romanticizing the past. People say to me, nowadays, as though the old days were terrible. Well, they did not live in the East End of London, which was pure squalor, even when I was a child. But they forget that, you know. So I don't know, but I hope that this has been useful. And you do have copies of my book. Some of the principles are in here, and they're available here. And there is also a CD in the back of the book of Steve's beautiful songs to the... He's a great singer and he's a wonderful poet. And he's very talented and very poor. So enjoy the conference. Thank you.

And they asked me if I'd give the opening address. And I said, oh, sure. You know, it takes about 18 hours to get there or think of something.

Anyway. I didn't do much. I was busy doing other things and about two nights before leaving, I turned to my husband, who's no longer with us, unfortunately, but his whole career, he was a structural engineer and his whole career was designing buildings.

And I was sort of walking around trying to think of what am I going to say and what shall I emphasize and so on, and I turned to him and I said to him, When you design a building, when you design the foundations, what are the principles that you use? And he said, first principle, you have to find out everything you can about the nature of the soil you're building on. And he went on for about an hour. And questions like, how deep do you have to go to get to the rock? Is it slushy, slimy, sandy, on and on and on and on, oh dear.

But, you know, it's a fairly useful sort of metaphor that we have to know as much as we can about each child, what experiences has this child had, experiences has the child not had, the families, and so on and so forth. So the first principle then is finding out everything you can about the soil you're building on. Then he said the second principle is you have to be very clear about what kind of structure you want to put on it.

Is it going to be tall, thin, round, wide, long, short, and so forth and so on. And that's rather interesting for us. Are we clear?

And I got this from listening to Vivian just now and so on. We have a lot of thoughts about what kind of structure we are wanting to build in the children we teach. What qualities do we want them to have now as well as in the future? And we need to know how to ensure that they will continue, for example, throughout life, to seek important knowledge and understanding and so on.

The second... The third principle my husband gave me was you have to find out everything you can about the forces that will be acting on that structure. Will there be hurricanes or tornadoes or earthquakes? His main specialty was earthquake resistance design. And I think that's relevant for us that we must talk about some of the important influences that impact on our children.

And there is a... A note, a publication in your bag about the impact of technology, television and so on. A lot of work is being done.

I think it's really important, not only for us as teachers, but to help parents to get a sense of the forces that are and will continue to impact on our children. Finally, he said the fourth... and last principle, and that was if you don't build the foundation properly, it can be very dangerous and extremely expensive to repair. This principle reminds us that if we don't make sure that the early years are really good ones for children's development, it can be very expensive and maybe even not possible to make repairs.

And I want... to sort of end this framework with the suggestion that we must resist the temptation to start children on the third floor. I don't know if it's what it's like in your schools where you're teaching, but I'm all over this country and I'm telling you there is a tendency of, especially people who don't know children, but they're making state decisions and so forth, to try to push down. what we probably shouldn't do later and do it earlier.

And so starting children on the third floor, sometimes the fourth floor and so on. So our teaching then should be developmentally appropriate for the age and the experience that comes with age. And starting formal instruction earlier is not good for the children and I'm going to come back to that. I propose then, in this semester that we have this morning, to address these issues with ten basic principles of how to build a solid foundation.

And it's based on recent research as well as extensive experience. So let me start with anyone who has to design a curriculum, it doesn't matter what subject, whether you're going to teach... nutrition or engineering or history or foreign language, whatever, has to address four basic questions.

The first question, what should be learned? And the answers here must include the aims and the goals and the objectives for which a curriculum is a plan. And please keep in mind that the definition of a curriculum, the classical definition, is a plan for learning. Second question, When should it be learned?

Answers to this question address the nature of development as well as sequences in which things are best learned and you all know that from your own experience. The third question is once we've decided what should be learned, the third question is how is it best learned? And the answers to this question are a mix of the first two. Depends on what and when.

There is a fourth question that we just don't have time for today, but it's a very, very important one, and that is how can we tell how well we have answered the first three questions? That's called evaluation and assessment and the effects we have. And there is now, I'm not sure about New York, but I live in Illinois, and I've been involved in many...

I was going to say nice ways, but I won't. I'll say in many ways. In the development in Illinois of standards, and sometimes called outcomes.

And I was having this discussion with my colleague, Sylvia Chard, one day, and I said to her, you know, I hate this term outcomes, because it's based on an industrial metaphor. In an industry, you put raw material on an assembly line, and you run it through a sequence of... processes and outcome identical shoes or chairs or cups or whatever you're making and she said to me it's not an industrial metaphor it's a digestive metaphor i wouldn't have thought of that of course she said the purpose of food is to nourish the body not to produce the outcome so I wish we would go back to the habit, or if you haven't had it, develop the habit of talking about what effects do we want to have on the children, and then talk about how effective we are. I think it's a better analogy than outcomes and standards.

In fact, I'm trying to write a piece now, I haven't finished it yet, in which I'm proposing that instead of talking about standards of outcomes, we talk about standards of experience. and answer the question, what experiences should all children have much of the time? Not every minute, but much of the time, and I will come back to that in a little while.

The other big question about this fourth question of assessment and so on, is when do we see the really important effects of what we do in the early years? And I will come back to that one. So, I'm going to present my answers to some of these questions based on, as I say, recent research and lots of experience.

So the first question then is what should be learned in the early years? And I want now to suggest some principles of practice. In my list I've got ten principles.

