Kindergarten: A Teacher, Her Students, and a Year of Learning

by Diamond, Julie

  In general, systems of management that rely on competition and material rewards don’t help children develop their own understandings of right and wrong, their own notions of justice and fairness, cooperation and conscience. Approaches to classroom management that rely primarily on external motivation, on rewards and punishment, are centered on adult power and control; they cannot effectively teach children to think about and regulate their own behavior, nor are they intended to. The threat is what carries weight: if this class doesn’t behave nicely, we won’t go to the play! In a sense, when children in this kind of classroom fight, they are merely replicating, in a more direct and violent form, the governing assumption of social interactions, the tit for tat, the lack of faith in cooperation as a motive, the absence of a thoughtful, open, questioning response to problems.

  Last, no method of managing children’s quarrels works all the time for all children. Too often, we generalize about children (“Denay always cries when things go wrong”). When we do, we assume an unchanging child and an unchanging adult: “we” manage “them.” This point of view permits a stereotyping bias in relation to that child; it doesn’t allow us the distance to help. We don’t see the specific child in the specific conflict: what is it that set her off? If we see children in generalized ways, we’re less likely to ask questions, to look back at exactly what happened, and at everything we know about this child, to dig for full explanations that will add to what we know about the child. Children are not inorganic, stable elements. We need to manage particular moments, to see each child with greater specificity, to take as much as we can into account. We can inform that difficult moment with details that are obscured when we react in a more immediate and unthinking way:

  Denay cannot catch her breath. I send her with Hayley to wash her face, but still she sobs every time she tries to talk. It was what she was like the first day of school; I’d forgotten . It’s a sort of zone of discomfort, of nonfunctioning. What triggers it? There is still, sometimes, a fragility to her—even though at other times she seems easy, even though she is generally so competent. I remember the way she held onto Graham as a partner, in the beginning, someone she knew, someone she could completely depend on.

  When we see children with more detail, we look differently at the two children who continually squabble, who seem to rub each other the wrong way. Although we might still separate them, we also ask ourselves questions. What is it about the two of them that brings them into these perpetual conflicts? What are the traits that draw them into battle again and again? Two children with short fuses? Two children who tease? Two would-be leaders? There are as many answers as there are sparring children. What draws them to each other—is there anything positive in their relationship that the teacher can work with? The teacher’s response has to be built from knowledge of these two and their unique antagonism. It’s over weekends, away from the two and their barbed encounters, that the teacher can plan a long-term strategy that might help them replace hostility with a measure of civility. When this is possible, even for short periods, the tone of the entire class is affected.

  We must use weekends, too, to look at our own reactions to a particular child who gets our goat, because we can find ourselves taking things personally, or disliking one child—it is a topic not often discussed. A teacher friend had a telling story: one day she heard the blocks crash, and without thinking, called out one child’s name—the boy she’d assumed had knocked a building over. Then she remembered he was absent that day. Those kinds of automatic responses should make us think. For each of us, one attribute may be especially annoying or disturbing. I’m challenged by defiant behavior, I overreact; for another teacher, it’s whining or tattling. Some teachers can’t stand bullying. We like to think teachers are above such personal weaknesses; not true. Self-knowledge may be uncomfortable, and gaining it may entail doubt and unpleasant truths. But when a teacher catches herself quarreling with a child, she must begin by examining her own preferences and antipathies.

  What Do We Mean by Managing a Class?

  That is what teaching is, our continual looking at and asking questions about a child or children, and about ourselves, about something we did or didn’t do. It is how we continually become professional—rather, become who we are in this profession.

  Just as children are not set, stable elements, neither are we. We manage things better or worse on different days, at different times. Thus, when we think about “managing” a class, we have to take into account many elements. Ultimately, when we think about managing a class, we’re describing how motivated, energized, responsible, and together a class is, but we’re also talking about ourselves. What’s the teacher’s role in achieving this? We have to search for elements we can control, understanding that just as children change, we do too.

  These matters are not, most deeply, matters of management; they are not, most deeply, technical. There are techniques involved: we can train ourselves to put our directions in a positive frame whenever possible: to say walk rather than don’t run. I have found it works to give a child a direction, then walk away, busy myself, and check back. When I talk to the whole class, I make sure I can see all of their faces—and that the faces are turned toward me. If two children are still talking, I say, “I’m waiting for you!” I make certain, as noted earlier, that supplies are prepared; make sure that if I am brimming with anger because of what a child just did, I wait to talk to the child, saying only, “I’m too upset right now to speak to you!” There are effective methods, effective tones of voice, effective looks, and effective actions: we seek them as beginning teachers; we test, fail, test again, and refine. These must become our own. My colleague Hollee Freeman used to say, “You are plucking my last nerve!” I say, “What did I just ask you to do?” and “Can you hear how irritated my voice is sounding right now?” We learn to count to ten; we learn to hold children’s attention; we learn to use humor and a light touch. That quality of touch: present, not grabby.

