I just finished presenting my third two-day introductory training on Teaching Strategies GOLD® (TS GOLD®) to another group of of Vermont early childhood educators and, while I am a little tired, I am always thrilled at what I get out of these trainings as much as what I am teaching to the participants.
TS GOLD® is a mandated assessment by Vermont for providers who are drawing down State Education money to pay for preschool children participating in their programs. As the number private providers who are doing this expands with the passage of VT Act 166, more will need to be trained in using this tool correctly.
So, I am out there, training providers how to use the online assessment system for the children they have in their programs. Today and yesterday, I was with a group of teachers in the Northeast Kingdom both from private settings and Head Start who teach kids ranging from infants to 5 years old. It was an excellent variety of learners. Most of them had some familiarity with TS GOLD®, but at least three of them had never seen it before.
As we got to know the tool, the more experienced participants shared their knowledge with the newer learners. Thankfully, I was able to also show the veteran participants some new functions of the tool as well, so they walked away with new tricks.
One of the participants has made her own hand-held version of what is called the Objectives for Development and Learning (ODL) that she shared. It was a clever design that I plan on sharing with my Teaching Strategies trainer. It is pictured below.
Another participant shared a set of infant and toddler activity cards called Mighty Minutes that her Head Start program had purchased from Teaching Strategies that could be a time saver when working with the TS GOLD® data system. While these are not cheap, they were a new resource that everyone in the room was able to get their hands on and open the box and look through, rather than just look at a picture on a website.
These two resources were new to me and to the other participants. They are just a couple of examples of what I love about sharing early childhood learning with others. I go in with my agenda and goals and learning objectives for the day, but I come out with new, unexpected knowledge and ideas from my participants that re-energizes me about my work and the whole early education field.
Since 2012, in an amendment to the Americans with Disabilities Act, the federal government made it mandatory for all new and renovated public playgrounds to have accessible equipment.
As I have been thinking and reading about accessible, it has been more clear to me that there is a big difference between accessible and inclusive. There is a link on the NPR website from their story about an inclusive playground in which you can find an accessible playground near you. When I used this link, some of the playgrounds simply had one ADA swing, and that counted as accessible by the new ADA mandate. Accessible really just means that you can get to the playground, or there is a few pieces of equipment that will accommodate a child with some limited mobility. They still may need a lot of help getting to that equipment, since the playground surface may not be wheelchair friendly. The design says, "Yeah, we gave you a second thought, but we're not really playing with you."
The parents of Brooklyn Fisher, a girl with spina bifida in Idaho, wanted their daughter to be able to be included when she went to the playground. What they envisioned was a playscape that allowed their child to go up on the structure with her wheelchair with other kids, access all the equipment and join in with her friends without having to be carried by her parents. They designed and raised money to build Brooklyn's Playground, which opened in 2011 in Pocatello, Idaho. It is probably the most inclusive playground in the world. Parents of children with disabilities from all over the Rockies make special trips to give their children a playground experience like they have never had before.
In Salinas, CA, Shawn and Amanda Bakker raised money to build Tatum's Garden, another inclusive playground that they were inspired to raise money for and build after they visited Brooklyn's playground with their daughter. These inclusive playgrounds, with their rubberized ground surfaces that allow wheelchairs to roll merrily along them, do not come with a small price tag. In both cases, the families raised over $500,000. What did not go into the initial building of the playgrounds stays in a fund for maintenance.
As communities around the country are considering updates to their playgrounds for their public, these two playgrounds can serve as models for how to include everyone in the play. As Brooklyn's mother said in an Aljezeera America article about her daughter's first time on the playground, "I saw her with all her best friends play like every other child," she
said. "She wasn't on a different level, there was nothing different
about how she was playing with them. They were all just enjoying play
together and they did it for hours."
Accessibility is okay, it says I'll let you in here, but I don't have to interact with you, but true inclusion is when social ties and real connections happen for people. We can do better on the playgrounds for all of our kids. It will take community support for inclusion everywhere.
I listened to Valora Washington speak at the Vermont Association for the Education for Young Children Fall conference and she got me all fired up again. She pointed out that now that we have drawn attention to our field and that even President Obama is talking about the importance of universal access to early education in his State of the Union speeches, we can no longer hide in our bubble.
She called on us to first imagine for our field. Come up with a unified vision of what is important. In Vermont, many stakeholders have been thinking about a unified vision and have settled on: "To realize the promise of every Vermont child." I think that is pretty nice. It is a vision many early care and education stakeholders can then carve out their missions. Valora (I feel I can call her by her first name since she greeted me with a hug when I picked her up at the airport) wants us to be "Smart Improvisors" as we imagine. Our new ideas can come on the fly, but they come from a deep well of knowledge and experience that we have in the field of early childhood education.
Next, she asked us to know. We are in the midst of a field that has experienced a knowledge explosion in the last 20 years. We have to consider "What should early educators know and do?" as a question we need to answer. Valora says that we know more than we are doing. She also believes that we know what quality is. Our problem is that this is tacit knowledge in our field which makes it hard to articulate what we know. We also know that we do not have the funding to do quality work and for too long we have tried to uphold the myth that we can do for a quarter what really costs a dollar. One of our challenges as a field is to figure out how do we get better funding and then what would we do with it.
