ChildCareExchange.com - ExchangeEveryDay

Think Like a Kid

Thu, 02 Sep 2010 00:00:00 EDT

It\'s not every day that I get to cite an item from my home town of Fargo, but today is one of those days:

Researchers Darya Zabelina and Michael Robinson of North Dakota State University (in Fargo), in an article in Psychology Today (August 2010) advocate applying a "childlike mind-set to our daily lives" in order to boost our creativity. Zabelina explained... "It\'s about giving yourself permission to explore and free time to play. It would not just increase your creativity — it would also motivate you to create."

Robinson suggested these ways to boost creativity:

View yourself in a more light-hearted fashion, perhaps by thinking of your odd (but not ego-threatening) quirks.
Adults develop habits that narrow the range of what they think is possible. Do something spontaneous, preferably every day.
Grownups treat errands as problems to be solved in a logical manner. Appreciate tasks as opportunities for exploration, not boring duties.
Being present and living in the moment gives you the opportunity to appreciate fun when it occurs.
Free time is free time. Don\'t fill every moment with chores.

Quarterbacks and Teachers

Wed, 01 Sep 2010 00:00:00 EDT

Malcolm Gladwell, author of Blink and The Tipping Point, has equated the difficulty in selecting a successful quarterback in professional football with selecting a good teacher (whether it be a preschool or a high school teacher). In What the Dog Saw (New York: Little Brown and Company, 2009) he gave multiple examples to demonstrate how NFL teams find it almost impossible to judge how a college quarterback will do as a pro. Many Heisman Trophy-winning quarterbacks have been total failures in the NFL and many barely-noticed college quarterbacks have become superstars. He concludes that there are certain jobs, such as quarterback, "where almost nothing you can learn about candidates before they start predicts how they will do once they are hired." He continues... "A number of fields have begun to wrestle with this problem, but none with such profound social consequences as the profession of teaching."

Gladwell goes on to describe how the key to the success in teaching is the quality of the teacher — "the difference between good teachers and poor teachers turns out to be vast... If you rank the countries of the world in terms of academic performance of their school children, the United States is just below average ... the United States could close this gap simply by replacing the bottom 6 percent to 10 percent of public school teachers with teachers of average quality.... But there\'s a hitch: No one knows what a person with potential to be a great teacher looks like. The school system has the quarterback problem."

Gladwell concludes this essay with that radical suggestion that to find successful teachers at any level we can\'t exclude people based on test scores or certificates, but we need to keep "the gate as wide open as possible" and then hold on to the ones who demonstrate what it takes on the job. "... We shouldn\'t be raising standards. We should be lowering them, because there is no point in raising standards if standards don\'t track with what we care about.... Teachers should be judged after they start their jobs, not before."

Teacher Knows Best?

Tue, 31 Aug 2010 00:00:00 EDT

In her popular Exchange book, How Does it Feel? Child Care from Families\' Perspectives, Anne Stonehouse asks, "How would you feel if you believed that the professionals in the program were more knowledgeable and expert about your child than you were?" ... and then observed...

"The knowledge and expertise of experienced professionals can be very helpful to families, especially those who are inexperienced. At the same time it can be daunting. Professionals need to take care about giving out advice and information to families. Parent support is much more appropriate than believing that you have a mandate to \'educate families.\' The point is to support and empower families as the most important people in their child\'s life. Excellent parenting involves both availing yourself of information and advice and also trusting yourself. Too much information from \'experts\' can cause families to lose confidence and become confused, especially when advice is conflicting."

Best Educated Nations

Mon, 30 Aug 2010 00:00:00 EDT

Newsweek recently ranked "The Best Countries in the World" based on education, health, quality of life, economic competitiveness and political environment. Below are their rankings for the top 25 nations in terms of education. In commenting on the high ranking of South Korea, Newsweek observed..."It\'s hard to imagine now, but back in the 1960\'s South Korea\'s national wealth was on par with Afghanistan\'s. Today it\'s one of the world\'s richest nations, in large part thanks to its focus on education."

