3 Trends Early Childhood Classroom Landscape

by Sandra Duncan, Jody Martin & Rebecca Kreth

There are over 11 million children under the age of five spending the majority of their preschool lifetime in some type of early childhood classroom. Most of these environments for young children look pretty much the same resembling each other with their traditional primary-colored equipment, area rugs bordered with cartoon figures, shapes and letters, brightly colored plastic toys, laminated posters of all sizes and shapes, and shelves stuffed and stacked high with learning materials. Even the room’s arrangement of the learning centers and furniture is similar. There is, indeed, a certain aesthetic code or a traditionally accepted notion of what an early childhood environment should be amongst teachers, college professors, parents, and producers of early childhood products. The result? Cookie cutter classrooms.    

Experts are beginning to break the traditional aesthetic codes of early childhood classrooms and examining classroom design with a new perspective. They are, for example, listening to the research of environmental scientists that clearly demonstrates a positive correlation between human productivity and space design. Armed with the contemporary thinking about pedagogy and space and the recent educational and environmental research on potential of positive places, educators are beginning to recognize the classroom environment as the third teacher. As a result, certain trends are starting to emerge: (1) linking the classroom to the local community; (2) providing authentic play spaces; and (3) naturalizing children’s spaces.

#1: Linking Classroom to Community  

Connecting the child’s outside world to the classroom is essential for them to feel connected, included, respected, accepted, and secure — all critical emotional needs.  Often, however, our definition of the outside world is much too broad when we include experiences such as flying to Japan in an airplane made of cardboard with children’s chairs for the jet’s seats or turn the classroom into an Amazon rain forest. It is far more meaningful to connect children to the amazing world immediately outside their classrooms’ windows or doors. It doesn’t matter if your classroom is located in a suburban, urban, or rural landscape, place-based adventures abound anywhere you reside.

Placed-based education is the process of using the local community and environment as a starting point for teaching academic and social-emotional concepts to young children. Because place-based education emphasizes hands-on, real-world learning experiences in the immediate area, this educational approach: (1) helps students develop stronger ties to their community; (2) enhances children’s appreciation for the natural world; and (3) creates a heightened commitment to becoming active and contributing citizens.

One strategy for place-based education is through traditional arts. Most of the time, traditional arts are passed down or learned from someone that shares ethnic heritage or family background and passed down from generation to generation. Often, these traditional arts can be learned from someone in the neighborhood who is willing to share their talents and skills. Offering children opportunities to engage in traditional arts activities such as basket making, weaving, flower pressing, wood carving, folk dancing, knitting, instrument making, painting, sculpting, storytelling and other forms of traditional arts helps promote a sense of connection to their community. 

Nugget of Thought:  Look close by before you look worldwide

#2: Providing Authentic Play Spaces

Most classrooms include the basic equipment, furniture, and learning materials required for licensing and accreditation. However, many of these items are not authentic and do not represent or reflect children’s real life experiences. Because authentic (or real) items are familiar, they are meaningful to children. When children are offered meaningful experiences through authentic learning materials and objects, their conversations, social interactions, and cognition increase. Examples of authentic objects include real pots and pans, metal colander, sterling silver tea pot, dish towels, pot holders, and wooden bread board. Framed images of real or natural elements such as flora, fauna, topography, animals, or people from the local community also enhance children’s play spaces with authenticity.

Nugget of Thought: Offer authentic over plastic—real over pretend.

#3: Naturalizing Children’s Spaces  

It seems like children spend less time outdoors than they used to even though research shows that children who interact with nature are happier, healthier, and do better in school. Fortunately nature is all around us. Whether it is playing in the mud, searching for shells in the sand, picking berries off a bush, or tending to a mini-garden on the playground, children learn from interacting with nature and natural elements. Too often, however, educators think of nature experiences being limited to the outdoors and do not consider the idea of bringing the outside in.

In addition to the common elements of the classroom such as tables, chairs, bookshelves, and equipment, natural items can be added to enrich the environment.  Examples of natural items include seashells, river rocks, tree bark, sea glass, pinecones, acorns, twigs, driftwood, buckeyes, tree cookies, sea grass, coral, and pine boughs — all gathered by the children from the local community. Including natural elements from outside the classroom door gives young children a connection to their neighborhood and a sense of belonging.