I'm not sure that you'll all still be awake after the fifth one, so I'll stop. But anyway, there are, and I've made them up. so you can make up your own principles.

I always make them up. And by the way, I think Fred has said that there is available here a book that I wrote with my youngest son, Steve. It's called Intellectual Emergencies because ever since he learned to talk, he would raise questions and I would make up an answer. I mean, that's how I am.

And eventually the answers made me, I'll mention some of them as we go along, what made me think again about important issues. And the 12 issues, I'll give you an example of an intellectual emergency. If you haven't had it with your children yet, you might.

Steve is a musician. He's a cellist. If you've got a child going in that direction, do what we didn't do. Indicate that playing music is what you do on the weekend. but during the week you get a job.

But anyway, so Steve went to the University of Illinois, where, of course, I've been working for all these years, and did a bachelor's degree in music. But he didn't live at home. He lived with a friend in the neighborhood. But on Saturdays, when the weather was nice, about four times a year, he would come to do his laundry at home.

And while the laundry was drying, he and I often would go for a walk and talk. And he'd talk about the classes he's taking. He's taking conducting and trumpet and composition and on and on and on and on.

And it was very nice, and I enjoyed it. One day we're walking along, and he's about 19 by that time, and he's talked about his classes. All of a sudden, he changed the subject.

Hey, Mom, he said, how do you decide whom to marry? That's called an intellectual emergency. Now, I wanted to say to Steve, in your case, it had better be somebody wealthy.

Oh, if only. But of course I didn't say that. I had to make up something in a hurry. And you can borrow this if you want.

And I said... Steve, I think you have to decide whether or not the two of you can go on growing in each other's company. I really thought about that before, but this is an emergency. He's our middle child. He's 16 months younger than his older brother and 15 months older than his sister.

So he's in the middle, but he was the first one of the three to fall in love. Oh boy, did we suffer. And the first girl, she was an excellent violinist, just what we needed because we all played quartets together and so on.

But she would just look at him and breathe at him and that was about it anyway. So I said to him, I think you have to decide whether or not the two of you can go on growing in each other's company. And by that I mean that all relationships have to have content. You can't just relate to somebody, you have to relate about something. And after the walk, I thought about this some more, and I do a lot of visiting of schools, working with teachers, and a lot of work in Head Start, preschool, kindergarten, and I began asking this question myself when I'm observing, what's the content of the relationship between teachers and children?

And I'll come back to that in a little while. But that came out of the emergency with Steve. And that's a typical example of how he challenged my thinking.

But anyway, so I want to say the first principle then is what we teach and how we teach changes with the age and the experience that usually comes with age. For example, we all agree we want our children to learn to read and write. But we don't all agree about when they should learn all these things. And I travel all over the U.S.

I've lectured in all 50 states. And I just came back Sunday from a five-city tour in England. And it's the same issue there. They seem to think that whatever you have to do later, start earlier. And English is a ridiculous language anyway to read.

But that's another semester. Anyway, so the question then is what... should young children be learning? And by the way, if you're taking notes, keep this in mind. Children always learn, not necessarily what you want them to learn.

And I give you my strongest example. I had a graduate student did her PhD with me many years ago, about 25 years ago, and she got a job teaching at a university in southern Illinois, and she did fine, and then retired. and decided that she would volunteer in the local Head Start program where she lived, just twice a week, to be helpful and so forth.

One day she's there in the Head Start program, and a mother comes with her four-year-old holding his hand, and the boy lets go of the mother's hand, comes right over to her, points at her like this and said, Hey, you're an old white whore. We have absolutely no idea what he thought that was. was.

But he learned it. And by the way, when the mother came to collect him, Eileen said to the mother, I think you should be very careful about what you say with your friends and family when your son is around. And the mother said, don't you dare tell me how to raise my son. So you get a picture of what that was like.

So please remember, we have to be very careful to keep in mind that children always learn and not necessarily what we want them to learn. I want to suggest that it helps to think about this first question in terms of four different kinds of learning goals. And I put at the top of the list knowledge, not because it's more important than all the other goals, but because if you're an educator, it is high on the list.

That helping the young or your students, whatever age, to acquire worthwhile knowledge, important, significant knowledge. But I've added since then the term understanding, and this came out of an experience I had with one of my six grandchildren. I've got six.

I have ordered six more. But my daughter said to me when I talked to her about it, look, Mom, I'm having hot flashes and I'm growing a moustache. Forget it.

