Featured Speakers:
- Peter Mangione, Senior Fellow and Director of the Program for Infant-Toddler Care (PITC) at WestEd
- Janis Keyser, Early Childhood Education Instructor (Retired), Cabrillo College; Lead Author, Creating Partnerships with Families, California Department of Social Services/PITC
Host:
- Elizabeth Crocker, Director of Training and Certification, PITC at WestEd
Elizabeth Crocker:
Good evening, everyone. We’re thrilled to welcome you tonight to the webinar to explore the new California Framework Infant-Toddler Learning and Development Framework. And we’re so happy that Peter Mangione and Janis Keyser are going to be leading us on this journey over this Wednesday and the following Wednesday. This webinar series is offered in partnership between California Department of Social Services and WestEd, and we are going to be thinking together about how we can really observe and work with children and support their individualized development and learning. And I’m going to turn it over. I’m Elizabeth Crocker, and I’m the Director for Training and Certification at PITC, and I am going to pass it over to Heather McClellan-Brandusa so she can introduce herself.
Heather McClellan-Brandusa:
Hello, Elizabeth. Hi, everyone. I am Heather McClellan-Brandusa, and I’m with the California Department of Social Services in our Childcare and Development division. I just wanted to join you for a moment to say welcome on behalf of the California Department of Social Services. I’m so excited to see you all here. The CDSS is thrilled to be partnering with PITC once again and bringing you this important two part webinar series, as Elizabeth mentioned, tonight, and also next Wednesday, to really help us think together about the new California Framework for Infants and Toddler Learning and Development, and how we can use this to support planning and individualization for infants and toddlers.
As you all know, the birth to age three period is a time of rapid brain development, and children at this age are active learners who are developing their language, their physical capabilities, their social and cognitive capacities, and really, they’re building all of this through relationships and hands-on experiences. So we need to value the way children, infants and toddlers specifically, learn by building strong and trusting relationships with them and their families, and providing them meaningful experiences through their daily routines and their interactions to support their learning and development. So we’ll be going over all of this. The PITC team has a really interactive and engaging evening planned for you, and we hope that you find the information provided through these webinars really helpful in your work with young children and families, or in supporting our infant-toddler workforce, if that’s your role. And thank you again for your time and dedication in joining us tonight. And now I’ll pass it back over to WestEd.
Peter Mangione:
Hi, everyone. My name is Peter Mangione. I am a senior fellow at WestEd, and I direct the Program for Infant-Toddler Care, or PITC, and have been at this for a long time. Actually, Ron Lally and I wrote the original proposal and led the development of the PITC through the years. I’m also very pleased to be with you this evening and to co-present this webinar with my colleague, Janis Keyser. Janis, would you like to introduce yourself?
Janis Keyser:
I taught at Cabrillo College for 30 years in the Early Childhood Education department, where we had the honor of hosting a PITC demonstration infant-toddler program. I also got to work with a team of people at Google for 12 years, both designing and implementing for childcare centers in Mountain View. I wrote a book for families called “Becoming the Parent You Want to Be,” and I also wrote a book for teachers and educators to support them in creating partnerships with families. Recently, California Department of Social Services and PITC have partnered to publish a revised guide, “Creating Partnerships with Families,” on which I was a lead author, working with Peter Mangione. I also had the honor of contributing to this Infant-Toddler Learning and Development Framework. So, I’m excited to be here with you.
But I also wanna share that my strongest learning experience is being a family friend and neighbor, FFN, caregiver with several of my grandchildren. I have a little story for you. This morning, I was with my 20-month-old granddaughter, and she, I’ve been helping her learn how to open the tabs on her diaper, and close the tabs. So she was sitting on the couch, and she opened the tabs and took her diaper off, and I brought the little potty in and said, “Hey, maybe if you want to go pee-pee, you could go pee-pee in the potty.” So she maneuvered herself onto the potty, sat down, and made pee-pee. And her sister and I were like, “Whoa!” I said, “Do you wanna put that in the big potty?” So she lifted it out, carried it in, and poured it in the big potty, brought it back out, put it in the little potty, sat down, and went pee again. And then she carried, picked it up, carried it in, and put it in the big potty. She did it about seven more times in a 10 minute framework. I’ve never seen anything like it.
