Robert Paterson's Weblog

Kindergarten - Curriculum???? - What to do on PEI?

When we think of kindergarten at school we tend to think it looks like this. Sort like school.

Everyone is talking on PEI right now about the proper kindergarten curriculum. Is sort of like school what is best?

So what about this?

The founder of Kindergarten,  Friedrich Froebel's great insight was to recognise the importance of the activity of the child in learning. Activities in the first kindergarten included singing, dancing, gardening and playing with the Froebel Gifts.

Oh there goes Rob again - but I am not alone. The very folks who invented Kindergarten are going back to this this as its heart. (Thanks Steve)

IDSTEIN, Germany -- Each weekday, come rain or shine, a group of children, ages 3 to 6, walk into a forest outside Frankfurt to sing songs, build fires and roll in the mud. To relax, they kick back in a giant "sofa" made of tree stumps and twigs.

The birthplace of kindergarten is returning to its roots. While schools and parents elsewhere push young children to read, write and surf the Internet earlier in order to prepare for an increasingly cutthroat global economy, some little Germans are taking a less traveled path -- deep into the woods.

Germany has about 700 Waldkindergärten, or "forest kindergartens," in which children spend their days outdoors year-round. Blackboards surrender to the Black Forest. Erasers give way to pine cones. Hall passes aren't required, but bug repellent is a good idea.

Trees are a temptation -- and sometimes worse. Recently, "I had to rescue a girl" who had climbed too high, says Margit Kluge, a teacher at Idstein's forest kindergarten. Last year, a big tree "fell right before our noses."

The schools are a throwback to Friedrich Fröbel, the German educator who opened the world's first kindergarten, or "children's garden," more than 150 years ago. Mr. Fröbel counseled that young children should play in nature, cordoned off from too many numbers and letters.

They are also a modern-day snapshot of environmentally conscious and consumption-wary Germany, where the Green Party polls more than 10% and stores are closed on Sundays.

Only a fraction of German children attend Waldkindergärten, but their numbers have been rising since local parent groups began setting up these programs in the mid-1990s, following the lead of a Danish community. Similar schools exist in smaller numbers in Scandinavia, Switzerland and Austria. The concept is sparking interest far afield -- even in the U.S., whose first Waldkindergarten opened in Portland, Ore., last fall.

"The computer arrives early enough," adds Norbert Huppertz, a specialist in child development at the Freiburg University of Education and a Waldkindergärten booster in Germany.

Of course many worry about the DANGER that being in nature provides. Many worry that their little darling should be writing essays at 5.

Children in Germany and Nordic countries start being taught reading at 6 or 7. They do a lot better than we do. The emotional foundation and the child's curiosity is what they tend to emphasize before.

I think we should be very careful as the debate hots up on PEI about what we should offer in Kindergarten.

So that we might ground the debate in a third party who has real authority, let's look back at how Kindergarten was started and see how close we are to its principles. Let's see if Frobel's principles fit our time and whether we should adopt them. Here are Frobels' principles - see how they fit our time. 

Bill Lucas

    “ ”... Fröbel’s historic innovation provides an informative case study for all who endeavor to compose experiential systems in the future.” ”

Two hundred years ago, a youthful academic named Friedrich Fröbel began to experience the convergence of his primary interests—nature and education. About 30 years later, his pursuits culminated in the creation of kindergarten.

Fröbel viewed nature as a quintessential source of education and the perfect model for design. He also believed in placing students at the center of his pedagogy. Thus, the story of Fröbel’s invention corresponds with the contemporary field of “experience design.”

Now as then

The dawn of the information age has given rise to the notion of an emergent experience economy. In the new era, hallmarks of the industrial age, such as mass production and broadcast media, are giving way to mass customization and interactive media. [1] Examples abound in every corner of the modern marketplace. Internet blogs scoop corporate newsmakers. Fantasy football leagues augment live-action games. And everything from dolls to diamonds can be “made to order.”

