Thoughts About Kindergarten

 

Thoughts About Kindergarten

I read parts of an article this week about the problems being experienced with online Kindergarten and how to help teachers deal with that particular age group.  As you can see from the picture above, Kindergarten is all about active learning.  It is all about helping the young people explore their environment and learn how to function in a classroom of others like them.  In one of the books I've read over the years, an expression used to describe teachers engaged in teaching in their closed classrooms was that they were like kindergarteners engaged in parallel play.  When kids enter school, they are very much centred on playing with themselves and kindergarten is all about getting them to learn to engage with each other and become ready for the years of schooling to come.  So how does that translate into online learning when schools are forced to stay close because of the pandemic?  It occurred to me that what ought to be taking place is not interacting with the students but interacting with their parents and giving them tips on how to help begin the important school journey confronting their young ones.  I thought that the teacher could have a blog where he or she posts ideas on how to keep the kindergartener engaged and what a typical kindergartener should be able to do and how to engage them in rudimentary math and language learning.  It might also mean a lot of emails back and forth and sharing of resources.  One has to assume that if they are that young, the parents or a parent is at home with the student or maybe even a grandparent and dealing with that age group as students rather than offspring is very complicated but so crucial to future development.  As I am writing this, school boards ought to have professionals online all day who are there to consult with parents not with students.  So many questions arise that require professional knowledge, no matter what the age.  We have, forever, taught teachers-in-training that the parents are our partners in the educational process. But when you read articles about online learning, it is all about the kids. Of course it is hard, very hard, but that is because making the leap from parent to teacher is not easy and parents need coaching really no matter what the age of the child. Communicating with parents on a regular basis would also send a signal to ther parents that they are not alone, that a professional educator is available to consult with when a parent is not sure how to proceed. Having been a consultant myself, I don't see that that would be so difficult to transition to.  It is not that much different from helping teachers know what to do than helping parents know what to do and sharing that information with teachers.  I sometimes get there feeling that not enough educators are thinking outside the box.  Since it looks like we are going to have our ups and downs, lockdowns and opening ups, for a least another six months, school boards need to think out of the box lest we lose a whole year of schooling for our kids. We are already seeing the strains on that now.

Change is NOT an Option Today

 

Change is NOT an Option Today

Now that schools are returning to some variation of in-person learning  when and where possible, but others are no able to even begin to think about starting again, so many are talking about the almost compulsive necessity to make changes to how we teach and how students learn.  The idea of a school where students came every day of the week for so many hours and worked through levels of subjects and were off for two months of the year in the summer was an invention of the late 19th century.  It was perceived that too many young people on the streets working for peanuts or just getting into problems was a danger sign for society. So, schools evolved to what they were at the end of the last century, more or less. They stayed that way for the rest of the 20th Century. At the end of the century, though, a revolution occurred - the technology revolution. From not long after my entry into the profession until the end of it, Information and Computer Technologies, soon to be called there digital revolution, began to creep into classrooms all over the world.  The longer they hung around and the more central they became to the education of our young people, the more it was realized that they were going to make it necessary to change not only the physical but the pedagogical background of every classroom.  Now that the pandemic has required teachers in every part of the globe to extend the reach of their classrooms into the house of their students and now that the parents of those same students are realizing that they have a role to play in ensuring their children have access to technological tools and to the resources that make online learning possible.  It is not going to be an easy or a cheap process and where we end up and how soon we do is not written in the cards.  But make no mistakes.  The revolution in how technology dominates learning in the third decade of the 21st Century will have as an unintended consequence the way in which education in total is handled.  We know so much more about what effective teaching is and how deep learning occurs.  We know precisely how technology can assist that learning.  What needs to be top of mind is that good education is collaborative learning and there has to be an effective and skilled guide on the side to help students reach their potential.  It has be seen as no different than how we teach and perfect top athletes and what it takes to be good at any skill.  Talent for sure, skill for sure, but effective coaching as well to bring out the best in each and every young person who reaches for that brass ring, for the podium, for the gold medallions.  