Finland
South Korea
Canada
Singapore
Japan
Switzerland
Estonia
UK
Ireland
Netherlands
Belgium
New Zealand
Australia
France
Kazakhstan
Germany
Czech Republic
Switzerland
Cuba
Denmark
Austria
Croatia
Hungary
Latvia
United States

Training for Principals

Fri, 27 Aug 2010 00:00:00 EDT

The National Association of Elementary School Principals (NAESP) is calling for elementary school principals to get focused professional development to help them meet the higher expectations of modern early childhood education. In reporting this proposal, Education Week (August 11, 2010) observes..."in a bid to stamp out the achievement gaps that often plague poor and minority children before they start school, groups in early childhood are emphasizing the need for principals to be poised to lead good practices for pupils in prekindergarten to grade 3."

In the article Barbara Chester, President of NAESP, notes that "learning what developmentally appropriate practice looks like can be a challenge for any principal, but especially for those who come to elementary schools from secondary school backgrounds....We are looking for ways for our principals to have more training and understanding of what they should be able to do and know. The goal is not to make school for the youngest into a \'mini-kindergarten,\' but for principals to learn how to link up with early childhood providers that operate in their communities and even sometimes in their school buildings in a way that makes that transition for the youngest child easier....

"It is important for the principal to make way not just for the practices to happen in the school, but also the school\'s mission to engage families as well. It\'s a pedagogical underpinning, not just a philosophical tenet of schooling."

Creativity Revisited

Thu, 26 Aug 2010 00:00:00 EDT

We are thrilled when an ExchangeEveryDay message generates a lively discussion. The message for July 27, "The Creativity Crisis," attracted some interesting comments on the website, and spurred a discussion on the World Forum\'s play listserv. We invite you to go back and review this message, read the excerpts below of web comments, and then add your own input.

Sally Rowden from Madera, California wrote: I\'ve currently been rereading "Crisis in the Kindergarten — Why Children Need to Play in School," by Edward Miller and Joan Almon — Alliance for Childhood, which supports highly this current article shared by Exchange. The article quotes Daniel Pink, author of "A Whole New Mind," who writes about "imagination economy." How future leadership in the business world is demanding folks that think with creativity. The article gives valid research on how play, in it\'s complexity, supports children\'s learning in language skills, social skills, empathy, imagination, taking another\'s perspective, being less aggressive, having more self-control and higher levels of thinking (creative/abstract). It examines a "laissez-faire, loosely structured classroom; a classroom rich in child-initiated play; a playful classroom with focused learning; and, didactic instruction with no play" recognizing that teachers must have an understanding of all four methods. Yet, encouraging a balance of the "two central methods" (child-initiated play and play focused learning) which "leads to life long benefits."

Nancy K. Bush, Child Day Care Association in St. Louis, Missouri observed: I wrote this note to my boyfriend\'s daughter and now want to share it here, too. OMG. OMG! This is so cool. It reminds me of the quote — who said it? "We don\'t stop playing because we grow old. We grow old because we stop playing." Ah, the Internet. George Bernard Shaw said that. Cherish those questions from Natalie. Look up answers together. LEARN together. I learned every single day when I was a preschool teacher as a result of the books I read with the children, from observing and talking with them, from being ok with not knowing and saying so. I found that the kids were so impressed — not like, she\'s so cool because she knows everything, impressed as in, making an impression on their minds, their psyches — when I said I didn\'t know, followed by "We can look it up." As a corollary, children are also impressed when you say you are wrong and take steps to make whatever it was right, whether information, making assumptions or hurt feelings. When children grow up knowing that making mistakes is an acceptable part of life, a necessary part of life, they are willing to take intellectual risks, to think outside that box, to be creative and learn for the sheer joy of it.

Successful Enterprises

Wed, 25 Aug 2010 00:00:00 EDT

In his article "9 + 1 = Fun!" in the July/August 2010 issue of Exchange, Dennis Vicars outlines the characteristics of every "truly successful enterprise that I have encountered":

Employs strategic leadership
Is organized in a way to promote maximum individual staff performance
Promotes maximum individual growth and self-actualization
Is relationship oriented
Is always recruiting, always interviewing, and always prepared to hire positive people who will improve the organization
Is committed to ongoing training and the promotion of individual growth
Is efficient and effective
Has a culture of excellent service (to parents, vendors, and each other)
Is nurturing, with an emphasis on making mistakes early so that eventual success is guaranteed
Is a fun place to be!