But my husband and I, my daughter lives in Cincinnati, it's a little over 300 miles from where we are in the middle of Illinois, and we drove down there to be with Charlie for his sixth birthday. He's my second grandson, he's now 20 and 6'6", but he was six years old, and we went down there to be there. And we'd go into the driveway and Charlie comes running out, Grandma, Grandma, it's my birthday, and I said, that's why we're here. So it's your birthday, and he said, yes, it's my birthday. And he said, and I'm going to be six. And I said to him, you're going to be six? And he said, yes. And I said, six what? And he said, it's my birthday. I'm going to be six. And I said, well, are you six books? And he said, no, no, it's my birthday. And I said, well, what are you six of? And at that point, his older brother, who was nine, showed up. And whispered very loudly into Charlie's ear, you're going to be six years old, stupid. So Charlie said, I'm going to be six years old. I said, that's right, that's why we're here. And that was Friday, Sunday was the birthday party. And you know just what that's like with the cake and the ice cream and the candles and on and on it went. But the children sitting around the table spontaneously began to talk about who's already six and who isn't. And one boy said, well, I'm six and a half. And Charlie said to him, six and a half what? And the boy said, well, I don't know. And then Charlie said to him, well, what are you six and a half of? And the boy said, well, I don't know. But another boy at the table pointed at him and said, wait a minute. When were you a baby? That's a different level of understanding. Interesting. And the boy said, I don't know, 10 years ago? So, we have, as teachers, as you know, a really important role in helping children to gradually understand what they know. Now, I know that airplanes can fly. I've got 5.5 million miles on American Airlines alone, but I don't understand it. And by the way, it doesn't make sense. I mean, the wings don't even flap. Come on. So, I have this strong need to understand it. People have tried to explain it to me, but... Alright, we want to help young children to know things and also we have a role in helping them to gradually understand things like time and... year. And I was visiting a nursery school in London. This was not this visit, but because I've been there four times this year. And I got to one nursery school. And unfortunately, due to this, that and the other, I was late. So most of the children had already left. But there was one little girl sitting on the carpet, waiting for her grandma to come and get her. And she was tired. It was a long day. But so I got there. She was the only one there. And next to her was a big black girl. and a big calendar leaning on the blackboard. And so I said to her, well, it looks as though you talked about the calendar today. And she said, uh-huh, we did. And I said, so what day is it today? And she looked at the calendar. She said, raining. I've talked about this before. I won't go into it in detail. But a lot of children, I know you don't do this, but a lot of three- and four-year-olds waste a half an hour a day on the calendar. And you know, unless you're the one who pays the bills or you're worried about being pregnant, what do you need it for? I better move on. But anyway. Principle number two in my list. The overall goal of early education is to help young children to make better, fuller... deeper and more accurate sense of their own experience. When they get older, we want to help them to make better, deeper, fuller understanding of other people's experiences, those far away in time or history and those far away in place or geography. But when they're young ones, up through about the age of five, six, from a developmental perspective, a major learning goal is to help them make sense of their own first-hand experience, of their own environment, and at the same time, and I want to underline this, help them to acquire a lifelong disposition to make sense of their experience. And I was thinking about this before I went to England. I left the week before the election. I'd been contemplating. This idea of writing a paper in which I'm going to, I'm not going to do it, but I thought then I'd write a paper which said we shouldn't teach children fairy tales because when they grow up they vote for them. But anyway, I gave that one up. But again, one of the main purposes of involving young children in what we call project work is to support their natural disposition to make the best sense they can. of their own environments and their own experience. And let me... Are you there, John? I'm going to show some slides. Don't leave me. I want to show just a few slides. You said you would help me. Are you there? Okay, here we go. This is a very short but simple example. It's not up there. What? Well, I'll go on. We tested this and it was working. Oh, there we go. That's what I want. Okay, let me explain. I had a student in one of my classes and taught in a small town about 30 miles or so southwest of Champaign where we are, and she had to do a project. She said, oh, there's nothing in our environment, in our little town to study. I can't tell you how many times teachers have said that to me, no matter what town they're in. And I said to her, and I will say to any teacher, take a walk from your school in any direction for ten minutes. And as you walk, look around and say, is there anything that comes into view that the children I teach should understand about, should know more about, and so on and so forth. So she said, oh, okay. Across the road, literally across the road, From her kindergarten were these grain elevators, that's what they're called. We're in the middle of the cornfields of Illinois, thousands and thousands of acres of corn. And these are grain elevators and the corn is poured into there and it's very complex apparently. And then the trains come along and the corn is loaded into them. It was across the road from the school, they'd never looked at it. Not the teachers, not the parents, not the children. But I said, well, there must be lots to learn about it. Here's another view. There's a crane back there. You can't see it very well, but this gives you an idea. And across the road here is the school. And I don't have time to go into the whole project, but she went there, and it turned out one of the grandfathers had worked there for 50 years, so he became the in-resident expert for the children. So she took the children out to draw what they were looking at, and this is one of my favorite. Lessons from Reggio is the value of drawing and looking and noticing and saying, what's that? What is that called? Why is that there? What is it made of? Who did this? And so on. And this is what began to happen to these children. I'm just going to show a few simple examples. Evan, a young kindergartner, had never drawn anything from observation before. But she got the children out there with their clipboards and drawing pens and so on. And he drew, well he was looking at, and he drew the corn elevators or the grain bins from the top rather than sideways. But this was the train. And by the way, there's smoke he put in his picture. Our kids don't see smoke in our trains, but they read these silly books with steam engines that have smiling faces and smoke. Anyway. Three weeks later she took the children out across the road to draw this again. Oops, sorry, pressed the wrong button, didn't I? Three weeks later, this child, Evan, is