3 things I learned from 31 smart, little, seven-year-olds 7 July 2008

The idea of teaching to pre-school children has always terrified me.  My career is confined to the world of actively thinking though sometimes irrational adults.  They may be childlike and childish at the worst of times, but even at their nastiest, the rules of conventions controlled them. 

To my mind, children can be quite unreasonable.  They march to their own drummers to symphonies only known to them.  Although I was armed with the conceptual tools given by the giants of developmental and learning psychology, putting these concepts into practice was another matter entirely.

And therein lies my fears.  I have never had any experience teaching very young children.  Yet, there I was on 20 May 2008, standing before 31 young, impressionable seven-year-olds.  The community teaching service was part of our practicum and all I could do was comply.  I stood to deliver my lesson plan, the instinct to turn tail and run was very powerful.  It was a toss up between “stand up and deliver”, or “shut up and fold”. 

Community teaching

Welfareville Compound was the object of our service.  It is a 101-hectare property in Mandaluyong City owned by the DSWD.  Besides playing host to the Population Commission, and the Correctional Institute for Women, it was also a haven for informal settlers.  The depressed community was the beneficiary of St. Paul’s outreach program on early childhood education.

Panatag Health Center where we were to teach was a two-storey, relatively-new concrete structure in the midst of a busy urban poor community.  In a cramped second-floor room, 31 young children and an assortment of parents and teachers were confined to an 18-square-meter room. 

Despite the limited legroom, a hum of excitement buzzed through the entire place.  A sense of anticipation permeated the room, the people eagerly waiting for the program to unfold.  The small gathering seemed to be telling the team: “Surpise us!”

Lessons learned from smart minds

I am certain that the children we taught at Welfareville Compound brought with them unseen baggage much heavier than the ones I carried with me.  Poverty and its deprivations was a specter they confronted daily.  The mere fact that they were beneficiaries of an outreach program spoke volumes of their families’ scant capability in giving them the education they needed to transcend their indigence.

Yet, as we taught them, their faces were awash with the characteristic carefree countenance of young children.  They were as curious as their more-privileged counterparts in posh preschool learning centers.  There were a touch of inappropriate behavior exhibited now and then but overall, the children were attentive, responsive, and participative. They answered intelligently when called on to recite.  They played smartly in the learning activities.  Overall, they responded positively to the instructional overtures of our teaching team.

It was a baptism of fire for me, unsuspectingly thrust into the world of precocious minds.  But the experienced provided me a rich lode of learnings which I know will frame my future teaching career.  From those 31 young minds, I learned three huge, important lessons:

1. Preparation = confidence.  One of the reasons why new teachers are scared stiff of the prospect of teaching is the lack of mastery of the subject matter.  The simplest solution is still good, ol’ preparation.  This necessitates a healthy dose of curiosity, in the teacher, on the subjects that s/he has to teach. Writers are always admonished to read, read, and read so they will sound authoritative in their articles.  The same is true with the teacher.

But merely knowing the theories and concepts defining a lesson can bore students and stunt discovery.  The teacher must learn how to ask herself deliberate questions to expand her knowledge base. 

A teacher whose curiosity constantly drives her to search for new knowledge to answer questions her students may pose makes sure that she does not short-change the learners in her care.  She must be able to match her students’ curiosity with eureka experiences so that learning becomes a satisfying, not disappointing, experience.

The Lesson Plan (and consequently, the content standards, curricula, and syllabi) is still the ultimate standard of preparation for a master or a neophyte teacher.  What enabled me to stand before those preschoolers at Panatag Health Center despite my terror is my familiarity with my lesson for the day.

I researched, designed, drafted and edited the Lesson Plan.  I had a plan.  I knew when to start and where to end the lesson, and I knew what would happen in between.  I had benchmarks that guided me while I delivered my lesson to minimize surprises along the way.  In effect, I was controlling 90% of the proceedings; and that is the best confidence booster ever for a new teacher. 
 
2. Creativity = deeper understanding.  There is that rule-of-thumb in teaching children, and people in general, that says the attention span of an individual is equal in minutes to his/her age in years up to thirty years old.  Beyond thirty years old, the attention span reverses in increments of one minute.  A six-year-old child will have a six-minute attention span.  A thirty-year-old can concentrate on a lecture for thirty minutes.  A thirty-one-year-old will have twenty-nine minutes or so of focus at a given time.

Given this, a grade school teacher will have to break up her lesson presentation in increments, employing creativity and innovativeness in her choice of techniques and strategies to capture and sustain interest and consequently foster understanding.

A one-hour session therefore may look like this: (a) a lecture for fifteen minutes, (b) a mini-workshop integrating the multiple intelligences for twenty-minutes, (c) a reinforcing/processing synthesis for fifteen minutes, and (d) a short quiz for five minutes.  By breaking up a lesson into student-centered activities, the teacher can grab the curiosity and concentration of her students.  In the community teaching, I saw that I retained the children’s attention with the varying ways I presented the lesson despite the distraction that two hours of sitting through different lecturers had created.

I also realized that colorful, varied, and vibrant visual aids extend students’ interest and attention longer.  Children are largely visual rather than abstract in their learning before age eleven, something that a pre- or grade-school teacher must optimize in lesson delivery.

3. Regard = respect.  The teacher has that frightening power to make or unmake a person.  Nowhere was this more evident to me than in my Welfareville experience. 

These children came to school with hidden baggage on their shoulders.  Theirs are fragile egos, not only owing to their age but to the perceived (in)capacities of their families.  For a teacher who is familiar with, and actually lives in the community, there is the danger of being equally frank and familiar in her language, or in the teaching strategies she utilizes.

However, there is that demand on the teacher to be respectful of her students, whatever their background or capabilities.  The tenets of judicious regard demand that she treat them with fairness: in the lessons she delivers, in her relationship and language with them, in managing behaviors, and with a host of other considerations.  For example, the speech she employs must not only give regard to the self-esteem of each student but must also be uniform across individuals in that it does not denigrate one and build up another.  Another sign of respect of her students is the measure of forbearance she displays in dealing with the learners’ mistakes, difficulties, and (in)abilities.

The Welfareville experience has made me realize that teaching is not for the faint of heart. It is a noble profession that requires hours and hours of preparation, a bottomless well of creativity, and great respect for the students not only as learners but as individuals with burdens to carry.  Awareness of these realities, I believe, will go a long way to helping others transcend the incapacities they were born with, whether they are residents of Welfareville or of Forbes Park.

For publication in the St. Paul University-Quezon City newsletter. Reflective journal submitted to my Practicum Supervisor on 05 July 2008.