San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
Sticking with high-quality learning
Pre-K 4 SA challenged by need to take early education online
With her 3-year-old daughter by her side and a host of kitchen ingredients in front of her, Cashelle Johnson watched as five little faces appeared on her laptop computer.
“Are y'all ready to make play dough?” asked Johnson, a Pre-K 4 SA teacher, drawing an excited response from her students, all of them in their own kitchens at home.
Johnson picked up each ingredient on her counter to show them what they'd need: flour, salt, vegetable oil and water.
“Oil?” asked Jasmine DeLeon, 5, with a perplexed tilt of her head. Her mother's hands could be seen moving in and out of the screen with the items.
“That's oil, yes, your mom has oil. I saw her putting it out,” Johnson said.
The water must be heated in the microwave, she told the kids, so their parents were going to help.
This is teaching preschoolers virtually in the age of COVID-19.
Since its inception in 2013, Pre-K 4 SA, the cityfunded early childhood education program, has been touted as high quality, meeting all the benchmarks that research says early learning should: peer-to-peer interaction with a highly skilled teacher who builds teaching moments on behavioral observations in modern classrooms for a full day.
Local educators have said they believe that the model it provided influenced state lawmakers to provide funding in House Bill 3 to expand full-day prekindergarten in traditional public schools and charter networks.
But with classrooms moved online, and the possibility of more virtual learning in the fall, can virtual
teaching of 4-year-olds still be high quality?
It can, but it’s going to take a lot more parent engagement, said Steve Barnett, senior co-director of the National Institute for Early Education Research at Rutgers University in New Jersey.
“It is far more difficult, and much more of the responsibility falls on the parent. And the teacher’s role becomes, in addition to doing what they can to engage, figuring out how to best support the parents to maximize the parents’ engagement and effectiveness,” Barnett said.
It’s not the desired ideal, Pre-K 4 SA CEO Sarah Baray said.
“Certainly we know those in-person interactions are hugely powerful,” she said. “At the same time, I’ve just been amazed at our teachers’ abilities to take what they know about the critical tenets of early learning and apply that in this environment to make sure our children still get that support.”
Back in the play dough class, Jasmine decided to take off the plastic gloves she initially wore. Some of her peers were “ewww”-ing as the dough oozed through their fingers.
“It’s disgusting,” Jasmine concluded.
“What about slimy?” Johnson asked, offering another word.
“Slimy like butter,” one of the boys said. “Sticky,” a girl said.
“It looks like I’m making pancakes,” another said.
The practice helps kids build vocabulary, Johnson said. Although she doesn’t think they can do online classes forever, projects like the play dough or making bubbles, like she had planned for the next day, are high quality because they benefit brain and language development, she said.
The preschoolers build their imagination as they express themselves, develop their gross motor skills and use their senses of seeing, feeling, tasting and smelling. And they learn math — counting the necessary ingredients and measuring the water and oil.
“It’s so much more when they’re younger than just that academic piece,” Johnson said.
The lessons also encourage families to do things together, like making pancakes.
“Making simple recipes will encourage them to all get together in the kitchen and do something. They’ll feel comfortable doing it,” Johnson said. “Instead of saying ‘You just watch TV right now while I cook dinner,’ maybe they’ll say, ‘Come in the kitchen. Help me mix this stuff.’”
Later, Johnson said she will debrief each parent about how the lesson went. They’ll discuss how the child did and what behaviors parents may be noticing at home that Johnson can provide guidance for working on. She spends much more time these days talking to families. To accommodate parents’ schedules, she’s taken phone calls as early as 6:30 a.m. and as late as 9 p.m. and on weekends.
Pre-K 4 SA has packed its online resource center for parents. There are videos for storytime, exercise, play, literacy, math, science and music featuring their educators. There are articles for parents about helping children cope during uncertainty and the importance of outdoor learning during quarantine.
Like many other schools, Pre-K 4 SA’s teachers and behavior specialists have made house visits. On-campus food pantries and any needed technology are available to families, Baray said. Program leaders recognized early on what Barnett said, that parents were going to need a mountain of support to continue the children’s development at home.
“While we’ve always focused on helping family members who are the first and most important teachers of young children, that’s become an even more important focus of our work because we’re needing to essentially coach families into how you deliver lessons or activities that support children’s development,” Baray said.
Pre-K 4 SA has managed to keep contact with all its students, and on average children are having five points of contact each week with a teacher, either in small groups like the cohort on Johnson’s computer screen or individually, Baray said. For about 70 percent of the children, the communication is synchronous, over Zoom or another method, for face-to-face interaction. The rest are communicating by phone.
The important thing at age 4 is not that kids learn their letters and numbers and draw them perfectly, Barnett said. It’s stimulating their conversations and their thoughts while their brains are rapidly developing.
Building vocabulary is huge, so reading is important. Having discussions about the world around them is critical, even if it is about a TV show the children and parents are watching together or about the plants and animals they see in the neighborhood, Barnett said.
And children need a routine. Having a set time to meet with their teachers and classmates over the computer is important, he said.
The play dough lesson likely maintained high quality over the internet, Barnett said.
“I think that’s a pretty good example of the teacher that uses Zoom to get the children together to do things, to share, so they’re seeing their friends, they’re getting a sense of routine,” he said. “They’re not just onscreen activities. They’re doing something hands on. They’re not doing it in a room together but it’s not just an on-screen activity.”
It is harder for a teacher to assess a child’s progress over a computer, however. In a classroom, a teacher is looking for how the kids interact with one another. Over the computer, a teacher can’t see beyond the four corners of the screen, and the children, while virtually together, are not within each other’s reach.
“There isn’t any fix that I know of,” Barnett said. “This is one of the issues for fall, depending on how things go,” he added, referring to a possible second wave of COVID-19 that schools are already bracing for.
Baray said her team is now discussing how to tackle that. Typically, children are assessed three times a year — beginning, middle and end. This year, teachers relied on the middle-of-theyear assessments to determine how to help children during this away time. But again, a lot of the work falls to the parents.
Soliciting parent feedback is what’s gotten them through this time, Baray said.
She’s accepted that some virtual learning will continue — some families will not feel comfortable sending their kids to school come August, given the possibility of a resurgence of the pandemic before a vaccine is available. For those kids, she said, her team will have to prepare more deliberate activities and seek new ways to collect data about students to measure progress.
“We don’t have any perfect answers to that right now, but it’s a reality we’re going to have to think through,” Baray said.
Toward the end of class, Johnson always saves some time for the children to share their thoughts.
“I miss my friends and you, too,” said Astrid Fernandez, 5.
Perhaps the piece of highquality early learning that is most important to sustain remotely, Baray said, is the attention to kids’ social emotional needs.
“Social emotional learning is, by definition of highquality early learning, part of the curriculum. It always has been,” she said. “This current situation is just heightening the likelihood children are experiencing stressors and trauma . ... High-quality early learning is an anecdote to the problems that can bring for young children.”
Johnson told the children she missed them, too. She reminded them that in the first week of June, their parents will drive them through their Pre-K 4 SA campus parking lot for a parade and that they’ll see each other, albeit from a distance but better than over the internet. She’ll even have goodie bags for them. The children gasped with delight.
“And when the virus goes away and there’s no more germs, maybe your parents will meet me at a park and then we’ll actually get to give each other a big hug before you go to kindergarten,” she said.
One by one, their smiling faces disappeared from view as they logged off.