The High-Performing Preschool

Story Acting in Head Start Classrooms

Gillian Dowley McNamee

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780226261003
• Topic: Didattica
• Subtopic: Didattica generale

The High-Performing Preschool takes readers into the lives of three- and four-year-old Head Start students during their first year of school and focuses on the centerpiece of their school day: story acting. In this activity, students act out stories from high-quality children's literature as well as stories dictated by their peers. Drawing on a unique pair of thinkers—Russian psychologist Lev Vygotsky and renowned American teacher and educational writer Vivian G. Paley—Gillian Dowley McNamee elucidates the ways, and reasons, this activity is so successful. She shows how story acting offers a larger blueprint for curricula that helps ensure all preschools—not just those for society's well-to-do—are excellent.
             
McNamee outlines how story acting cultivates children's oral and written language skills. She shows how it creates a crucial opportunity for teachers to guide children inside the interior logic and premises of an idea, and how it fosters the creation of a literary community. Starting with Vygotsky and Paley, McNamee paints a detailed portrait of high-quality preschool teaching, showing how educators can deliver on the promise of Head Start and provide a setting for all young children to become articulate, thoughtful, and literate learners.  

Chapter 1

Zones of Proximal Development in Head Start Classrooms

Mrs. Miller sits with her three- and four-year-old children in front of her on the rug, holding up shapes for them to name and describe. She holds up a green circle and asks in a cheery voice, “What color is this?” Sam calls out, “Brown!” The teacher replies, “What color?” Adrian is eager: “Red!” Mrs. Miller says, “Come on now, look what I am holding. What color is this?” “Blue! Blue!” “No, look at this; this is like the stoplight. It’s green. This is a green circle. What is this?” The class responds together, “Green circle.” “Good. Now what’s this?” the teacher asks as she holds up a red square. A child calls out, “A stoplight!” “No, what color?” “Brown!” “You know this! Come on, what color is this?” Child: “Red!” Mrs. Miller: “Yes, this is a red square! OK, time to go to the tables, and I want you to practice making the letter B. Take your finger and make the letter B in the air with me.”

The children do their best to mimic their teacher’s motions in the air. They then go off to tables, where they take up pencils that wobble and skitter about in their tiny hands. Their first attempts at letters are about as successful as their color naming. The next day when they come back to the rug, Mrs. Miller reviews the colors of the shapes with them, and then moves on to the names of the shapes. The lessons in shapes, colors, and forming letters occupy much of their school day and present a laborious curriculum challenge for both children and teacher in the weeks and months that follow.

The curriculum will continue with learning the names of the letters of the alphabet, their sounds, recognizing spoken words with the same initial or ending sound, counting the syllables in a word, counting to twenty, and reciting the names of the days of the week and months of the year. With each storybook, they will be taught to name it as “fiction” or “informational,” identify the author and illustrator and what work each of them do in writing the book, and they will answer questions about unknown words in the text. Teachers in today’s schools are asked to maximize the time spent each day ensuring children’s mastery of basic skills and concepts central to school curriculum. The detailing of such knowledge that children are expected to have to be kindergarten ready is growing longer given the goals now identified in the new Common Core State Standards (2010).

Mrs. Miller has been criticized by school administrators at Green Park Elementary for too much rote drill of academic skills in her classroom, and, when she carries out activities like storytelling and story acting, as she did with Daniella and the class, for not focusing enough on academics. How are teachers to reconcile the seemingly conflicting goals to teach fundamental knowledge needed for school success while creating classroom settings that motivate and inspire young children to learn? Is there an educational path toward nurturing the literate, thoughtful, well-educated, articulate children we seek in our schools that does not leave us choosing between skill mastery and meaningful learning? Lev Vygotsky and Vivian Paley offer an alternative, and my work with Mrs. Miller helps to fill in the outlines of this new direction.

Using Vygotsky and Mrs. Paley’s work together makes possible a new vision of what preschool and kindergarten education can look like. I believe that if Vygotsky had had the chance to observe Mrs. Paley at work with her children, he would have pointed immediately to pretend play, storytelling, and story acting as the key activities for realizing educational goals for young children in early childhood classrooms. Until Vygotsky, no other psychologist spelled out so clearly how imagination, words, and other children matter in an individual child’s learning. The words “Let’s pretend . . .” are symbolic mediators, tools for having ideas, clarifying them, and inventing new ones. Until Vivian Paley’s writings, no one had given a rendering of how learning in pretend play by an individual child could be made possible by a teacher along with every other child in the group. Play, storytelling, and story acting as Mrs. Paley portrays them provide a pathway to educational achievement for not only children of middle-class educated families, but—as the experience of Mrs. Miller’s children at Green Park demonstrates—those who grow up in poverty and are most in need of the promise that public education can offer.

