One
The Art and Science of Teaching

“What are the most important things for children to learn in pre-K?” asked Abby Morales, program director and coach for the Boston Public Schools early childhood department. She looked out at the roomful of teachers in front of her. Some had been teaching for years, while others were brand-new. Some taught in low-income neighborhoods and others in more economically integrated schools. None had taught Boston Public Schools’ K1 curriculum before.

“Social skills,” one teacher called out. “How to express their emotions.” “How to follow rules and be ready for kindergarten.” After a few moments, Morales asked the teachers what they noticed about their peers’ responses. “I noticed there was very little about actual academics, math, and reading,” answered a teacher named Melanie. Morales nodded. She knew that many of the teachers and program directors were worried about bringing academics into their programs for the first time. “Those of us who have been in early childhood for a long time remember when there wasn’t a curriculum, when it was all about play and following the interests of the child,” said Morales, who had taught for twelve years and worked as a coach for almost ten more. “Yes, this curriculum is about literacy and math, but it’s also about all of these social skills you have mentioned. It’s all about building better people.”

Morales knew that academic and social skills can’t really be separated, especially in the earliest years of schooling. Decades of research show that children who have stronger social and emotional skills are more likely to succeed in school in early childhood and beyond. Children who can listen, pay attention, and inhibit impulses like talking without being called on are more able to take in information the teacher is presenting. Those who know how to make friends and navigate conflicts are more well-liked by their teachers and classmates, which ends up providing them more opportunities to learn and get positive feedback. And when all or most of the students in a class possess these skills, it’s easier for teachers to teach and for the whole class to focus. But in a national survey, kindergarten teachers reported that many incoming kindergarteners hadn’t developed those skills, and that managing behaviors was the biggest challenge teachers faced in the classroom.

Children don’t develop social and emotional skills automatically; those skills have to be taught, and in every environment where children live, learn, and play, including school. Critics of social and emotional programs in schools often claim that such skills should be taught at home, that parents are the only ones who should be responsible for children’s character. But anyone who has spent time with young children knows that even those with engaged families and decent social skills sometimes struggle with taking turns, waiting, or coping with being left out of a game. Children learn how to deal with those challenges in the places where they occur, and because their parents aren’t present at school, they need their teachers to guide them.

Experts agree that disadvantage in kindergarten. Others focus so much on reading, writing, and counting that they risk skipping over a set of fundamental skills for kindergarten and beyond.

“So why do we need a curriculum?” Morales continued, taking off her hip glasses and placing them in the pocket of her sundress. The teachers were quiet at first. Then they started to raise their hands and offer up suggestions. “To have consistency across classrooms from day to day.” “To prepare the environment for the children.” “Intentionality.”

“Yes!” Morales cheered, lifting one fist in the air and doing a little dance move. “Intentionality” could be one of her favorite words, it’s so apparent in her work with teachers, her interactions with children, even the stylish way she dresses. Intentionality would be one of the biggest themes in her training and coaching with this new group of teachers, some of whom would soon be teaching in Boston Public Schools and others who would be implementing the BPS K1 model in community-based preschools, like YMCAs and Head Start programs.

On that muggy August afternoon, Morales’s goal for the day was to introduce the two curricula used in K1, one for math and one for language and literacy. But she emphasized that the point of the curricula was to help teachers facilitate learning in an organized and thoughtful way, not to march through a set of cookie-cutter activities. “Curriculum is a tool, not a rule,” Morales stressed to the teachers, using a favorite mantra among BPS early childhood coaches. “It helps you focus and be explicit about certain skills, but it’s the thoughtful implementation of the curriculum that really matters. The curriculum on its own isn’t enough.” Over the coming hours and months, Morales would describe and model the kind of thoughtfulness she was expecting of teachers, and the teachers would quickly come to love the curriculum and what their children were learning from it.

