This post was originally published as Measuring What Works for Children: CLASS™ for School & KIPS for Home on the KIPS Cradle Blog, January 16, 2013.
As an educator and a parent, I have so appreciated learning about the dimensions of the Classroom Assessment Scoring System™ (CLASS™). Having the language of the CLASS tool helped me think about teaching and learning in a new way that was liberating—it gave me the lens and vocabulary I needed to make sense of both positive and challenging moments I had experienced in the classroom. But it also gave me a new way to think about parenting and specifically my relationship with my two sons, who were teenagers when I became reliable on the Pre-K CLASS tool. It seemed to me that the behaviors of a good preschool teacher and parent are similar, so I was encouraged to find that in many ways the Keys to Interactive Parenting Scale (KIPS) resembles the Toddler and Pre-K CLASS tools.
Caring parents often question their interactions and reflect on how they handled events or issues with their children. I began to reflect on my own parent-child interactions with the CLASS dimensions in mind. Was I showing regard for their perspectives and encouraging leadership and independence? Was I asking the right questions to get them to think and reason through issues? Or was I just providing my own reasoning? Was I providing appropriate feedback to guide their learning? Or was I jumping in to answer questions and solve problems for them?
Different Settings but Similar Philosophy
In doing research on adult-child interactions, I learned about KIPS, designed to be used in the home to observe parent-child interactions. Many of the 12 KIPS behaviors are related to dimensions of the Toddler and Pre-K CLASS tools: focusing on the adult as a secure base for the child, creating a warm and supportive environment, showing sensitivity to children’s social and emotional needs, as well as supporting language development and cognitive skills.
Teachstone®'s CLASS tool was created for use in the classroom rather than in the home, but both tools have their foundations in attachment theory. Attachment theory suggests that children’s relationships with adults, especially with primary caregivers like their mothers, affect how children develop important social, emotional and cognitive skills and abilities.
In addition to attachment theory, the CLASS tool also has its foundation in ecological systems theory, which suggests that children’s development is impacted by many factors in their environment outside of the home. Interactions children have with adults in school and in their larger community also play an important role in their growth and development. So, to get a full picture of the important influences in a child’s life, it stands to reason that observing both their parent-child interactions and teacher-child interactions would give the most accurate picture.
The Importance of Observation
Both the CLASS tool and KIPS are reliable observational tools that have been validated in multiple studies. Observations are important, because what teachers or parents report to do on surveys or in interviews can differ from what they actually do in their interactions with children. For example, Pianta et al. found CLASS instructional scores weren’t correlated with teacher self-reported attributes, and the CLASS emotional scores were only weakly correlated (Pianta, Burchinal, Bryant et al. Features of Pre-Kindergarten Programs, Classrooms, and Teachers: Do They Predict Observed Classroom Quality and Child–Teacher Interactions? 2005, Applied Developmental Science Vol. 9, No. 3, 144–159). Similarly, KIPS scores of parenting quality did not correlate with two different self-reports of parenting knowledge or efficacy (Comfort & Gordon, 2006).
Thus, if you want to assess what children experience in their interactions with either a teacher or parent, you need an observational tool. Both of these tools require observers to learn the components of the tool and pass a reliability test in order to use the tool with fidelity.
As someone who has made interactions the focus of her career, I find it encouraging to know that this work resonates at home and in classrooms, and that there are two strong observation measures to support work across these contexts.
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Originally published October 18, 2021
There is always an opportunity for interaction. Some opportunities are easily recognizable: times of play, free choice, centers, small group. We often see teachers engaged in activities alongside children during these times or hear questions being asked. Other opportunities might be a little less obvious. These are the times of your day that you might see as mundane moments that merely require your supervision or monitoring. The times where you’re going through the motions. “I’m doing this thing so I can move on to the next thing.”
In a previous blog, colleague and early childhood environment extraordinaire, Heather Sason, discussed how your classroom environment can help promote effective teacher-child interactions. In this blog, I propose we explore some of the often overlooked times in your day that are ripe for interactions with children and that do promote exploration, learning, and development!
Originally September 15, 2021
How do you make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich? I posed that question to a random selection of contacts via text message. What did I discover? Everyone in my sample group spreads on the PB first, then the J. There are a variety of ways though to apply the jelly, but in my random group, the jelly always comes second.
Peanut butter and jelly sandwiches make me think about Behavior Guidance, a dimension in the CLASS® toddler observation tool. Especially the first two indicators of behavior guidance: proactive and supporting positive behavior. Proactive is the peanut butter! It goes first. That layer of peanut butter is the base for the jelly, which promotes positive behavior.
Originally Published April 8, 2021
The foundations for language and literacy success are built in the early years. Trajectories for reading proficiency in third grade and beyond are set in birth to five early learning environments. Knowing this, preschool and early elementary educators work hard to provide literacy-rich environments and interactions, but the COVID-19 pandemic threw a wrench into the plans of even the most veteran teachers. These disruptions have changed learning across the board, including in the critical area of early literacy.
Can we talk about structure? When CLASS® entered my life, I was 20 years into my career in the field of early childhood education. What I remember most about that initial training, besides the nervousness about an impending reliability test, was a sense of relief. Structure, including state and program standards, curriculum, materials in the classroom, and approaches to childcare and pedagogy, had dominated my working hours. CLASS was a lot to learn, but for me, it was a breath of fresh air. Observing with CLASS meant I could set aside my obsession with all things structural, which encompassed my thoughts every time I walked into an early childhood classroom.