What Is an Academic Kindergarten?

http://www.sfds.net/extras/Academic_Kindergarten.pdf

I wrote the above articles during my tenure as Head of School at Park School in Baltimore. They were also the starting points for the talk and discussion at last week’s kindergarten coffee. What follows is a summary of the presentation to our kindergarten parents.

In an age of standardized testing, many parents are rightfully concerned about what constitutes an academic kindergarten. In contrast to some of the media and government pressures, it is my view that skill lessons in letter identification and phonics are not age-appropriate for early childhood and can hinder rather than support cognitive development. At four and five years old children can, of course, be taught to write down their names or repeat the names of letters. However, these learned behaviors do not represent meaningful skills to young children; they do not use them to further their curiosity and knowledge. And, adults must force young children into unnatural conditions in order for them to mimic the intended behaviors. In order to develop the capacity for conceptual thinking, young children need to engage in activities that fire their curiosity and encourage them to build connections between themselves and the world around them. First-hand observations of the natural and social world that lead to conversations and questions enable children to follow their curiosity. Imagination and creativity are actually the keys to academic accomplishment.

Consider the following two stories:

Story 1
Three young pre-school students are asked to sit at their desks with worksheets. One teacher stands at the blackboard drawing a series of letters and shapes. A second teacher stands with the students, helping them circle the corresponding letter or shape. One young boy struggles with the assignment. He sinks down in his seat, looking back and forth from blackboard to desk, trying his best to fill out his worksheet correctly. At times he rubs his eyes, frantically trying to clear his mind and focus on what was obviously a very difficult task for him. The teacher spends most of her time managing the behavior of this boy. She tries her best to help him focus and finish the lesson correctly. He wants desperately to do what the adults are asking, even though the specific letters he is learning are just empty symbols unrelated to any content and interesting information. He does make some marks that the adults seem to accept, and he is then permitted to hurry off to the block corner where he builds a castle.

Story 2
A young girl accompanies her mother on various errands one night. She notices the moon is up. At each stop she mentions to her mother that she sees the moon again. In the middle of the drive, she announces that the moon is following them. The girl is
acting just like a young physicist. She knows that usually when she moves from place to place her environment changes; the same objects are not in two different places. On this night, however, the moon remained in view throughout the drive. Puzzled by the discrepancy between what she saw and what she expected, she created a theory to explain the phenomenon. Her theory to explain the unusual observations: the moon is following her. Not knowing how to explain to her daughter that the moon is not really following them, the mother instead seeks to engage her daughter in a letter-recognition activity. She points to a nearby pharmacy sign and asks the child to identify the letters of the store’s acronym. Unwittingly, the mother has directed her child away from her natural interest and observation in the moon.

Rather than asking children to participate in activities that are disconnected from their experience, let us choose another way. Let us choose to support our children as they explore their unique internal understandings of the world through language and imaginative play. To do this, we can always return to the method of asking questions. We promote cognitive development by asking, “Why do you think that?” and “What else do you notice?” These questions encourage young children to come up with their own theories and narratives about the world – a practice that builds children’s imagination and cognitive reasoning.

It can be difficult to find the time in our hectic schedules to delve into the long, circuitous conversations that result from listening to our children about their interests and observations. It does require tremendous patience and perseverance to participate in children’s thinking. However this empathy with children is exactly what activates cognitive growth and intellectual development.