This task is a concern of Harvard educator Eleanor Duckworth. In her influential essay “The Having of Wonderful Ideas,” she gives concrete examples of the work that can go on in this middle space—a space of trust, listening, and knowledge of both children and curriculum.7 Duckworth’s title essay takes a child’s active learning as its starting point: the child jumps into a self-initiated task saying, “ ‘I know what I’m going to do.’ ” Duckworth goes on to conclude that “the essence of pedagogy” is giving children “the occasion to have . . . wonderful ideas.” 8 In practice, this means that teachers “must find ways to structure subject matter so as to enable learners to get at their thoughts.... Then we must take those thoughts seriously, and set about helping students to pursue them in greater breadth and depth.” 9 In another essay in this collection, Duckworth describes two aspects of teaching: “The first is to put students into contact with phenomena related to the area to be studied—the real thing, not books or lectures about it—and to help them notice what is interesting.... The second is to have the students try to explain the sense they are making, and, instead of explaining things to students, to try to understand their sense.”10
This approach doesn’ t prohibit teachers from being, on occasion, pointed and specific; it prohibits only interventions that are not tied to the student’s investigation. This is elaborated on by Tiziana Filippini, a Reggio educator: “The teacher has, for us, a role as dispenser of occasions . . . a provoker of occasions.” 11 Teachers are responsible for that closeness, that tying of comments and questions to children’s observed activities. When the teacher’s goal is the opening up of the subject, the teacher’s choices are infinite.
Moving Back and Forth
The group studying squirrels’ homes produced a big collage—it was truly great, and it was David’s idea. The kids—a somewhat feisty bunch, all boys—loved cutting the paper to make the tree and branches and grass . . . pink for the babies in the squirrels’ nest. When I looked at it with David later, I saw that the long grass was at the top; it seemed as if the tree was upside down. I asked him, What’s the story here? He said the grass was Michael’s, for the squirrels’ nest. I said, It’s almost as big as the tree! You have to work with them, ask them, What’s the size of the nest, how long should the grass be? You have to look at it with them. The next day, he worked on it with them again.
Our study of squirrels constituted this sort of opening up of a topic. We wanted to give the children opportunities to encounter new information, and to put information in the context of what they already knew, to “explain the sense” they were making. We moved back and forth between different kinds of experiences: actual observations, lengthy discussions in small groups and with the whole class, study of pictures and text in books, and production of drawings and charts that pulled together what the children were learning.
After the children’s initial observations of the tooth marks on the acorns, I brought in books about squirrels, which I put in a book basket (labeled “skwls” by the children, with a drawing). The children began consulting these books at quiet reading time, poring over the pictures. When they found something interesting in a book, they marked the page with a Post-it so they could share the page at meeting. (Earlier in the year, I’d introduced the idea of using Post-its in this way, when children wanted me to show the rest of the class a picture or read a page; there was always a pile of marked books on a shelf near my chair.) When some point came up in a discussion, I would look for a relevant passage.
Next, we went outside the building to look for squirrels and for “things squirrels may have left behind, like acorns.” The children drew their finds, and we made a wall display of these drawings. I set out the individual collections on shelves in the science area, so that they could consult these if they wanted to. The class environment began to reflect the squirrel study.
The next week, David worked with the class to make the first chart of things they knew and had observed about squirrels. The children contributed ideas at a meeting, and then four of them worked with David to illustrate their statements. This chart was put up in the classroom too. It was during that week that the squirrel appeared at our window. The children, beside themselves with excitement, were still able to quiet themselves and observe the squirrel’s movements. They pointed out the way he scratched his ear with his back leg. Caroline asked about his balance. Brooke asked, “How does the squirrel jump onto the branches?” Hayley asked, “How does the squirrel get such a good grip on what he’s holding?”
The following week, we took a second trip, to a stand of oak trees two blocks from the school. Here, we saw lots of squirrels. We’d taken clipboards and paper this time, and the children spent long periods observing the squirrels closely. Since we’d already been reading about squirrels, the children had ideas about what to look for. We saw the squirrels digging, and the children suggested they were burying their acorns. Back in the room, I’d found a page to read to the class about squirrels’ burying of nuts. Squirrels, we found out, don’t actually remember where nuts are hidden; they use their sense of smell to find buried nuts.
We organized small research groups. David began to meet with them, to read squirrel books and make drawings. I didn’t want the children to simply collect random facts, so in organizing the groups, David and I kept in mind the questions we judged to be important, as well as the children’s interests. We focused on questions connected to survival: how squirrels get around and protect themselves, how they get food, how they take care of their young. One group made a chart of the parts of squirrels’ bodies. Another group compared hmans and squirrels several children were especially interese in comparing how people and squirrels care for their young.
