"The Collective Creation Of Knowledge"

I became a preschool teacher at 37-years-old. Prior to that, the profession in which I had the most extensive experience was as a baseball coach. I've only recently realized this, probably because coaching baseball was never been a serious career. Sure, I'd spent four seasons coaching children of all ages through the Corvallis, Oregon Parks & Recreation department and another two coaching a second division German adult team, but up until now if you asked me what I did prior to teaching, I answered something like "freelance writer" or "junior business executive."

Those years coaching baseball and softball -- some 40 teams in all, including boys, girls, teens, and adults -- no doubt taught me skills and techniques that translated into the classroom. For instance, I was, from the beginning as a teacher, comfortable speaking in front of groups of children. I was also relatively comfortable interacting with the children's parents from the very start because that had also been a big part of my coaching life.

The goal of every team I ever coached was to have fun. Some of my teams won a lot of games, some of them rarely won. Even my adult players in Germany, a group that included a player who was selected for their Olympic team, insisted that they were in it for fun. For me, that meant that every player played in every game and that, to the degree that I could manage it, they got to play the positions they most wanted to play. In this, I was supported by my Parks & Rec boss who gave us coaches full authority to ban any adults from the parks who made a fuss about winning, losing, balls, strikes, or playing time, an authority I used on a handful of occasions. Even as a teenaged employee, I was trusted by my employer to coach my teams as I saw fit. If we wanted to take advantage of a hot day to play on a slip-n-slide instead of practicing baseball, that was perfectly fine. 

Some might say that this wasn't taking baseball seriously, but I beg to differ. I took my job very seriously. I took the children's fun very seriously. And I took each of my teams seriously in that I wanted each of them, as a group, to get out of it what they wanted. I coached one girl's 12-14 year old softball team, for instance, that was choc-a-bloc with talented players. I don't think we lost a game all season. How did we do it? We spent a large part of every practice sitting in the shade talking in a large group about whatever the girls wanted to talk about. It was no accident that we were a true team in every sense of the word. 

I coached another team of 7-8 year old boys that not only lost every game, but only managed to score a single run all season. You've never seen a more joyous celebration than the one that erupted upon scoring that run. Another true team.

The idea of a "team" is probably the sports metaphor we most commonly use. We talk about teaching teams, management teams, volunteer teams. Some employers even encourage workers to refer to one another as "teammates." In that same spirit, and because of my years as a coach, I've always thought of my classes of children as teams as well as individuals. The majority of the professional teachers I know came through college teaching programs (I did not), most of which focus on individual learning, which is all well-and-good, but much of what children learn, at least in the early years -- especially the important stuff like motivation, working with others, and being personable -- is the result of collective, or team, learning. Teams are in the business of what Eleanor Duckworth called the "collective creation of knowledge," which she defines as the "interaction between many minds."

Naturally, as a coach, I would work with individuals on specific skills they might need or want, but I rarely, if ever, pulled an individual aside for one-on-one coaching. Instead, I would create games and drills that included everyone, both skilled and unskilled all mixed up together, because I intuited, as a coach, that they would learn most effectively from one another, through observation, imitation, and inspiration. Sure, I would offer some basic advice on technique for doing something like, say, fielding a ground ball. But, I would then just hit lots of ground balls at them, letting the kids figure it out as a team. Some of the kids I coached went on to play varsity baseball. Most went on, I hope, to have fond memories of playing baseball. But I'm certain that all of them learned something about what it means to be a member of a team, one engaged not only in the collective creation of knowledge, but also the collective creation of community.

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"Teacher Tom, our caped hero of all things righteous in the early childhood world, inspires us to be heroic in our own work with young children, and reminds us that it is the children who are the heroes of the story as they embark on adventures of discovery, wonder, democracy, and play." ~Rusty Keeler

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