Meeting Sunday, October 5

Dear Families,

In continues to be a pleasure to witness your children play, work, imagine, cooperate, and find solutions and alternatives when cooperation is difficult. The Children's Garden newsletter comes out next week, and I want to save detailed descriptions of play scenarios inside and outside for that letter. Because grandparents and other relatives are reading of our children's experience from afar, I will also post my contribution to the newsletter to the blog once the hard copy of the newsletter comes out.

We have a parent meeting for the Butterfly nursery in our classroom this Sunday, October 5, from 3 to 4:30pm. Here is a proposed focus for the meeting. Please email me (wdolde@gmail.com) if you would like me to address other topics.

Arrival and a chance for parents to paint (Kim, the children, and I will transform these paintings into our lanterns for our lantern walk at the end of October).

A lecture/discussion on the way we can use the wisdom of Kim Payne and others in early childhood. While I observe that our nursery children show great capability in transforming conflict into chances for imagination and growth, I have also heard that there is general interest in the school and among early childhood families in particular in learning and working more with the work of Kim Payne. In my previous school, I took the three year training with Kim on his social inclusion work; I have attended a workshop with him at Sophia's Hearth; and I have spent a few years with colleagues translating his work for early childhood classrooms. As such, I think I am well suited to give a taste of this sort of work, and I can give examples of how our children are already showing prosocial and problem solving behaviors.

This lecture/discussion will have 5 general parts.

A. An brief introduction of some of the most important things I learn from Kim Payne. Another teacher or parent might take different points. Kim might make a different list himself.

1. Conflict is important for our development. It is our job as parents and teacher to help children when conflict gets stuck--while having trust that they also benefit from being involved in solving problems.
2. Restoration, making things right, doing things over is much more effective than punishment or apologies. This has nothing to do with being soft or wishy-washy. It has to do with being effective.
3. Help the children humanize one another.
4. Help children move from fixed positions to being able to express their needs and see how their needs can be a bit flexible and do not necessarily conflict the needs of others.
5. Notice what is working. When helping the most egregious situations, Kim and those who follow him are effective because they are able to show a, say, supposed bully that she does not always torment the supposed target. When a child realizes that she already is capable of performing a prosocial action (even if she normally chooses the more agressive one), she is much more likely to show the healthier, healing response.

B. A discussion of the selection "The Safety of Nonjudgment" from Your Child's Self-Esteem by Dorothy Corkille Briggs. This provides us a way as parents to support our children if they come home and say, "Jim is a bad boy. He took my toy." Briggs helps us move from judgmental and "you" statements to "I" statements. Although "I" statements have their place, beyond personal statements enhance our ability to guide our children in a truthful way (here is another link to that article from a previous blog). If you like the chapter from Briggs, copies of Your Child's Self-Esteem are coming to our school's library soon.

C. A discussion of an interview between a counselor and parents from Difficult Children - There is no Such Thing. In this conversation, the counselor demonstrates a remarkable ability to see beyond the ostensibly negative (and outright alarming) behavior of a young boy. It is amazing what we can do when we suspend judgment and look for the archetype of an ostensibly difficult child. I also want to place this selection here to help us think about possible "exceptions" to a child's version of a "no put-down diet" below. The counselor is able to help the parents see that insulting language from their son is not a direct attack at them but is instead an indication of pain or sensitivity. In a similar way with children, I will caution us from making our children apologize every time they say something like "You're the meanest child in this class" (which a child in Baltimore used to say, very nobly, when he saw one child treat an other child unfairly). We can model and offer an alternative, without judgment: "Yes, it is very upsetting to see that toy being taken away."

D. A reading of a version of Kim Payne's "no-put down diet" for adults and older children (he revises, so there may be more current models). Although the agreements work best for children in 5th grade and up and adults, the principle of noticing and trying to do things over (without asking questions or drowning young children with explanations) is very helpful with young children. I will provide hard copies of this selection at the meeting.

E. A discussion that as parents and teachers, we can't always do the best thing for every child in every situation. We do our best to keep our children safe and to support them as they transform conflict into conversation, but not every intervention is always going to seem best for every child--at least in the short term.
As a teacher learning and growing from year to year, I still sometimes wondered if I could have handled this or that situation differently or better. Master teacher Jack Petrash, from that other Washington's Waldorf School (outside of D.C.) helped me accept my imperfection in a brief passage from Waldorf Education -- Teaching from the Inside Out (available in our parent's library but checked out; this is a readable and eloquent introduction to Waldorf education):

Reflective teaching invariably leads to self-knowledge. Although this may sound daunting, there are simple ways to proceed. One understanding is that what makes a teacher good also has within it the possibility of making a teacher ineffective. For instance, classroom management is a skill many teachers need to develop. Getting large numbers of children focused and on task requires a variety of abilities. Teachers have to be clear about directions and expectations, and be both persuasive and compelling. To do this effectively teachers also have to develop a certain degree of insensitivity to individual needs and interests. In moving students from one undertaking to the next, it is often necessary to respond to questions with, "Not now. Please take your seat," or "Tell me about that in a couple of minutes, right now just get started," and of course, "No, you may not change your seat. You need to sit right there." The ability to move a group from one activity to the next requires that teachers ignore certain individual needs.
Some teachers do this so effectively that children simply comply and lessons go smoothly. However, if these teachers do not also cultivate a keen interest in the needs of individual children, their work will suffer. Teachers need simultaneously to have the ability to work with the whole group as well as the ability to focus on the individual. And this balance does not always come easily. Teachers generally start out with a natural inclination in one of these two areas and then realize that they need to work consciously to develop the other.

Again, I recommend Petrash's book(s). He has also published Covering Home (in our library) which gives lessons for parenting inspired by baseball and Parenting a Path through Childhood.

With warmth and light,

William Dolde