Squirrel running down the tree (drawn by Joanna Berman)
Photo by David Vitale-Wolff
The class also made a trip to the Museum of Natural History. The two docents with whom we met had a lecture-oriented approach, wanting to convey what they knew about squirrels. What was most valuable and exciting for the children, however, was being able to hold, examine, and draw stuffed squirrels. Despite the fact that the docents drew conclusions for the children, the trip enlarged the children’s understanding of how squirrels’ body structure aids them in escaping predators. The docents pointed out the position of the animals’ eyes, on the sides of their heads, and explained how this helps them spot predators and escape quickly. The children could also see—and feel—the squirrels’ curved claws (we’d already seen photographs of the claws in our books). Observing squirrels on our earlier trip, the children had noticed how they move down trees head first; they learned from the docents that the curved claws enable them to do this, allowing them to see danger ahead. The children made drawings of the stuffed squirrels.
Back in the classroom, we talked more about how squirrels survive. The children had clearly begun to appreciate the complexities of life for them. As I read a page from one of our books, we found out the answer to Caroline’s question about how they balance: they use their tails. One of the children pointed out that their ability to balance meant that they could hold acorns in their front paws while looking around and listening for danger.
The squirrel groups continued to meet; each group produced a chart. There were other forms we could have used for reporting on what had been learned. The children could have made a mural, books, or models. David and I decided to make charts, because and similarities between squirrels and people. Here are the comments that went home to parents that Friday: they would be big and would display information in a clear, organized way. Also, because some of the younger children were still struggling with representational drawing, we could adapt their contributions to the charts to their levels of skill. David had the idea of using collage as a technique, and this worked really well, for the children already had experience making collages, and they enjoyed cutting and gluing. The charts were shared at meetings and discussed before being displayed, first in the room, and later out in the
hall. Eventually, all the charts were put up in the hall.
Every Friday morning, the class dictated a letter to parents about the week’s events. I would photocopy the letters, and the children would illustrate them in the afternoon. As the children finished their illustrations, I’d write down their individual dictations. One Friday, I asked the class to say something about the differences and similarities between squirrels people. Here are the comments that went home to parents that Friday:Squirrels are different from people. Humans walk on two legs, squirrels walk on four. Squirrel skeletons are different from people skeletons. People don’t have tails, squirrels do. Squirrels have two big teeth in the front. People don’t. Squirrels have their eyes on the side of their head and people have them in front. Squirrels have fur and humans don’t have fur.
Squirrels have claws and we don’t. Squirrels have big claws and can climb on trees. Squirrels can climb down trees with their front paws first and we can’t.
People come out of their mommy’s tummies and squirrels come out of mommy’s tummies. Squirrels drink milk and people drink milk. Squirrels run fast, and people don’t. But sometimes people run fast.
Working on a squirrel chart
Photo by David Vitale-Wolff
A Last Trip to the Park
As always, they ran with the sheer pleasure of running—in the leaves, under the trees, on the packed earth—not on sidewalk or playground rubber. It gives them a different sense of freedom, a sense of more space, of more sky, the quality of freedom that children are offered in nature.
For city children, there is no substitute for getting close to the natural world: an open field in a park, a bunch of trees. Nature provides rich material for the senses: the smells of earth, grass, and trees; the sounds of crunching leaves and moving branches; the feeling of the wind; the textures of leaves, bark, and stones; the sensation of kicking a stone or dragging a stick through dusty earth. The experience of being in nature touches children in a way that man-made environments cannot, and adds to the identification between children and the living things they are learning about.
I had a motive behind this trip: it was my new knowledge of squirrels that prompted its planning. From the books we’d looked at, we learned that squirrels’ nests are called drays and that they can be spotted high in the trees. Another teacher told me that she’d seen drays in Riverside Park, so I scouted out the area after school one day. Once I knew what to look for, they were unmistakable, big bunches of old leaves high up among the top branches of oak trees. I’ve always considered myself good at noticing things, and I always look at trees when I walk in the park. But I’d never before noticed the squirrels’ nests.
Our last squirrel trip was in early December. The drays were easily visible because the trees had lost most of their leaves, and the children happily spotted them. We’d brought along peanuts for the squirrels, but they were uninterested. I also wanted the children to draw trees on this trip. Before the trip, I talked to the class about really looking at the different parts of the trees.
In the park, the children sat and drew, working hard at their observations. One of them drew the trunk getting narrower higher up! Denay sat at the base of the tree, leaning against the trunk, gazing directly up in the branches, and drawing for a long time.
When the class returned to school, we looked at the tree drawings, and then I put them up for display in the hall, next to the squirrel charts. The drawings were wonderful in their variety: the different perspectives from which the children had drawn, close to the tree or far away; the different points of view. Some of the drawings showed the roots, others showed mostly trunk and bark; a few drawings showed the whole tree, with branches and twigs clearly articulated. Exhibited together, the drawings made a statement not only about children’s ability to draw with close attention, but about the individuality of children’s ways of seeing trees.