  We learn when to ignore something, when that’s the better part of wisdom. We learn when not to ignore; we learn when to call an “emergency meeting” or make the time to have a conference with a child whose behavior we’re concerned about, to ask, “What’s going on?” We learn to recognize the circumstances that set off a particular child, to help the child recognize those circumstances before something occurs, and to praise the child for changed behavior afterwards. We learn when to yet again practice getting on line, and when to give it a break, let it go. We learn what kinds of compromises to suggest, what kinds of negotiation will work with individual children. We learn to see the progress being made by a difficult child, and to give that child credit; we learn to take into account the occasional steps backwards. Teachers can, with perseverance, find what works.

  But the job of teaching is a human job: techniques rest on the spirit with which they’re applied. Our feelings matter, and are communicated; when adults’ intentions or tone are at odds with their words, children aren’t fooled.

  In the conclusion of Teaching Children to Care, Ruth Charney takes up the notion of the connection between our “deepest selves” and our work; she refers to the “authentic teaching” that is possible when teachers draw on personal resources.1 Authentic teaching reflects both our “unique strengths and passions” and our willingness to “reveal our vulnerabilities.” 2 Charney outlines the difficulty of our dual task. “Care for children,” she writes, “is both a burden and a gift of the spirit.” 3 We must take responsibility for our own growth, as well as our students’. As Charney aptly comments, “Authenticity is knowing oneself well enough to allow others to know themselves.” 4 Knowledge of children and knowledge of ourselves develop in tandem; respect for ourselves parallels respect for our students.

  The teacher’s genuine authority resides in the ability to repeatedly inhabit and communicate a self that is just, fair, open-minded, responsible; not someone perfect, but someone accountable—accountable most crucially for building relationships w
ith students. To the extent that that’s who we are—who we can be for our students—we make it more likely that our students, through their identification with us, will find and nourish those qualities in themselves. To the extent, too, that we see those qualities in them, we not only encourage their development, we gain strength for ourselves.

  To this end, when we reflect on our mistakes, it should be with a generosity of spirit. At the end of the school year, adding up pluses and minuses, I can’t wipe out the memory of my reaction when Emily and Francie bickered over the possession of something or other for the tenth time that morning—and wrote on each other with markers. I snapped at them. In that moment, I took the quarrel as a judgment on myself and my teaching: it doesn’t happen, after all, when they are immersed in activity. With distance, I can think about the quarrel and about my own feelings. I can find a viewpoint that is critical but not judgmental.

  Authentic teaching is, I think, a product of our ability to learn—to learn about ourselves, to learn about the children in our care, to examine the possibilities that a teaching setting can provide. This openness is, in turn, a product of our empathy with children and with our own struggles for growth.

  Our authority as teachers, I believe, rests squarely on the continuing commitment to knowing our children and ourselves: Right now, I’m learning how to not let Sam disappear, how to not let him not know what we are doing. I pull him out. Or, to put it differently, I try to find out, when he disappears into himself, what that “himself” consists of. The learning I have to do is endless and infinite. The authority we gain as knowers of children gives us the strength to stand up for what we believe is best for them; it makes it incumbent on us to do so. Our commitment to this goal also legitimizes a continual search for forms of authentic learning, a continual questioning of what authentic work is.

  Student teachers sometimes confuse my teaching style—my concern that children take responsibility, my preference for curriculum based on children’s interests, my repudiation of dependence on external rewards and punishments, my informal manner—with adult passivity. Nothing could be more disastrous. The student teacher, Valerie, was lining them up, but they were a mess, all over the place. She stood there and made no attempt to get them in line and quiet. I didn’t want to take over. We’d just talked about her being less “formal” in how she speaks to them—or rather, finding a way to be herself-as-a-teacher. Does she think that means to simply allow them to be unruly? When we got back to the room, I was short-tempered with the children. It wasn’t their fault—I was annoyed with her for not taking charge. We take responsibility—as adults—by insisting that children take responsibility for themselves. In this way, we promote the development of social attitudes; we work with their better impulses: I say to the class, Look at this! Who left the table like this? Another time, Hayley comes to me and says, I don’t know what to write about. I say, I don’t know! Later, I check back, and if she still hasn’t begun, offer an idea.

  It’s ironic that this role should be taken as a passive one; it’s anything but passive. It requires activity and engagement, although those may take the form of looking, listening, and looking again. We gain authority and legitimacy to the extent that we manage this balancing act: knowing when to watch, knowing when to step in.

  Valuing Childhood

  So many management skills are physical. I’ve learned a way of talking, looking at the child and then away, communicating an absolute belief that they will do the thing asked. A faith . . . a confidence in what’s expected from each of us. It’s how a relationship is made real—that, and the commitment I have to only asking of them things I have a right to be asking as a teacher. Which means knowing what a particular child or group is capable of.