Nugget of Thought: Bring outside in.

Abandon the cookie cutter classroom notion of institutional environments and find other joyful expressions of unique furnishings and materials that can be added to change the landscape of the early childhood classroom. Connect to local community, offer authentic play spaces, and naturalize children’s environments.

Sandra Duncan, EdD, has over 45 years’ experience in the early care and education field. A past owner of early childhood programs, she now publishes curricula and teacher resources and trains teachers and program directors throughout the country. Jody Martin has 30 years’ experience at nearly every level of early education, a BA in psychology and minor in child development. She is now serving as vice president of education and training for Crème de la Crème. Rebecca Kreth has spent the last 25 years working with diverse communities, including supporting teaching practices for American Indian and Alaska native children. She has a BA in psychology and minor in child development.

Capturing The Spirit of Wonder in Schools

 

By Christian Long

I’ve been playing a single 1-min Internet video of little kids splashing in a puddle for most of the day. And I’m captivated. Dressed in bright colored full-body rain suits and rain boots, a gaggle of pre-school students wanders a gravel forest road until they encounter a giant rain puddle. Everything in their world stops. One child enters the puddle: exploring, laughing, running. Then another follows until all joyfully do so. They then circle back to do it again and again. To the viewer, it is a remarkable moment of splashing, laughing…and pure wonder-fueled discovery.

The viewer first asks the obvious: Where are they? Where are they going? Where are the teachers? What are they actually supposed to be doing? Then slowly, almost magically, one’s imagination becomes more curious, like the kids themselves: What are they making sense of? What are they feeling? What is this sparking in the the nearby adults? Where else do they get to explore without boundaries or adults guiding every choice? What are the long-term effects of ongoing playful discovery?

As viewers’ questions unfold while watching this video of ForestKids students in Nova Scotia, Canada, it becomes less about the ‘what’ and more about the ‘why’. And as a designer, this shift makes all the difference in the world.

Over the last 15 years of collaborating with a number of really passionate and talented school design / architecture teams, working with a wide array of schools with a variety of project needs and aspirations, I have seen a profound shift in how many are approaching the design process. While many of their questions still focus on easily measured / easily priced ‘objects’ – square footage, materials, furniture, 3D printers, etc. – more and more of our clients are starting the design process by asking a different set of questions entirely:

Ø  How will this process prepare our kids, teachers, and community for the ways they will teach, learn and collaborate in the future?

Ø  Beyond spaces, what else must we re-imagine and re-design?

Ø  Can the design process itself be the way our school creates and collaborates over time?

In other words, as important as the physical spaces are, there is a rising sense that ‘how’ we come together to design new learning environments may be the most valuable asset of all. And perhaps even more, the spirit of wonder and curiosity – more so than theory and certainty -- must be front and center at every design step along the way.

While I am extremely proud of the ‘end products’ my WONDER team creates with our partners, I am most inspired by the ‘messy process’ of discovery that has become central to everything. At our founding three years ago, our WONDER studio intentionally shifted away from the traditional A&E / business process of focusing on the ‘building’ as the end product.

In its place, we invested in a human-centered, multi-disciplinary design methodology committed to uncovering what people and communities ultimately ‘need’ so they can thrive as learners, collaborators and human systems. It has become less about efficiently guaranteeing predictable ‘projects’ that are spreadsheet-driven and more about ‘expeditions’ that uncover the unpredictable.

Like professional design studios IDEO and NoTosh, university programs like Stanford University’s d.school or MIT’s NuVu, or a rising number of K-12 schools like the Nueva School and Mt. Vernon, we have embraced a ‘Design Thinking’ process. Everything we do is anchored in ‘empathy’ via purposeful ethnographic methodologies and ‘prototypes’ via rapid development techniques to re-think and challenge all of our assumptions within every project.

In other words, we want to occupy a mindset of wonder and curiosity as long as possible. This means teaming up with film-makers, scientists, technology entrepreneurs, policy makers, and others that do not normally ‘design’ schools so that we can challenge every assumption we have.

This means not asking kids and teachers to be ‘school designers for a day’ via traditional workshops but instead teaming up with kids, teachers, and community partners to take on real-world design challenges beyond the project itself in order to make real community impact (and simultaneously observing ‘how’ teams instinctively use spaces, tools and each other in real time).

