Watching Ravens, Contemplating Clouds, and Picking Dandelions IS Education

National Park Service

Ravens are found pretty much everywhere.

Their "success" has to do with their intelligence and adaptability, especially their capacity for working with other species.

Like humans, they are omnivores, although most of their diet is meat. They have been known to hunt smaller animals. They are also notorious nest raiders, making off with both eggs and hatchlings. But their preference is scavenging. If you live in an urban area, you see them around open dumpsters. The ravens in Seattle are well-known for frequenting parks on sunny days which is why you never leave a picnic lunch unattended.

In more recent times, ravens are thought to be nefarious pests. Their flocks are called "unkindnesses" in some places. But throughout most of history, humans have admired ravens. They feature I many mythologies as tricksters and emissaries of the gods. Their presence during a hunt was considered to be a good omen in many indigenous cultures.  

And that's not mere superstition. Ravens commonly hang out around hunters, especially wolves and humans, but also bears, big cats, and other predators. Of course, they're after the spoils, but they are more active than that. They're known for calling out (caw-caw) while "pointing" (wing dips) to indicate where choice prey is hiding. When predators are successful, ravens feast alongside them.

This is an example of one of the most beautiful aspects of nature: symbiotic relationships. Bluestreak cleaner wrasse is a small fish that sets up "cleaning stations" on coral reefs where larger fish queue up for cleaning. Oxpeckers in Africa eat the ticks and other parasites from the skin of large mammals. Antbirds follow columns of army ants in tropical forests feeding on the prey that escapes them. Historian Yuval Noah Harari, in his book Sapiens, makes the case that humans and wheat are in a symbiotic relationship in which the wheat provides us with food, while we, through mass farming, have made it one of the most populous grass species on the planet. In fact, he wonders who domesticated whom.

If you start thinking in this way, it's easy to see symbiosis throughout nature, at every level, involving every living thing. Hence a web of nature based on the principle of you-scratch-my-back-and-I'll-scratch-yours. It's cooperation and mutual benefit. Without the mutual benefit, if one side takes without giving, it becomes parasitism in which either the parasite destroys the host or the host destroys the parasite.

We rightfully worry about what all those screens are doing to this generation of children. I worry about what it's doing to all of us. In the US, Gen Z and younger adults spend, on average, less than five hours a week outdoors, with many avoiding the open sky altogether. Adults aren't much better. We're quickly losing our connection to the natural world, and with it our essential symbiotic relationships. When these ties are broken we suffer physically, emotionally, and psychologically, not just as individuals, but as a species.

Screens are not the disease, but rather the symptom. The real culprit is a society that is hostile to children spending time outdoors at all, let alone in natural spaces. Our schools are largely indoor projects. Inmates in high security prisons get more time outdoors than the average American school child. Our cities, neighborhoods, parks, and playgrounds all require adult supervision, which means that most children cannot choose to be outdoors, but rather must wait for their adults to be both willing and able. The adults can't handle the "begging," so we give them screens.

Increasingly, our role in nature is shifting from that of symbiosis to parasitism. Of course, we aren't capable of destroying the world, so that means the world will have to destroy us. It's a matter of urgency and survival that we return to nature as a species and the place to start is to ditch the screens and open the doors of our preschools. As a matter of public policy, our preschoolers should be spending at least half of their school days outdoors, preferable in actual nature, but at least playgrounds that are gardens, where the stuff of nature (trees, rocks, water) replace standard-issue manufactured equipment. It must be understood that watching ravens, contemplating clouds and picking dandelions is education for the survival of our species.

Children who are hooked on nature instead of screens will "demand" their elementary schools do the same. And from there, who knows what will happen.

******

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!

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.

******

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.

******

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. 

******

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!

The Agreements We Make With One Another

There was no reason for me to be close, so I kept my distance. There was no reason for me to be a part of their game, so I remained invisible.

It probably began days, if not weeks, before I understood it was a game, but it came to my attention in the form of a girl filling a plastic witch's cauldron with things she had scavenged from around the playground.

A friend said some words to her. Maybe he asked, "Can I play with you?" but it was more likely something along the lines of "What are you doing?" which is typically a better playground question if the goal is to be invited in. They began filling the cauldron together, discussing each item, coming to agreements over what went into the mix and what was cast aside according to some system known only to them.

A decision was made to add water to the cauldron. By now it was heavy with the debris they had meticulously collected. But not too heavy because it only took one of them to carry it over to the cast iron hand pump. While the girl held the cauldron, her friend began filling a smaller bucket, which he then poured over their collection. As they worked together, another child joined them. After a discussion that may or may not have included the phrase, "I've got an idea," they agreed to forego the unnecessary step of the bucket and slide the cauldron itself under the flow of water.