Evaluation Versus Assessment

Evaluation Versus Assessment

Another question that is crucial to understanding the changes in education today is the concept of Assessment versus Evaluation.  Assessment is a process and evaluation is an act. Assessment is ongoing and evaluation is a picture of a snapshot in time.  In any classroom, a good classroom teacher is assessing his or her students and their work and progress all the time, We are assessing for growth and growth is ongoing or it should be. We have a variety of different ways of making assessment of student growth. These include observations, asking questions, looking at work in progress, testing knowledge gained, asking for performances of some kind to demonstrate new knowledge and so forth.  WE need to be keeping records on each student, as an individual, and not as a member of a class.  This is different from Evaluation.  WE have an obligation to report to parents about how their child is doing and doing this reporting periodically.  It has to be periodic because some weeks can go by when the student is working very well and then something can happen at home or with a friend or within the child and so progress slows or stops completely. Students need to know what we will be saying to parents because they want to know what is being said about them.  But there should be no surprises for students when it comes time to report to parents because if we gave beeb properly assessing students, we have been talking to them about progress, questioning ups and downs and making judgements about their strengths and weaknesses.  I remember a particular year teaching a group of student with more than one or two who believed they were much smarter and better than I was judging them to be. They wanted to do next to nothing and be rewarded for that lack of effort. I was trying to rectify that belief.  I had to fail a student in a particular subject because he had done almost nothing. The father came in and all but accused me of not treating his son fairly.  I had to explain what was going on and then I had student work based upon the same assignment and shared that with the father so that he could see what his son had NOT done compared to what another boy of equal opportunity HAD done.  Having been able to show the father what his son was trying to get away with for finished work made ALL the difference in the world.  So evaluation is what we communicate to parents about their children on their report cards or on a phone call or at a parent-teacher interview. If we are going to be fair to the students, we need to have enough meaningful data to support our analysis and value judgements.  We need to ensure teachers and parents understand that there is a difference between Assessment and Evaluation and we need to work at gathering enough evidence so that we have data to support our prognostications.  

The Changing Nature of Assessment

The Changing Nature of Assessment

When I first started school, I can remember the report cards that came home with a bunch of letter grades and a small square with comments from the teacher and the competition was on to see how many A's a person got.  I used to get a fair number of A's but my handwriting was always atrocious and my grade in Physical Education left a great deal to be desired.  By the time I was ready to be a teacher, things hadn't changed much.  I remember distinctly making a table using my class list and having a column for each assignment and what mark the students received whether it was on a small quiz or a major assignment and then adding up all the marks, even if it was out of 425 and figuring out the percentage out of 100 and THEN transforming that to a letter grade with a plus or a minus for some wiggle room. What a crock of shit.  Even then, I realized that that was not the best way to assessment students.  Now we have come a long way in the almost fifty years since I first worked in a classroom.  We now know so much more about what assessment is and what it is not and why we do it.  We know that we assess for growth......how much or how little did a student grow in knowledge, skills and affect as a result of a period of time spent on a particular subject.? Is there a difference between demonstration of knowledge,skills,  and affect while working away and what a whole term of work is like.  We ask questions about strengths, weaknesses and next steps.  Are there reasons why students do better in one term and worse in another term?  I write about this today because there has been so much discussion and introspection about the ground lost by students due to the pandemic.  So many teachers and jurisdictions are worrying about the loss of time in school and how to gain ground as a result.  What the pandemic is drawing attention to is the huge disparities between students and how to program so that every child makes progress.  Like curriculum, the new methods of assessment draw attention to the fact that it has to be all about individual differences between students.  If we focus on formative assessment for each child than we can focus on what they are making ground on and what they are lagging behind on.  We can set goals for learning for each student separately and the job of the classroom teacher becomes helping each child progress to the best of their ability. Two students in Grade 6 can have missed the exact same amount of time, but one child, upon return, can be much further behind because no two. learners are the same.  I have to try and take each student where they are at and move them forward.  If we focus on the need to find strengths and weaknesses in each student, then we can plot next steps much easier.  If you think about my old ways of assessing, it is much harder to make it realistic when I have some standard of achievement that I measure everyone in my  class against. It penalizes one group of students and rewards other groups of students and education shouldn't be about that, at all.  

To Step Up or Not to Step Up

To Step Up or Not to Step Up

So first there was an email from the federation, the Ontario Teachers' Federation, asking for retired teachers to volunteer to help boards meet the commitment to provide teachers to teach online.  The Federation made it clear that they were looking for anyone practically who was willing to step up to the plate.  Then, today in the papers, there were articles about the search for teachers to meet the demands required by the pandemic and the number os kids learning online.  I felt badly in a way because I have the skills needed and required. No too ways about it.  A huge part of name loved the classroom and loves the idea of working with kids online.  But, then I started to think about it and realized that I am already, believe it or not, 20 years beyond retirement age of all the classroom teachers. No doubt there are lots of teachers around who are way younger than me.  But the big issue is not age but willingness. I have spent a lifetime giving of myself to various things and always putting my own interests on the back burner.  I spent so much time in front of students and working online with students, that I didn't read, I didn't watch movies, I didn't exercise, and so forth. I ran from one activity to another and denied myself rest and relaxation.  I just don't want to do that any more.  I haver t o fight with myself continuously and remind myself that it is not being selfish to want to NOT work even part time. I would rather work on my interests and write my next book and sell my current book than parcel out time to work in front of students.  I'd love to be a consultant and help others in developing and refining the skills necessary to be successful, but there again I would have to divide myself into little pieces.  So, in the end, I just said no to myself.  I am watching from the sidelines to be sure, but not interested in getting my toes dirty in the water. I have to constantly remind myself that I am entitled, because there is more than a little bit of guilt involved in what I am doing.  But in my old age, I want to have fun and leave myself open to new experiences and nothing more. So I wish the boards good luck and watch with interest.