And what I know about her is that she is an engineer in everything she does. She’s so curious about how things work. She’s observant. She loves to implement and repeat the sequences that she’s learned. So, I continue to learn so much from her. And the thing I love most about being an educator is that life is a continuous learning journey. I’ll pass it back to you, Peter.
Peter Mangione:
Thank you, Janis, and thank you for that wonderful story. You’re very fortunate to be doing what you’re doing with your grandchildren. Every time you’re with an infant or toddler, or young child for that matter, is a learning experience for us, and that’s what the framework is about. We can go to the next slide. What we’re going to do is give you an overview of this infant-toddler framework. And it really is, first and foremost, about infants and toddlers and what we learn from them, and then based on what we learned from them, how to best support their learning and development. So, Janis and I will spend a short amount of time here just touching on some of the main points that are covered in the introduction of the infant-toddler framework. And then, unlike a lot of webinars, which are just about hearing from the presenters, we wanted to have an active time with you, where you get to explore some ideas and express yourself. So, the second part, or maybe the last third of this webinar, will be focused on looking at some of the ideas from this framework, and then relating it to your own work. So why don’t we go to the next slide, get started?
One of the things that’s come up in recent times, especially in our work with the California Department of Social Services, is how to think about who our audience is, who we’re trying to reach with the various materials, webinars like this, et cetera, that we’re doing. And the Department of Social Services uses a general term, educator. And when you think about it, every interaction, anyone caring for an infant or toddler, or a preschool aged child, is educating that child. Every experience that the child has with us, an interaction, as a learning experience for the child, as well as for us. And so we wanted to highlight not only the learning part, but the caring part. So, in the framework, we use the term, and generally, in the PITC, we’re starting to use the term care educator. And as you can see here from the definition, it’s anyone who is providing learning experiences to support young children in their learning and development. And that could be in a home-based environment, that could be in a center-based, or a community-based environment. All of those different kinds of places we can find care educators.
And care educators often are the individuals who are directly caring for infants or toddlers, but they may also have other roles. They may be an owner of a family childcare home, they may be a director of a center and also have a role around supporting learning. So, we can think of our audience or all of you as being care educators. Then there’s this term, caregiver, which we’ve historically used, and by caregiver, we still use that term, because a lot of what we talk about refers to caring for infants and toddlers no matter who you are. It includes families. And so anyone caring for an infant, that includes care educators, families, relatives, neighbors, anyone is a caregiver. And we especially are mindful of using that term when we’re talking about relationships with infants and toddlers, because a lot of the information we have in our field is focused on this idea of being a caregiver, especially if we look at work around attachment or other kinds of concepts. So, keep in mind these two terms, and when you take a look through the framework, you’ll see when we are directly addressing care educators, and then when we’re talking more generally about caregivers. Let’s go to the next slide.
Why a framework? That’s a really good question. This was going to be a second edition of California’s Infant-Toddler Curriculum Framework. And as we began this work on the second edition, we brought together experts from around the country, we brought together people like yourselves and the focus groups, and started talking about this idea of a curriculum framework. And a lot of people said, or asked or questioned, “Why are you using the term curriculum?” Because what we know, and actually, in the PITC, what we believe, is that infants have their own curriculum. All you have to do is observe them and see them exploring their environment, see them interacting with people, and how every moment that they’re interacting with you or others, or every moment they’re manipulating something or seeing how something works or trying to figure something out or solve a problem, every one of those moments, we can see their curriculum at work.
We don’t have to program what they’re doing. We don’t have to write a curriculum for them to learn language. What we do have to do is be partners in their learning and development. And that’s what this framework is about. It’s how do we approach this very, very important role? Because we know even though infants and toddlers have their own curriculum, they’re not gonna learn it very well without our supportive presence, without our being with them side by side and joining in and interacting with them, and encouraging them and creating an environment, giving them materials, having interactions, doing routines with them in ways that engage their learning. So the framework is very focused on, A, how infants and toddlers are learning and what we can learn from them, and B, how can we be responsive to that learning and best supportive? Let’s go to the next slide.