The shift in emphasis from purveyance to participation resembles a time of revolutionary change within the field of education. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, a handful of European theorists rejected the purely dispensational tenets of mainstream pedagogy in favor of a trend known as “natural education.” [2]

The new doctrine called for nourishing a child’s innate curiosity through hands-on activity. In turn, proponents transformed the instructor’s role from lecturer to facilitator. They replaced rote learning with object lessons, extended the classroom beyond the walls of the schoolhouse, and encouraged sensory engagement in, and about, the environment.

The 30% factor - The heart of our challenge at school

Some have questioned that number of about 30% entering Grade 1 as being in deep trouble already.

Every set of parents on PEI is evaluated for their own coping skills at the birth of their child on PEI - here is how it looks:

In this "Positive" means high risk.

Helping parents cope well is the development issue of our time. If we are to prioritize our education dollars - here is where they have to go.

This is not an odd PEI result - this issue of parents not coping is becoming an epidemic. Here is some Ontario data:

The Globe and Mail ran a leading article on November 25/03 that revealed the preliminary results of the $34 million research project Understanding the Early Years. Bottom line, the facts are in we have to start to work hard to help kids get ready to learn before they go to school. The issue is parenting and the driver is not poverty in terms of money but poverty in terms of ability to parent.

Some key findings:

In the Dixie Bloor area of Peel Region, 3 communities of 80,000 people just west of Toronto, 28% of 5 and 6 year olds lack the language skills to graduate from senior Kindergarten to Grade 1. Yet the area has fewer low income families (earning under $25,000) than the Canadian average. 18.8% versus 22% for the nation. A high proportion of single mums, recent immigrants and weak community have given these kids a poor start the study says.

The numbers suggest that in a typical class of 25, 7 kids are in over their heads. (Likely to be 5 boys and 2 girls)

A separate study by Peel school board found that boys are much more likely to be unready for school than girls. "Too often, the difficulties these children face are painfully obvious from the early stages. Equally obvious is that many will never catch up".

So what is going on with parents? Why is family culture so important?

“Culture is learned, not inherited. It derives from one’s social environment not from one’s genes”
Geert Hofstede[1]

School, Literacy, Employability and Children’s Behaviour "I have been given 28 Senior Kindergarten students who I dub "the class from hell". Every day consists of stealing, lying, hitting, throwing tantrums, throwing rocks, throwing up. I wake up at night having nightmares and get up in the mornings unrested and with butterflies in my stomach, worrying about going to work and facing these children. I am fearful for the adults they will become and the teenagers they will be in ten years. What is wrong with the world? "[2]

Conversations with many Kindergarten and Grade 1 teachers reveal that they are often the first witness of a growing wave of poor behaviour. Poor behaviour that inhibits children’s ability to learn at school. Teachers, and the school system as a whole, are finding it exceptionally difficult to shift behaviour and hence outcomes once the child is school age.

Research[3] backs up this anecdotal evidence.

“..approximately 212,000 children out of 900,000 in the 0-6 age group are at risk of not reaching their full potential when they enter the school system and are on a life course that could lead to learning, behaviour and health problems in later life. The majority of these children live in two parent, middle income families”

We are beginning to recognize that the battle for literacy, social cohesion and employability is best fought before a child enters school. The time of maximum opportunity is in the first 3 years. The optimal place is in the home.

What do we know now about home environments that will help us move upstream to where the root causes of learning problems occur?

Family Culture is the Driver for Behaviour and Hence Learning Outcomes
Until now, we have focused our limited resources available for supporting the Early Years on the poorest segment of families. We looked at the Socio Economic gradient as the best way of finding out where to focus our limited resources. We have made the assumption that poor learning outcomes are closely linked with poverty.

New research[4] suggests that how a family functions, or its “culture”, is more powerful than Socio Economic Status (SES) in affecting learning outcomes of children.

“These findings present a serious challenge to the “culture of poverty” thesis and the widespread belief that the children of poor families do not fare well because of the way that they are raised.

