One of the effects of our society’s mostly Essentialist philosophy of education is that we are expecting higher and higher benchmarks for our children without really evaluating if they are ready to meet them. If you set the mark too high you will always have a high rate of failure. That is not to say that we should lower our expectations in the classroom, but should adjust them to fit the needs of individual students instead of scientific age ranges. Statistics are helpful, but only when applied to a group. Statistics have as little bearing on individual children as stereotypes do. Children enter a PreK program for a variety of reasons including developmental delays, less than ideal home environments, poverty or a combination of different risk factors. It will be my job to prepare them for kindergarten. But what exactly is kindergarten today?
A study by The Gesell Institute for Human Development, says “despite ramped-up expectations, including overtly academic work in kindergarten, study results reveal remarkable stability around ages at which most children reach cognitive milestones such as being able to count four pennies or draw a circle.”[1] Four and five year olds have the same physical and developmental abilities they have always had. It is our expectations that have changed. What we are teaching 5 year olds may be to read, write, and deal with complex shapes, but are they actually absorbing the information?
The study suggests that the play time is really where our children learn. Play based learning “smooth(s) over developmental ranges, allowing children to work on skills without feeling judged.” (Guddemi). Critics say today’s kids are different, smarter, have larger responsibilities and are ready for bigger challenges – but can’t we meet in the middle. Provide play and exploration activities that both encourage exploration and challenge them to learn? This same theory can be applied to project based learning or multi age classrooms in later years. Providing more individualized activities is a strain on the individual teacher as it requires more preparation and an acute insight in the personalities of each of her students. This is especially true in the early grades as the benchmarks for progress are much more subtle. Students cannot be judged based on their answers on tests, each students progress is tracked through observation and discussion with other educators and parents.
The idea of developmental readiness extends far beyond kindergarten and our traditional structure does not serve this aspect of student readiness. Regularities of schooling, a term coined by Seymour Sarason, describes the traditions of schools that are taken for granted even when other ways of organizing schools are available. Peer grouping is only a part of this and it also includes how teachers see the role of parents and the greater community, the asymmetrical teacher/student power structure, how classrooms are structured and how the typical school day is structured.[2] When looking at education, it seems as if we should first look not at what we teach, but how we are teaching it.
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