This is the way we go to school (1979?)

[Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] these children are three and four year old they are participating in a preschool experiment designed to assess the impact of three major methods of preschool education these kids come from low-income homes they attend school two and a half hours a day in a class of 16 with two teachers in a paraprofessional they along with their mothers receive a home teaching visit from one of the teachers every other week for about an hour and a half unday Boyd the director of the project from its inception in 1967 to its completion in 1970 Donna McLellan the project supervisor and I are going to talk about the project the children were randomly assigned to one of the three programs selected for the study we expected to find many differences between programs in the performance of the children because these curricula were so different in methods and aims the language training curriculum emphasized learning of academic skills it was developed by Carl bull rider and zigfried Engelmann at the University of Illinois the unit base curriculum emphasizes the social-emotional development goals of the traditional nursery school the teachers drew upon their intuitive understanding of the children to guide the program the cognitive curriculum was developed over the last five years of the Atlanta Perry preschool project it applied principles of cognitive development derived from piaces work as well as ideas from Sarah slansky and most important from teacher observations the first program we're going to look at is the language training curriculum [Music] [Music] think that most people who visit react rather negatively to that sort of approach to young children they say not ready to learn to read and to sit for long periods of time or even short periods of time and repeat sounds and this sort of thing they feel that children need to to play and to use their muscles and use outdoor equipment and that they feel that this is not a useful thing for children and that they will become chance and they'll cry that it's not a popular thing to do and I think this shows that it is a possible thing to do that not the children are doing that they're enjoying it really they're eager and they can't wait to have their turn to say it they try to outdo one another to be the first one to say it I think to that reading has been treated more and more by people as a non intellectual task it's a simple decoding operation which probably could be taught earlier more easily than teaching it [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] it's not an artificial or an abstract thing it's a very personal very close relationship that's established with the teacher of the child in the language training program in spite of its structured format and this may be why then the language program is relatively successful indeed there is a strong suggestion that it's a very powerful method where youngsters are not injured by it but indeed are helped considerably on the one hand then we have the language training program with its carefully pre-programmed sequence which teachers give to children in an order which has been prescribed by the program developer and the children respond and are rewarded as such in the whole system of Education x' built up around that approach at the unit program which represents in a sense the other extreme of programming the whole situation's turned around in this case the children are the ones who plan what they're going to do and the teachers job is to respond to this activity on the part of that of the youngsters and they do this in a very informal and very often chaotic manner in the unit program the teachers tend to think of the child in terms of his social development one of the important things to see though is that while they're playing together there's not really a tremendous amount of in a relationship each one is doing his thing in his way or they team up momentarily to work together out of task and then break apart to go on to something else anyone to give him all kinds of experiences so that he you know can see his world in a broader way [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] the teachers in the unit program depend on the kids to get in there kids they don't push them if they're ready and show the teacher in some way that they're ready for a new experience she tries to provide it but I think generally they kind of let the child feel this way for example if a child were playing by himself at a table and was involved with something the teacher probably would not intervene she might not even give it a whole lot of thought of whether he's done the same thing for five days she'd probably look at it from the plaintiff that child so watching he's not ready to move into some kind of a social interaction with other children it's unit teachers were going to plan say unit around firemen they would have tried to stimulate the children to think about firemen to maybe begin to play firemen they sing songs about firemen in the music time they tell flannel board stories using the flannel board firemen they would try to stimulate some kind of play around fireman in the black area using the fire trucks and then their climax to this day you know it would probably be a trip to the fire station the cognitive curriculum starts with the idea that children learn concepts learn to think and make sense of the world through action in the cognitive curriculum the teachers would introduce the children to the real experience of the real object before they went on tomorrow representational or symbolic activities in the class [Music] I'm very important in watching these children interact with these farm animals as the intensity with which they regard the animal the way they touched the animal and Stroke the fur and get a real feeling of presence with the animal when the children got back in the classroom they could represent this farm experience in many different ways they could represent the sounds animals made by singing old MacDonald's they could represent by using their bodies to move like animals many youngsters are uncertain as to where milk comes from this days when people live in the cities this chance to be in the country to see a cow and to actually see how a cows milked or to actually milk the cow himself is a very important experience this experience through touch gives a depth of understanding of of cows that could never be achieved in any other way [Music] [Music] a child understands that the turkey can walk and fly and can run but this side of a turkey fluffiness feathers and extending its neck is a peculiar movement that can be understood only by direct observation when the teacher touched the children with a feather they had to recall from their experience what animals a feather came from [Music] [Music] the planning board is a device that helps the child to think about and to decide where he wants to work in the room and what materials he wants to you making a plan is a difficult task for a young child in order to help him the teachers assist him in holding to his plan during his activity and