Making Meaning in the Company of Others

"The bad guys go in here." 

He was explaining his pastel drawing to me.

"Then they go around like this." 

He contorted his body to demonstrate.

"And this is the knife part." He pointed to a jagged pastel mark. "Sometimes they get stabbed, but sometimes they run away."

He and his buddies had spent the morning excitedly scribbling on both sides of architectural printouts that a parent had brought in from her office recycling bin. The drawing took far less time than the explanations. In this case, we were learning about the details of a bad guy trap.

"Then they fall off this part, into this hole. They can't get out because the sides are too slippery."

The process they had collectively developed was to declare your subject, say, a tornado, scribble frantically, sometimes using more than one color. The penultimate action was to crumple the paper into a ball before unfurling it, declaring, "This is my tornado." Then came the final step, which was a detailed explanation of what we were looking at. The boys were obviously making it up as they went along, working hard to both make sense of their scribble and entertain their friends. There were lots of knives, poop, underpants, fighting, blood, baddies, and goodies in these emergent stories.

Often there was even a question and answer aspect to the creative description. "What happens to the bad guy when he's trapped?" "Then he gets out and goes to jail."

Sometimes there were creative suggestions. "And then you put tigers in the hole!" "Yeah, and lions and snakes!"

These boys had been playing together for nearly three years. They had grown up together in our school, but this was the first time I'd seen them sit down en masse to make art. Usually, they were racing about in costumes or playing out their games with blocks. If any one of them had stopped by to make art, they had done so solo, as a way to take a break from their usual intensity.  

But today, these boys had come together to create worlds. From the randomness of scribbles and crumples, they were constructing meaning by combining what already knew with their imaginations and connections with others, making sense from senselessness. This is what the human mind has evolved to do: make meaning in the company of others.

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Books have a way of transforming us unlike any other media out there. Be it fiction or non-fiction, a books has the power to fully immerse us into a world in way that makes us come out the other side a changed -- and better -- person. I've put together this list of 16 books that have done that for me. They are intentionally not early childhood books, although each one has, in one way or another, profoundly transformed my work with young children. Maybe you'll find a few new ones here that will do the same for you. To download the list, click here.

I put a lot of time and effort into this blog. If you'd like to support me please consider a small contribution to the cause. Thank you!

Fight As If You're Right and Listen As If You're Wrong

Socrates is arguably the most famous teacher of all time, at least in Western culture. His Socratic Method is a type of argumentative dialog between individuals, usually a student and teacher, that involves asking and answering ever more probing and confrontational questions. Ideally, the goal of these "arguments" is not to persuade or to "win" but rather to move the conversation ever closer to truth or wisdom or knowledge.

Perhaps the most inspiring thing about Socrates as a philosopher and teacher was his consistent assertion that despite his reputation as "the wisest man in Athens" he himself knew nothing. His wisdom did not consist of certainty, but rather in questioning, which is to say to look at all things, even the most sacred, from all sides, and to know that there was always another perspective he had not considered. 

Modern schooling tends to take the opposite approach, at least when it comes to the early years in which knowledge is viewed as a collection of correct answers that the children must be able to repeat on command. Children who challenge the "authorized gods" (as Socrates put it), who question, who argue, are viewed as problems. They might be humored for a bit, but ultimately, if they don't conform, they are punished with poor grades, low test scores, and sometimes, if they persist in arguing, worse.

Intellectually, most of us agree with Socrates: "(T)he life that is unexamined is not worth living." But among the very first and most important lessons we teach our children in standard schools -- if they are to be "successful" -- is to not question the correct answers. And by no means are you to argue. 

The result of decades of this kind of schooling is that few of us know how to argue productively. Almost everyone I know confesses to being "conflict averse." Arguments make them uncomfortable. It's no wonder because arguing these days, especially over politics, but really anything of importance, tends to be fraught, so much so that many of us have given it up altogether. After all, we all know, going in, that we’re very unlikely to change anyone’s mind, so why risk the vitriol, anger, and even the threats of violence that seem to lie just under the surface.

