Early Childhood Education Commons^™

A Framework For Coaching In Early Childhood Settings: Drawing On Bank Street College Of Education’S Developmental-Interaction Approach (Dia), Virginia Casper, Milenis Gonzalez, Tarima Levine, Emily Sharrock, Annie Schaeffing

Bank Street Education Center

Coaching helps teachers activate and better articulate their previous knowledge, skills, values, and belief systems, along with new concepts, to construct and continually refine an approach that is meaningful in their everyday work. This framework captures some commonalities of a positive coaching stance across contexts while allowing enough flexibility to make use of these ideas in ways that will serve that setting and teachers best.

Establishing Early Care & Education As A Public Good, Brandy Jones Lawrence, Emily Sharrock

Bank Street Education Center

This brief outlines a set of guiding principles including tactical policy and advocacy actions needed to move us toward investing in early childhood education as a public good to support all children, families, and society as a whole.

Centering Values: Building An Equitable Future Through The American Rescue Plan Act, Emily Sharrock, Brandy Jones Lawrence, Karen Demoss, Brigid Brennan

Bank Street Education Center

The $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) constitutes a significant change in our nation's approach to social policy and offers a new opportunity to imagine positive change in how we value and support human development and learning with a clear focus on equity. This memo outlines Bank Street's recommendations for spending to inspire communities and policymakers as they think broadly about the potential this funding offers to invest in our future.

Realizing The Promise Of Early Educator Apprenticeships, Brandy Jones Lawrence, Emily Sharrock, Courtney Parkerson

Bank Street Education Center

In response to the introduction of the Early Educator Apprenticeship Act in both houses of Congress, this positioning statement outlines recommendations for rebuilding the workforce at this critical moment with quality and equity at the center through apprenticeships, which have been effective in improving K-12 school systems. A national system of robust apprenticeship programs would support rebuilding our supply of care while also ensuring educators receive the high-quality clinical practice and coaching required for the complex task of supporting early brain development.

We Are All Learning About Climate Change: Teaching With Picture Books To Engage Teachers And Students, Ysaaca D. Axelrod, Denise Ives, Rachel Weaver

Occasional Paper Series

The topic of climate change and climate justice is politically charged, doesn’t sit neatly within a single subject or content area, and raises concerns of not being ‘age appropriate’ for young children. In this paper we describe how teacher educators in an elementary education program support a student teacher who took up the topic of climate change and climate justice in her 1st grade teaching placement. She designed a unit around a picture book that focuses on the words and work of Greta Thunberg, and used a diverse set of texts to support students’ understanding of the complexity of climate …

Angry Like Me, Catherine-Laura Dunnington, Shoshana Magnet

Occasional Paper Series

In this article we take on a challenging picture book, The Heart and the Bottle written and illustrated by Oliver Jeffers, and how one preschool boy’s response changed us. As part of a three-center initiative to discuss hard feelings and grief with preschool learners, we teamed with six preschool teachers to read and work through this text. We explore how both the preschoolers’ and the teachers’ responses challenged us to look at how the disjoint between pedagogy (literature that says we should teach these types of texts) and practice (how this classroom experience actually unfolds) leaves much room for continued …

Equitable Compensation For The Child Care Workforce: Within Reach And Worth The Investment, Emily Sharrock, Courtney Parkerson

Bank Street Education Center

This brief outlines concrete ideas and innovative strategies to help advance early educator compensation at the local, state, and federal levels and, in turn, support the development and care of our nation's youngest learners.

The High Lonesome Sound In Little Voices: The Use Of Appalachian Balladry In The Early Childhood Classroom, Lance Piao

Graduate Student Independent Studies

Although both music and poetry are thoroughly-integrated into the Early Childhood classroom, the ballad, their intersection, has not been studied. Appalachian music features a prominent tradition of balladry, a synthesis of several different music traditions. With the increased interest in Appalachian Studies after the 2016 U.S. presidential election, the study of Appalachian custom has become increasingly relevant. From a critical-historical perspective, the ballads, their collection, and their analysis have been used to perpetuate the oppressive structures that have come under increased scrutiny since 2016. This study is a hypothetical curriculum for integrating the study of Appalachian ballads into the Early …

Investing In The Birth-To-Three Workforce: A New Vision To Strengthen The Foundation For All Learning, Emily Sharrock, Courtney Parkerson

Bank Street Education Center

This report asserts that every child—regardless of race, income, or opportunity—should have consistent access to high-quality learning experiences from birth and provides a roadmap toward change at scale, including the development of residency programs and improved compensation for the infant/toddler workforce.

