Editor’s note: To read profiles of all 2015-2016 Blackboard Awards honorees, click HERE!
Laurie Engle
Pre-K & Kindergarten
The Neighborhood School—P.S. 363
Tell us about some of the special joys and challenges you’ve experienced as a teacher.
Teaching is an intellectual and social activity. The degree to which a teacher can fully teach his or her class has a lot to do with what the school supports. At the Neighborhood School we believe that all children are capable. We develop a rich curriculum in which skills are integrated into real and meaningful experiences. The arts are a big part of the curriculum. It is inspiring to work collaboratively with dedicated and creative teachers, artists, staff members, and our principal.
We use a range of descriptive practices to know each child well and to think deeply about how our curriculum supports individual children and the whole class. It is a joy to observe and hear children in action. I use what I observe to create an environment and curriculum that helps them develop and expand their ideas and bring who they are and what they think to our class community. This year our grade-level study has been playgrounds with a focus on simple machines. When we began exploring inclined planes, one student drew a flat road but called it a ramp. I talked with her about her drawing. She explained that she had drawn it that way because she did not know how to build a support for a ramp. The child’s drawing and questions about ramps became the subject of our morning meeting the next day. Collaborating on building ramps became the focus of class work for the next few weeks.
The push for early childhood testing and looking for a particular kind of data based on proficiencies has shifted how early childhood classrooms are viewed and assessed. This push creates a challenge to maintain our support of children’s play, exploration, and expression through art. The activities in a rich, experiential learning classroom with play at its center are not easily translated into crunch-able data, nor should they be.
In the earlier days of our school there was greater ethnic, racial, and economic diversity in our student body. We had an admissions system that protected this. The system for admissions has become centralized and our student body is less diverse. It has been a challenge to find ways to maintain student diversity.
Please share a special project or achievement (or two) that you are particularly proud of from this year.
In our simple machines curriculum, children explore how tools and simple machines work and how they can be used. It is also about exploring properties of the physical world such as gravity and force, and therefore helps children expand their understanding of how the world works and what is possible. Children construct their understanding and knowledge and develop their ability to act in the world.
As part of this curriculum, I wrote a grant that our school’s PTA funded to provide a two-week intensive workshop with an expert woodworking teacher. Each child used tools to build a wooden car. Children worked in pairs so each child got a turn to be a builder and also to observe the construction. This helped children understand force, motion, and construction in the most hands-on kind of way. Using real, “grown-up” materials helped them develop greater physical ability, control, and confidence. As teachers, this project helped us to see another aspect of children’s interests and abilities. Then, children used the cars as part of our exploration of inclined planes.
Over the course of your career, what do you consider one or two of your greatest accomplishments?
Working with teachers and families to found, grow, and sustain a unique community school is an accomplishment I am proud of. At the center of the school is supporting the child as an individual and as a community member. Giving kids appropriate time and instruction to work on their ideas and to develop according to their own trajectory – central to this is seeing and understanding the child in many different dimensions. Seeing the school grow and develop as it maintains a commitment to mixed-age grouping, close collaboration between teachers and parents, and an arts-infused core curriculum has been a pleasure. It is very exciting to work with a generation of younger teachers who value these ideas, are building on them, and are finding ways to make them live in their classrooms.
In my own classroom, an ongoing activity I am proud of is how we participate in Fall Family Celebration, a school-wide event. Our class prepares a lunch for their families. The activities related to this – such as talking about your family and things your family likes to eat, writing and drawing shopping lists, going to the farmer’s market and buying both familiar and unfamiliar ingredients, cooking and following a recipe, writing a menu, decorating our classroom, and having parents and other family members come as guests – gives children opportunities to use and develop many skills and brings students together as a community. After having accomplished this big, “grown-up” task they are ready to take on a wide range of work together.
What drives you? What keeps you motivated and committed to being a dedicated and hard-working educator?
The philosophy and structures of the Neighborhood School create a lot of wonderful relationships. Children are engaged and happy in their work. Families are supportive and appreciative of the work that I do and of the work we do as a school. I feel a tremendous sense of accomplishment when I look at how much children grow in a year. I am lucky enough to work with children and their families for two years because we have mixed-age grouping.
In developing curricula, I work collaboratively with my wonderful, insightful colleagues. We meet regularly to consider how this all fits together for each grade level and how we can best know and teach children. This is what makes teaching enduringly fascinating.
Any special advice for parents on how they can best support their children academically at the grade level you teach? And more generally? And how they can have the most productive relationship with their children’s teacher and school?
In pre-Kindergarten and Kindergarten, it is easy to become focused on letters and numbers as indicators that your child is learning. My advice is to think of literacy and numeracy beyond letters and sight words or numbers and number facts but as complex and intriguing ways of sharing ideas about the world and experience. How can we help children make sense of these abstractions and connect them to the real world? Spend time at the library. Find stories that you both love. Talk about the story and think about how the author and illustrator craft their narrative. What do you notice? How would you tell the story? Children at this age are great at noticing details and patterns and hypothesizing. These are the skills that support critical thinking. This is what your child will need to be a good reader when he or she is older. Use numbers and counting in real ways. Think together about pattern, size relationships, and geometry to build, arrange, or sort things. Talk and problem solve together.
When I meet with families, I realize that each of us worries that the other will think we have not done a “good job.” Try to go into conversations with your child’s teacher thinking of him or her as an ally. Work together to gain insight into your child and how he or she thinks and works. Together you, your child, and your child’s teacher are collaborating to provide the richest possible education for your child. Each of you has a role to play and each is important.