On that first day, though, the teachers’ faces were a mixture of relief and anxiety. Most were comforted to have a structure to follow (“so I don’t have to make up the math part on my own,” as one of them put it), but they also seemed overwhelmed by its scope. “How are we going to fit all of this in?” some whispered to their colleagues as they began to flip through the two-inch stack of pages that coaches were handing out—a ream of paper that covered only Unit 1. BPS staff were in the process of revising the original literacy curriculum to better suit their purposes and students, and they were building the plane while flying it, to use an expression common among educators. “We apologize that there are no page numbers,” one of the coaches offered, explaining that the do-it-yourself layout program he was using didn’t allow for pagination. “We’re doing this rewrite on a nickel and a dime and a hope and a prayer,” Morales told the teachers. They didn’t look surprised. The teachers of one of the most respected pre-K programs in the country had been asked to bring their own three-ring binders. There simply wasn’t the funding to do everything.

One teacher put down her packet, raised her hand, and pointed out that the Head Start program in which she taught already had a long list of requirements (almost fourteen hundred of them), including how to structure mealtimes, ensure that all children are getting health and dental screenings, and schedule home visits with families. Since its creation in the 1960s as an educational and antipoverty program for low-income children and families, Head Start has had multiple goals. Although academics have come to be a larger focus since the mid-2000s, they were originally a side note to the program’s other services, including health, nutrition, and employment for low-income parents. “How are we supposed to do it all?” asked the teacher, to the nervous nods of others in the room.

The multiple requirements the teacher brought up are one of many challenges for community-based programs. Community centers typically have to coordinate multiple funding streams and regulations that come from different entities, like departments of education and state childcare agencies. Staffing is another big challenge. For starters, directors need more staff, because they have to meet state-mandated adult–child ratios over the course of a ten-hour day, as compared to a school’s typical six-hour day. And the fact that community programs rely on family tuition, state subsidies, or both means that teachers usually get paid significantly less—almost $14,000 a year less—than public school teachers. As a result, community-based preschool teachers tend to have less formal training and education in child development, and some studies find that they tend to turn over more frequently, as they look for better-paying jobs. The BPS-community partnership program aimed to address that problem by funding a sizable increase in teacher salaries. The salary difference wasn’t publicized to parents like Ayannah Hilton, but it made a difference in the centers’ ability to hire and keep qualified teachers to work with Jeremiah and his peers.

That additional funding was helpful to programs as well as individual teachers. Financial sustainability is a big issue in community preschools, especially now that public schools are offering pre-K. In early childhood centers serving children from infancy to school age, the four-year-olds essentially subsidize the younger children. Four-year-olds don’t require quite as much individual attention as younger children (at least when it comes to meeting basic needs and ensuring safety), so their classrooms aren’t required to have as many staff, and that means that the centers can use some of the tuition from the older children to pay the staff serving the younger children. But when large numbers of preschoolers leave private centers for the public school system, the programs become financially strapped. If all four-year-olds made that transition, the infrastructure of infant and toddler care would likely collapse. One community center director told me her organization is thinking of eliminating infant care because the center is losing tens of thousands of dollars a year. Those kinds of figures are why even the limited number of twenty-five hundred K1 spots had roiled the early childhood community in Boston, creating tension between the district and some of the community centers that simmers to this day.

Abby Morales was sympathetic to the Head Start teacher’s concerns. She had taught in a community preschool for more than ten years herself. She also knew what it was like to launch into a new way of doing things. She remembered the early days of the K1 program, when a few core staff members would meet on street corners under lampposts because they lacked adequate office space—a far cry from the sunny space the staff of twenty now occupies on the fourth floor of BPS’s recently renovated office building.

“Picture a pickle jar,” Morales told the room of teachers in front of her. “You have some big, fist-sized rocks, then some gravel, sand, and water. How can you make everything fit?” After a dramatic pause she answered her own question. “You have to put the big rocks in first, and then the other things can fit in around it. That’s the way it is with the curriculum. You have to put in the big rocks first, like centers and small-group math. Then you can add other pieces, like Let’s Find Out About It and storytelling.” Spotting confused looks, Morales assured the teachers they would learn about those curriculum components later. “One of the other big rocks for you as teachers is this: don’t lose sight of the joy in this. You should be as curious and surprised about teaching as the children are about learning. Focus on the things that engage them as learners, not on things that make you a classroom task manager.” “Task manager” is not a phrase most preschool teachers would use to describe their jobs, and yet, in many preschool classrooms, that is very much what it looks like, with teachers giving constant orders about what to do and handing out consequences when children fail to follow rules.