These findings show that positive parenting practices have important effects on childhood outcomes, but that both positive and negative parenting practices are found in rich and poor families alike. Thus good parenting is a concern for all parents………….

Because positive practices are only weakly associated with Socio Economic Status (SES), it is not feasible to identify parents with relatively poor skills on the basis of socioeconomic factors[5]”

Nor is family structure itself tightly coupled to learning outcomes:

“Parenting practices are not strongly related to SES or to family structure…both positive and negative practices are apparent in all types of families”

Willms’ team identify the three key family cultural groups as being:

“Authoritative” – Parents who establish a warm and nurturing relationship with their children but set firm limits for their behaviour

“Authoritarian” – Parents who are highly controlling, requiring their children to meet an absolute set of standards

“Permissive” – Parents who are overly nurturing and who provide few standards for behaviour and are extremely tolerant of misbehaviour.

The Willms research informs us that the poorest learning and development outcomes are found in families that have Authoritarian and Permissive cultures. The research team’s conclusion is:

“..Given that about a third of parents might be characterized as Authoritative, most parents could benefit from training programs that improved their skills. …The aim would be to provide parents with practical ways to monitor their children’s behaviour, engage with them positively and encourage their independence[6]”

We are beginning to understand that simply targeting the poorest of our society will not shift our total development deficit[7]. Wilms is making the point that the collective of family functioning, or culture, is a very productive place to look and work.

Geert Hofstede, the leading scientist looking at culture in the workplace reinforces this view:

“Every person carries within him or herself patterns of thinking; feeling; and potential acting which were learned throughout their lifetime. Much of it has been acquired in early childhood, because at that time a person is most susceptible to learning and assimilating. As soon as certain patterns of thinking; feeling and acting have established themselves within a person’s mind; (s)he must unlearn these before being able to learn something different; and unlearning is more difficult than learning for the first time. “[8]

Is it possible to help families? Yes it is and I will talk more about that later.

A Plan for Child Development on PEI - The Real Report Card

This summer - depressed by my fears about how we on PEI are to cope with the great shocks that are ahead of us - I decided to see if I could find a way to bring the cavalry over the hill in time to save us.

It's not enough to complain - I felt that I had also to explain and to offer some ideas that could be used that would have a good chance in shifting us from a system where nearly 70% of our kids leave school ill equipped for life to where 70% leave school ready to tackle anything.

This is the real report card on education on PEI. In Korea only 7% of kids arrive in Grade 1 in trouble. On PEI it is abut 30%. I will provide you with the evidence.

In junior school, we lose most of the kids who give up. The system in effect Tips - If you turn the graph upside down you will see that it is a classic Adoption Curve that shows the Tipping point. What has happened is that the influencers, the disrupters, have won over their peers to a culture of loserdom.

In Korea 70% of kids leave school able to attend university. On PEI it is about 20% . Worse - most cannot hold down even the simplest of jobs - they have been encultured into being helpless.

So what to do?

Here is how I see the leverage points - About 30% of kids now arrive in school unable to behave and to learn. This is a tragedy for them and also for the 70% of kids who are ready. The teachers have no choice but to make control their paramount issue. So the 70% are progressively worn away by the rigidity of the system and by the influence of the disrupters. By grade 10, the system Tips. Most kids buy into the dominant social group - those that think that school sucks.

The way out? To work hard on the Early Years - we have to help parents reduce the disruptive group to less than 10%. We know how to do this and we have a foundation in place. We have to change the culture of the school - especially in middle school. We know how to do this too.

The attached pdf is spells out the details of how I see our predicament and what we can do to have a good chance of heading this crisis off at the pass.

Download edubrief9a.pdf

"J' Accuse" My thoughts on our Education System

What do think oil will be priced at in 2015? $200 - $300 a barrel? What will be the state of farming and fishing then? Will the world be at peace as oil and water are short supply? What will health care be like when there will be more people over 65 than under 25?

What a challenging task confronts us! It looks to me as if everything that we take for granted today, will be overturned. Surviving as a society will be an exceptional challenge that only the most resilient can deal with.