Impact of Maternal Employment

Tue, 24 Aug 2010 00:00:00 EDT

Researchers at Columbia University have found that children of mothers who work full time show some cognitive delays that continue into first grade, but there are positive effects of mothers\' working outside the home that mediate those effects. In the article "First-year Maternal Employment and Child Development in the First 7 Years", in the August 2010 issue of Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development, the researchers observed that "mothers who worked had higher \'maternal sensitivity\' or responsiveness to their children and were more likely to place their children in high quality child care."

Technology and the Brain

Mon, 23 Aug 2010 00:00:00 EDT

Recently, five brain scientists spent a week in May in a remote area of Utah, rafting the San Juan River, camping on its banks, and hiking the tributary canyons. A New York Times article "Outdoors and Out of Reach, Studying the Brain" described this as "a primitive trip with a sophisticated goal: to understand how heavy use of digital devices and other technology changes how we think and behave, and how a retreat into nature might reverse those effects."

The trip was organized by David Strayer, a psychology professor at the University of Utah, who is studying "what happens when we step away from our devices and rest our brains — in particular how attention, memory, and learning are affected." Strayer observed...

"Attention is the holy grail. Everything that you're conscious of, everything you let in, everything you remember and you forget, depends on it.... On a day-to-day basis, too much digital stimulation can take people who would be functioning O.K. and put them in a range where they're not psychologically healthy."

Strayer and fellow trip participant Paul Atchley, professor at the University of Kansas who studies teenagers' compulsive use of cell phones, argue that "heavy technology use can inhibit deep thought and cause anxiety, and that getting out into nature can help." They planned the trip to prove their point.

The Magic of Preschool

Fri, 20 Aug 2010 00:00:00 EDT

An article, "How does preschool work its magic?," in Wired magazine, reviews a new paper by Flavio Cunha, an economist at the University of Pennsylvania, and James Heckman, a Nobel Laureate at the University of Chicago, on the reasons to invest in preschool education. In the paper Cunha and Heckman discuss the findings of the Perry Preschool Study and the article summarizes....

"Interestingly, the Perry Preschool didn’t lead to a lasting boost in IQ scores. While kids exposed to preschool got an initial bump in general intelligence, this dissipated by second grade. Instead, preschool seemed to improve performance on a variety of \'non-cognitive\' abilities, such as self-control, persistence, and grit. While society has long obsessed over raw smarts — just look at our fixation on IQ scores — Heckman and Cunha argue that these non-cognitive traits are often more important. They note, for instance, that dependability is the trait most valued by employers, while \'perseverance, dependability, and consistency are the most important predictors of grades in school.\' Of course, these valuable skills have little or anything to do with general intelligence. And that’s probably a good thing, since our non-cognitive traits are much more malleable, at least when interventions occur at an early age, than IQ. Preschool might not make us smarter — our intelligence is strongly shaped by our genes — but it can make us a better person, and that’s even more important."

Art from Nature

Thu, 19 Aug 2010 00:00:00 EDT

The World Forum Foundation is enriched by its partnership with the early childhood community in Bolivia. Led by Maria Carmen Schulze (to whom this work is now dedicated) and Roxana Salazar, early childhood educators in Bolivia have explored how they can promote children\'s creativity through art in even the most impoverished settings. The result is a series of beautiful, bilingual books sharing how to promote drawing, modeling, and construction with natural materials. In the introduction to the second book in the series, Modeling with Children Under Six Years Old, Salazar and Schulze explained their challenge:

"....We realised that we needed to provide alternatives for what we did not have. For example, where we did not have tables, we had flat areas of earth; where we did not have pencils, we had branches and charcoal; where we did not have white papers, we had old newspapers and flat stones; where we did not have colours, we had plants, flowers, fruits and soil; and where we did not have teachers, we had mothers and young community volunteers. The constant was, however, that we always have children who want to live, to learn, and to dream. We discovered that the transcendental value of living was strongly rooted despite the lack of materials in this urban or rural poverty context...

"In short, this situation motivated us to begin looking for alternatives and real possibilities, and to promote sustained creativity in the minds of the children and the community educators. The situation of poverty should not paralyze our aspirations and the integral development of our children. On the contrary, we found that the context of poverty was the genuine source of our liberation. In that web of miseries and ventures, we were able to find solutions by using what was in the environment. This comprised of three components:

Social component: we had families who were of very low income and few material possessions, but who were willing to participate extensively.
Nature component: we had a beautiful and mysterious landscape of mountains, forests, and rivers with their different climates.
Cultural component: we had languages, traditions, legends, dances, songs, and art.

