Carnegie Reporter, Vol. 1, No. 3 | Early Childhood Education: Distance Learning For Teachers Adds A New Dimension, page 2

Because of the wide differences in the educational backgrounds of child-care workers and preschool teachers, HeadsUp! Reading avoids educational lingo and presents information in a simple, but sophisticated manner that takes very little knowledge for granted. “Jeri and Toni, why is it important for teachers to think about books themselves, the actual items, rather than just teaching reading?” Rutherford asked, early in the program. “Well, you know Mike, all books are not created equal—there is some real trash out there and there are some high-quality books,” replied Daniel. “And so, as teachers, we have to be highly intentional and careful about the selections. Toni, I know you’ve got some ideas on this as well.” “Yes,” Walters chimed in, “there is so much children can get from books, beginning from birth throughout life. It’s important that they have a good selection that reflects what the world is like, the people in the world, the kinds of things that happen in the world where we live.”

Picking up speed as it moved along, Class 19 focused on strategies for selecting high-quality, developmentally and culturally appropriate books. Translating theory into practice, the program featured several charming video clips of preschoolers taking a class trip to a public library in Cincinnati, Ohio.

On this particular night in Portsmouth, Ohio, the television program was followed by presentations of posters, maps and books that the preschool teachers had done as homework. There was no formal discussion of that night’s television program, but several teachers said they had picked up some good ideas and others said they planned to take a taped copy of the program home for a second viewing.

The library program had a big impact on Terri Will, one of many Head Start teachers who took the course for credit toward an associate’s degree. Like many of her colleagues, Will is a high-school graduate whose first contact with Head Start was as a low-income parent with three of her four children in the Portsmouth program. That was a dozen years ago, and her initial volunteer work evolved into a paid job as a bus driver and as an assistant teacher, after she obtained a one-year certificate in early childhood development. Now 45, she continues to do both jobs, earning about $12 an hour.

“I’m almost ashamed to admit it,” she said in an interview several weeks after the class on reading, books and libraries. “I used to take all 20 of my kids to the library, sit them on the floor and expect them all to pay attention to my reading four or five small books. But they couldn’t see the print or appreciate the pictures! Naturally they wiggled and misbehaved and wondered what everyone else was doing. Looking back on that now, it seems so primitive! It didn’t work at all, but that was the way it was done. I feel like I had blinders on because I was mostly concerned that they sat quietly and behaved—their behavior was more of a concern than the actual books. I didn’t realize how impressive the library could be to them, how books could be so important at this time in their lives. I see that differently now.”

Will now uses the library more creatively. “I take the children through the stacks and ask about their favorite things that they want to read about. The library has books on all their interests from airplanes to bumblebees to books on divorce and dying. Now, I also choose really large, colorful books, some with pop-up illustrations and flaps, to read out loud. I read to only three or four children at a time and I ask questions about the story and the pictures. I find that the children automatically behave when they are interested in the books and when I’m interested in the books. The whole quality of my reading has gone up 150 percent!”

Will said that the 22-week HeadsUp! Reading course had made her a better teacher and made her feel more professional. It strengthened her confidence, she said, by validating some of her own teaching methods. The course made her realize the importance of structured language and literacy lessons, and how they could be seamlessly woven into every part of the children’s day.

Very Young and Eager to Learn

Terri Will and her Head Start colleagues are pioneers on the new frontier of education. Brain research, which has been widely publicized (and oversimplified) since the early 1990s, opened the nation’s eyes to the intellectually fertile preschool years. Studies on child development and education, including some that had sat on shelves for years, suddenly gained wider readership and influence.

Researchers tell us that children start thinking in complex ways just weeks after birth, not when they enter kindergarten or first grade, as previously assumed. The human species, it seems, has an innate ability for learning language, math and science—a proclivity that can be nourished or starved, with predictable results. Four-month-old babies rapidly learn to distinguish between similar sounds like “ba” and “pa,” and they suck and wiggle with excitement and attentiveness when learning new sounds. Infants can also tell when one pile of objects is larger than another, and they recognize the difference between adding objects and subtracting them from the piles. When toddlers play on their own with specially weighted blocks, they develop hypotheses about the blocks’ center of gravity and solutions for balancing them. As they walk up and down a ramp, preschoolers tend to think like physicists, making observations and predictions about motion. Not only are toddlers eager to learn about dinosaurs, they enjoy sorting toy ones into categories that include diet, habitat and behavior.

The research clearly demonstrates the need for responsive teachers and enriched learning environments, where fun and games are designed to lead children through a structured learning process. Responding in kind to babies’ coos and clucks, and encouraging them to mouth sounds in front of a mirror turn out to be very valuable lessons: One study indicates that the earlier babies babble fluently, the earlier that they reach every other milestone in acquiring language.

In just the last four years, ideas about applying this new understanding of children’s early development to classroom practices have begun flowing out of consensus-building conferences, commissions and expert panels. “We’ve recognized that children need to be challenged with ideas, with learning—and that is very, very new, believe it or not,” says Susan B. Neuman, an expert in children’s literacy who recently joined the Bush Administration as Assistant Secretary of Education for Elementary and Secondary Education. “We need to prepare children to think conceptually,” she adds, “not just teach them numbers and shapes, but teach them about measurement and size so they can build a connection between the abstract symbols and what they see in the world.”

The terms daycare and preschool once distinguished between full-day custodial care and half-day programs that had more of an academic focus. Now, as education is expected in all programs, the terms are used interchangeably.

Currently, research is being applied to lesson plans, learning units and teaching strategies with impressive results. But as yet there are no comprehensive curricula to guide preschool teachers. What is needed, according to a 2001 report called Eager to Learn: Educating our Preschoolers, done for the National Research Council, is “curricula that encourages children to reflect, predict, question, and hypothesize, setting them on course for effective, engaged learning.”

In describing the magnitude of the preschool reform opportunity—and its challenge—Anne Mitchell, president of Early Childhood Policy Research, says: “We need to make the same kind of investment in early education that we do in higher education. We all know that going to college makes a huge difference. The same is true with early childhood education.”

Next page: Child-care Centers Today: Mostly Parking Lots for Kids!

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