Her next step is that we have to act. We have to build networks among our groups. We have to all play in the same sandbox. We are a field that is compartmentalized and we often do not speak well of other sectors (who may actually be doing valuable work, if we could step back and look at the whole picture). She challenges us to figure out how to work together, combine efforts, and mobilize to focus on solutions. Part of this is that we have to be willing to call out bad practice when we see it. We are a field that is conflict-averse, so we have to learn to deal with conflict in creative ways.She also said she is looking for the Disruptive Innovators and the Positive Deviants. The people who are changing things because they know it can work and they are willing to act on their knew knowledge, or they see a new way of delivering an idea and go for it. Those are the people that change are field and pave the way for the rest of us. Change is not optional.
Lastly, she called on us to take personal responsibility. We often try to fly under the radar, when what we need to do now is focus on outcomes and build networks. Workforce qualifications are getting higher and this is a challenge for veteran teachers who do not have those credentials. How do we advance the field and serve the field? We need to take responsibility and unify and professionalize our field.
Currently, Valora stated, there are 1.8 million early educators in the United States. In the often quoted Perry Preschool Project, the teachers were educated at the Masters level, the students had wrap around health services and the program had high family involvement. As we think about the good outcomes that high quality produced, we need to figure out how we can replicate it throughout our varied systems, whether it be home and family providers, Head Start programs, child care centers, or public and private preschool programs. Early care and education has many faces, but in order to realize the promise of every child, every child should have access to high quality early care and education experiences in whatever environment that child's for chooses.
Okay, limiting me to just five is really hard, so I am going to list the top five that come to my mind because there are SO SO SO SO many children's books that I love.
1. Piggie Pie by Margie Palatini - I love to use this book to introduce the word "problem" to the kids.
2. Stand Tall Molly Lou Melon by Patty Lovell - My favorite book about being nice to one another, grandmothers, and self-confidence
3. The Three Little Wolves and the Big Bad Pig by Eugene Trivizas - kids need a good grounding in the original story to appreciate this one, but this one cracks me up every time.
4. Can You Hear It by William Lach - this is a fabulous introduction to classical music and paintings for kids. I was so surprised how much the kids loved the pieces and following the prompts to listen for the specific instruments. They ask to hear this over and over again.
5. How to Make an Apple Pie and See the World by Marjorie Priceman - I just love this book. We take out my children's map of the world and find all of the places the little girl goes to collect the ingredients for her pie. We also talk about all of the kinds of transportation she uses.
Dumb Things I'm Good At
I can hang four spoons off my face at once, one from each cheekbone, one from my nose and one from my chin.
I can balance about 10-12 pennies on my bent elbow and then catch them in my hand.
I can spin couch pillows and heavy textbooks and a basketball (but not as well) on my finger.
More Impressive Things I'm Good At
I'm a pretty good singer, especially when I am in my mezzo-alto range. Now that I am older, my voice gets tired faster and if I spend all night happily singing, I will lose my voice the next day. I want to get up the courage to volunteer to sing the National Anthem at our local Single A baseball club this summer.
I'm really good at Boggle and Big Boggle. I play Scramble with Friends and I am pretty unstoppable.
I'm good at meeting people and making people feel at ease. I can strike up conversations with anyone. I really like people and enjoy having conversations with people from anywhere. It is the extrovert in me. So far, it has not gotten me in into trouble.
Off the top of my head, here are few Pet Peeves...
- When the word unique gets qualified. Unique means one of a kind. There is no such thing as very unique.
- People who wave you on in traffic when they have the right of way. Traffic works better when everyone follows the natural rules. I don't mind waiting for my turn.
- Passive-Aggressiveness
- Cell phones at the dinner table (unless you are food spotting)
- Come to think of it, cell phone that go off in movies, performances, meetings etc...Put it on rumble people!
- When opinion sneaks into news coverage (liberal or conservative)
- Gridlock (of all kinds)
- When technology decides to take the day off and I really need it to work
- Forgetting just one ingredient, but an important one, for dinner.
- Coffee grinds in my coffee (but I gave up coffee, so this doesn't bother me so much any more).
A Colleague I Admire...this is easy.
Miss Andrea teaches a fully inclusive classroom in Vermont that has five students with disabilities. She weaves the best research-based practices for students with autism within an integrated, inclusive classroom that works for all students with and without disabilities. She incorporates discrete trial learning, DIR®, and video modeling, alongside with visual supports and scripted stories to help support her students progress. She uses many of these techniques, as well as the Picture Exchange Communication System (PECS) with a student who has Down Syndrome. She does have a lot of support staff, often up to four classroom assistants, but she also makes sure they have common planning time and they all know what all of the kids goals are form week to week. They work together to choose the best strategies to and activities through which to reinforce the skills each child is practicing.
I have worked with Andrea since 2005 as a coworker. We have presented on inclusive practices at many conferences together. She is extremely organized, where I am quite scattered. She is a linear thinker, where I am a creative throw spaghetti at the wall kind of thinker. She is often quiet and contemplative, where I am a total extrovert. But, don't cross her on her beliefs about inclusive practices...she lives it and sees its power and knows it works and she will defend it loudly. Her students make such amazing progress because she believes she can unlock the key to each and every one of them. She can figure out how they learn and how they can connect with their peers. While I hold these same beliefs, she has shown me the way with so many of my students over the years.
She is on a mission, and is one that I have joined her on the ride, she wants all Higher Education programs to offer dual certification in early childhood education and special education. It is what she had as a program when she went to Lesley College in Massachusetts. In reality, since there is no compulsory education for preschool children, young children with disabilities are in placements with early childhood educators that have no special education background. If every early childhood education program required some coursework in special education, it is possible the workforce may be more prepared to serve these children where they get their early care and education.