Vygotsky’s Ideas about Learning

As an undergraduate in the early 1970s, I worked as a research assistant with Michael Cole, founder of the Laboratory of Comparative Human Cognition that first opened at Rockefeller University in New York before moving to its current home at the University of California, San Diego. I worked with Michael Cole and teachers at a Head Start site in Harlem. Our goal was to explore ways to organize classroom learning to expand home and community conversational proficiencies and extend them to school learning.

One of the four-year-old Head Start children told her aunt one day while walking home from school, “I a tiger at home and a mouse at school.” When her aunt told the teacher this the next day, we recognized what the child meant: that she is quiet in school but lively and talkative at home. This child was articulating what William Labov (1972) was documenting with school-age children in Harlem. In school, when and if children spoke at all, it was in short, unelaborated sentences, while outside of school they engaged in more fully developed verbal interchanges, particularly with peers. What would it take for Head Start children to bring more aggressive outgoing verbal excitement and participation to their classrooms?

While studying children’s patterns of conversation inside and outside of their Head Start classrooms, Michael Cole was working on translating Vygotsky’s work for American audiences. One day he handed me a page he was working on.

A child’s mental development is a process that is no less simple than the growth of peas or beans in a garden; and well before the fruit appears, the gardener can discern the stages that lead to the appearance of the fruit. It would be a poor gardener who would judge the plants under his care only on the basis of the harvest, and equally deficient is the educator who is able to determine nothing more than what has already happened developmentally, that is, nothing other than a retrospective developmental summary. (From a draft manuscript for Mind in Society in 1974)

I could not get this image of educators as gardeners out of my mind. Skilled teaching would include being able to see the developmental history of children up to the current point in time, analyzing what is occurring in the moment and having an idea about the effect of current activities in shaping the children’s future. I was drawn to the idea of standing in the present and being able to say something about the past and future. What would it be like to be a teacher with a class of children having a view of where they have come from, and where they are headed?

One aspect of Vygotsky’s genius was in realizing that when describing development, two levels need to be specified, not just one. Educators and psychologists need to be watchful like the gardener describing what has already developed, what represents fully developed cycles of change and growth. In addition, they need to describe what is in the process of formation, “the buds and flowers” of development that anticipate the fruit to come in the harvest. Vygotsky was the first to develop a framework for thinking about a child’s actual level of development, those parts of a child’s thinking and development that have matured, and the potential, those aspects that are in the process of unfolding.

Vygotsky went further to specify how to detect the area between the two points of growth: the point of current mastery of skills and knowledge, and the area of the child’s newly emerging competence. He recognized the key to pinpointing what is strong and stable in a child and what is in the process of developing is to examine carefully what happens while the child is interacting with others. He defined this mental space as the zone of proximal development, and described it as “the distance between the actual developmental level as determined by independent problem solving and the level of potential development as determined through problem solving under adult guidance or in collaboration with more capable peers” (Vygotsky 1978, 86). Thus, any child’s development is characterized by two benchmarks, one describing what a child can do on his or her own, and the other what he or she can do with help from others—adults and peers.

Vygotsky proposes that all intellectual learning happens twice; first it is carried out between people, and then gradually it is more internally generated and sustained by each of us as individuals. He states, “It is through others that we develop into ourselves” (1981, 161). The conversations in seminar rooms guided by Michael Cole and Sylvia Scribner and colleagues in the mid-1970s at Rockefeller University began to recognize that these principles are at work in young children’s schooling as well as in their home lives. The dynamics were waiting to be discovered in all arenas of life where families, communities, schools, and businesses organize themselves to benefit from teachers, coaches, mentors, trainers, and supervisors (Cole 1996).

The idea that other people are key to the unfolding of new thinking and learning in young children seems obvious, and yet in the mid-1970s, the work of Vygotsky and his colleagues began to transform the possibilities for how this process might unfold. Like other psychologists, Vygotsky said children construct knowledge, but he emphasized that children build thinking with other people first. He maintained that thinking is social (involves others), historical (done over time), and cultural (following the lines of group beliefs, values, and practices). An individual’s thinking and reasoning emerge from participating in society with family, community, and teachers and classmates in school settings. Individuals inside of groups construct patterns of personal and community thinking toward a current and future world for all involved.

