Hopes for Educators’ Engagement with Children

“What we believe about children’s rights and capacities informs how we craft professional learning,” write Ann Pelo and Margie Carter in their inspiring new book, From Teaching to Thinking: “If we believe that children are capable of inquiry and are active constructors of knowledge, then we create opportunities for exploration that grow from and speak into children’s passions and pursuits and their developmental unfolding. And we provide educators with support for reflective, responsive planning. Educators, in turn, engage children with curiosity and attention, with the dispositions of researchers, seeing children as the source of curriculum…

Here’s how I hope that educators engage with children:

• I hope that educators hold children in the highest regard.
  
  
• I hope that educators invite children to stretch even as they affirm children’s competence and knowledge.
  
  
• I hope that educators honor heart and spirit as well as mind.
  
  
• I hope that educators plan responsively and with curiosity, with clearly articulated values and pedagogical commitments.
  
  
• I hope that educators make children’s learning visible to them, as well as their questions and misunderstandings, in a way that invites further questioning and learning.
  
  
• I hope that educators engage children in the pursuit of an idea over long stretches of time.
  
  
• I hope that educators are willing to be changed by what they learn from and with children.”

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