Some of the teachers continued to look nervous. “Our job is to help you put the pieces in place,” Morales continued. “We’re going to be coming into your classrooms at least every two weeks to observe, talk with you, give you suggestions. We’re there to support you, not to evaluate you.” With a conspiratorial smile to accompany another of the coaches’ favorite expressions, she added, “We are not the curriculum police.”

Morales then dove into the curriculum, starting with the time when children and teachers gather for the morning meeting. “Morning meeting is active learning; it’s different than circle time. We don’t do the calendar. We don’t do classroom jobs.” Surprised twitters spread across the room. Circle time is a staple of preschool classrooms, during which children sit and listen while the teacher and one or two children dutifully go through a routine set of questions and answers: the day of the week, the date, the alphabet, the letter of the week. Morales was asking teachers to leave these components at the classroom door, because they are examples of what she calls passive learning, where kids receive information rather than constructing it. Morales saw the teachers exchange startled looks. “I can feel the resistance here,” she said with a little smile. “I get it. We’re all used to those routines. But we want instruction to start moving. Maybe the kids like doing the weather, but it’s not pushing new learning. Once they learn it, they’re not getting anything out of it. If you keep doing the same thing every time they come to the rug, chances are kids are going to wander off and say, ‘Peace out, I know this already.’ We will do songs, but we’re going to keep changing them and augmenting them, because we want to keep the level of engagement high and not stop with things that are familiar.”

Many parents might be surprised by the level of thoughtfulness that goes into these kinds of plans and training sessions. When our children come home and sing songs they learned at school, most of us find them charming and are glad our kids can sing along to “Row, Row, Row Your Boat” in the bathtub. But it may not occur to us that our children’s brains develop more when they are constantly learning new songs and hearing new words in those songs. So much of what good early childhood teachers and programs do is easy for the average person to miss.

Morales then went on to explain how the centerpiece of the curriculum is hands-on learning centers, six to ten activities that change every day and that teach children concepts and skills through play: “We know that children learn in hands-on ways. Kids have to be active agents in their own learning. That means they need choices and engaging things to do.” The concept of centers wasn’t new to teachers, but the method was. In many classrooms, centers amount to free-play activities, where teachers put out materials they think will interest the class and children choose whatever they want to focus on. But research finds that three- and four-year-olds don’t make much progress in literacy, math, or other concepts when they are simply left to play with no structure. In the K1 curriculum, children still choose their activities and rotate from one area to another, but every center has an intentional learning goal and a link to an overarching unit theme and weekly focus. They are connected to themes like Families, Things That Grow, and the World of Color. At the core of each lesson is a book, carefully selected to illustrate certain concepts and serve as a springboard for center activities. When a class reads Ezra Jack Keats’s Peter’s Chair , which addresses sibling and parent relationships, children not only discuss what happens when a new sibling is born, they learn about Keats’s artistic medium of collage and experiment with using it. When they read The Little Red Hen Makes a Pizza , which puts a twist on the traditional tale of the industrious farm animal to emphasize community, children talk about cooperation and friendship, write recipes, and make “number pizzas” with paper plates and plastic chips to explore the concepts of same and different amounts. Karen Katz’s multicultural book The Colors of Us inspires a self-portrait activity; after noticing different skin colors, children mix paint to create their own skin color, use observational painting techniques to create detailed, realistic self-portraits, and write their names.