Vygotsky offered for the first time a way to look at the connection between what a child does with others and how those interactions are utilized and reworked in a child’s mind as he or she figures out how things work in the world—at home and in school. “Development does not proceed toward socialization,” he proposes, “but toward the conversion of social relations into mental functions” (1981, 165). Vygotsky also contended that new learning comes not just from adults—a child’s peers, siblings, cousins, and neighborhood friends also contribute to opening up possibilities in a child’s unfolding future. The important message we can take from Vygotsky is that the pattern of interactions in the classroom matters: the conversations, arguments, debates, negotiations following tears, and the explanations. These interactions are the blueprint for the child’s thinking in the future.

Vivian Paley and Zones of Proximal Development

In 1974, I left New York to pursue graduate studies at the University of Chicago. Within a few short weeks of arriving, I met and observed Vivian Paley in her kindergarten classroom at the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools. I saw children making dioramas for figures they made out of clay and painting pictures at easels lined up alongside one another on one wall, where they could look at their classmates’ experiments, copy one another, and talk about what they were trying out. There were children playing checkers, taking care of babies in the doll corner, and using wooden beads as their vegetables for chicken soup. Children were building elaborate forts in the block area and watching a goldfish as it darted around the thick green grass of the fish tank.

The volume of conversation in every corner of the classroom was deafening, like nothing I had ever heard among a group of children. Rather than teachers instructing, asking questions, and children answering, the dialogue flowed among children and their teacher. I had never seen children play in school with such intensity. It was not a part of my own kindergarten experience and not part of the Head Start programs I worked with in New York. I was overwhelmed with the possibilities.

As Mrs. Paley signaled the group to gather on the rug for music and stories, I saw another side of teaching children I had never heard of or thought possible. She was trying to tame a lion, searching for the wavelength of one of the most exciting and challenging children in the class, Wally, who was shaking the ground she stood on as a teacher. A few years later, she published her account of trying to understand this child in Wally’s Stories.

When I began to play the piano, [Wally] leaps over Lisa and Rose to get to the piano first, but before the song is finished he is on the outer edge of the rug, growling.

“Don’t make that noise, Wally,” I say.

“It’s a warning growl.”

“Not at piano time.”

“I’m guarding the lions,” he whispers. “The growl means I hear a suspicious noise.” The children stop squirming and watch Wally as he crouches in concentration. Several boys copy his pose and give low growls. (1981, 7)

A week or two later during a visit to her classroom, I heard Mrs. Paley pick up on a comment from Wally to discuss with the children, which she also recounted in Wally’s Stories.

One day at lunch, Wally says, “I’m going to become a mother lion when I grow up.”

“A mother lion?” I ask. “Can you become a mother lion?”

“Sure. The library has everything. Even magic. When I am eight I can learn magic. That’s how.”

“Why a mother lion?”

“Because I would have babies and do the mommy work. They stay at home and take care of babies. Daddy lions go to work and have to walk fast.”

Deana has been listening. “People can’t turn into animals.”

“That’s true,” Wally says.

“You changed your mind, Wally?” I ask.

“It is true, what she said. But I’m going to use magic.”

“Oh, I didn’t hear him say that.” Deana leans forward. “If he uses magic he might. Maybe. It’s very hard to do.”

Fred joins in. “I might become a daddy crocodile. Every time a person tries to kill them they can swat at their guns.”

“Fred,” I ask, “do you believe Wally can become a mother lion?”

“No. Only if he practices very hard.” (1981, 7–8)

During a third visit to her classroom, I watched Mrs. Paley read the children a storybook that they then acted out. A shy and quiet child, Rose, took the role of a character “drinking the sea.” The class had acted out The Carrot Seed (Krauss 1945) a few days before, and when Rose heard “sea,” she thought of the word “seed” and proceeded to act out swallowing a seed. Her misunderstanding of this one critical word became evident while she stood in the middle of the rug with the whole class watching, a moment that could have ended in embarrassment and humiliation. Wally changed everything in a second, using his fluency in ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword
• Preface
• Chapter 1: Zones of Proximal Development in Head Start Classrooms
• Chapter 2: Acting Out Stories and the Common Core State Standards
• Chapter 3: “Doing Stories”
• Chapter 4: Beginnings of Storytelling and Story Acting
• Chapter 5: Changes in Development
• Chapter 6: Looking Ahead to First Grade
• Chapter 7: Staging Stories
• Chapter 8: Starting Points for Teachers
• Chapter 9: Teaching Friends
• References
• Index