Have we prepared our kids to take on this challenge? Are they mainly good copers? Are they mainly resilient and take charge kids? Do they work well with each other? Do they have good work habits? Do they have any real skills?

What do our eyes and our experience tell us?

I think that we have been exceptionally complacent. I think that we are failing our children. I hope that there may be time to do things that will give them a good chance of being prepared. We surely have to do much much better.

This is quite an accusation - Dave Pollard has kindly given me space to tell you why I feel this way and you can find my thoughts here.

PEI Literacy

More needs to be done to improve the reading and writing skills of Prince Edward Island residents, says Education Minister Gerard Greenan.

Greenan is reacting to statistics that indicate the reading skills of 30 per cent of P.E.I. adults are so limited that they can’t deal with printed materials. Another 35 per cent of adults on the Island need materials written clearly and in plain language to understand it. (The Guardian)

Well here it is in black and white. Our reality. So what is the real problem?

It is that unless we dig deep and see why we have this result and how we can really turn it around, we will fail as a society. What do I mean by fail?

I mean that in the next 10 years - 2017 - we will have to have thought, planned and acted to solve the following problems:

• Sometime - next week, next year, by 2010 at the latest - Oil will be priced at levels way ahead of today. Unless we have worked out how to cope with say $200 a barrel or even $300 a barrel oil, we will no longer have an agriculture, a school system - an economy.
• By 2015, there will be more Islanders over 50 than under. Soon there will be more over 65. Who will do all the work? Who will lead the economy? Who will pay all the taxes to keep all us old folks in retirement homes? PEI will have the least amount of young except Newfoundland. Can we afford to have 65% of them as dependent as the old dears aged 85?
• Sometime soon our traditional agriculture and fishery will fall over. An Oil shock will do it. If not, our farmers will have gone bust or we as a society will have to stop them for environmental reasons. How will we transition out and to what? Will we have the smarts to find a new economy?
• Sometime in the next 10 years we can anticipate a series of weather events that may stop us in out tracks and/or face an environmental crisis. How will we think our way through this.

This is the challenge that faces us. It will be a stretch for the most resilient society. With 65% of our population unable to comprehend complexity and looking to others to save them - we will not have a chance.

Fiddling with literacy has not worked until now and why should it work now. This is no time for doing the wrong thing.

Our core issues are these:

• Our ability to read and to cope with the world is essentially set not at school but during the ages of 0-6.
• Currently 30% enter school here on PEI incapable of learning. By grade 10, we lose the next 35%. Our schools do not engage our kids. This is not just PEI - this is everywhere.

The places to work are here - with families to help them know how they can best help their kids and to look at why school is now such a turn off and what can be done to re-engage our kids while they are school.

In the next few weeks I will expand on these ideas and offer a series of choices that have a chance of enabling us to to turn the corner.

Montessori Opens in Summerside this Week

A new Montessori School opens this week in Summerside.

Here are some keen alumni who think that it was their experience at Montessori was the single most important reason for their success - being able to see what most people cannot - hard to beat that!!!

Larry Page and Sergey       Brin, founders of the popular Internet search engine Google.com, credited       their years as Montessori students as a major factor behind their success.       Having been friends since childhood, when Barbara Walters asked if the fact       that their parents were college professors was a factor behind their success,       they said no, that it was their going to a Montessori school where they       learned to be self-directed and self-starters. They said that Montessori       education allowed them to learn to think for themselves and gave them freedom       to pursue their own interests.

Surely it is these qualities that we all need most today?

Here are a few: Alice Waters, Friedrich Hundertwasser, Julia         Child, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Helen Keller, Alexander Graham Bell, Thomas         Edison, Henry Ford, Mahatma Gandhi, Sigmund Freud, Buckminster Fuller,         Leo Tolstoy, Bertrand Russell, Jean Piaget, Erik Erikson, John Holt, Ann         Frank, the Dalai Lama, Jacqueline Kennedy, Prince William and Prince Harry         of the English royal family, Cher Bono, Yul Brynner, Bill and Hillary         Clinton, and Yo Yo Ma.