Okay, so what do we focus on? There’s a companion document, the Second Edition of the California Infant-Toddler Learning and Development Foundations, and those foundations basically give us research-based information based on the most current research on how children are developing in five major domains. And these domains are social and emotional development, and we list it first with a purpose, because that’s really the heart of the matter. The child’s social and emotional development and wellbeing is essential for everything else that happens in infancy. And then approaches to learning, how children engage in learning. Some of you may be familiar with the term executive functioning. That’s part of approaches to learning. Language development. That’s an essential part of learning. I was listening to a podcast the other day, and the the expert said, “The most important human invention in all of human history is language.” When you think about it, everything we do is based on language. And infants have this amazing capacity to learn it. We don’t have to teach them it. We don’t have to write a curriculum for it.
Cognitive development, how are they developing intellectually? How is their thinking developing? And perceptual and motor development, which is just as important as all the other domains. Anyone who, and like yourselves, who’ve been around infants and toddlers, know that they are always moving. It’s hard to imagine an infant learning without seeing their motor development engaged, without seeing them move. So, all of these are… These are the domains we’re focused on, and the framework focuses on each one of these domains. But that isn’t the whole picture, and Janis is going to take us to the next slide and talk about these domains in some more detail.
Janis Keyser:
I love this graphic, because it’s so beautiful when you can see the colors mixing together, how integrated children’s learning always is, because for so long, we’ve looked at individual learning skills. “Today, we’re gonna assess children for their physical skills,” or, “Now we’re gonna set up an activity that’s gonna promote their math skills or their cognitive skills.” And when we do that and we’ve been asked to focus so narrowly, we miss so much of what children are learning, because children are never learning and growing in just one way at a time. In their play and exploration, they are almost always testing and stretching their social, their emotional, their language, their cognitive, their perceptual, their motor skills simultaneously, and in overlapping ways. When we as educators are asked to focus on just one area, we often miss the richness of learning that children are experiencing across the skill spectrum.
And understanding children’s approaches to learning is really exciting to me. It’s an essential part of our learning about them. And as we better understand their approaches to learning, we also learn more about their temperament tendencies. And when we think about approaches to learning, it kind of reminds me about 21st century skills because it includes curiosity, initiative, collaboration, engagement and perseverance, cognitive flexibility, resourcefulness, adaptability, children asking questions, children making predictions, children experimenting and observing, developing their working memory and their attention, problem solving, collaboration, and developing their attentiveness to communication. And it’s almost through watching these approaches to learning that we learn more about who the child is as a learner, and how they approach integrating all of those skills into their play and into their learning experiences.
And I think the thing that’s so thrilling for educators who can do this is that you are always in a curious, observing stance with children. So you are always growing, you’re always having aha moments like, “Oh, I’m putting that together, now I can see what questions they’re asking and how they’re pursuing those questions, and how that relates to what we saw last week when they were doing something very similar.” And so the idea that we don’t have to just narrow down and use a checklist. We’ll be talking later about learning stories, which is a really integrated way of doing a formative assessment for children. But when we can free ourself up from just looking for one thing or setting up an activity for one thing, there is richness not only for children in terms of how we see them, how we plan for them, how we extend their learning, but there’s a richness for us as educators as well. Peter?
Peter Mangione:
Thank you, Janis. And if we think about infants and toddlers, and Ron Lally used to talk about it this way, he said, “Well, we have these different domains, whether we’re talking about language development or cognitive development, social and emotional development, that’s the way we adults think about things. We need categories. It helps us understand what we’re observing.” But if we think about it from the point of view of the infant, the infant isn’t thinking, “I’m learning language right now,” or, “Here’s a moment where I’m developing socially and emotionally,” or, “Here’s a moment when I’m using my motor development skills and refining them.” They’re not thinking that way at all. They are simply curious, active, engaged learners, and they are engaging their whole selves in that learning process. And so as they’re doing that, what we can observe are all of these different areas of development happening at the same time.