The thing is, study after study shows that if the goal is to learn something new, to make better decisions, or to be innovative, then the best way to make that happen is for people to fight over ideas. As Stanford business school professor Robert Sutton says, if learning or creativity is the goal, then “People would fight as if they are right, and listen as if they are wrong.” In other words, winning or persuading has nothing to do with this kind of argument. And while the latest science demonstrates the power of intellectual conflict, Socrates and his famous method has been with us for centuries.

As a preschool teacher, I want the children I teach to know that it's not just their right, but their responsibility to question the authorized gods. I want them to know that the most important thing they can do is to ask questions, especially inconvenient ones. I want them to know that their questions deserve thoughtful, honest answers, even if that answer is "I don't know." And the only way this happens is for me to give up on the idea of correct answers.

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Books have a way of transforming us unlike any other media out there. Be it fiction or non-fiction, a books has the power to fully immerse us into a world in way that makes us come out the other side a changed -- and better -- person. I've put together this list of 16 books that have done that for me. They are intentionally not early childhood books, although each one has, in one way or another, profoundly transformed my work with young children. Maybe you'll find a few new ones here that will do the same for you. To download the list, click here.

I put a lot of time and effort into this blog. If you'd like to support me please consider a small contribution to the cause. Thank you!

"Comparison is the Thief of Joy"

I recently met a parent "in the wild," who, when she learned what I do for a living, began telling me why her son is perfectly normal. In other words, she, like many parents, had some doubts about it.

"Normal" is not a useful concept when it comes to human beings, and most especially young children. In recent decades, we've attempted replace it with the word "typical" -- as in neurotypical -- but in the minds of nervous parents I'm not sure there's much difference between the two.

Theodore Roosevelt once said, "Comparison is the thief of joy." Normal and typical are terms of comparison that run so deep in modern education that it can be hard to conceive of institutionalized learning without them. We grade and rank children, we expect them to meet or exceed arbitrary "standards" and "developmental milestones," we fret about reading above or below "grade level." Not so long ago, our youngest citizens weren't victims of these ham-fisted comparisons until well into elementary school, but today they are being analyzed and assessed from the moment they're born, always having hoops placed before them to prove they are "normal."

No wonder our children are so depressed, stressed, fragile, and joyless. The process of normalization in normal schools is crushing. It plays out as a relentless focus on each child's deficits, which means a search for ways in which they do not fully measure up. Oh sure, we celebrate those who exceed the standards, but when children are extraordinary in any way that the system does not measure, their unique traits are deemed to be challenging behaviors. Their extraordinariness is evidence of an inability to focus. Or a waste of time. They are then tutored, punished, pathologized, and even drugged in order to bring them in line with normal.

I've never met a normal or typical child. They are all extraordinary. This is not an empty platitude. I've spent my professional career refusing to engage in the violence of comparison. This is often frustrating to parents who have been brainwashed into worrying about how their kid measure up to normal, but when I'm asked to assess any child, I only talk about their superpowers. I talk about what spurs their curiosity and what sparks their joy. I delight in their quirks, eccentricities, and passions. This is my job: to figure out what gives them joy, then to do whatever I can to make it possible for them to be joyful. 

The flaw in a school system (or child rearing) based on normal is that the focus on deficits presumes there is some process or method by which we can somehow get all the kids to measure up, to toe the line, to be like everybody else. It defines "extraordinary" in a very narrow and, frankly, arbitrary range, which, of course, leaves most kids out.

Play-based preschool is the only educational method I know that fully embraces the extraordinary in every child. It should never be about comparison, but rather the joy of learning what it means for each child to come fully alive. 

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Books have a way of transforming us unlike any other media out there. Be it fiction or non-fiction, a books has the power to fully immerse us into a world in way that makes us come out the other side a changed -- and better -- person. I've put together this list of 16 books that have done that for me. They are intentionally not early childhood books, although each one has, in one way or another, profoundly transformed my work with young children. Maybe you'll find a few new ones here that will do the same for you. To download the list, click here.