And it means getting involved in projects far beyond architecture to broaden our insights, whether it be organizing multi-school leadership retreats to explore the future of education, working with national foundations to create multi-year films, or leading long-term teacher professional development processes. Perhaps the process leads to a better building. Perhaps it leads to a decision not to build a building at all. Or perhaps it leads to re-imagining ‘school’ in ways never before imagined. 

Of all of these efforts that have had the biggest impact on how our clients engage the school design process – and on us as a design firm – the most striking are the year-long / multi-year-long teacher professional development design expeditions we regularly are asked to lead. Generally, there are three reasons why a school team makes such an investment:

·         1. They will renovate or build in the future, so they want to amplify their educators’ ability to solidify the non-negotiable cultural / behavioral characteristics that must underpin all future design choices.

·         2. They have already begun the architectural process and realize that educators must now collaboratively experiment and test new behaviors in order to fully leverage emerging spaces.

·         3. They realize that if they only design new spaces without re-thinking everything as a unified ecology – spaces, culture, brand, time, schedule, curriculum, technology, partnerships, professional practice, etc. – they will never fully realize the value of the architecture itself.

Structurally, we employ with the following elements:

Learning Design, Not School Architecture

As much as we want to eventually focus on the design of spaces, the focus of the teacher experience can’t be about solving that problem. Ideally, we can use it as a spring board, but it’s never the explicit focus of the overall experience. Instead we want to find the underlying questions worth exploring, whether it is agility, collaboration, professional identity, a maker culture, etc.

Design Thinking Methodologies

While we are very experienced with the traditional architectural process, we are equally experienced as educators. We intentionally use ‘Design Thinking’ methods so that teachers and educator teams can ‘hack’ everything we do and bring elements back into their own day-to-day practice. Also, we want a process that uncovers the unexpected, that approaches design challenges in oblique ways, and naturally requires unexpectedly multi-disciplinary teams that choose to be curious rather than certain.

Multi-Disciplinary Cohorts

While the team may be made up of educators from the school, they are never the teams that typically gather together. We do not start off with resumes or department lists to create the teams. Instead, the teachers are given a design challenge to respond to and team selections grow out of looking for a creative blending of backgrounds and yes-and attitudes.

Multi-Semester / Multi-Year Experiences

Each team agrees to work together for a minimum of one year, made up of two school semesters. This allows the first semester to be an ‘ethnographic’ process of empathy-driven discovery, both about themselves as professionals and the overall school itself. Similarly, it allows the second semester to be focused on making a positive impact on each member and the school itself. In an ideal world, the first cohort will be followed each semester by a new cohort. And over time, each cohort will take on some facilitation / mentoring of the future cohorts so that the process becomes embedded in the school culture itself.

Solo and Group Design Challenges

Together we end up exploring many things that arise along the way: childhood, peer collaboration, trans-disciplinary curriculum design, faculty lounge interactions, hacker and tinkerer mindsets, supporting parents, emergent professional practices, grading, plausible futures, artificial and virtual reality, storytelling, faculty meetings, social-entrepreneurism, creating cultures of curiosity and innovation, imagining entirely new school models, etc. Inspired by discoveries like these, each cohort member takes on a semester-long design project and the entire cohort takes on a group project as well, all of which has the dual goal of expanding individual practice and creating the conditions for the entire school to thrive. 

While such a shift away from the traditional architectural process has a profound impact on the eventual design of spaces and places, it has a larger impact on amplifying the non-negotiable values within a school community. It creates opportunity for people to truly ‘beta-test’ their future experiences.

As a designer, approaching ‘school architecture’ in this way is no small change. It is akin to shifting from asking a client practical questions – such as how much space and storage do they need in their classrooms and studios; what kind of furniture do they want in their new library or community spaces; and how many 3D printers they want to order for their new maker space? -- to engaging a more oblique line of design inquiry:

Or, looking out more into the future, it becomes less about what the building can and should look like, and more about asking a school community (and oneself) about their aspired behaviors and rituals: how can multi-generational collaboration take place equally both on and off campus; how can we test for and prototype an emerging culture of just-in-time creativity and curation in the ‘corners’ and ‘nodes’ of the school; what if only 20% of our future students come ‘to campus’ each day, while we simultaneously serve 1000% more students then we ever have in the past; what if we stop designing existing classrooms as studios in the traditional sense of ‘school’ but instead position our students and teachers as empathy-fueled change agents out in the community at large?