Let’s take a couple of examples. A child is… There’s several play things. I don’t know, let’s think about maybe an eight month old, nine month old, 10 month old. And that child picks up one object and starts banging it on the floor with, you know, up and down movement. So what is the child doing there? Well, first of all, the child is exploring. “What happens if I do that?” And is learning about, “Does it make a noise? Is it hard when I hit with it, or is it soft? Is it different from the last thing that I tried to do, this same way of learning that I used, banging? This is the way I learn about something.” They may look up to a care educator and express interest or joy in that moment, and the care educator can respond, so it becomes a social moment for the child. The child is gaining confidence in themselves every moment they’re engaging their curiosity and exploring and playing and trying to figure things out. And so we see all of that happening. The child might make a sound and might receive a response from that care educator like, “Oh, that’s making a big noise.” So the child’s learning language in that moment too. So all of that kind of learning is happening in this simple act that the child is doing.
We could take an older child, we could take a child who’s, I don’t know, let’s say 20, 21, 22 months of age, and you’re in a place, and the child encounters a new climbing structure, something the child hasn’t done before. Now, the child has had some experience with climbing, so it has some knowledge about that, and the child is very interested in this new thing and is going to apply what the child already knows about climbing to climb this structure. And they’re gonna have to make some adjustments because it’s a little different from the last one, but they will, and they’ll be doing that, and they’ll be gaining confidence as they do that. That strengthens their sense of identity. “I’m someone who can do these things.” That’s a very powerful thing that the child is learning. It’s engaging their curiosity, trying to figure out how things work. Obviously it’s about motor development and perception. They have to be able to navigate in that space perceptually, and they have to be able to use their small muscles and even fine muscles to do this, big muscles to do this activity. And if a caregiver or care educator is present, they’re gonna look and say, “Look at me.” They’re gonna be using language. And you’ll be giving a response, so that language learning is happening too. So again, a very simple moment if we think about it from the adult point of view, but a very complicated moment which is engaging all of that child in, really, supporting the child’s learning in all the different areas of development that we’ve identified as being important. Janis, do you wanna pick it up from here?
Janis Keyser:
Yes. As we observe the richness of this holistic learning, we are inspired to creatively imagine possibilities we can offer to children to extend their experiences, their curiosities, their explorations and their investigations. And it’s always fascinating to me when I see a child working on a question, and the question might be, “What can I put down this ramp, and how will it behave? What if I put sand down this ramp? What if I put a ball down this ramp? What if I put a shovel down this ramp?” And as a teacher, many of us came into this profession because we really wanted to answer children’s questions. We wanted to give them information. And it’s been a long journey to understand that what I wanna give children is an opportunity to ask more questions, to pursue those questions that they have even more deeply.
And so then it engages my creativity to think about, what question is the child really asking? Even if they’re just putting trucks down the slide, it’s not necessarily a curiosity about trucks, but it’s probably a curiosity about physics, and how fast can things go? What kind of a sound do they make? And so we are then in the process, as their collaborators, in learning, as their co-researchers. It asks us to think about, what questions are they asking, and how can we give them opportunities to ask more of those questions, and to pursue those questions more deeply? And we sometimes even call it slowing down the curriculum, because as children go slower and have more opportunities to try it again and again and again, like my granddaughter, who was trying to figure out how many times could she pee on that potty, that their learning becomes deeper and deeper, and their understanding gets broader, and it opens up so many more new questions for them.
So we’re in this cycle of always looking at the questions, looking at the ways they do research, so that we can support both their approaches, their current approaches to learning, and maybe offer some other approaches that they haven’t discovered yet. So, I always wonder, you know, who’s learning more, the children or me? And I think that in that process of collaborating with my colleagues and with children’s parents and the children, we sometimes call it the learning triangle, where the child and the family and the educator are always in dialogue about the learning that’s happening and about how we can continue to collaborate in supporting that learning.
Peter Mangione:
Okay. What I suggest is, Janis and I have been talking through content from this slide, and we can go a little bit more in detail here. Janis, do you wanna speak to the first point just for a moment?
Janis Keyser:
The first, “Infants and toddlers experience the world?” That one?
Peter Mangione:
Yes, yes.
