Hello Jonn,
I think I agree with Carol Murray, ( if I'm intrepreting her comments correctly), "non-transparent" is too murky a concept to work well in early childhood education. I believe "transparent educational practices" comes from education aimed at older students, and is basically the idea that allowing students to see their educational content, classroom teaching goals, assessments, etc, creates a learning environment that is more engaging & assessable to the students, and thereby facilitates both learning and the assessment of whether "learning" is being achieved. All of this really depends on metacognitive skills that are not developmentally appropriate to preschool learners. I can imagine that the term, "non-transparent teaching" is a pushback against trying to "quantify" & document learning in preschool- right?
One curriculum that could be said to include the concept of "transparent teaching practices" in a preschool setting might be "Tools of the Mind" - where one component used engaging children's metacognitive skills. (Full disclosure: I am in no way trained on this curriculum, and my knowledge of it is basically through NPR coverage!) children were ask to come up with a "play plan" or "learning plan" and then, afterwards, the child is guided through self- assessment or reflection of the child's success in meeting the original plan's goal. This is completely oversimplified, the curriculum includes much more, relying heavily on Vygotsky's theory, peer learning, social & emotional regulation, intentional teaching, project-based learning and guided play. This curriculum showed great results in cognitive growth self-regulation skills during early implementation, however, later assessments with greater sample sizes did not bare out the initial findings - although the curriculum continues to demonstrates high level of success in multiple settings. Here is a link to one published article that analyzed the curriculum:
http://nieer.org/journal-article/educational-effects-tools-mind-curriculum-randomized-triali do believe preschool teachers should help children's metacognitive growth by introducing the idea of "thinking about thinking" - why do you think that? Where did you learn that? How do you know how to do that? What helped you get better at that? Are all great questions to empower self reflection! Of course, metacognitive skills are almost non existent at age 2, and every child progresses on their own developmental timetable. I do think preschools benefit from reflection on individual & group development and it is important to have some objective tracking in place & shared with families, though I do not believe in formal assessments in pre-K. Again, this is out of my area.
Here is a link to one article that discusses transparency in early childhood
education:
https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ1158195.pdf
For my own experience- 1x or 2x a year parent- teacher conferences with a brief developmental checklist, and an end of the year scrapbook compilation of once a month free drawing projects that recorded the child's thoughts on an experience or idea (my self portrait, I love when my family _____, my favorite part of preschool is _____, etc). I am very interested in learning more about keeping student portfolios.
Hope this adds to the discussion!
Margro Purple
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Margro Purple
Rockville MD
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Original Message:
Sent: 06-10-2019 10:52 PM
From: John David DeOliveira
Subject: Preschool Programs and "Non-Transparent Academics"
Hi again everybody,
Just today I organized a meeting with some preschool teachers in my area (one of which was my former teacher in 2nd grade), and we talked about both a New Jersey state government program which is giving a total of $25 million dollars to predonimantly low-income districts for them to expand their preschool programs to full-day. This is so these districts ensure that many more kids with working parents get support from their preschool systems.
Also, we talked about centers in a preschool setting, which is one specific way for teachers to prepare their kids for Kindergarten. The reason why I call these centers in Preschool/Kindergarten classrooms a form of Non-Transparent Academics is because the teachers are still practicing academic concepts, but they are perceived by the kids as a fun or enjoyable activity, and therefore don't realize the long-term academic value of it.
One of the two examples that this teacher showed me was an "ocean treasure" activity in which there is a storage container made to represent an ocean and the kids have to pick up little shells or other objects from an ocean using their hands or with tweezers (fine motor skills). Afterwards, the kids go over to the floor and start counting how many items they found (learning numbers), and along the way they learn the shapes of the item.
The other example is a dramatic play area that for the last week of school (which is this week in my area) gets turned into a pretend ice cream shop, where kids can actually take jobs like being a cashier, or actually making ice cream. This is designed for kids to gain exposure to jobs that they might have as their first job later in life. According to this teacher, it can also help with gaining life skills, like handling money.
Now since I have explained Non-Transparent Academics I have two questions: Do you think these two examples are developmentally appropriate for 3-5 year olds, and what do you think about the Non-Transparent Academics concept in general?
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John David DeOliveira
Randolph NJ
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