We live in a world education where everything is changing right in front of our eyes. No longer is it even understood what it will mean to ‘go to school’ in the future, nor what it will mean to ‘design a school’. As educators, distributors, manufacturers, school and community leaders, and designers of future learning environments, this means we are being challenged to adapt and shift on multiple fronts in order to serve our students and communities in ways we cannot possibly predict. To that end, this is a remarkable 'design challenge' to embrace, equally intimidating and extraordinary in nature.

And that brings me back to pondering rain puddles. Or more specifically, it brings me back to pondering how our own design process can learn more from kids splashing joyfully in rain puddles -- where perhaps the spirit of wonder and the unabashed desire to discover is the governing ethos– rather than in the ways we’ve historically created buildings called schools.

About the Author: 

Christian Long is an educator, school planner, plausible-futures seeker, and passionate advocate for innovative learning communities, having spent the last 20 years teaching, coaching, leading experiential education programs, and designing schools.

Devising a New Strategy for Great School Food

By Greg Christian 

As our lives have become more and more hectic due to the demands of living in today’s society, our eating patterns have shifted to consuming fast convenient foods during less structured eating occasions.  Families rarely gather around the table to enjoy a home-cooked meal together anymore. Meals are now quick and on the go.  In general today’s younger generation has not learned how to make healthy food choices and older generations have forgone healthy food choices and often do not cook meals.  Just look around at the next gathering you attend.

In recent years many groups including: garden/local food/composting advocates; government organizations such as the USDA, Let’s Move, and the EPA; parent groups clamoring for better food; and students storming board meetings demanding better school food across the country have all been focused on trying to make school food better.

Clearly these groups are working very hard to make an impact on children’s eating habits, but many students are still unsure about where their foods come from and how they should eat healthy. Students at many schools are eating mostly processed foods that they end up throwing away (at least 40% of what they take is being tossed into the trash can, according to a food waste study I did with the EPA in 2016).

Is there anything that can tie these silos together to make real change happen in our school dining centers? The ONE ingredient that can and will bring all the silos into one congruent shared vision is scratch cooking.  Scratch cooking in schools is where it needs to start in order to help students learn how to make healthy food choices for life.

This may sound easy enough, but it is not. The system is stacked against scratch cooking. Commodity purchasing and the reimbursable meal program (USDA) make it nearly impossible to produce good tasting, healthy meals. A majority of schools rely on the reimbursable meal program as well as the trend to fast, convenient, processed foods that so many of us have become accustomed to.

My partners in sustainable school food and I have worked in school food environments nationwide for many years. During this time, we have learned that people simply need to get back to the basics of cooking foods from scratch (without being held hostage to commodity programs) in order to make real change. Wholesome, good-tasting food can be the catalyst to make a difference throughout the school and into the community. 

We have developed a proven process to achieve the goal of serving fabulous school food in a sustainable system. The following steps build sustainable food systems that engage all members of the school community.

Step 1 - Assess Reality

To start the process, we need to identify how a school currently approaches its food service. Our first step is to perform an assessment where we make on-site observations and ask questions to determine the current reality is in the school.

Step 2 – Determine the Vision and Develop the Strategy

Once we know the lay of the land, we then develop a vision for the future. We meet with members of the kitchen staff, students, parents, school administration, and some community members to determine what is important to the school community as it pertains to food, sustainability, and engagement.  We find that it helpful to let people vent their frustrations and then let them talk about all that they are trying to accomplish and what they have already tried to lead students to make healthy food choices as well as be good stewards of the earth. The feedback is used to lay out a strategy with benchmarks, so there are clear outcomes and quantifiable results.

Step 3 – Implement the Strategy and Engage the School Community    

Once the strategy is developed, we make sure that all stakeholders are in agreement. Then it’s time to implement the strategy, engage the school community and start COOKING! It is critical to track all data points so that progress can be continuously measured. We also identify where any funding may be needed to improve the kitchen equipment or facility. To be the most effective in driving food and sustainability education throughout the school, we often suggest to our school clients that they consider hiring a green team coordinator to lead these education initiatives.