  The underpinning of this sort of teaching is faith—faith in children’s ability to learn, to grow and change; faith in my instincts as a teacher, a knower of children. This faith is so ingrained that it expresses itself through tone, through touch, and through the slow building of relationships. Faith in children’s learning is part of a system of values. It is built, Charney writes, on “a strong foundation of what we believe and value most . . . [our] ideals and principles.” 5

  Seeing teaching as a value-laden enterprise is especially important at this time, when we are repeatedly told that research should drive instruction, as if research were objective and valuefree. That assumption is false: What questions are studied? How does the preference for quantitative data affect the questions we’re able or likely to ask?

  Values are embedded in all we do and say, in all our decisions. To put it differently, they are given meaning through what we do; as John Dewey declared, “There is no such thing as educational value in the abstract.” 6 When I call the class to the rug because children are cleaning up in a disorganized and distracted way, I’m likely to question them: “Why did I ask everyone to come to the rug?” The question implies the existence of a social contract, applied to the class as a whole.

  Values are inherent in such practices as my frequent sharing of children’s work, the space I make for children’s individual solutions, my insistence that children pay attention to each other, my encouragement of rituals that children invent, and my use of management techniques that emphasize the needs of the class as a whole. Values are inherent when I give children the space to develop individual passions and allegiances, for example, when I allow them to choose which undersea animal they wish to study.

  Children’s passions add to the richness of the classroom’s common life, but in valuing individual feelings and the common good, I’m making a choice of values. My purposes are social and moral, and refer, as Dewey put it, to the quality of “human experience.” 7 For Dewey, educational values inhere in actions that give meaning to human lives. He makes this point beautifully in concluding his discussion of values in Democracy and Education: Education “is not a mere means to . . . [a conscious, moral] life. Education is such a life.” 8

  Our values may be invisible, but they affect our functioning. The parent of a child I taught once told me how much she appreciated the fact that the children who were articulate and responsive, who were easy to teach, weren’t favored in my class. I hadn’t thought about it consciously. My behavior grew from the conviction that every life has value and weight, that, as Patricia Carini writes, “the person . . . has intrinsic value, and his or her being and experience have both coherence and durability—that is, integrity.” 9

  This point of view gives us each responsibility in relation to others’ lives. It defines teaching for me as the work of seeing each child, knowing each child. It helps us find a position from which to respond when faced with conflicting demands.10 Our moral responsibility in relation to children is, as Charney puts it, “not a simple imposition”—it is allied with children’s developmental requirements, their “desire to be included and attached.” 11

  We also ally ourselves in a consistent way with children’s urge to know. When children choose which animal to study, their feelings fuel investigation: “What we feel deeply about . . . evokes our thought.” 12 These spheres are not separate: children’s social and moral development and their intellectual development can be viewed together. In Reggio schools, children “are active and competent protagonists [emphasis in text] who seek completion through dialogue and interaction with others, in a collective life of the classroom, community, and culture, with teachers serving as guides.” 13

  These moral and social imperatives inform my understanding of educational purposes. Day to day, they translate for me as a sense of what childhood demands from adults: What do we know / believe about the nature of childhood? I think about what childhood is for, what it “wants to be.” It is an art, perhaps, the art of being a child, and not all children are equally good at it, or rather, equally allowed to become good, given the conditions of becoming good—not “good children,” but good at being children, which implies, allows for, the normal difficulties of reconciling one’s will with the realities
of the world. What do children need from us, from adults? Consideration, kindness, concern/understanding for their essential weakness and vulnerability; a love of their love of play, of beauty and movement, and of their love of action; appreciation of their physical need to act upon, to gain mastery, to look into, to squirm.

  Our job, I believe, is to take into account the qualities specific to children: their openness to experience, their plasticity, their ability to identify with things, their almost compulsive interest in exploring, examining, seeing what will happen. These qualities take different forms in different places and times. Yet if we carefully observe children at play, listen to them as they converse, we can learn more of who they are: I just thought about “Doughnut Girl,” my granddaughter’s imaginary friend. I’m struck, again and again, by how quickly children come up with imaginative explanations that exactly suit their needs. How did she come up with this perfect name—food in the form of a friend, or vice versa? What is central for me is faith in children’s ability to tell us who they are. In an interview, Carlina Rinaldi, former director of the Reggio preschools, put it this way: “The cornerstone of our experience, based on practice, theory, and research, is the image of the children as rich, strong, and powerful.” 14 My task as a teacher is to discover the unique capacities and aptitudes of the children I teach, and then to create conditions that make it possible for them to work with others to extend these capacities. To set up conditions for them to be children—curious, inquiring, socially involved. In short, our job is to see, and to give importance to what we’ve seen.