What’s the best way to teach empathy to an infant, toddler, or preschool aged child?
Joanna Parker joins the Teaching with CLASS® podcast to answer that question. Joanna has spent her entire career in early care and education. She’s worked with Head Start, Early Head Start, child care, early intervention, public PreK, and home visitation programs at the local, community, state, and national levels.
Joanna explains that defining empathy in early childhood is all about understanding social-emotional development. Children will not display empathy the way adults do because they are still developing social-emotional skills. But educators can instill foundational skills for children to build upon as they mature.
Burnout among early childhood educators is at a whole new level within the last couple of years. Administrators, teachers, observers, and staff feel different levels of burnout, and there isn’t a magic cure or quick fix. On this episode of Teaching with CLASS®, our guest Colleen Schmit returns to the podcast to help educators recognize and work through burnout.
Together, Sara and Michelle provided tips for helping educators dig deeper in their interactions and feel more confident in their teaching practice. Before diving into the tips for building confidence and consistency, Michelle shared a powerful quote from Lori Archer, a Head Start teacher:
Meltdowns and tantrums in the classroom can be a frustrating experience for both the educator and child. It's important for teachers to support children through their development of essential social and emotional capabilities.
Creating a culture of continuous learning is critical to building educators’ abilities, confidence, and in creating consistency of quality teaching practices. But, this is no easy feat. Time constraints, access to relevant and quality professional development, and lack of learning communities are known barriers and have been found to impact teacher job satisfaction.
The good news is, that despite these challenges, there are opportunities to strengthen staff empowerment and to continue to build educators’ confidence to increase consistency of best practices.
How can we shape innovators starting at a young age? Early childhood teachers have a big role in growing that mindset in children that they can solve problems.
Dr. Lourdes Norman-McKay joins us to explain how teachers can get students comfortable with shades of grey in the discovery process and with not knowing the right answer.
When I was a teacher, I can remember taking care to intentionally plan differentiated, or individualized, instruction. And, when I was teaching pre-K I added the same level of intentionality to which materials were available in interest areas, and how I approached transitions throughout the day.
While any level of intentionally, specifically in relation to planning, is important -- I missed a critical opportunity in being more intentional in my interactions with the children in my class.
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!
It's not uncommon for teachers in early education to need to strike a balance between following children's leads and sticking to the classroom schedule. We know that intentional teachers are aware of their responsibility to assess student progress, understand skill mastery, and plan accordingly to provide opportunities for children to grow. However, many times, as teachers begin a specific teacher-directed activity, it is unsettling when students begin to veer from the step-by-step plans the teacher has worked hard to implement.
Teacher and coach, Colleen Schmit, will share how teachers can strike the balance between following the lesson plans and giving children freedom of choice and flexibility in the classroom.