Source the Ingredients First –Then Build the Menu Based on those Ingredients

Flavorful meals are the result of fresh ingredients. Therefore, by determining which local ingredients are in-season and best priced, it is possible to source meal components that are optimal for cooking great tasting meals from scratch that students will love!  This way of planning is not a common practice in many commercial kitchens today. It takes time, preparation, and lots of practice to get there, but once this method is in place it leads to sourcing more local foods which taste better than foods that have traveled great distances.  It’s no secret that eating flavorful foods that taste great is more enjoyable. 

Once we establish our ingredient base we can then plan the menu.  When the menu is built based on the ingredients, similarly to the way upscale restaurants source seasonal ingredients and build the menu, the result is better tasting food.

We also believe in eliminating variety. Let there be one fabulous entrée a day that kids will eat, with a fantastic salad bar, with homemade dressings, hard boiled eggs, maybe even a ‘make your own sandwich’, for those that don’t want the entrée. Reducing variety and waste will offset any additional funding it may take to serve fresh foods from scratch. We have demonstrated that a scratch-cooking foodservice program can be achieved with the funding that is already in place.

Once the menu has been built and we know what we want to cook, serve, store and hold for different day parts, then the kitchen may be assessed to determine if any remodeling will be needed. Most people go to remodeling first because it looks like something is happening. But if you don’t assess and design based on menu, these decisions will result in wasting money or overspending. A peak into existing school districts will reveal that most kitchens are underutilized based upon how the district currently feeds students. Resources are literally being wasted.

Start Cooking!

Once the ingredients are sourced and the menu is planned then we start cooking! Here is where the edge of the knife comes in. It must be sharp and fast (or get fast).  Fresh ingredients heading towards local and organic are key to success. Direction and leadership for the kitchen team will result in confidence that they can ‘scratch-cook’ in real-time so the food is served at the height of flavor, it looks great and kids eat it! The act(s) of growing, harvesting, cooking and eating are at the center of all we are. The act of cooking homemade meals stirs memories, makes memories and creates a social well being (of sorts) that instills so many healthy things in our lives. The bottom line is that we need to see happy people wielding knives and cutting boards in the kitchen. There is a special kind of joy a child feels when they see someone cares enough to take the time and effort to cook a good meal or bake a fresh treat.  The other by-product is happy, proud employees.

Measure Waste

Waste measurement is key to identifying success or failure in the front and back of the house. The information must be processed (used) regularly to be of value.  In one study (Punahou School on Oahu in 2008). Student waste was measured for several days. One day the waste was pushing 40%. Since it was the last day we let students know why we were weighing the waste. Several felt the need to explain the reason for their waste that particular day. It led to some very interesting conversation about why food was wasted. In this case, (40%) tofu was the main entrée (commodity) and it was slathered in teriyaki sauce. The kids simply ate around it.

The old adage ‘the way to a man’s heart is though his stomach’ is still true today except that it should be modified to say ‘the way to a healthy heart is through healthy food and lifestyle. Studies have shown that having a chef or culinary presence in the school cafeteria to interact with students through taste tests and demonstrations is beneficial. A 2012 study conducted in Boston Public Schools found that middle school students eating in school cafeterias with chefs/culinary leadership were more likely to eat whole grains, and consumed more servings of vegetables per day than students in cafeterias without chefs.

In the end it’s all about serving great food in a sustainable system. Responsibility is not on the food service workers alone, but rather it is a shared responsibility with the school and families as well. Growing happy, healthy children should be integrated into every aspect of the school and at home. Involving stakeholders creates ownership and food can be the common thread. Schools across the country are struggling to keep enrollment up due to charter schools and open enrollment. Parents and students have more choices that ever. All things being equal food quality can play an important role in the decision-making process.

Devising a new strategy for great school food takes commitment, but it is worth the hard work to have healthy students who are engaged and better prepared to learn. It is possible to aim for a higher standard for the students we are feeding and honor the earth for giving us sustenance, and each other by remembering that we did not get to the fast paced, processed food world overnight. By combining our commitment, respect, determination, and hard work, our children will learn about healthy food choices.

About the Author:

Chef Greg Christian is a sustainable food service consultant, chef, author and entrepreneur. His company, Beyond Green Sustainable Food Partners, measures strategies and solutions for organizations interesting in making the switch to more sustainable food service platforms. Learn more at www.beyondgreenpartners.com.