Creativity, Curiosity, and Childhood Development

Creativity underscores all of that work. It is an innate human process; it is how we make new ideas and fashion our thinking, our experiences, and even the materials we use in ways that are most authentic to our unique communities. Creativity is an aspect of our joy, without it, how are we equipped to work toward justice?

On the journey to licensure, teachers experience a course in childhood development to varying degrees. However, it's often before in‐service teaching starts, and it's a body of knowledge that sits on the backburner for many people working in upper elementary or secondary schools. In other words, it's been separated from school‐based decision‐making. More and more often, we see the life of child development disappearing from curricular landscapes for even our youngest children. It makes me shudder.

It doesn't have to be this way: together, we can imbue childhood life back into school!

First, let's consider all kinds of ways and all kinds of things children learn from birth to the time they turn four years old. Each time I delve into the scores of work and research documenting the intellectual life of very young children, I am blown away at how capable they are, by how much they know and are able to do before they even arrive to school.

I didn't start my career in education knowing much about childhood development. Aside from the experiences I had caring for my nieces and nephew, who were school‐aged during my first year in grad school, I'd not spent significant amounts of time with people four years old or younger. In fact, I taught for five years before I spent significant amounts of time with very young people, before I began to deeply explore how synapses and neural pathways and environments and caregivers coalesce with one another to inform what a child knows.

Before I considered how much adverse childhood experiences have power to shape and undo important milestones in life, or before I knew how all the funds of knowledge kids were bringing into school could be embraced and built upon, rather than straightened out and stretched toward assimilation, I was well underway teaching students in high school.

I was mothering my two very young children at the same time I began teaching fourth and fifth graders within an elementary school. They, of course, were my ultimate teachers, and it was from them that I learned much of what I now know about childhood development. In addition to my elementary school‐aged teachers, I've also learned, and continue to learn, by witnessing my own children's development, reading well‐known research from Jean Piaget, Marie Clay, George Land, and Beth Jarman, and reading and listening to lesser‐known (but equally important) work from the advice of bloggers like Janet Lansbury and Dr. Sears, as well as all of my family members. Really, the sources I learn from are endless!

Here, I give you the CliffNotes version on all the things kids learn before they even receive any schooling, from the very beginning. Later, we're going to expand and bridge this information into the kinds of decisions we make at school to sustain deep levels of curiosity for the students we teach, allowing their inner lives to fuse with the outward experience of school.

Powerful and peer reviewed, The Center on the Developing Child at Harvard University provides succinct research for understanding “the science” behind childhood development. It's an excellent source for foundational knowledge for how humans learn and all the different ways their environment and early experiences impact the ways in which they engage with their peers, families, and school. The Center on the Developing Child's website is fueled with multimedia for taking a deep dive on the topic. In short, here are salient points regarding childhood development and learning:

1. In the first few years of life, over 1 million neural connections are formed every second. Already, as babies, humans are exercising powerful cognition! The brains of babies are strong, and with each day, they grow more complex. The very young brain is constantly revising itself, adding more details to its once simple structure. Sensory pathways for things like hearing and vision are developed first, followed by early language development, and later higher cognitive functions like using a spoon to eat with or learning to walk.
2. The strength of cognitive development is incumbent upon the richness of babies' interactions with the humans and environment that surround them. Genes and experience are both at play, and the idea of “rich environments”¹ is one that must be complicated … we don't want to adopt assimilationist perspectives! Perhaps you've heard of “serve and return”? Serve and return is the idea that if a baby makes some kind of baby‐contribution to the world, like smiling, babbling, or taking a step, the baby's actions are affirmed by another human, ideally a caregiver, with some type of communicative warmth, for example, a returned smile, an affirmative sentence in response to the baby babble, or congratulatory steps after the walk. If the baby serves, or “contributes” to the world, and is not acknowledged for their effort, the brain's structure develops more weakly, causing gaps in learning and activating early stress responses.
3. In the earliest stages of life, brains are most elastic, accepting, adapting, and revising all kinds of information. This is one of the many reasons young children are able to capture and become fluent in more than one language much more easily than adults. Humans are never too old to learn new things, change their habits, or strengthen neural pathways, but as kids and adults grow older, new habits are harder to develop because the brain is less elastic.
4. The brain does not work in compartments! All of its parts—social, emotional, and cognitive capacities—are in constant interaction with one another. This is why it's so important to make space for children to explore a full range of emotions in all the spaces they occupy. When we ask them to push their feelings aside, essentially we are asking them to use a small piece of their mind.