Montessori Comes to Summerside - Jane Boyd and the New Immigrant

There is a new trend in immigration - it is for some professionals to leave the big city and relocate in smaller more rural places that offer a richer community. We see this in how the PEI BioAlliance and UPEI are attracting a certain kind of academic like Kira Salonius or Russ Kerr.

I think that this is a trickle now - but the internet, air travel, house prices and community are starting a move back "Home". It's not just scientists who seek a better lifestyle but all types of professionals that are not Place Dependent. What is calling us - for I am one - is the need to be in a human scaled community. A community where I can not be rushed off my feet. A community where I can afford good housing. A community where I can walk down the street and know people. A community where politics means something. A place that I can call "Home".

It's not for everyone - but it is for lots of folks now. The internet is a key driver. As is air travel. The New York Times talk about this tend here. (Subscription Required). A cultural fit is the most important factor.

“Folks moving in tend to embrace the values rather than try to change them,” said Gail Cote, who moved to Fort Mill from Greenville, S.C., with her family 13 years ago. “I think it’s reduced the resentment that is a natural outgrowth of the number of people moving in.” The Cotes live in Beacon Knoll, an established subdivision with little turnover.

Like most pioneers, I came here to PEI 12 years ago prepared to give up all my old life. I came to PEI to adopt its way of life not impose my old city life on it.

But if PEI is to attract the next wave of the adventurous I think that some of the most important aspects of the life that they leave behind have to in place before they come. One of the most important will be to know that they can find good schools.

Well we can't reform the whole school system next year. The doctor crisis is no longer a PEI one but is a national crisis and anyway - as we have found out - if you are very ill on PEI the system is excellent.

A key element then in attracting and keeping the new wave is to have some choice in schools. If PEI had a few excellent private schools - we would be open for business.

This is Jane Boyd - a pioneer herself who is moving from Vancouver to PEI to set up our first Montessori School in Summerside.

Jane and her family want to move to PEI for the same reasons that many in the new wave want to come here. She is bringing her school with her!

As many of you will recall, I have been managing a project with Global Montessori Schools in PEI.  Global Montessori is opening a new campus in Summerside this September for children aged three to five years  (We are planning to eventually also offer private elementary education as well).  This program will be the first Montessori offering in this part of PEI and we are very pleased with the warm welcome we have received from the community to get this new program up and running.

I think that Jane will have as much an impact on the future of PEI as we may derive from opening up more direct air connections.

The City of Summerside think so and have been very helpful. Hopefully next year - Charlottetown?

Education on PEI - Literacy or Survival? Part 1

We all know on PEI that we have to do better in education. But I don't think we know just how important this is.

The numbers suggest that if we do not turn our system around int he next 10 years - that is 2017 - we will be finished as a society. Well this is quite an extreme statement so I had better back it up.

You may have seen these before. But have you really thought about what this means? Never before in the history of the human race will there have been this kind of imbalance in young and old. Can we afford to waste any of our children anymore?

Let's see another view of this

The crunch is not a lifetime away - it is less than a decade away.

It gets worse as we not only have too few young but many of the most competent leave.

Look who is leaving and who is arriving.

Now look at what happens at school.

On the first day of grade 1, 30% of our children arrive unable to learn or to behave. By around grade 7, we start to lose most of the rest. By graduation about 80% of Island kids have bought the idea that they are 2nd class citizens.

Of the 20% who go on to University, how many do we then lose to the big cities because there is no opportunity for them here?

So even in a stable world, PEI does not at the moment have enough capable young to just cope with a normal world. But we do not face a normal world either. PEI has to cope with the end of cheap oil, the end of commodity agriculture, global warming among a few other issues. All societies will be stretched to the max to cope.

This is the context for our future. Assuring that most of our children can meet their potential is not a nice to have but a survival issue.