I put a lot of time and effort into this blog. If you'd like to support me please consider a small contribution to the cause. Thank you!

16 Books That Transformed My Work With Young Children

A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies . . . The man who never reads lives only one.  ~George R.R. Martin. 

What will you do with your summer? It's what our teachers always asked us as the school year wound down. As professional educators, many of us get to ask ourselves the same question.

My answer then, as it is now, is read.

Indeed, if I have one piece of advice for early childhood educators it's to read more books. Whole books. Education and development books, of course, but more importantly, books on any topic or by any person that sparks your interest.

Unfortunately, our time is limited. Much of the reading we do as educators tends toward "professional reading" -- curriculum materials, lesson plans, assessment tools, policy documents. Sometimes we might take a look at the latest book on play-based learning. Most of us have a stack of books that we "need to" get to. But the bottomline is that this is all just functional reading, reading to solve problems and produce results, like how to manage behavior, how to meet standards, and how to deliver content. 

When this forms the bulk of our reading, it tends to narrow our vision . . . not to mention exhaust us because we are reading for a purpose, as opposed to reading for pleasure. It keeps us circling around the same assumptions, the same language, the same ways of seeing children. We can too easily get trapped in a bubble of ECE orthodoxy. As John Dewey reminds us, education is not preparation for anything; education is life itself. And books give us life . . . a thousand lives. 

If our role is to create environments in which children are free to follow their own curiosity and teach themselves, then our most important tool isn’t a strategy or a script. It’s our capacity to see. The wider and more deeply we see the world, the more perspectives we possess, the more possibilities we’re able to offer. That kind of vision won’t come from staying inside the field of education. It comes from reading broadly—books that stretch our sense of perception, that challenge what we think we know about human nature, that invite us into relationships with the more-than-human world, and that immerse us in imagination, ambiguity, and even humor. 

When we read this way, we can’t help but become more reflective and less certain, more curious and less controlling. We’re better able to recognize the invitations children are constantly offering us, and less likely to fall into the trap of unsolicited instruction. In short, we become better at creating environments where real learning can happen. 

I have put together a list of books that have done that for me.

None of the books on my list are “how-to” guides for teaching, but they all made me a better play-based preschool teacher. This is not a list of my favorite books. It is, rather, a list of books that I return to again and again in my work as an educator. Seven of the books are fiction, including a pair of picture books. The other nine are non-fiction, books about history and science mostly, although there are two essay collections on the list. I don’t think of myself as a particularly avid science fiction reader, but there are three books on this list that fit (loosely) the category. Maybe that’s because these authors show us a vision of the future, and at the end of the day, that's what we do: build the future through our work with our youngest citizens.

These are all books that have expanded how I understand people, knowledge, and the world itself. And that, in turn, has transformed how I show up with children.

If you're interested in checking out my list of 16 Books that Transformed My Work With Young Children, along with the reasons I included them, download by clicking here. 

I'm not saying you should or will feel the same way. In fact, I found putting together this list such an enlightening exercise that I can heartily recommend that you make your own list of books that transformed your work with young children. I found it an interesting filter through which to consider the thousand lives I've lived. Many of the books I consider to be among the greatest ever written are not included. Most of my favorites didn't make the cut. But every book on this list -- these 16 lives -- made a direct and last impact on my work as an early childhood educator.

What will you do with your summer? How about living a few more lives?

******

Books have a way of transforming us unlike any other media out there. Be it fiction or non-fiction, a books has the power to fully immerse us into a world in way that makes us come out the other side a changed -- and better -- person. I've put together this list of 16 books that have done that for me. They are intentionally not early childhood books, although each one has, in one way or another, profoundly transformed my work with young children. Maybe you'll find a few new ones here that will do the same for you. To download the list, click here.

I put a lot of time and effort into this blog. If you'd like to support me please consider a small contribution to the cause. Thank you!