drawn. He's still got the corn dust here, but he put railroad tracks in there and he told the teacher, there's the smoke, which it wasn't, but anyway, the wheels, the wagons and the train tracks. But what is even more interesting to me is Evan could sit and look at his own drawings, one by the other, and not say, that's bad, this is good, but say, hey, see, I left out this there. Now I've got it in there. And this is the disposition to evaluate your own work and your own progress, which should be a lifelong disposition. One more example, I think. Rusty's first drawing, never drawn anything from observation before. But he tried to draw the locomotive and the freight cars and the train tracks. Three weeks later, they didn't get art lessons, that wasn't the point. But they had a visitor, they asked questions, they were curious, and they went out there and he said to the teacher, first is the locomotive, new word for him, then the other cars, and a couple of cars. Couplers, look at these, the couplers that connected the freight cars. And he said, when he saw them, what's that? What's it called? Why is it there? and learned a great deal. Are you holding up some warning? Is that what that is? Oh, I got your questions. Okay. Anyway, so, but again, imagine Rusty sitting there looking at his own drawings and saying to his friends and maybe to the teacher, maybe to the parent, See the first one? I left this out, but I've got it in there now. And now I know what couplers are and what they do and why they're there and so on. And this was Aaron's first drawing and he drew the grain elevators from the top down, but he wasn't interested in the freight cars. He was interested in the one passenger train that they saw and that's what he drew. But again, I want to just say that the children are asking. What am I looking at? Why is it there? What is it made of? Who does this? How do they make it work? And I'll come back to that in a minute, but I don't know how we got to that. Did we talk about learning goals, skills as the second learning? No, first is knowledge and understanding, okay? Thank you, John. Second learning goal is skills. Skills are different from knowledge and understanding. They are small segments of behavior, usually direct. observable although you often have to infer that a child has addition skills or subtraction skills but most of the skills we're concerned about in the early years can be observed there's small segments of behavior usually directly observable and there are many verbal skills social skills physical skills depends on how specific or detailed you want to be hundreds of them to be learned in the early years and on my flight from O'Hare to LaGuardia day before yesterday, he was sitting next to a young mother with a nine-month-old. Oh, he was so cute. And he spent, I don't know, maybe ten minutes trying to figure out how to make the tray at the back of the seat in front of him fall down and put back. Nine months old. And luckily I succeeded in getting the mother to let him try by himself. But anyway, a lot of skill there. Unlike knowledge and understanding, skills are units of behavior that usually require some practice to achieve skillfulness. Which skills should we emphasize in the preschool years? And I was thinking about this also when I got into LaGuardia, because I don't get to New York that often, but I used to come quite often because I was a consultant to Sesame Street years ago. And one of the specific topics that... I worked with them on was social skills. And I was remembering an incident we developed in which Big Bird and Elmo decide to go to the park to play hide and seek. And you see them going off into the park. And Elmo turns to the camera and says, we're going to go to the park where we're going to play hide and seek. But I'm not going to hide there because Big Bird knows that that's where I'll hide. I'll go somewhere else. So you see him going in another direction. And then He says to the camera, yeah, but Big Bird knows that. I know that he knows that. So he goes in a different direction and so on. But the important thing is that social skills require and involve a great deal of anticipatory thinking. How do you think, what do you think will happen if? Or how do you think so-and-so will feel? Or what part of this would your friend like to do? These are important, and there are many, many social skills. Next time we'll spend a whole... semester on them. But the evidence is pretty clear that they have to be learned by about the age of six, but I'll come back to that. Learning goal type three, I call dispositions. I think many of you are familiar with the work I've written on this. Very difficult to define. It helps to think of them as habits of mind with intentions and motives. Not the same as attitudes, but I don't have time to go into all of that. you to think of the distinction, for example, between having reading skills and having the disposition to be a reader. You want both, obviously. But there are many children, not in your schools, but believe me, in some parts of the city, for whom learning to read is so unpleasant that the disposition to read will not be learned. What we want to do is both. Not much use having the disposition to be a reader if you haven't got the skills, obviously. So... We have to think about that with each child. Am I helping the child to learn to read or whatever skill it is, and the disposition to use it? Every once in a while, a teacher tells me that she's teaching her children listening skills. By the way, most kids have them. Just try whispering. But there's a difference between having listening skills and having the disposition to be a listener, to the habit of listening to adults and teachers and so on. Well, anyway, I better get on. But let me say some of the main points about dispositions. They cannot be learned from instruction. In fact, they can be damaged by instruction, especially if instruction is too intense, too early, and too formal. The most important dispositions, by the way, are inborn. The disposition to learn, by the way, as I've already said, not necessarily what we want them to learn. The disposition to make sense of your experience, though these are, of course, stronger in some individuals than in others. I happen to be a twin. I'm not recommending it, but I didn't have any choice. I'm the older one, ten minutes, but my twin sister's an artist, and we had an older sister, was also an artist. Both my sisters won a scholarship to the Hammersmith School of Art in London. I didn't. The only giftless one in the family. But my mother used to complain that I was born with a question mark on my face, because I was always asking questions. And that was obviously my disposition. But I was evacuated during the war, so I was away from my mother for nearly three years, so that helped a bit. But anyway. And let me mention to you, as you already know, not all dispositions are desirable. Have you ever worked with somebody who had the disposition to be quarrelsome? No. But let me tell you, it can be very annoying. No matter what... I had a colleague, no matter what we said, and the... Staff meetings, he always said, we did that, it didn't work, or you can't make that work here, or it's not going to happen, or no matter what we said, but I plotted. And I got my colleagues together and said, when he says that, let's just say calmly and slowly, I take your point. And he didn't know what to do with us. It's so very interesting, and I want to remind you, I mentioned