I think that this is a much broader issue than education or schools even. It is surely a human development and resources issue.

I have been working for months now on what we can do that will have a shot at getting us out of this jam. I will be ready to go public in a few weeks.

I am interested in having a few Alpha readers though. If you would be willing to help me - please let me know. The opening page is in the follow on:-

The failure of education

John Walter made the responsible comment on the lack of citation for the data I presented from the American Literacy council on the low level of literacy in the US:

I see you got the graph showing the current US literacy rate at 35% from American Literacy Council, but where are they getting that statistic? They offer no citation for this figure, which is unbelievably low.

So here is an even more depressing set of data with a proper citation:

Here is what these levels mean:

In these population assessments of adult literacy (prose, document, and quantitative), the
OECD and U.S. Department of Education use a scale of 1 (low) to 5 (high).

Each level can be described in terms of what individuals were able to do.  For example,
persons proficient at Level 4/5 on the prose scale are capable of making medium to high
level text-based inferences by integrating or contrasting abstract pieces of information in
relatively lengthy texts that contain several to many distractors.

At Level 3 on the prose scale, persons can make low-level text-based inferences by
locating several pieces of information from a few to a number of different sentences or
paragraphs, and integrating or contrasting information across sections of text that contain
few to several distractors.  This level is deemed as a minimum for persons to understand
and use information contained in the increasingly difficult texts and tasks that
characterize the emerging knowledge-based society and the information economy.

Those scoring at Level 2 on the prose scale are capable of making low-level text-based
inferences by locating one or more pieces of information, and integrating or contrasting
two or more pieces of information across sections of text that contain some distractors. 
Thus, persons at this level may not be able to consistently understand more difficult texts
and tasks that are increasingly prevalent in modern societies.

Proficiency at Level 1 indicates that persons may be able to locate one piece of
information that is identical or synonymous with the information given in a directive but
in general they have difficulty making low-level text-based inferences.

Source: The Brookings Institution

Early Child Development and Experience-based Brain Development -
The Scientific Underpinnings of the Importance of Early Child Development
in a Globalized World *

J. F. Mustard
Founding President of 
The Canadian Institute for Advanced Research

February 2006

Briefing a new government - Education

As our new government prepares to govern, new ministers are reading their briefing books and being told what the issues are by their departments.

I would like to offer a few ideas. I will start with Education.

We all know that we have to do better. Much advice will be given about the need for more resources. Bigger and better schools. Smaller classes. More Teachers and more T/A's. We must invest more. The cabinet will leave that meeting to go to another where the Health people will say - we need more doctors, more nurses, better equipment, more drugs on the list etc - we must invest more. Then off to Agriculture. We have to support our farmers, we need more of this and that and so on.

I am going to challenge "We need More" argument. I will start with Education - offer a challenge and then in later posts offer a broader context for what we have to do and how we may do this with less!!! After a few posts on Education, I will do the same for Health and for Agriculture.

This is how it looks and looked in the US at the time of the one room school. My bet is that our own figures will show the same kind of decline. We know for sure now that nearly 80% of our kids leave school today unable to participate in the economy as it will unfold.

Here is a link to an excellent site that expands on this perspective that after all our investment in a formal school system, results are getting worse.

More US data - but I am making a point about resources. In spite of a massive investment in traditional infrastructure, the reading scores remain flat.

By 2015 over 50% of Islanders will be over 50. By 2030 50% will be over 65. We know for sure that every child will be precious and that we have to have as many young as possible who can be both good citizens and flexible. They don't have to all be PHD's - they have to be net contributors - they have to be like their great grandparents who also had to cope with a lot of change.

We have to ask a big question first. What kind of person needs to emerge from our school system that will enable us to get through the crisis of - the end of cheap oil, the end of commodity agriculture, climate change, a health care cost crisis, a world torn by conflict over religion, oil and water?

What is the product of our existing approach? Is it that most of kids will be able to cope or not?

Then we need to ask - what kind of kids do we need and how will we get them? What if we fail? How much time do we have?

More later