Janis Keyser:
Yes. So, let me come up with an example too. Well, I was thinking about children who are engaged in symbolic play. So, I was just looking at slides of children who were pretending to nap. And so one child was the baby, and the other child was the care educator, and the care educator was pounding on the baby’s back very firmly. And I was thinking, and so I had all sorts of questions about, how does the child that’s acting like the baby feel about this? This is definitely a social interaction. It’s certainly about memory and cognition and about the child’s image of sleeping, and what are the elements of sleeping? So the child’s demonstrating their memory of what the teacher does and what the child does, or what the adult does and what the child does. And then there’s the language, you know, “Night, night. Go night, night, baby. Lay down.” All of the language that that child is using. And then the child who’s trying to think about, “What would it be like if I was the baby that was sleeping here?”
And so the dynamic social interaction, verbal and nonverbal, between these two children, who both have their constructs of what nap looks like. And they’re figuring out a collaboration. They’re figuring out, “How do I take my idea and mix it with somebody else’s idea?” It’s definitely a physical exercise. One child is patting, one child is covering the other child up, the other child is stretching their body out in a nappy, and turning over and sitting up. And so I think about, you know, the social learning, about the relationship building, about the physical learning, about the practicing, the extending your own paradigm of what sleeping is like with an adult helping you. And so to me, the learning is just so, so rich. And the other thing that’s, you know, I was watching the video, and it went on for more than five minutes, and so I’m watching the length of attentiveness, the length of focus, the persistence, the, “Let’s keep trying this to see what more we can understand about this relationship, about sleeping.” When you close your eyes and lay down, is that sleeping? That’s a really interesting question. What makes it sleeping? And what makes it just closing your eyes and laying down? So, I could go on and on, but that was a recent observation that I made.
Peter Mangione:
And, you know, Janis and I have already given some examples of how all these different areas get engaged for the child as they’re learning, as they’re exploring, as they’re playing, and they’re always wondering, and they’re always asking questions. Even if they’re not saying them verbally to us, maybe they’re not yet talking, but we can see in the way they’re relating to the world, they’re asking a question, they’re investigating, they’re trying to gain new knowledge. They’re very curious about how things work, how we relate to each other, we humans, how they can become part of this interaction and more and more in a relationship with us. That’s really what they’re about. You know, what we’re seeing are their minds at work.
And I always think about, you know, if we ask as adults, we think about ourselves as adults, and just, I’m gonna ask the question, and you can think about it for a moment. If I asked you to point to where your mind is, or we could even say brain, let’s say mind, where your mind is, when you’re engaged in learning, where is it happening? I think a lot of you, and you can tell me if I’m wrong, would point to your head. But if you asked a five month old or a seven month old where their mind was, if they could tell us, it might be their mouth, it might be their hands, it might be their feet, it might be their whole body, it might be the sounds they make. All of those ways are how… That’s their thinking process. That’s how they engage and figure things out. So, as we observe them, what we wanna do is understand that they’re operating from a different point of view than we operate.
And we wanna almost get into their mind and see how they’re relating to the world, and then think about, what are the possibilities we can offer to them? What are the ways that we interact? What kinds of experiences can we offer? What kinds of materials can we offer? What kinds of environments can we create for them to investigate, for them to act on their curiosity, using their senses, engaging with curiosity and persistence and wonder and joy? How can we create situations for them to keep learning? And that’s really what the framework is about. That’s really what what we’re trying to do, is suggest ways to do that. What are those possibilities we adults have to offer, we adult care educators, caregivers, have to offer to infants and toddlers so they can engage to their heart’s delight?
Janis Keyser:
You know, Peter, do we have time for one more example?
Peter Mangione:
We sure do.
Janis Keyser:
Because the examples that are so powerful to me are what happens during routines. And we think about meal times, we think about eating, and we think, you know, sometimes it’s just like, “Let’s get this snack over with so we can go and play and get back to our work.” But the eating process is so interesting with infants and toddlers. You think about toddlers, how toddlers can engage in setting up the eating environment, in bringing the dishes over, in bringing the bibs over and in cleaning the tables, in washing their hands, and then in getting themselves in a chair and thinking about the food at the table. And when we slow it down, and the teacher at the table actually cuts the fruit open with the children, has them touch the fruit and smell the outside of it, and feel it and look at it and guess what’s inside, and then cuts the fruit open and the children get to see what’s inside, there’s a whole process of discovery and prediction that children may have.