So, at the tender age of two, very young children have developed a brain with millions of neural connections, they've used their brains to revise and select and grow new ideas about the world, and, for many, they've built a solid foundation for language learning they'll use throughout their lives. It's no wonder they are so temperamental! They've done an incredible amount of work to simply be.

Immersing Oneself in a Student‐Centered Space

When I work to build student‐centered experiences in a standards‐based classroom, I do so by spending a lot of time in educator spaces. I keep my eyes and ears open in school communities, and pay attention to the felt knowledge I experience by watching how kids relate to, communicate with, or even physically locate themselves to teachers within communities who do the work of positioning children as the center of their pedagogy in ways that are clear and subtle, and are especially evident in the ways children react and respond in the classroom communities they have designed. Keep in mind—I'm in educator spaces in a lot of ways. Yes, I'm a coach, but I'm also a teacher volunteer at a local summer camp, and I also am the parent of two elementary‐aged children. There are numerous spaces where I am watching, observing, analyzing, and sense‐making the multitude of human interactions on a daily basis.

One of the most meaningful and salient observations is the way in which my youngest daughter's pre‐K teacher positioned students at the center of her pedagogy. Markedly, she did so through an undercurrent of love. I wrote about this phenomenon a while ago, for no other reason than that I didn't want to forget it. I knew from the research that this pre‐K year would probably be the most joyful year of her life spent in school. Below, I describe this felt experience and analysis in detail.

2018

My Daughter's Pre‐K Classroom, Brooklyn, New York

Every time I walk into my youngest daughter's pre‐K classroom, my heart swells. At the top of the stairs leading to her classroom, we are first greeted with a carefully constructed and kid‐created three‐dimensional alphabet museum hanging on the wall, on which most days we pause to find the letter “N,” which is how her classroom door is labeled: “Classroom N.” The walls are peppered with the work of inquisitive young minds; recently, stories of the children's families, drawn exclusively by the children, were posted alongside collages they had made earlier, including pictures of people in their lives who were important to them, with other fuzzy and shiny objects decorating the images.

Upon entering her classroom, we go through a fairly typical routine of unpacking, washing hands, and flipping her picture over on a chart to show everyone she has arrived (all the children do this). Also, similarly to many pre‐K classrooms across the country, the classroom has several “areas” that children are allowed to spend time at each morning with one another, including an ever‐changing Dramatic Play corner (since the beginning of the school year, it has shifted from a kitchen, to a doctor's office, and most recently—a gym (with a pretend treadmill crafted out of a yoga mat and cardboard!!!).

However, not so typically, on a wall near the class's daily schedule there is a “feelings wheel,” where children place an arrow alongside the feeling they are currently experiencing. They can choose to talk more about it, or not. Additionally, every Tuesday, they have what is called Friends School, where the school social worker pushes into the class and works quite explicitly on a curriculum that helps the children develop strong social and emotional skills. There is a biweekly parent/caregiver group that coincides with the same curriculum, led by the same social worker, supporting families to build those same skills with their children. Cornelius and I receive a flier in Indi's backpack every week, highlighting the activities Friends School engaged in with tips for us on how to support our child at home.

After about a month of pre‐K, Indi said, “Mama, do you wanna know something?” I said, “YES!” (I usually respond pretty enthusiastically when any kid, especially my own, is on the cusp of articulating an idea that has been percolating.) “My teacher loves me,” she replied, in the same tone someone would tell you a benign fact, like “The sky is blue.” It was clear that in her mind there was no doubt that she was loved at her school, within her classroom, between the adults who care for her every day when her family is not with her. I asked her how she knew, and she said, “Because Ms. H told me.” So, quite literally (and also implicitly through a million other kind and gentle micro‐interactions taking place between teachers and children), my child is loved in school. Just as the sky is blue, it is a fact.

The comment, “My teacher loves me,” was arresting, and it occurred to me that I, too, experienced a similar feeling whenever I dropped her off or picked her up at school: an undercurrent of love. A bit of salve for my fiery heart working in a big giant school system, where sometimes the softness of working with children gets lost in the harshness of a system that doesn't protect grown‐ups' well‐being, that maybe centers itself too much on achievement and not enough on growth and progress. This undercurrent of love so clearly carries a community of children forward because, more than anything, it centers their development and well‐being as the priority of their school experience.

Those notes, put together as an imprint for my work and to capture a beautiful year in school for my daughter to look back on, beckon happy tears: there is nothing like dropping off your child in a healthy school space where they declare evidence‐based love for and from their teachers. I'm also slightly heartbroken after taking that trip down memory lane because it was pre‐COVID schooling, which was not perfect, but certainly more resourced. And I'm also a little rejuvenated—we've so much to learn from the ways of pre‐K!