then evaluate it with him when he through [Music] one of the most important parts of this curriculum is the focus on the individual child and this cause is possible or this can be done only when the teacher really understands what the child is doing where he's operating how he thinks for example it's very important that a teacher be able to work equally with youngsters using the same materials although they may be working in different levels the teacher has to maintain throughout this a capacity to respond to the child as a person as individual [Music] [Music] in all three programs we added the home teaching because we felt that unless the mother was included in some way she could not provide the support to the child that would be necessary in the years we were working with him and perhaps even more importantly as he went through school the home teaching has increasingly come to mean occasion to draw the teachers attention to the individual child so that as the teacher thinks about a child she begins to see him as a total person at home as well as at school we knew that home teaching would could help the mother learn about what education is all about how learning occurs especially how terribly slow it is and we also had hopes that the mother would learn how broad learning is it's not just learning the alphabet or learning series of number combinations but is a a wide range of things much more than particular skills but things like curiosity and learning to ask questions and learning to listen to what people are talking about learning to bring things to other people's attention so that that learning becomes a way of relating to people almost inevitably this becomes the most important thing the teacher does all of our teachers have become very enthused about home teaching and after getting over the initial fear of getting out of the classroom and out of the safety of the school and into the home into the mother's domain nearly all of our teachers have found this the most rewarding work we began this research project with the question what is the best type of curriculum for preschool education we used a wide range of testing instruments to determine how well the children were learning in each program we found that the children did remarkably well on these tests and observations but the surprise came when we found that on the whole there were no significant differences between curricula in the performance of the children so we had to conclude that it was not the particular curriculum that produces effective preschool programming but the way any curriculum is implemented now what did these three programs have in common that made them all work so well we identified four things as essential first planning and evaluation by the teachers themselves second classroom supervision by an experienced teacher third team teaching and fourth the expectations all the teachers had for the children [Music] I saw supervision more as a supportive kind of thing rather than telling teachers what was expected to name their classrooms they felt that somebody cared about what they were doing and what they were doing was important but to also focus them on their particular curriculum that they were doing to keep them on that focus and on the goals of the particular creep them they were working with the fact that I had worked with children I think was a important factor because the teachers knew that I had probably experienced it myself so that I wasn't asking them to do something that may sound ah right in theory but isn't practical when you try to implement it in each program to teachers and aides work together in a team teaching situation the teachers and aides shared responsible in the classroom plan discussed the curriculum issues together and they provide a mutual support that's so essential to maintaining a high quality of classroom programming the teachers were not only committed to the programs they were committed to the children and they expected them to do well in all three programs the teachers made demands on the children and in responding to these demands the children grew intellectually and emotionally for example the children were expected to talk with the teachers and the other kids the children were also expected to reflect on what they were doing to think before acting to attend to the things they had selected to do and they were encouraged to complete what they had begun because our research said that all the programs work equally well on the majors we selected to test we feel free to think about preschool education in terms of our values our philosophy of Education if you will we no longer feel compelled to look for the preschool curriculum the one that will work best in all times in all places and so we can now say to educators you're free to choose your curriculum on the basis of what you value if you value creativity spontaneity permissive warm atmosphere in the classroom where children are free to explore discover on their own and you can think in terms of the traditional approach perhaps is exemplified by our unit based program in this approach you would be concerned primarily with the social and emotional growth of the children if you think on the other hand that children require a highly structured environment with an emphasis on acquiring language and academic skills and you should think in terms of a language training program one of the powers of this kind of structured programming is the tremendous insistence on the part of the teacher for performance from the child this curriculum is strikingly different from the traditional preschool method and yet I'd like to emphasize again that in our experience the two have produced equal results unlike the language and the Unipro grams the cognitive approach requires a commitment to a theoretical framework the cognitive teacher looks at children and plans activities on the basis of a theory of intellectual development while the children are encouraged to explore and make discoveries through their own actions the general direction is provided by the teacher she develops clearly defying goals for the children yes she does not do it in such a way as to impose these goals on them rather she works with each child at his level and structures his explorations into learning experiences based upon these conceptual goals [Music] now this balance between the child's freedom to explore and to learn things for himself and the teachers actions and stimulating and guiding him is what defines a cognitive teacher's role in choosing the cognitive approach then you'd be choosing that role for the teacher or if she can strike such a balance then she will be providing the kind of atmosphere in the classroom that is most suitable for cognitive development the major conclusion of the study is that while a well-conceived curriculum is of some importance what is more important is the way staff members work together to provide quality teaching this finding frees us to think about things we feel are philosophically important and this freedom is something we have yet to fully understand and to fully exploit for the benefit of our children [Music] [Music] [Music]