You know, sometimes we hold the apple up and say, “What do you think is inside?” And so there’s a whole social activity too. As children are serving themselves, they often turn to serve the person beside them. So, all those motor skills of figuring out how to work spoons and how to work bowls and how to find your mouth with the spoon and bring it up, and all the social learning of watching the people who are at the table with you, grabbing the food with their hands or serving it with some tongs or pouring from a pitcher. And then the role of the teacher in terms of both modeling the joy of eating, the joy of discovering new food, but also providing opportunities where children will interact with each other around the food. And, you know, maybe I served myself, and, you know, the educator might say to me, “Would you like to see if Peter would like some? Maybe he’d like you to serve him some too.”
And so, you know, those social interactions, the relationship-based care, not only the mastery of physical skills that it takes to eat, but also the knowing of your body physically. What does hunger feel like? What does it feel like when food comes into my body? What does thirst feel like? How do I know I’m hungry, and what can I do when I’m hungry? What cues can I give the people around me? You know, we could go on for hours talking about the layers of learning that happen in routine care when we can slow it down and remember that this is as essential to learning and development, as essential to curriculum as anything else we do throughout the day.
Peter Mangione:
A nice additional example, Janis. That’s great. Let’s go to the next slide. And so this is the infant-toddler framework. And tonight we’re talking about chapter one and the kinds of things we want to think about from chapter one. Overview of early learning and development, it’s in two parts, and then it gets into an overview of how to support early learning and development. Chapter two, which we will be talking about next week, is around reflective planning. And then there are three additional chapters. What’s very interesting is the curriculum framework, that first edition, had five chapters. It had chapters based on domains. And as we did this work and really looked at it carefully, we said, “That doesn’t make sense.”
I think what you’ve heard from Janis and me so far, you get a clear picture of why we don’t think it makes sense to talk about one domain and then the next domain, to talk about language development and then cognitive development, for example. Instead, we focus on those contexts, those different kinds of situations in which we as adults engage with infants and toddlers, join together with them in their active engagement and learning. And so there are three, relationships and interactions that we have with them, routines, and Janis gave us a wonderful example from routines, and the environments and materials. These are the ways that we create these possibilities for learning. And each one of the chapters, chapters three, four, and five, goes more in detail in each of these areas. Chapter three is on relationships and interactions, chapter four on routines, and chapter five on environments and materials. As I said tonight, we’re giving an overview. Janis wants to share one more aspect of this particular document, the framework, with you before we get into a more active learning part of this webinar. Let’s go to the next slide.
Janis Keyser:
Yes, thank you. So, one of the things that we really want is for this document to inspire, to come alive, to speak to you in a way that you can think about your own practice in relationship to these big ideas, all kinds of big ideas. But we wanted to really include in-practice examples from real teachers throughout the document. So, there are descriptions of moments of care, they invite you to read and reflect on the meaning and the application of the illustrated practices. But more than that, we want your brain to be going, “Oh, I have an example of that. I have an example of that. I can imagine what that looks like.” And so the in-practice examples are just really meant to stimulate you and inspire you to think of your own work and ways that you may incorporate more of these ideas into your own work as well.
So, the learning stories are another kind of example that we’ve included here, and learning stories are inspired by the teachers in New Zealand, who began this way of thinking about children’s growth from a much more holistic way. They are even written as a letter to the child. And so, you know, PITC’s central concept is relationships. And so to include relationships in this assessment piece is really essential, because the care educator brings their experience and history of the child. As they’re looking at this observation, they’re looking at the different skills that children are demonstrating, but they’re also looking at the dispositions, the approaches to learning that the child is showing. And so it’s a very personal kind of description of the child, it’s an observation, and then it has the educator’s system of belief about and interpretation of what’s happening in the observation, at some, and sometimes many points during the writing of a learning story, the educator may check in with the family and say, “This is what I observed. What do you think about that?”
And they may be able to get some family information that relates to what they’re observing that they can include in the learning story. And even further than that, when a parent or a family member comes in and shares a story with the educator, the educator might say, you know, “I would love to see that story in your child’s portfolio. Can you write it up? Do you have pictures? Because that really represents the way your child approaches learning. All of the different ways they tried to fasten their sandal together on their foot is also what I see here in the program. Your child is so determined, has so much persistence, so much resourcefulness in ways of solving problems.” And so once the educator has talked to the family, they can include the family’s perspective in the learning story as well.
