The Pica Perspective

More evidence that physical activity boosts student achievement

The proof just keeps coming. Howell Wechsler, director of the Division of Adolescent and School Health for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and his colleagues reviewed 50 studies that examined the effect of school-based physical activity on academic performance. Half of the studies showed a positive impact, half showed no effect, but virtually none of the research showed any negative impact.

Among the specific findings, released today:

•Recess can improve students' attention and concentration and ability to stay on task.

•Increased time in PE classes can help children's attention and concentration and achievement test scores.

•Short physical activity breaks of about 5 to 20 minutes in the classroom can improve attention span, classroom behavior and achievement tests scores.

•Participation in sports teams and physical activity clubs, often organized by the school and run outside of the regular day, can improve grade point average, school attachment, educational aspirations and the likelihood of graduation.

You can read the full article here.

Don't you wonder how many studies it's going to take before people (i.e., the policy and decision makers) realize the mind and body aren't separate entities??

To quote the late Alfred North Whitehead, educator and philosopher:

"I lay it down as an educational axiom that in teaching
you will come to grief as soon as you forget that your pupils have bodies."

Amen!

Teaching children who won't sit still! 4 panelists offer wisdom and advice @ http://tinyurl.com/ydjgbmq .

Value & harm seen in K-3 common standards

Another report from Ed Miller of the Alliance for Childhood:

In Wednesday's edition of Education Week Catherine Gewertz reports that the K-3 core standards are getting "a mixed reception" from early childhood experts.  The article is titled "Both Value and Harm Seen in K-3 Common Standards," and overall the emphasis in the story is on "value," not "harm."  (See http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2010/04/07/28common.h29.html.)

 

A few excerpts:

The swirl of discussion among early-childhood educators about the K-12 common standards is taking on new dimensions, also, as the possibility emerges that they could be expanded to include children from birth to age 5. Leaders of the National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers, which organized the drafting of the K-12 standards, told early-childhood experts in meetings and conference calls late last month that they hope to begin working on zero-to-5 standards within a couple of months, according to some of those who participated in the sessions.

Dane Linn, who is leading the work on the Common Core State Standards Initiative for the NGA, told Education Week that the NGA and the CCSSO are exploring ways to work with states and the early-childhood community to ensure that all children have the skills necessary for kindergarten. “We’d be naive to think standards are not a part of that,” he said....

Much of the early-childhood community has long been wary of any formal standards for young children, fearing they could result in drilling of rote information. Some studies have found, too, that programs for young children have cut back on play-based learning to prepare pupils for the tested subjects that lie ahead.“Having standards in early-childhood education in general is not a good idea,” said Nancy Carlsson-Paige, a professor of early-childhood education at Lesley University in Cambridge, Mass., and one of more than 400 prominent early-childhood educators who signed a statement by the advocacy group Alliance for Childhood opposing the draft common standards....

Many leading voices in the early-childhood field recognize the risk of misusing early-learning standards, but still believe that, with care, they can be done right.

“I am strongly pro-standards,” said Sharon Lynn Kagan, a former NAEYC president who is a professor of early-childhood education affiliated with Teachers College, Columbia University, and the Child Study Center at Yale University. “The criticism that they could be misused is valid. We have limited precedent for how to use standards well. But well constructed and well used, they can advance the quality of early-childhood education and the capacities of our teachers.”

The article does not mention that three other former NAEYC presidents--Lilian Katz, David Elkind, and Ellen Galinsky--signed the Alliance for Childhood's Joint Statement.  Neither does it point out that among the 135 members of the committees that wrote and reviewed the standards there was not one K-3 classroom teacher.

Week of the Young Child

Sunday begins this year's Week of the Young Child, an event promoted by the National Association for the Education of Young Children (NAEYC).

Celebrated from April 11th to 17th this year, this annual event calls attention to the special time of life that is early childhood -- and to the professionals who've dedicated their lives to the care and education of young children.

The theme for 2010 is Early Years Are Learning Years. Frankly, this title worried me, considering all the misinformation concerning early childhood education that is so prevalent in today's "earlier-is-better" culture. Would this theme be misconstrued? Would it be interpreted as meaning that the more we can "teach" children in their youngest years, the better -- that earlier is indeed better? Then I saw the sub-themes. Note the first one!

• Play: Where Learning Begins
• Embracing Diversity
• Teaching and Teachers Matter
• Encouraging Health and Fitness
• Investing in Young Children Benefits All
• Prevent the Achievement Gap: We Know How

At the NAEYC website you can find ideas for event planning, with handbooks in Word and PDF, and for activities. The latter section includes suggested activities with a focus on the following:

• Raising Public Awareness
• Public Policy and Advocacy
• Reading and Writing
• Violence Prevention
• Child Health

Also included are ideas for outreach to the broader community. According to the website,

Active outreach and inclusion across the full community offer two important benefits to your efforts. Actively involving diverse groups can help to raise the quality of services available for a significant number of children and their families who might not otherwise be reached, and it can help to establish positive relationships between various groups within the community around an issue of equal importance to all.