A few years back, I worked briefly with a pre‐K center on a topic‐based professional development on Universal Design for Learning. When I prepared for the work, I studied the New York State Prekindergarten Foundation for the Common Core standards that the New York State Board of Regents adopted in January 2011. The New York State Prekindergarten Foundation for the Common Core is divided into several domains, with the first domain called Approaches to Learning. Below, find a summarized version of the foundational skills included in this domain:

As I read and reread the text, never before had I seen such appropriate guidance for learning; guidance that could really work for any child within almost any curriculum. Those skills are just a small taste of the guide in its entirety, with other domains including: Physical Development and Health, Social and Emotional Development and Communication, and Language and Literacy. There is a Part B in the document as well, including English Language Arts and Mathematics standards from the Common Core State Standards.

Comparatively, when children start kindergarten within the many states that have adopted Common Core Standards or states that have adopted their own standards in recent years, there are no standards named “foundational,” rather, they are divided into Reading, Writing, Language, Speaking and Listening, and Mathematics, where children are expected to do things like:

CCSS.ELA‐LITERACY.SL.K.1

Participate in collaborative conversations with diverse partners about kindergarten topics and texts with peers and adults in small and larger groups. (Common Core State Standards Initiative)

And:

Use a combination of drawing, dictating, and writing to compose informative/explanatory texts in which they name what they are writing about and supply some information about the topic. (Common Core State Standards Initiative)

Many children will be able to work toward those standards and participate in peer collaboration and writing with zeal. They will come to school excited, and rush to their caregivers to tell them about all the wonderful things that happened in their kindergarten class that day. Conversely, many children will experience great difficulty sitting in their chairs on the rug for many minutes, taking turns during conversations and/or during choice time, or even spending six hours of classroom time without having a tantrum, and their caregivers might unpack a note from their teacher in their backpacks requesting a meeting, or a paper that includes how many smileys they earned for the day.

It is with deep realism that many children entering kindergarten are still developing their “approaches to learning,” regulating their emotions, and developing positive relationships with those who surround them. Even more importantly, and of deeper concern, is that many students entering middle school, high school, and even college are still grappling with those same issues. Yet—the crux of their development seems to have been left out of the core of their school experience, leading to just that—an experience where they go to school, as opposed to a place they go to learn.

Placing Kids' Developmental Needs at the Center of Learning in Community

When we think about creating spaces of learning with schools (and I know, it's funny how deliberately we must invest in making a school a learning space), it makes sense to start at the very beginning of a child's experience with school. When children's emotional development and social skills are supported as the impetus for learning throughout the day, really, the fiber that makes the fabric of the classroom community, they feel better and their hearts and minds grow more. When kids feel better, teachers feel better.

In collaboration with teachers, I worked hard to think about what it means to develop the way children approach not just learning, but how to learn with one another. Moreover, we wanted to integrate the work of supporting children developmentally throughout the day, not just tucking the work in on the fringes of the day into a “character education” or “mindfulness” period. We'll start with a bird's‐eye view in a kindergarten classroom, taught by Rachel Sharpstein, and then zoom in, noting how this teacher's work took place over time, with perseverance, and with great care.

When I met Rachel Sharpstein, I had been working as a staff developer for the Teachers College Inclusive Classrooms Project in her school for a few months, working to build inclusive practices with several teacher teams in ICT classrooms.² During a debrief with the school's principal, it was requested that I support one of their kindergarten teachers working in a general education classroom, mostly teaching by herself, who was feeling overwhelmed and particularly challenged by a few children, and very challenged by the whole class's general dependence on her for everything. The principal suggested I might help create classroom stations, or centers, with her to decrease the amount of whole‐group learning.

As an educator who seldom taught alone, I knew I had to enter this space with great empathy: a 27:1 kid:teacher ratio is rarely easy. I first had an opportunity to visit her classroom. Before I meet with teachers, I usually request a low‐stakes classroom visit to get a sense of their community vibe, to witness and collect important micro‐interactions and other subtleties taking place between kids and kids and teachers and kids, and, also, to note how the room set up affects communication. Then, I engaged with her one‐to‐one, channeling all my active listening skills.

I firmly believe in teacher agency, and one way we can work together to reaffirm teacher agency is to invite teachers to our platforms and include them when we talk about different ways to enact justice and joy in our classrooms. To that end, I invited Rachel to be included in this text. Below, you ‘ll find her voice sharing the journey we embarked upon, underscoring the choices we made to improve both her and her students' experience.