this yesterday to some of you, the literature research on bullying, which I don't have time to go into, but that's a disposition. If it's girls, we call it bossiness. Do you have those around sometimes? What they show in the research is that children who are bossy or bullies select victims who will resist slightly. They don't want anybody who caves in. immediately because there's no real power in that. They want to find somebody who just resists enough to let them show their capability for being bossy and bullies. So as I say, not all dispositions are desirable. Some people have the disposition to be suspicious. Some have the disposition to be misers and so on. Long, long list. But yes. We do know that there is research to show that young children who have frequent experience of observing adults reading, it doesn't matter what they're reading, whether they're reading Playboy or the racetrack, it doesn't matter, but children who have frequent experience of seeing adults around them read, learn to read more readily and more easily than children who never do. I don't think you have any of those problems, but a lot of teachers do. So what I'm suggesting here is we should ask ourselves as parents and teachers, can the dispositions we want our children to have be seen by them in us? For example, a child might ask a teacher a question about something and the teacher might not know the answer. So the teacher might say something like, hmm, that's an interesting question, I'll see what I can find out. The next day the teacher goes to the child and says, remember yesterday you asked me about such and such? I was thinking about your question and I talked to my neighbor who knows all about it and this is what I found out. It's the disposition to follow up on a question, to probe and seek more understanding that is illustrated and seen by the children that way. Another example would be if the teacher says to the children, maybe you've got three-year-olds or four-year-olds, you know, I've been wondering if that's the best place to put the bookcase because of that. that maybe we should find a different part of the room. Anybody got any ideas? Don't be phony. Don't ask that question unless you mean it, by the way. But again, you're saying, you say, anybody any thoughts about it? You're modeling, showing, demonstrating the disposition to consider alternative courses of action and children benefit from seeing it. Don't be phony, be genuine, use real instances so that children can understand what it's about. Learning goal number four. It's called feelings. Many feeling capacities are, of course, inborn. You don't have to teach fear, anxiety, or even joy. And I want to tell you, I'm in airports all the time, all over the world, and I have never, ever failed to engage a baby that's about seven months up through maybe 15 months in the real joy of peekaboo. Never failed. And the joy they express in it is amazing. But many important feelings are learned from experience, feelings of belonging. Also feelings of not belonging. Feelings of confidence, high or low, are learned from experience, as well as many other kinds that we don't have time. Feelings cannot be learned from instruction, exhortation, or indoctrination, although adults do have a role, I think. in helping children to learn appropriate feelings. For example, I don't know if you've had this experience where you teach, but every once in a while I've seen a child really act as though it's a major tragedy at the end of the day because he or she didn't get a turn with something. Have you ever seen that? And complain, a three-year-old, four-year-old, I didn't get my turn, and on and on and on. What I'm suggesting here is that the teacher could say calmly, Okay? I understand you're disappointed that you didn't get a turn, but there's always tomorrow. So find something else to do for now, or something like that. And every once in a while when I'm observing, I think it's easier for me to say that, because I grew up in England in the wartime, and we used to ask people for things, and they'd say, well, of course you want whatever it is, but there's a war on, so just get on with it. And that was the end of it. But I watch my own show, my oldest son especially, he has twin boys, they're not boys anymore, they're men, they're 20 now. But he, Dan is just like his father, he's loving and tender and caring and affectionate and warm. And he was like that with these two boys, but boy they had him figured out. And they would press his buttons, and he's a television news anchorman, so the kids know a lot about television from very early on. And every once in a while I would be with Dan and he'd say to the kids, OK, they're young, when they were young, OK, it's time to turn off the TV. It's 7.30 or 8 o'clock. And one of them would say, but Dad, and go on and on. And the other one would say, and my friend, he gets to watch this. And he'd say, oh, all right. So they could manipulate him very well. But I want to suggest that it is better for teachers of young children to be clear about what you think is right, what you think is valuable, what you think is appropriate, and then move on. There's lots more here, but I better move on because I'm running out of time, I think. Yes, keep in mind that children cannot get self-esteem or self-confidence from empty flattery or excessive praise. And there is research now, and I can't remember which journal it was in, and I've got to find it. where they were listening to five-year-old children telling each other that anything a teacher would give you a reward for, nobody in his right mind would do willingly. And I was amazed, but it's true. They say, well, yeah, they gave us this whatever it is because nobody would really want to do this. So what are we teaching children if we reward them for stuff? But it's important, in my view, to speak... to children clearly, honestly, and matter-of-factly, not with high or strong emotion, and then change the subject, change the content of the relationship so that it's focused on what the child plans to do or is thinking about, but there must be something interesting and real to talk about. And that's another one of the reasons why I would like, if we had time, we don't have time today, to talk about the importance of including projects. in the curriculum. It provides many real and important and interesting topics to talk about. Principle number three. I've got several more, but I'll go fast. The younger the children, the larger the role of adults in helping them to achieve social competence. It's a huge topic. I need at least three and a half hours for that. But I want to emphasize that addressing children's social development is a very important... part of building a good foundation. There's a huge amount of research now on the long-term benefits of early social development and of the expense and difficulties of helping children whose early social problems were not solved. And by the way, not all of them can be solved by a teacher. Every once in a while you need to bring in a specialist. We don't have time for that, fortunately. But then evidence now indicates that unless a child achieves at least a minimal level of social ... competence. By the time he or she is about six, he or she is at risk for many kinds of social difficulties for the rest of his or her. Obviously, parents have a large role in helping young children's social development from the moment they are born. We don't have time to go into all that, but just imagine, for