“What About Standards?”
David wants some kind of answer to a question he’s asked before. What are your goals for the year? I pull off the shelf two or three of the multitude of lists of learning objectives that I’ve been handed over the years, and toss them to him: “Here!”
There are real standards and phony standards. Phony standards abound, because boards of education feel they are only getting their money’s worth if they put fat loose-leaf binders in the hands of all the teachers in the school system. Teachers’ guides, lists of goals, mandated standards, scope and sequence: I have a shelf full of them.
These lists of “goals and objectives” may serve a limited function. They may help us think about what we are seeing and hearing. The better of them may form—in part—the “logical reality” that Dewey postulates. Teachers can use these lists to check up on the range of what we are thinking about as we plan. If we accept Dewey’s formulation of the relationship between child and curriculum, we ought to be able to locate children’s interests within the conceptual framework of adult disciplines and knowledge. For example, in studying squirrels, did the children learn that animals’ body structures are adapted to their environment, that animals have evolved ways to find food and defend themselves? To put it differently, when curriculum content is age-appropriate and multidisciplinary, the concepts listed in these handouts are likely to be “covered.”
For new teachers, guides and lists of goals may lessen the feeling of confusion that is a part of planning. But the danger is that these will take the place of our actually seeing and hearing the children in front of us. Rather than thinking about planning by beginning with our real children in their actual environment, teachers feel they must teach to the specified, listed goals. As Karen Gallas puts it, “the curricula and the kits that the experts present to teachers are heedless of children’s questions, development and potential as thinkers, and make assumptions about the kinds of experiences they have had before coming to school.”12
The use of preplanned units of study can prevent teachers from considering whether a concept they have “taught” has been grasped in an operative way. This was brought home to me one long-ago fall, after the class had spent weeks studying apples. We’d bought varieties of apples, tasted apples, cooked apples. We’d visited an orchard and picked apples. We had read about how apples develop from seed to blossom to fruit. Yet when children drew pictures after the orchard trip, several of them drew those stereotypical circular green trees, adding red apples, each with a short stem. Their idea of an apple, that picture of a red circle topped by a black stem, took precedence over their memory of the apples we’d seen on the trees. These children were not ready to give up the idea. When I’d undertaken the “unit,” I had started by looking at and thinking about what children knew or didn’t know about apples—their factual knowledge. That is, when asked what they knew about apples, they would quickly say, “Apples grow on trees.” But I hadn’t thought about children’s actual understandings, about what they imagined to be true, things that they might not explicitly say. I hadn’t considered what it meant that the apples children drew on trees were always drawn with those short stems. I might have described children’s knowledge this way: children associate apples with apple trees but don’t know what it means that they grow on apple trees. If I’d said that to myself at the start of the study, the study might have proceeded differently, with an emphasis on students’ development of understandings of the process of growth.
The standards that I set for myself are never included in the photocopied lists on my shelf. My commitment to attending to children’s understanding of a subject is a real standard. Another standard: are the material, the theme, and the methods of inquiry meaningful and appropriate for these children? I ask myself all year, about one or another of the activities I’ve planned, Is this “real kindergarten work”? It’s easy to get five- and six-year-old children to do what you ask: they (still) like to please adults. But when work is not appropriate, children get cranky, complain of boredom, quarrel with each other, and roll pencils off the table. These same children will
work with concentration and intensity on tasks that they have chosen themselves, or assigned tasks that engage them.
Certain work is “authentic,” by which I mean that it respects the child’s style of learning and developmental stage; it respects children’s intelligence and thinking. Authentic tasks—whether children have initiated them or they were suggested or assigned by the teacher—are congruent with children’s intrinsic motivation, their intense desire to learn, explore, and make things. Much of kindergarten work does not have this character. Teachers and programs use cute pictures and artificial tasks to manipulate children, ignoring intrinsic motivations, as if children must be tricked into participation and education must be coercive.
One indication of whether or not a task or topic is authentic is the quality of children’s involvement, the degree of energy invested. A child who may otherwise be labeled as having attention deficit disorder will spend a solid half hour or longer working on a puzzle or assembling a construction. A second sign that work is appropriate is children’s use of a concept on their own initiative. I have often made a map of “rug spots”—to help children find their assigned spots when they sit on the rug for a story or discussion. The laminated map, with the children’s names and photos, is in constant use, consulted when children come to the rug: “No! You sit next to Molly, not in front of her!” a child will say, pointing to the relevant spots on the map. The constant use they make of the map indicates to me that this particular symbolic representation makes sense and is an authentic tool for this age. In addition, the children often follow my lead and make their own rug maps, using drawings or names to represent people. They move on to other maps (including treasure maps, of course).
Kindergarten: A Teacher, Her Students, and a Year of Learning Page 9