Who Is Doing the Learning?

The Theory:

I have worked with many teachers who have videotaped themselves interacting with students over the last few years. Every single one of them (including the one that I see in the mirror daily) have all said, “Wow, I talk way too much!!”

Somewhere I picked up the quotation that ‘the person doing the talking is the person doing the learning.’ As those who know me would tell you, I must be doing a lot of learning! Maybe it is a characteristic of the type of person who goes into teaching? I am trying to curb that tendency now!

There is quite a bit of research done on ‘Wait Time.’ The average ‘wait time’ that a teacher waits between posing  a question and asking a student in the class to offer up an answer is about 1 second. Wow! The recommendation is to wait at least 3 seconds (Kathleen Cotton, “Classroom Questioning”). Doesn’t sound that long until you count it out in your head! When I first read this, I started putting a 5 second interval into practice with the JK's I was teaching. Interestingly, not only did more of the students raise their hand (especially boys), but more actually had an answer rather than “I don’t know” (i.e. ‘I just like raising my hand’). I became a believer! I made it explicit by calling it “think time,” so students would know what they were supposed to be doing (and allowing others to do), and often showed the time passing by counting the five seconds out on my hand.

Connecting the “Think Time” back to ‘the person doing the talking is the one doing the learning’… I am wondering about how we can optimize that ‘kid talk’ in our classroom. We have 30 students, a teacher, an ECE and three one-on-one EA’s.  It is easy for that many adults to talk for kids, or even for kids to talk for one another. Also to ‘do’ and ‘create’ for one another.

The Practical:

A simple example brought this all together for me. As we continue organizing the classroom and the materials, I began to sort the crayons into a tray. Suddenly I caught myself, thinking, “What am I doing?!! I am not the one who needs practice sorting!!!” 

Doesn’t it really come down to:

·         Don’t say anything a child can say  (Reinhart, 2000).

·         Don’t do anything a child can do.

·         Don’t create anything a child can create. (Connecting this to the last blog about the alphabet frieze we are constructing with the students)

We have a sign up now (high up out of the kids' zone) to support us in remembering who needs to be doing the talking, thinking, doing, creating and learning! We are also posting prompts/questions for each of the six curricular areas to support adults in the room in fostering more student talk.  

Doesn’t mean we adults never do any of the talking, doing, creating… LOL… we are just learning to be more strategic about where it is needed!

Learning Environments… the Walls

My Background:

Let me start with a full disclosure… I have created insanely visually busy environments in the past. Not only have I had the brilliantly coloured corrugated paper, with the matching themed borders, one year I decided it would be great to get “hom-ier” and I used patterned wall paper. One bulletin board even had a quilt of wallpapers samples for the background. They were however in the same colour grouping- LOL! And that doesn’t begin to cover what went on top of them and up in every spare square inch of wall space!

Then a number of years ago it did occur to me that if I wanted a peaceful and calmer class, I needed to begin with a more peaceful space. I read an article on Feng Shui for the classroom (just ‘google’ for many sites), and brought in more plants and some soft furnishings.  I snuck in on the weekend, as I know many of you have, and painted the bulletin boards (not that we condone that practice, wink, wink) very similar to the peaceful tones of this blog.  That did give me a calmer feeling, much like the staged homes we see in magazines, done up in harmonious colours.

I also let go of control of the bulletin boards. I didn’t have stunning displays set up for the first day of school. I tacked up some commercial posters that connected with what we would be looking at later that year to introduce the grade. I allowed the students to create the borders and help put materials on the walls. I even gave up my addiction and compulsion to make all titles with those bubble letters! I was more relaxed and felt that it was more of the students’ classroom.

Besides ‘calming the visual overload, I also took a critical look at what went up on those walls. My theory was that if the kids or I didn’t actively use it, it had become akin to the aforementioned wallpaper.

Putting The Theory Into Practice:

The influence of Reggio Emilia philosophies, the thinking behind Ontario’s move towards a play-based, child-centred Kindergarten and research on self-regulation has caused a change in our thinking as my partner and I began to set up our environment this year. Knowing that we were expecting more than 30 kids (we have ended up with 29), we considered the impact of the busy visual environment on those who already have difficulty self-regulating (and their students- ha ha ha!). We decided we wanted a calm neutral background to build on and stripped down to the corkboard (surprisingly neutral!). We chose not to put up commercially prepared materials (see article by Patricia Tarr – below-for a compelling argument about the cute, stereotypical and trivialized image of childhood these may convey and that children will fit themselves into) and really build what went on the walls with the kids. Literally nothing was on the walls for the first week of school- not your typical K classroom” look by any means!

Blocks Centre and Reading Pool area set to go. Discovery Centre by window.

We are trying to consider how the environment aligns with our image of the child (see previous blog entry) as a creative, competent, brilliant little being. How therefore can we reflect the richness of their individuality, their learning, thinking and work? How can they be co-creators of that environment? An simple and  telling example of the shift within us is that we do not yet have the alphabet up (end of second week of school)! Shocking! However, our movement is deliberately away from the transmission of learning model imparted by a commercial and other-created alphabet frieze towards co-constructed learning. This coming week we are going to begin creating our focus letters with materials in the classroom, and photographing the results. Thus THEY will start to create that alphabet frieze.

So, two weeks in, our walls were no longer bare for Open House on the 7^th day of school.  The bulletin boards contained:

·         Artistic productions from the ‘Creation Station’

·         A “Play Is How Young Children Learn” display of photos of the children learning through play (labelled with the main area of learning) surrounding  quotes about play from our Program document and from other sources

·         A display of the role of adults in the room with photos of us with small captions

·         Examples of the starts of drawing and writing beside a chart of the stages of writing (introduced and discussed with the children)

·         A display of students sorting items as part of our documentation of their math learning

We know that our on-going journey with our walls will be to expand on our use of how we (with the students) can use them to more deeply document our thinking and learning.  I am sure I will have more to report in this regard!

Helpful Resources:

·         Full Day Early Learning Kindergarten Program, Draft 2010 – p. 35-37

        http://www.edu.gov.on.ca/eng/curriculum/elementary/kindergarten_english_june3.pdf

·         Consider the Walls by Patricia Tarr

http://www.naeyc.org/files/yc/file/200405/ConsidertheWalls.pdf

Next blog:  Who is doing the learning?