example, a mother or father comes home from work and everybody, the kids and Mother are in the kitchen getting ready to serve dinner and the father comes in and says to the mother, hey, I invited my office mate to come and have dinner with us on Fridays. I hope that's okay. And the mother says, oh sure, that'll be fine. And then the father says to the mother, but when she's here, don't mention the word, I don't know, Republican or something. Doesn't matter. Doesn't matter what. What the children are hearing is adults anticipating how someone else will feel. Or grandma's coming for lunch on Sunday, you know how she feels about whatever, whatever. So let's be careful not to talk about it while she's here. You're not saying she's a wicked old thing. You're just saying, you're just teaching children that you anticipate others' thinking and feelings. This is a basic part of social competence. We also have evidence to show that peer-rejected children, with their rejected early, eventually find each other. And they form close groups, which they never did as children, with others who also share with them a bitterness about the rest of society, and we call them gangs. But let me mention to you the summary of Willard Hartup at the University of Minnesota, who spent his whole career studying early social development and following up children, lots and lots and lots of them, and this is what he said. The single best childhood predictor of adult adaptation. It's not IQ, not school grades, and not classroom behavior, but rather the adequacy with which a child gets along with other children. Children who are generally disliked, who are aggressive and disruptive, who are unable to sustain close relationships with other children, and who cannot establish a place for themselves in the peer culture, are seriously at risk. risk for the rest of their lives so it is important. The elements of social competence are not usually learned through instruction or lessons or lecturing or preaching or scolding and preaching about being nice is the wrong content for relationships between adults and children. And again implementing the project approach makes it possible for young children to benefit from having frequent real opportunities to work together, to argue about how to make this or how to build it and resolve the arguments and to work out differences of opinion. And again, this is why I recommend strongly the project approach. And if there is any time, I'm going to show you a project very quickly. There is a second question that I mentioned, like when is it best learned? And this leads to principle number four, which is what children should learn. and should do, must be decided on the basis of what best serves their development in the long term. And we now have wonderful data to show that you can start children on all kinds of learning very early, and they look good on the tests at the end of preschool, but when you follow them up at grade 6, grade 8, grade 10, these kids have now been followed, they don't look... better than children who had high scope or Montessori or other kinds of preschool experiences in which they exercised judgment, took responsibility, solved problems, and so on. And I wish we had more time for that. Another important thing to keep in mind here is that dispositions, about dispositions, is that once they are lost, they cannot easily be put back in again. The disposition to seek knowledge and understanding, if it gets lost early, may be lost forever, and that would be a serious mistake. Principle number five, I'm going to hurry. I suggest that it's very useful. and important to distinguish between academic goals and intellectual goals. And some people in the field of early childhood use the term cognitive all the time. Everything's cognitive except sneezing and a few other basic body processes. But everything else, I think it's useful to make the distinction between academic and intellectual. As children grow older, we must address both. But for the young ones, it's more important to support and strengthen their inborn intellectual disposition. And let me try making a list of distinctions, and I'll go fast. Academics have to do with small bits of information, knowledge, and some skills, the alphabet, phonemes, grammar, punctuation, etc. They are usually items that can be correct or incorrect. They are usually first learned out of context. They involve rote learning and items that have to be memorized. Academic work usually includes things like worksheets or exercises. They're items that don't have an internal logic, but nevertheless must eventually be learned. And I remember with Steve, when he was in first grade, he came home and told... me that he had written, and if you're taking notes, write this down. He wrote this word, N-O-L-I-J. Well, you know, he's a musician. He does everything by ear. And he said the teacher really scolded him. And so I wrote the word knowledge correctly. And he said, what do you need the K for? What do you need the D for? What do you need the E for? And I said, it's history. our language has a long complicated history. Now he's an old man, he can appreciate those sources of various words. But in first grade, he struggled with it because he did everything by ear. Anyway, academic learning is important as children get older. But let me talk about here or define intellectual learning for you. This refers to cognitive disposition such as the disposition to make sense of what you're experiencing. to analyze information, to synthesize information, to theorize about how things happen and how they work and where they come from, to try to figure out cause-effect relationship. What will happen if I do this? If I add another block here? If I put this over there? And so on and so forth. And to predict what they might see when they go somewhere. And if you're taking children at all, I don't know if you can do field trips in this city. It must be very dangerous. If you can, take opportunities for the young children to anticipate what might you see, or when we go here or there, what do you want to see more of, or look at, and so forth. And these are intellectual processes. Or it might be a question like, well, if you do A, then B, what might happen? And by the way, don't be phony. Ask the question sincerely. Which leads to principle number six. Introduction to formal academic instruction too early and too intensely may result in the children learning it, I've already mentioned this, but at the expense of the disposition to go on learning. I've already suggested that this I'll have to pass up now because of the time, but I do want to tell you that there are very good data now to show that early academic emphasis in the preschool years looks good early but it doesn't look good later on if you're interested I've got the references for the the data that have been reported on that so I better hurry question three which I had if you may remember is how is this all best learned and given this view of what should be learned academic dispositions and so on when should it be learned principle number seven in my list is the younger the children the more they learn through interactive experiences, through active rather than passive experiences, and through Interactive rather than just receptive processes. This doesn't mean they don't learn through passive experiences. And this is one of our big worries. How much and what do children learn from television? And I don't think anybody's done this, but I keep trying to find a graduate