Another thing that sets K1 apart from other approaches is the level of thoughtfulness with which teachers are expected to explain and facilitate concepts. “You want to set up the environment in a way that invites the kids to explore and discover. And you are going to introduce one or two of the centers at morning meeting every day, to help kids delve into what they will learn there,” Morales continued, explaining that when teachers walk around and facilitate centers, their job is to ask questions, provide suggestions, and provoke new ideas. That might sound easy, but it takes a very skilled and thoughtful teacher to do it well. As Morales explained, “You don’t want to tell them exactly what to do, like ‘Here’s how you make a penguin,’ because then maybe they will just copy what you did. Instead you might want to show some videos of penguins and say things like, ‘Here are some videos that might inspire you.’ Then you ask them what they notice, or point out elements of their work from the day before.” As a model, she showed a brief video of a veteran K1 teacher introducing centers during the World of Color unit. The teacher explained the materials that were at the paint center, showed examples of how some children had mixed colors the day before, and brought out a color fan she had borrowed from a paint store for inspiration. Studies show that when teachers have these kinds of discussions to orient the class to the activities they are about to do, children learn more about literacy and math, develop larger vocabularies, and are more skilled at regulating their own behavior. It’s particularly important for teachers to explain the “what” and “why,” as the veteran teacher did in the video. Morales also pointed out some of the teacher’s other best practices: “She didn’t tell them how they had to do it. She didn’t tell them ‘don’t do this’ and ‘don’t do that.’ She said, ‘Here are some of the things you can do.’” The teachers nodded quietly and took notes, as Morales went on to explain how they could use that approach in every aspect of their teaching.

When the teachers took a break, the teacher named Melanie shook her head and said, “I wish I had had this before we started last week. This is going to change everything we do tomorrow. I’m really excited, but it’s a little bit like ‘Whoa!’ There’s just so much.” She had taught preschool before, but not like this. When she had been hired at the East Boston YMCA about a month before, she had learned about the program, but she said that she “had no idea what goes into it. Even when you try to be diligent and look through the materials, you can’t know until you are here in the training what it really takes. I didn’t really understand the part about the child driving it and being such an active part of it. That’s really new, instead of us telling them what to do all the time.”

Meg Hackett appeared to share the combination of excitement and trepidation. Thirty-year-old Hackett was the new lead teacher for Jeremiah and the other four-year-olds at the Roxbury YMCA. She wasn’t just new to the Y, but new to teaching pre-K. Hackett had been a special education teacher for older children and had worked with toddlers in home-based early intervention services, but she had never taught a pre-K curriculum.

At the end of the first day of training, Hackett huddled to plan with Kamilah Washington (who everyone, even the adults, calls Ms. K). Washington was the Roxbury Y’s “floater teacher”—a person who covers whatever classroom needs support, either because a teacher is absent or children need more adults in the room than usual. Washington had been an assistant teacher in the Young Achievers classroom the year before, but she had no formal background or degree in education or child development, and the grant funding the new program required that assistant teachers have at least an associate’s degree in early childhood education. However, the Y had been unable to fill the assistant teacher spot, so they made arrangements with BPS for Ms. K to attend all the trainings (about one a month) and cover the classroom until another teacher was hired. Washington, who had just started taking courses in pursuit of her associate’s degree, said, “I’m excited about this.” Looking back on her first year, she mused, “I didn’t know what I was doing. I felt bad for the kids, but I was doing my best. I’ve worked with kids for about five years in camps and stuff, but I was basing it on my childhood and the things I know.” looking at basic health and safety issues, and she figured the teachers were pretty much interchangeable anyway, because she was used to seeing the same pool of teachers, as they left one center and moved to another nearby. But she wanted her children to learn and get ready for kindergarten, and those goals are highly dependent on the quality of teaching a center provides. Teaching varies more than many parents realize.

As Hackett and Washington contemplated their daily schedule and talked about how they needed to clean out the classroom and “start fresh,” they were energized but not entirely confident. Hackett asked how often they would get coaching, and Morales assured her, “As often as you need it. When I’m working with a new center, I am in there all the time.” Morales knew that following the K1 model would be a big shift for the Y and many of the programs. She knew the teachers would need support, but she also knew she couldn’t do the work for them. Just like when she facilitated children’s learning as a teacher, she would need to gently guide teachers and centers. And there was no time to waste. Jeremiah and the other children had only one shot to have a successful year in pre-K, and it could turn out to be the most important year of their schooling. 8wAuqXZd9RcECFEjBRGg4zNbxG2eTfdlDGFfSW2IGwmP3NvKtaefFerC4WepCCym