Engaging students

Three out of the five students who responded to the poll identified engaging students as the most challenging issue they expect to face as educators. I found a video of bored students on You Tube (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NUQjIIjUhKY), and although these students appear to be in middle and secondary classrooms, the message is important. Learning is impossible without engagement. We talk a lot about student engagement. For example, it is cited as the number one strategy for avoiding behavior problems in the classroom. However, we may not understand how to always encourage it. After all, many of our college courses are teacher centered and lecture focused.

The first step in engaging students in early childhood classrooms is to understand development. You might prefer to learn about teaching strategies, and certainly that would be helpful. Teaching strategies, however, are based on what we know about young students' development (e.g., cognitive, social/emotional, physical, and language). Understanding how young children think, communicate, interact with (and understand) one another, and use their bodies to navigate their environment gives us a valuable starting point in developing strategies. For example, my nephew's kindergarten class used to write their numbers (1 to 100) at the start of each day... first thing. Writing the numbers is great practice, but this activity doesn't help with understanding magnitude or the concept of counting (a one to one correspondence between each object and a number). My nephew would always try to go and play in the centers but wasn't allowed. In another classroom where I observed for a semester, the kindergarten teacher would identify two or three different students each day to stand and say their numbers to as close to 100 as they could. The teacher never discussed the numbers in real world contexts or related the numbers to actual objects for counting or understanding magnitude.

When my daughter was in kindergarten, she also worked on writing her numbers to 100. This task was accompanied by a number of other activities, such as counting to the 100th day of school (and having a 100th day party), collecting 100 small objects, counting objects by 5's and 10's, counting field trips, etc. The emphasis wasn't on writing to 100 but on understanding what 100 means. This took some time and effort using play and multiple strategies. The teacher approached teaching from an understanding of how her students think.

I suppose one wouldn't need to understand development to use such strategies; he/she could simply follow good lesson plans developed by someone with this knowledge. However, knowledge of development is a benefit that goes beyond lesson plans and supports the day-to-day, moment-to-moment learning opportunities in early childhood classrooms. It drives the design of classroom environments, teacher-student interactions, and the spontaneous decision making required of teachers.