student to do a study of how many explosions each child is likely to observe in a week on television. Lots and lots of them, believe me. So that children do learn from passive experience, and of course they learn lovely things from stories and so on. But the disposition to go on learning, which is the goal of all education at every level, lifelong learning, the disposition to master knowledge that is not yet known, requires interactive processes like discussion and argument, and could also benefit from the experience, by the way, and I wish we had time. Another time we'll talk about this, the important potential benefits of mixed age grouping. And there's more research on that now, and of course I have a bias because I'm a twin, and I think children should be in mixed age groups, but that's, you know. Who wrote this? Carl Jaspers, the German philosopher, said there is nothing to philosophy that is not autobiographical. I think it's an interesting point, and I often think of it in my own work, but anyway. Principle number eight is based on new neurological research. Very interesting. A whole bunch of research says that young children in the first six years need frequent experience of what's called continuous contingent interaction. I'm going to say it again. Continuous contingent interaction. This means that very young children from very early in life need frequent interactions that are continuous. Maybe a series of one-to-one exchanges. You hold a baby, it's a week old, and if you're a granny like me, you'll maybe sing, although my mother was a musician and she told me I had a lovely voice, but it was in the wrong key. Shut up, she said. But the baby doesn't know that. You hold the baby and you make funny faces or you sing. Everything in the baby slows down. And for me... Heart rate, pulse rate, breathing rate, except information processing. By the way, that's the origin of the disposition called interest, which means being able to lose yourself in something outside of yourself. But if you do this with a baby and you're singing, if you don't change the sound you make, the baby turns away, causing you to change your behavior. And there's evidence that frequent, I don't know how frequent, but occasional experiences throughout childhood of interacting so that each participant's behavior is contingent on the other one's behavior provokes the development of the connection between the midbrain, where emotions are, and the frontal cortex, where thinking, planning, anticipating, reasoning, and so on is. I wish we had more time for that, but keep it in mind. The best example of continuous... Contingent interaction is a conversation. One person says something, the other one says, oh, come on. The other one says, no, I'm serious. And the other one said, I don't believe you. It's contingent. It's a sequence of contingent interactions. And with babies, you do all kinds of things, and with young children, and certainly with children in the preschool, take opportunities to engage them in conversation. What do you mean when you say such and such? Show me an example. Or what are you planning to do next? How are you going to make that? And so on, lots of ways. And another reason for mixed age grouping is more conversation when the children are mixed in age. But that, we'll have to do it another time. Anyway, not always words in interaction. It might be a smile or it might be somebody says, wow, that's contingent what the other one said. But it's contingent. And that turns out to have a very powerful effect on the development of the brain in young children. It stimulates the neurological connections between the midbrain and the prefrontal cortex. But, if you're going to do that, there must be something of interest to talk about, which again is another reason why project work is so important. Do I have a few minutes more? Where's Freda? I don't know. Anyway. Oh, I have some questions too. Oh, that's good. I want to show you a very old example of a school. This was in Bristol in England, and in the olden days, before they had a certain prime minister whose name I won't tell you, and she messed it all up. But they used to do what Americans called open education. The British didn't call it that. They had other words for it. But this happened to be, I only have 15 pictures that were all taken in 20 minutes, so you can get an idea of what these three, four, and five-year-olds mixed were up to in an old house. They didn't have a proper environment at all. None of us would agree. In fact, no state licensing bureau would allow us to have a nursery school in a building like this because they had to go up and down stairs and so forth and so on. But that's all they had in that neighborhood at that time. And these were very low-income children. But I just took the pictures that morning in 20 minutes. This little girl and a few other children, boys and girls, were reconstructing their neighborhood. And I tell you, when I go into a preschool class or kindergarten class, I always look around and ask, what is going on here that they will come back and do more work on tomorrow? I don't know about New York, but I'll tell you in Illinois it often looks as though they've hosed the place down when the peasants have left every day. But anyway, so these kids are building their neighborhood. And they had the, you know what, a working class neighborhood in a city like Bristol. The houses in long rows are attached to each other. They're also dark gray and black and they also have chimneys. I grew up in a place like that in London. And they have... They've got some curtains. They've got one chimney, but they're going to bring some more. And this little girl is making her front garden. And most of the front gardens are very small, but she's made a pretty big one, and there's one there. Real dirt. In Illinois, you couldn't do that. Some child brought a piece of railroad because they were right near the train tracks. That's going to be a petrol station, a gas station. And somebody brought this for the motorway. And... That was where it was that morning. I didn't go back the next day, but it was interesting. This little girl brought a photograph of her cat to the class, and the children studied it and agreed to build it. And when I took the picture, she stood there to make sure I got the food, because she said, we've got cat food here too. And her friends were inside there. Can you see the fingers? And they would turn the head, and they would say, Another mouse please! And this is, one of the children in the school had had a tonsillectomy and before that child went to hospital, the whole class went to see where this was going to be, talked to the nurses, the nurses gave them empty pill bottles, an old blood pressure gauge, and what do you think, what do you use for that, heartbeat and things like that, and they decided to build a hospital in their school. What you see is the surgeon getting ready for the day's work here. I think if you saw this today, this was 1970. The physician would be a female and the nurse would be a male, but there she's getting him ready for surgery. This is a typical English hospital screen. You can see right through it. There's the sink, but on the table here are the pill bottles, the blood pressure gauge, all kinds of things, and the teacher's helping them to create a... pillow of some kind. But what you see in the back they built is an ambulance. And the English ambulance in those days, it's changed a bit now, were always white with dark windows and a big