And so I think what the learning story gives us is a chance to really, it’s a tool in which we can look at holistic learning. And the other thing is that many educators have used it in conjunction with an assessment tool, a more traditional assessment tool that they were required to use, so at the end of the learning story, they can write the standards or they can write the particular accomplishments that the other assessment tool asks them to use, and so it can be integrated as well. So, one of the things that we’re gonna do next week is we’re gonna actually look specifically at some learning stories and practice thinking about them and reflecting on them together. Anything else, Peter?
Peter Mangione:
I think that covers what we have in the framework. And what we can do now, because we wanna make sure you have some time to think about some of these things, the very end of chapter one provides a set of principles, 12 principles altogether. And rather than reading through them, we have them on slides here, I think what we’ll do is we’ve created a Padlet that has these principles. You can read through them now. Here are the first six. We’ll give you a little bit of time to read through them. And then there are the second six. But Janis is going to introduce an activity around these 12 principles.
Janis Keyser:
So, once you get a chance to look at these 12 principles, and when you go to the Padlet wall, they will be all together on one Padlet. You can choose one or two or maybe three that really inspire you. And we’d like you to share your thoughts, your examples, your questions, anything that you have that comes up around that principle that you can share with other people in the group, that you can share with all of us. So these walls are gonna be rich with people’s reflections. And when we get done, we’ll come back, and Peter and I will kind of look at some of the comments that you’ve made.
Peter Mangione:
I don’t know if you all have had a chance to look through the different Padlets, but there’s a lot of rich information on each one of those pages. It’s quite amazing. Janis, did you have any reflections?
Janis Keyser:
I wonder if we can just start… Well, let’s go back to the principles pages, and we’ll just go through them one at a time? And I think you had number one.
Peter Mangione:
Yes. A lot of people focused on number one. And building relationships with children was said several times. The importance of strong relationships and helping children transition. It’s a focus of every time you get started with a new child, it’s the relationship that becomes what you go work on first with the child, and building that trust so the child can feel secure enough to explore and really enjoy and experience the environment you’ve created. A lot of ideas. I think, Janis, you’re on two.
Janis Keyser:
I am on number two. So, families, their cultures and home languages are fundamental to early learning and development. And somebody talked about the child’s whole self feels included and accepted when they can see their culture, when they can hear their language, when their culture and language are acknowledged and valued. And several people talked about learning keywords and phrases in the child’s language. And what I know is that we probably can’t always speak every language of the children and families in our programs, but what is so key is demonstrating deep respect, interest, and a willingness to learn those words. And maybe every day when the family comes in, you can say, “What’s the new word that we’re gonna learn today?” Families can make lists of words and phrases that they use, or can record those words and phrases so that we as educators can learn them. We can also use families’ recorded voices and singing lullabies to children at nap time. So, all of the ways, whether we can actually fully speak the language, there are so many ways that we can convey to that child, “Your language is important, and it’s worthy, and you’re worthy, and your family and your culture are so important.” And so I think that’s the disposition that we want to convey to children and their families.
Peter Mangione:
And there’s just so much richness here, and we are at time. We are going to leave this Padlet up available for you to go through, and we will certainly go through it, Janis and I will, before we reconnect with you next week. Also, feel free to keep adding. We really wanna create a community here where we’re sharing ideas around these concepts. And we’re very much excited to have shared this evening with you, and look forward to rejoining with you next week. Thank you all for joining us. Janis, do you have a couple final words here too?
Janis Keyser:
It’s just so exciting, and I love that you’re sending your comments up and that you participated in the Padlet wall, and we are interested in hearing about you, and there’ll be more opportunities for interactive learning next time as well. Thank you so much for coming, and thank you so much for the incredibly important work that you do with infants, toddlers, families, and their teachers. Thank you.
Peter Mangione:
Yeah, that’s so well. Thank you all.
Elizabeth Crocker:
We look forward to seeing you again next Wednesday when we go deeper into planning to support children’s learning. So, we’ve enjoyed being with all of you, and we hope you have a great evening. And we thank you for all of your good energy and your good thoughts and all the activity in the Padlet. It’s clear that you think deeply about the way young children learn in partnership with their families.