Maximizing Every Child's Potential In The First 1,000 Days Of Life: A Landscape Analysis, Emily Sharrock, Courtney Parkerson

Bank Street Education Center

This report features a series of findings, supporting evidence, and bright spots that build a case for developing a stronger approach to supporting the diverse infant/toddler workforce.

Art & Early Childhood: Personal Narratives & Social Practices

Occasional Paper Series

No abstract provided.

Living A Philosophy Of Early Childhood Education: A Festschrift For Harriet Cuffaro

Occasional Paper Series

No abstract provided.

Feelings Charts Instead Of Behavior Charts: Radical Love Instead Of Shame, Margaret Blachly, Noelle Dean

Graduate School of Education

In this article, the authors introduce some core concepts and language of Emotionally Responsive Practice at Bank Street , an approach to working with children developed based on deep knowledge of child development and a respect for children’s life experience (Koplow, 2002, 2007, 2009).

Implementing Nh Child: A Comprehensive Approach To Professional Learning To Reach All New Haven Early Childhood Educators, Emily Sharrock, Courtney Parkerson

All Faculty and Staff Papers and Presentations

New Haven Children’s Learning District (NH ChILD) envisions a city where all children have access to high quality early learning experiences. In order to turn this vision into reality for the 14,800 children ages 0-8 living in New Haven, NH ChILD is working to increase the number of spaces in high quality programs while simultaneously improving the quality of early learning experiences in existing programs. The following paper outlines NH ChILD’s beliefs, commitments, and plan for action with respect to NH ChILD’s citywide efforts for in-service professional learning.

L’Dor Vador: Storytelling For The Holiday Cycle In A Jewish Early Childhood Setting, Krista Bogetich

Graduate Student Independent Studies

Storytelling is an effective and appropriate method of engaging young children in complex concepts such as values and ethics. This paper provides rationale for using storytelling in an early childhood setting, background information on Jewish holidays, and highlights the values in the stories told during those holidays. It includes synopses of stories told through original storytelling, descriptions of activities incorporated in the experiences, as well as children’s responses and photographs of children’s work.

Rethinking “Parent Involvement”: Perspectives Of Immigrant And Refugee Parents, Zeynep Isik-Ercan

Occasional Paper Series

I arrived in the U.S. 15 years ago as a master’s student in early childhood education after teaching in elementary schools in Turkey. Becoming a permanent resident in my new country and parenting my two Turkish-American boys fueled my scholarly interest in the experiences of immigrant communities with their children’s early school years, specifically the ways they negotiate cultural and linguistic identities in educational settings. Among many encounters with my children’s teachers, one is particularly memorable.

Shortly after Enis, my older son, began attending the campus preschool at age two, his teacher asked me to speak only English at home …

Facilitating A Block Program In Kindergarten And First Grade: A Manual For Kindergarten And First Grade Teachers, Hannah Rau

Graduate Student Independent Studies

Many preschool classroom have unit blocks. Unfortunately, not as many early primary classrooms incorporate blocks into their programs. This paper discusses the power of using unit blocks in a Kindergarten and first grade. The first three sections of the thesis focus on the importance of a unit block curriculum in early primary classrooms by discussing the developmentally-appropriate ways blocks invite problem solving and mathematical and scientific thinking. The final section is a teacher’s manual designed as a guidebook to support teachers who are starting a block program in their Kindergarten and first grade classroom. In this manual, critical components of …

Learning To Teach: Observing And Reflecting, Nancy Nager

All Faculty and Staff Papers and Presentations

This video series, “Learning to Teach,” provides a platform for professional development in early childhood education. It introduces viewers to compelling early childhood classroom footage accompanied by facilitated discussions about observations and teaching practices. You will get a hands-on look at how beginning teachers learn to closely observe children and engage in reflective conversations about children, materials, the classroom environment and themselves.

Descriptive Inquiry At Bank Street: Building Intellectual Community While Responding To Accreditation, Jessica Charles

All Faculty and Staff Papers and Presentations

Over the 2016-17 academic year, Bank Street Graduate School faculty and staff participated in a school-wide Descriptive Inquiry process to examine their programs and pedagogy. As part of the process, faculty met regularly to share their practices and to strengthen their well-established programs in teacher and leader preparation, museum education, and child life. Dean Cecelia Traugh initiated this process, drawing on her extensive experience implementing Descriptive Inquiry in higher education settings, in order to help faculty reflect on their practice, improve program quality, and build organizational coherence.