red cross. This cross looks more religious than medical, but that's the way it used to be. But it took them several weeks to build this ambulance, but they needed it for their hospital. These two chaps said they wanted to make a stretcher. So the teacher said to them, well, what do you need for a stretcher? We need some long sticks, they said. And, of course, they wanted some kind of fabric or cloth or whatever they called it. Anyway, the teacher got some old broomsticks and gave it to these two. And there, by the way, is a patient waiting to be taken somewhere or something. They made this stretcher. And look at the stitching here on both sides and he is saying to this patient stop screaming you ain't dead yet. They're in the front of the ambulance you can see the front is made out of an old piece of staircase and he's turning around saying you're almost there you ain't dead yet. There is the ambulance right there and this is part of a double-decker bus that they built which I'll show you again. But I want you to see the back of the piano. They were encouraged by the teacher to look at different textures. Styrofoam, plastic, milk carton here. There is also tape out of a cassette tape. You can't see it, but it's hanging here. And a piece of cloth. And here is an old matchbox with the sandpaper side facing outward. And there it is, flat. So they've been looking around in their home environment and bringing stuff in. And when they come together as a group, they would show each other what they brought, and the teacher would help them put it up there. And this is the back of the bus. He's the conductor, and he goes around collecting the fares. Tickets, please. Fares, please. And so on. And this is next door to where their school was, was a new house being built. And they studied it closely through the window and so on. And they decided they needed to make some bricks. So they collected egg cartons, stuffed them with newspaper. The teacher helped them to put tape around them to make the bricks. And here's a discussion about how this building is going. But I want you to see this here. It's called the Workman's Hut. And they put their helmets up there and their lunch bags in there because they had investigated it next door. And here they're talking with the teacher about making another brick and how where it's going to go and so forth and here you see the cement truck we would call it a cement truck they called it a brick lorry and the bricks and cement were inside when they went into the truck I'm stopping in a minute they it's it's so tall that they had to be lifted into the driver's cabin so when they made their own you can see that they had a basket here and a box there and a big box there. This was an old door that they used for the side. But the cement and the bricks were in there. And they'd bring them down, weigh them on here, and do the building. I'm almost done, honest. And there is one of the builders. By the way, that painting was really beautiful back there. But that we don't have time for. Before they built their lorry or brick truck, a brick, yes, truck, They did it, one of the children did a painting and they asked the teacher to write, Our Brick Lorry, and there is Andrew the workman, there are the bricks, there are the bags of cement, Larry the driver, and Rodney the builder. And then another child did this painting of Andrew the workman, and this is the workman's hut with the helmets and the lunch bags, and he's going to come down, weigh the cement, and there's the bus. You can see the bus conductor up there collecting the fares, and in those days, the big double-decker bus of London, the driver was in a separate cabin. It's no longer true. There it is. In like 20 minutes, look at what these children were doing together, arguing, suggesting to each other. Turn that off. I'm at the end now. There is a principle, number nine, which is young children benefit from opportunities to work on a topic or an investigation or an activity. activity over extended periods of time, as you've just seen. Oh, well, there's just, next time I'll finish it anyway. Principle number 10 is the last one in the list, and I'd love to go into it in detail, but let me just say, remember that enjoyment is not the goal of education. It's the goal of entertainment. The goal of education is to engage the mind of the learner fully and... And when we do that well, the learners find it enjoyable and satisfying and interesting. And the capacity for interest has to be strengthened and developed throughout the early years. Sorry there isn't more time. But anyway, my last note is somewhere in here, in the last page. Cheer up, it's almost over. Number one. As teachers, all we have at a given moment, in a given situation, is our own very best judgment. Throughout our professional lives, we study and reflect in order to refine that judgment. We exchange with colleagues on occasions like this one. We consider others' solutions to the problems we face and examine available evidence, all in order to improve our judgment. But in the last analysis, all we have... is our own very best judgment. Number two, teaching involves many conflicting pressures, as you well know, and conflicting situations. We can't respond fully and equally to all of them. We have to decide what's worth making an issue over. Don't make an issue over everything. Select the few that really matter to you. Half a dozen issues will do, and then take your stand on them with clarity, confidence, and courage for the sake of the children. And finally, number three, cultivate the habit of speaking to children as people. People with minds, usually lively ones, appeal to their good sense. It's not necessary to be sweet or silly or sentimental at one extreme, or somber and grim or harsh at the other. Let's be genuine, direct, honest, serious and warm with them and about them, and sometimes. humorous too. Thank you very much. I've got two questions here. Do you think pre-K and K kids should learn to read music notation? Is that what it is on a beginning level? I don't know, I haven't thought about it. Give it a try, see what happens. If it doesn't seem to work well, drop it. And I should put in my list of final comments, experiment and try things. And read the results or read the effects and continue or not, depending on your experience. The other question, the world has changed dramatically in the past 10 to 20 years. Do you think the way children develop is different? I don't know. I'm not sure. But I do think we should learn much more than we already know about the effects of the media on children. But it's an interesting question. I don't know what to say. But I'm not sure it's different. And you have to be very careful, by the way. There is a strong tendency, and it's stronger in Britain than here, of romanticizing the past. People say to me, nowadays, as though the old days were terrible. Well, they did not live in the East End of London, which was pure squalor, even when I was a child. But they forget that, you know. So I don't know, but I hope that this has been useful. And you do have copies of my book. Some of the principles are in here, and they're available here. And there is also a CD in the back of the book of Steve's beautiful songs to the... He's a great singer and he's a wonderful poet. And he's very talented and very poor. So enjoy the conference. Thank you.

Transcript for:Foundation Principles in Early Childhood Education

Transcript for:
Foundation Principles in Early Childhood Education