Survival of the 'kindest'

A brief morning break-time chat with a colleague this week has sparked off a series of questions in my mind about kindness and empathy in children. My colleague mentioned that he felt our students think with their heads and not their hearts, something which really stopped me in my tracks. In the week some examples of bullying had surfaced and I’d just, while on this same break duty, listened horrified to a Grade 2 child gleefully describing the way his older brother loved to torment cats by swinging them round and round! My colleague's observation seemed disturbingly spot on!

The Pleasure of a Puddle

"Let the children be free; encourage them; let them run outside when it is raining; let them remove their shoes when they find a puddle of water; and when the grass of the meadows is wet with dew, let them run on it and trample it with their bare feet; let them rest peacefully when a tree invites them to sleep beneath its shade; let them shout and laugh when the sun wakes them in the morning."
Maria Montessori

Exploratory Thoughts on Childhood, Work and Learning

I have always been uncomfortable with the term "work" to describe children's learning engagements and was pleased to come across Guy Claxton's humorous way of pointing out its absurdity.
Check it out at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BqRu74M_1Gw   (Watch from 14:00 - 18:00)

In a PD session this week I shared the extract with my team and one group of teachers decided to look up the dictionary definition of work. Here's what they found:

work

wəːk/

noun

1. 1.

   activity involving mental or physical effort done in order to achieve a result.

   
   

   "he was tired after a day's work in the fields"

   
   

   synonyms:

   labour, toil, exertion, effort, slog, drudgery, the sweat of one's brow; More

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2. 2.

   a task or tasks to be undertaken.

   
   

   "they made sure the work was progressing smoothly"

   
   

   synonyms:

   tasks, jobs, duties, assignments, commissions, projects; chores "haven't you got any work to do?"

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1. 1.

   be engaged in physical or mental activity in order to achieve a result; do work.

   
   

   "an engineer who was working on a design for a more efficient wing"

   
   

   synonyms:

   toil, labour, exert oneself, slave (away), plod away; More

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2. 2.

   (of a machine or system) function, especially properly or effectively.

   
   

   "his phone doesn't work unless he goes to a high point"

   
   

   synonyms:

   function, go, run, operate, perform;

(http://bit.ly/2ErPCt4)

The Journey Begins

So, with our IB Evaluation over, I am bursting with enthusiasm to move the school on to the next level. That level is definitely going to take us on a journey, which will undoubtedly be challenging and even unsettling at times; a paradigm shift, actually.We are going to unpack what the concept of “learner agency” really means and how it looks in practice.

I feel that a natural starting place is looking at the way our youngest learners engage with their world. Anyone who has had the privilege of spending time with babies and toddlers might be struck by the way they construct their understanding of the world around them, using every sense to build their unique schema.

The image of the child presented by Loris Malaguzzi (1993) is one in which the child is viewed as highly capable and naturally in charge of their own learning. He describes children as, ‘rich in potential’ who ‘seek the meaning of the world from birth’. As a teacher committed to constructivism, I am excited to gain a deeper understanding of Malaguzzi’s philosophy and the approach of the Reggio Emilia schools movement and how we can apply the pedagogical practices in our setting, across the primary grades.

References

Malaguzzi, L. 1993. ‘For an education based on relationships’, Young Children, 11/93, 10.