In Figure 6.1, find the materials Rachel and I developed as the Super Solvers became ritualized in Rachel's classroom community.

I want to note: Rachel and I didn't create Super Solvers out of thin air. As we brainstormed and planned together, we also read and researched together. The following articles and texts informed the learning designs we created.

• What Is Shared Imagination & Why Is It So Important to Relationship Development? by Michelle Garcia Winner, MA, CCC‐SLP and Pamela Crooke, PhD, CCC‐SLP from socialthinking.com.
• “The Importance of Educational Partnerships,” Chapter 1 in the book Educational Partnerships: Connecting Schools, Families, and the Community by Amy Cox‐Petersen.
• Whole Body Listening by Susanne Poulette Truesdale.
• Buddy System Tip Sheet: Teaching Tools for Young Children by R. Lentini, B.J. Vaughn, and L. Fox.

We took my field notes from Rachel's classroom that included interviews with students, analysis of student artifacts, and observations of times where children demonstrated high dependency on their teacher, in combination with Rachel's direct experiences and knowledge with the kids, very seriously. Based on new understandings from our research, we named the following skills to serve as the foundation for the teams of Super Solvers.

Underlying Skills for Super Solvers:

1. Expressive language.
2. Identify feeling.
3. Express feelings appropriately.
4. Express needs.
5. Identify and apply resources/strategies.
6. Efficiency in completing daily routines.
7. Compassion.
8. Empathy.
9. Perspective taking.

Ritualizing Super Solvers

After we figured out partnerships, Rachel worked to create a schedule where Super Solvers was consistent within everyday classroom life … not just something that popped up every now and then (Figure 6.2). It became a ritual, and students learned to authentically check‐in with one another after lots of practice and explicit teaching.

	Monday	Tuesday	Wednesday	Thursday	Friday
Partnerships	Morning Check In: “How are you feeling this morning? Why?” Positive Thought/Wish: (In mindful position with lights off and closed eyes) Send your Super Solver a positive wish or thought from your heart to theirs. Afternoon Check In: “How are you feeling this afternoon? Why?”	Morning Check In: “How are you feeling this morning? Why?” Afternoon Check In: “How are you feeling this afternoon? Why?”	Morning Check In: “How are you feeling this morning? Why?” Positive Thought/Wish: (In mindful position with lights off and closed eyes) Send your Super Solver a positive wish or thought from your heart to theirs. Afternoon Check In: “How are you feeling this afternoon? Why?”	Morning Check In: “How are you feeling this morning? Why?” Afternoon Check In: “How are you feeling this afternoon? Why?”	Morning Check In: “How are you feeling this morning? Why?” Afternoon Check In: “How are you feeling this afternoon? Why?”
Small Groups		Group Games: In groups of two partnerships, play UNO together. Talk about something that went well and something that was challenging with the whole class.		Classroom Problems and Solutions: In groups of two partnerships, give them a picture of a problem in the classroom and have them collaboratively come up with solutions. Share with the class.
Whole Class	Super Solver Solutions: Create an ongoing list for the week that the kids can add to, recognizing ways in which their Super Solvers helped them solve a problem. Post the problem and solution. Save the charts so that you can analyze the types of problems and solutions and help push them to find new solutions or best practices.				Super Solver Celebration: Write your Super Solver a thank you letter to appreciate she/he for something (specific) that she/he helped you with during the week. Share with class.

Rachel created numerous artifacts and scaffolds for students to actively participate in the various Super Solver rituals, including Thank You Cards (Figure 6.3) and Kindness Postcards (Figures 6.4 and 6.5), where students practiced recognizing each other's helpful actions and affirming each other's presence in their community.

Rachel's development of the Super Solvers rituals had a deep impact on her classroom community. Her students were becoming more independent in their learning, and were also developing supportive social skills with one another. As we continued our work together, she became more independent herself, cocreating a purposeful, deepened core of social‐emotional literacy with the children in her classroom.

Figures 6.7 through 6.13 are artifacts created by Rachel Sharpstein that supported the students' participation in groups, working toward stronger social and emotional literacy.

Rachel Sharpstein had a high degree of teacher agency, and her work was supported by school leadership that built the school from inclusive principles in education. The artifacts and learning designs shown are examples of “homegrown” curriculum discussed in the previous chapter. Rachel was able to share her learning and classroom experiences with other teachers in her school during an Ed Camp‐style, locally derived, teacher‐run professional learning day at her school.