Yesterday, I went to my son’s kindergarten.

Flash forward, shaving this morning, and listening to the news:  Physics professors are now deciding that lecturing is “obsolete.” (There is actually a pretty interesting article on this here.)  Physics professors have proven in controlled experiments that students in physics seminars retain a lot more of the material when they are given opportunities to actively engage with it in a collaborative problem-solving context....  This is news....

Anyone seriously involved in education knows that teachers are not dispensers of knowledge.  Kindergarten teachers have known this since back before we called them kindergarten teachers.  A kindergarten teacher has no choice but to start with an assessment of the learner’s needs and with some sense of where the learner is. 

Is the learner tired? 

What interests her right now? 

Where do those interests need to pivot in order for me to reach a meaningful objective with her? 

What can I do to harness her intrinsic motivations? 

How is the learner creating meaning?

For the kindergarten teacher, centering on the needs of the learner is the only option.  Kindergarteners have no “student-ness” paradigm that you can rely on.  

Yesterday was a Father’s Day event.  My wife had told me that my son’s current teacher (we’ll call her O-sensei) is not liked by the parents.  A teacher myself, that made me instantly O-sensei’s friend. 

O-sensei was lovely.  She played the piano exquisitely.  Her activities ran like clockwork, and when speaking to the room, she was warm and radiated intelligence in a way that reassured us that she knew what she was doing.  My son, Dana, had drawn a picture of our family that was posted on the wall.  Strangely, Dana’s picture did not look like a cloud of truck exhaust fumes.  It is VERY hard to get Dana to follow through on activities like that — either he’ll be completely disinterested or he’ll throw himself into it completely, and draw something completely different from what you had asked.  So I was intrigued.

I asked Dana to show it to me and talk about it with me, and he didn't feel like doing that. 

Dana had also made me a Father’s day gift — a foot-high cardboard me in a tie, with a stand that O-sensei explained to everyone was for holding mail.  My tie, my pants, and my shirt were different from all of the other daddies' ties, shirts, and pants.  I THINK Dana had done some of that coloring

Dana is EXCEEDINGLY hard to keep on task with anything.  He’s never disruptive, but if you are not engaging him directly, he tends to drift off to the side; that’s just where he is these days.  And that’s where he was for this lesson. 

From 1:30, to 2:10, the activity was for the daddies to make a sea creature with the kids.  O-sensei gave the daddies explicit instructions as to how this was to be done.

And now I understood.

M-sensei — Dana’s kindergarten teacher last year — would send Dana home with crumpled stuff that Dana had definitely made himself. 

Order often fell apart in M-sensei's room. 

But I chose this school because of M-sensei.  She was directly engaged with each kid and Dana flourished because the crumpled stuff  was his, and it was obvious to me that where Dana’s interest flagged, M-sensei found ways to re-engage him.   If there was a moment in the school play where somebody needed to jump up and scream something, Dana owned that part.

There were other teachers present during O-sensei’s lessons, but they were all effectively outside the room.  The room was O-sensei’s exclusive domain.  I figured out who O-sensei's assisting teacher was only because that teacher ducked in and out when it was time to arrange for a group of kids to bring the attendance paper down to the office. 

M-sensei always had an assistant in the room with her, as well as, I think, a third person from time to time that happened to be available.  I'm thinking her colleagues just plain liked working with her.

For O-sensei, working as a team like that, clearly involves more variables than she can safely expect to control.

O-sensei was the classic example of a teacher whose primary concern it is to create the impression of transparency, while being opaque to observers, and impervious to critique.  She was impeccable in keeping to the clock, she articulated her intentions to the class in such a way that — while Dana, and most of the kids, wouldn’t understand them — the parents and teachers present would.  My Japanese isn’t good enough to do this, but I know just how my feedback session would have gone if she had been one of my teachers....

PETER:  “I notice that Dana’s drawing of his family looks pretty much like everyone else’s drawings of their families.” 

O:  “I felt it was more important that Dana get the satisfaction of completing something.”

PETER:  “Would it have been acceptable to you if Dana’s attempt at drawing his family ended up looking like a cloud of truck exhaust fumes?”

I ask questions like this, not because I know the right answer but because the reaction I get is often telling, and I am pretty sure that the answer that I got would have been something like this:  “Theoretically yes, and we do activities like that sometimes, but I had different objectives for this assignment.”

She was centered on the need for the wall of family drawings to look good.

She was centered on the need to execute all of her planned activities within the span of what, granted, was an important observation.

She was centered on making sure that every decision that she was making would have a plausible argument in its favor, were it to be questioned.

M-sensei — in contrast — was a work of art, welling up with tears at every moment where she saw a kid take initiative and apply him or herself.  M-sensei was a mess.

But kids are messy, and the only thing that M-sensei was centered on was the needs of her learners.

Dana learned.