"Building Up": Block Play After September 11, Lisa Edstrom

Occasional Paper Series

Like most people in New York City, the children in Edstrom's class were affected by the events of September 11. However, not until five weeks later did these particular five- and six year-olds begin to make sense of what happened. Through the use of block play, they were able to explore the difficult emotions and questions we all had about the World Trade Center attack

Safe, Patricia Lent

Occasional Paper Series

The first four sections of this essay chronicle her attempts to make sense of September 11 in the succeeding weeks and months. The final section—”Corn, Beans, and Squash”—was written to and for her students at the end of the school year.

Conversations With Children About Death, Molly Sexton-Reade

Occasional Paper Series

This paper emphasizes the need for conversations around death in the classroom. Today's children are exposed to information about death through a wide variety of media. Teachers have a responsibility to provide opportunities for children to process this information in ways that are developmentally appropriate - acknowledging children's "magical thinking" as well as experiences children may have surrounding death.

Wrong Place, Right Time, Rachel Mazor

Occasional Paper Series

Mazor recounts working in the three distinctly different environments during her first year of teaching: sixth-grade math, pre-school social studies, and first-grade reading. Each of these experiences taught her specific skills that she later applied to assignments; additionally, each experience helped her develop her own style as a teacher.

Play As A Social Justice Issue In Early Childhood Education, Britt Kroll

Graduate Student Independent Studies

Play is a vital part of the early childhood experience to develop in cognitive and social-emotional realms. Schools are taking away an important tool for children to process new information and build skills needed for lifelong problem-solving by allowing less time for play in early childhood classrooms. This research combines data gathered to show the unique benefits of play in both cognitive and social-emotional areas, as well as qualitative data collected in a play-based and a non-play-based classroom.

The research defends the importance of play-based learning in early childhood and equips teachers with rationale to use play as a tool …

A Circle With Edges: How Story Time Privileges The Abled Learner, Melissa Tsuei

Occasional Paper Series

Takes a critical look at one of the commonplace features of early childhood classrooms—story time. In her essay, Melissa considers the ways in which story time reinforces unequal power dynamics for diverse learners by privileging the able-bodied learner. In response, Melissa creates and presents the SPHERE model, which promotes active engagement and shared dialogue through collaborative storytelling and nurtures an inclusive literacy-learning environment.

Talking Tolerance Inside The “Inclusive” Early Childhood Classroom, Karen Watson

Occasional Paper Series

Provides an inside look into what the Australian government calls “inclusive learning communities.” This term emerges from a national early-years learning framework that highlights ability and disability as diversity. Following the course of a six-month period in three “inclusive” early childhood classrooms, Karen offers an account of the transformative potential of inclusion in contrast to the harmful effects of teaching tolerance. Tolerance, as Karen’s study reveals, preserves the dualism of normal versus abnormal (or Other) and hinders critical reflection about ableist assumptions.

When Unit Blocks Came To Gardaborg, Kristín Einarsdóttir

Occasional Paper Series

Unit blocks have probably been used in some Icelandic preschools since 1950 or 1960, but a turning point occurred when one of the author's teachers from the Iceland University of Education (Fosturskoli Islands), Jonina Tryggvadottir, returned from studying with Harriet Cuffaro at Bank Street College in New York City.

A Study Of The Evolution Of Mindfulness Practice In An Early Childhood Classroom, Katherine Berninger

Graduate Student Independent Studies

This paper studies the use of mindfulness practice in a preschool classroom. Combining participant observation, personal journaling, and interviews with children, this study explores the relationship between the introduction of mindfulness practice, changes in classroom culture, and growth in emotional vocabulary.

Using Toys To Support Infant-Toddler Learning And Development, Gabriel Guyton

All Faculty and Staff Papers and Presentations

Being mindful of the basic principles of child development and the role of play, teachers can intentionally select toys to meet young children's unique needs and interests, supporting learning.

¿CóMo Se Dice En EspañOl? : Language, Self-Expression, And Development Of A Young Bilingual Child, Margaret Blachly

Graduate Student Independent Studies

This paper addresses three areas of early childhood development and education: a Language development of a native Spanish-speaking child in a dual-language school environment. Guided art experiences as a vehicle for self-expression, language development, and personal self-awareness in a young child. The role of a non-teacher/non-family member in a young child's development of self-awareness and language. The paper presents a case study with related research, analysis, and suggestions for educators. Lauren Rodriguez (pseudonym), currently 7.8 years old, is a Mexican- American girl whose first language is Spanish. She first encountered English at her bilingual preschool, where she began attending school …