Agreement, however it is arrived at, stands at the center of our preschool, as it does in life itself. Conflict, all conflict, emerges from the inability to agree. These children were not playing a game; they were living.

The children took turns pumping until the cauldron was full, or at least as full as they collectively agreed it needed to be. Now it was too heavy for a single carrier, so they circled around the cauldron and lifted it together. Walking with it was a complicated matter: they had to agree about where they were going, at what speed, and who would have to walk backwards or sideways. Maybe it was still too heavy. They staggered a bit under its weight before another friend joined them, dashing in to slide his arms under cauldron. When another playmate tried to squeeze her body in amongst them, it became clear that they could lift it, but not effectively carry the heavy thing, even when they all worked together.

They agreed they would need to put it down, which they did, carefully, not spilling more than a drop or two.

As they discussed their next steps, someone said, clearly enough for me to hear it, "I've got an idea! Let's use the wagon!" This was met with approval, with the exception of one girl, the girl who had tried to squeeze in. She objected. "I'm using it." I'd previously noted her idly pulling the wagon, alone, watching the cauldron situation from afar. She had abandoned it briefly to help.

"Please!" the other children begged. "We just need it for a second." The girl stood with her back to the group, apparently considering what to do. It wasn't long before she relented, "Okay, but I want it back when you're done." Another agreement.

Now the challenge was how to get the wagon to the cauldron. It was on the other side of the row of tree rounds that line the upper level of the sand pit. One child attempted to lift it, but when the others didn't join his effort, he gave it up in favor of what the group decided was a "better idea," which was to pull it around to the side. It appeared to be the work of a single child, so the others stood around watching as he wheeled the wagon the long way around. He struggled, however, when it came to the steep part of the slope, so other children, spontaneously, pushed from behind.

Then, the wagon in place, a small miracle happened. The girl who had started it all, easily lifted the heavy cauldron all on her own, placing into the bed of the wagon. As it turns out, it could have been carried by a single child, but they had collectively agreed that together was better, even if that made things more complicated, perhaps even more difficult. The agreement, not the project, was clearly the important thing.

The project, this project of life itself, continued to play out for some time as the wagon, propelled over difficult terrain made its way in stops and starts around the space, eventually winding up back where the whole thing had started. The cauldron hadn't, after all, mattered. The debris and water it held didn't matter. Whether it was a witch's brew or a soup didn't matter. Indeed, even where they were going with it didn't matter. All that mattered, all that ever matters really, in the end, are the agreements we make with one another.

******

Even the most thriving play-based environments can grow stale at times. I've created this collection of my favorite free (or nearly free) resources for educators, parents, and others who work with young children. It's my gift to you! Click here to download your own copy and never run out of ideas again!

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!

Who Wouldn't Want to Be Part of That?

Growing up, all things being equal, when given the choice, we would opt for being outside over inside. For many years as an educator I informally polled the children in my care, asking where they would prefer to be. Very rarely did anyone choose to be inside when outside was an option. I would likewise ask if they would rather play video games or play with their friends. Most chose friends, although one boy, after giving it some thought, replied, "I'd rather play video games outside with my friends." He rejected the binary choice, yet still, even with video games involved, he wanted to be closer to nature.

We tend to forget that nature is not a finished product, but rather a process that is ongoing. As mathematician and philosopher Alfred North Whitehead put it, "Nature is never complete. It is always passing beyond itself. This is the creative advance of nature." 

Studies consistently show that most humans, most of the time, are more cognitively alive while free from the confines of ceilings and walls. We think more clearly, more creatively, and it's probably not an accident that we also tend to feel less anxious when our horizons are expansive. Perhaps that's because we too are a part of the creative advance of nature. 

Our scientific tradition often place humans, and particularly our conscious minds, outside of nature. They tell us that things we can't see, like atoms and electromagnetic fields, are real, whereas things we actually experience, like colors and the passage of time, are just fabrications of our minds. Whitehead and others refer to this as the bifurcation of nature. But as any child knows, we are not separate from nature; rather we are fully intertwined with it. We are nature as much as any leaf or bird or geological process. 

In her book Braiding Sweetgrass, Robin Wall Kimmerer writes, "(S)cience is rigorous in separating the observer from the observed, and the observed from the observer." But "We make a grave error, if we try to separate individual well-being from the health of the whole." 

When I'm amidst young children at play, especially outdoors, it's impossible to not see that they are doing nothing less than fully engaging with Mother Nature's process, filling their role, not as individual agents, but rather as integrated aspects of the full expression of nature's creative process. It's not a great leap to see this creative process as all of nature engaged in play. And who wouldn't want to be part of that?

******

Even the most thriving play-based environments can grow stale at times. I've created this collection of my favorite free (or nearly free) resources for educators, parents, and others who work with young children. It's my gift to you! Click here to download your own copy and never run out of ideas again!

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!