There's also a place at the site where you can share your plans for this special week!

 

New on NAEYC Radio: Causes & coping strategies for teacher burnout. Listen at http://tinyurl.com/yfye2yz !

Digital media in early childhood education good or bad ? Listen as three distinguished guests share their views: http://tinyurl.com/ydjgbmq .

Horwitz on proposed kindergarten standards

A Statement on the Likely Effect of the Proposed Kindergarten Standards

By Carla M. Horwitz (carla.horwitz@yale.edu)

Director, Calvin Hill Day Care Center and Kindergarten; Lecturer, Yale Child Study Center, Yale University, New Haven, CT

The Calvin Hill Day Care Center, where I am director, also has a full-day kindergarten. It is a play-based curriculum with considerable intellectual content. Most of our children leave our kindergarten reading and writing, as well as competent in math, scientific observation, symbolic representation of all kinds (art, writing, speaking), problem solving, and negotiating; and they have experience in how to be a friend and a part of a caring learning community.

While I certainly believe in children in kindergarten achieving appropriate academic proficiency and in mastering the content curriculum, I am very worried about the national standards that have just been released. These standards outline the skills and content required of kindergartners, but make no mention of the ways in which young children learn and the social and emotional content that needs to be embedded in this learning.

Kindergartens in my community and many others are already far from developmentally appropriate. They have been stripped of outdoor activity, hands-on learning (the only way children of this age learn is through concrete experiences tied to more abstract concepts) and recognition of the complex social and emotional learning that needs to be supported by adults for children to become fully capable members of a classroom (and national) community. But most important, play has been excised from the curriculum in favor of short-sighted, rigid, scripted, skill and drill lessons.

These lessons are delivered by teachers who are themselves under the gun. If their principal finds the children “playing”—that is, engaged in dramatic play, experiences with sand, water, or blocks—the teachers are severely reprimanded. Even those who have been teaching for many years and understand the developmental needs of five-year-olds are threatened. They are leaving the profession because they can no longer do what they know will ensure learning and growth in the broadest, deepest way.

And in the hands of inexperienced teachers these national standards pose even more danger as inappropriate skills teaching will be combined with inappropriate content. Thus, our nation’s children are in double jeopardy—their curriculum is being stripped of all connection to the way they learn and grow, and their schools will be bereft of the very teachers who can help translate curriculum into meaning and learning.

March 28, 2010

Gidseg on the proposed core standards

Eric Gidseg, Ph.D.
Kindergarten Teacher
Arlington Central Schools, New Paltz, NY
March 28, 2010

The Common Core Standards developed by the National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers raise the bar of academic achievement for young children. They do this in spite of, rather than in the service of, what we know about the ways that young children learn. They seem to be based on the notion that workers need a set of precise skills and that we can “backward design” a system of education by defining what children must know at each grade level. Although I have grave misgivings about the overall attempt at codifying national standards, I am most concerned about the way that these standards make unreasonable demands on the kindergartners that I teach each year. Allow me to use young Gabe as an example.

Gabe is a bright little boy in my kindergarten class with sparkling blue eyes and loads of enthusiasm and energy. He knows just about everything that there is to know about fire engines and rescue vehicles. He can stand before a classroom of five-year-olds, show his detailed drawings of a ladder truck, and describe how it is used by firefighters when they attack a fire. Over the course of this school year Gabe has taken just about every book on firefighting and fire equipment out of the school library. Gabe is not yet secure, however, in the connection between the letters of the alphabet and their sounds, nor is he able to count beyond the number 15 without becoming confused and repeating himself. This is in spite of daily classroom experiences and instruction to support such learning, differentiated for his current level of achievement.

I am faced with a challenge. I know from more than 30 years of experience as a kindergarten teacher that there’s nothing wrong with Gabe—that he will learn to read and count perfectly well, given time and encouragement. But he has not met the standards that have been created to guide kindergarten instruction and learning. This child will have a failing report card if I cannot help him to master these skills. In spite of my long experience, I am unsure of myself as I am forced into an increasingly didactic role with children like Gabe. In all likelihood I can get Gabe to develop these skills, but at what cost? My understanding of kindergarten teaching and research on early learning leads me to nurture and support this child as he makes his early forays into literacy and numeracy by way of his passion. The standards, though, press me to get him to perform a set of predetermined tasks. The standards seem to be addressing the skills without recognition of the developing child who must make sense of these skills.

Increasingly, kindergarten teachers are faced with a double bind. Our knowledge of child development and early learning shows us that children like Gabe need time to develop skills by way of their deep interests, thus keeping alive their motivation to learn. And yet the standards (and those who hold children and teachers accountable for achieving them) are telling us that Gabe and his teacher are failing. We know that development does not always proceed at a steady pace along a defined pathway. The Core Standards proposed by the National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers are sorely in need of input from skilled researchers and teachers who have experience with young children in classroom settings. Children like Gabe should not be labeled as failures just as they embark on what should be a journey of confident discovery.