"This experience has convinced us of the hypothesis outlined in the first document: \'the child develops his/her artistic potential in spite of the conditions of poverty, as long as his/her brain is not affected and has a motivational atmosphere in his/her environment\'."

Gifted or Disabled

Wed, 18 Aug 2010 00:00:00 EDT

In a thought-provoking article, "Your Brain is a Rain Forest," in Ode magazine (April 2010), Thomas Armstrong posits that "whether you are regarded as disabled or gifted, depends largely upon when and where you live":

"No brain exists in a social vacuum. Each brain functions in a particular cultural setting and at a particular historical period that define its level of competence. Each civilization also defines its own forms if giftedness. In ancient cultures that depended upon religious rituals for social cohesion, it might have been schizophrenics (who heard the voices of gods), or the obsessive compulsives (who carried out the precise rituals) who were the gifted ones. Even in today\'s world, being at the right place at the right time seems to be critical in terms of defining whether you will be defined as gifted or disabled.

"One of the things I\'ve noticed in my work as a special education teacher is that kids in special ed. classes tend to be the weakest in those things the schools value the most (reading, writing, math, test-taking, rule-following), and strongest in those things schools value least (art, music, nature, street smarts, physical skill). So they end up being regarded by society as attention deficit disordered or learning disabled: ultimately defined by what they can\'t do rather than by what they can do."

Best Training Tools

Tue, 17 Aug 2010 00:00:00 EDT

What are the best ways to provide training to new, inexperienced teachers? Do new teachers pick up the tools of the trade most quickly: as experienced teachers observe them in action and provide feedback; by watching videos, by attending workshops; or by other means?

We invite you to share your insights on what methods and tools are most effective in training inexperienced teachers in today\'s Exchange Insta Poll.

Vikings and Farmers

Mon, 16 Aug 2010 00:00:00 EDT

"Executives who excel at execution resemble Nordic Vikings, who attacked when they saw an unprotected spot and retreated when they realized they couldn\'t win, maneuvering their longboats toward the next opportunity." Offering insights for contemporary leaders, Donald Sull, in his Harvard Business Review article, "Are You Ready to Rebound?" (March 2010) continues...

"Once Vikings seized a bit of land, however, they often remained to farm it. Over time, they came to value the security of protecting what they had more than the adventure of pursuing new opportunities. Organizations are susceptible to a similar dynamic. As a business matures, early entrepreneurs may leave for new adventures or settle into safe routines at the firm. New employees join the company for its perceived stability, not for adventure. What started as a Viking outpost becomes a farming community. Firms need farmers, of course. But companies with too few Vikings on the payroll struggle to execute with sufficient urgency."

Haiti and Pepsi

Fri, 13 Aug 2010 00:00:00 EDT

Haiti/Gulf Fundraising Success

Thank you to all who contributed so generously to the Nature Action Teams from Haiti and Louisiana. Over $9,000 was raised to bring multi-disciplinary teams from these communities to participate in the Connecting Children with Nature Action Forum in order to prepare for campaigns to connect children with nature. After the Forum in October we will be carrying periodic updates on the campaigns of all 60 Nature Action Teams from 30 nations.

Vote for T.E.A.C.H.

The Pepsi Refresh Project is awarding $250,000 for the top vote getting project among 1,200 contestants. Currently ranked #23 is Teacher Education and Compensation Helps (T.E.A.C.H.) Early Childhood® Project. T.E.A.C.H. provides comprehensive scholarships to early educators in 20 states. Scholarships provide access to higher education for a low-income workforce that cannot afford college. Scholarships enable early childhood teachers to take coursework leading to early childhood credentials and degrees by making it possible for them to afford both the time and expense of going to school. Research shows that young children who are cared for by educated teachers are more likely to graduate high school, pursue secondary education, and contribute to a viable workforce.

If T.E.A.C.H. wins the $250,000 grant from Pepsi, it will provide 325 scholarships for teachers. To cast your vote for T.E.A.C.H, click here.