The four key attributes of a great infant teacher

Article written by Heike Larson, LePort Schools

The training of the teacher who is to help life is something far more than the learning of ideas. It includes the training of character; it is a preparation of the spirit.
Dr. Maria Montessori

The most significant relationship in your child’s life is his or her relationship with you. Your connection with your baby is uniquely special, and at some level your child is aware of that irreplaceable bond.

But after you (and your child’s other parent/guardian), the next most significant impact on your baby’s development will come from the childcare provider you choose. She will be a major role model for your baby, and will contribute to his developing view of the world. She will impact his use of language, his social bonds with other children, and other areas of his growth. When you’re not there, it is her he’ll rely on for understanding and nurturing.  When looking at childcare centers, this means that the type of people the center chooses as caregivers will determine how joyful and educational your baby’s time away from you will be.

In contrast to most childcare facilities, who look for caregivers, LePort specifically hires infant teachers. We believe the time we spend with your baby is too important to be viewed as mere childcare: we look for teachers who can nurture your child and help him mature cognitively and behaviorally, in addition to comforting him and keeping him safe.

All of our teachers meet the base standards required at childcare centers: every teacher has completed her early childhood education units; teachers are CPR trained, and undergo a complete background check and health exam. What makes LePort different is that we go beyond this minimum standard.

We look for four key attributes in our infant teachers, both when we initially hire them, and as we develop them while they work with us:

• A passion and love for working with babies.At LePort, we strongly believe that you have to be passionate to do a good job: we want students to be passionate about learning, and we only hire teachers for whom being with children is a passion, not just a job.  This is especially important for our infant teachers. In contrast to the typical childcare center, which often hires low-skilled caregivers, and as a result experience high staff turn-over, we hire people who are excited to be guides in a young child’s development; who view their role not as a temporary job, but as a career requiring thought, reflection, professional growth. We believe this passion is visible in their day-to-day interactions with the babies in our care: come and see for yourself!

• Infinite patience and a calm, centered personality.Providing childcare to an infant is hard work, with many emotional challenges (and, of course, immense joys!). We have found that patience—infinite patience—is essential to working well with babies. Because our infant teachers love this age group, they delight in observing each baby, in discovering his unique temperament, and in responding to his individual needs. This focus on observation, and the knowledge of the importance of the early years, helps our teachers be unfailingly patient (and admirably more calm and centered than many of us are with our own children at home!)

• An explicit, thoughtful approach to nurturing and guiding young children.Our Montessori-trained lead teachers love working at LePort, because we offer an authentic Montessori infant program. In many childcare settings, there isn’t an explicit approach to guide the day-to-day life with infants. What happens in one childcare room may be different from another one next door; and as childcare providers are often short-time employees, it often changes from week to week, or month to month. This can be very confusing for babies, who urgently need consistency to bring order to their world. In contrast, our program consistently applies Montessori ideas, such as following the child, encouraging independence, observing and individualizing instruction, and using positive approaches to discipline.Our Montessori-trained lead teachers guide those staff members new to the program, and help them to consistently implement this positive, respectful and loving approach to caring for babies and young toddlers.

• A thoughtful, educated and intelligent individual.In her book, The Good School, author Peg Tyre quotes a preschool teacher who explains why intelligence really matters for teachers of young children:
  

  The best preschool teachers turn out to be ones who are very smart. “There’s a lot of things that you have to figure out. Preschool can be more difficult than the other grades because a lot of your teaching has to be embedded in other things. Understand that when you are playing with one child you’re working on their vocabulary, and with another child that you’re facilitating social skills and you’re teaching it through indirect ways.”Peg Tyre

  That’s one of the reasons we look to hire smart, university-educated individuals to become teachers, even in our infant classrooms. Yes, childcare providers for babies don’t have to demonstrate mastery in algebra—but they have to be able to think on their feet, to be creative, and to be able to observe and respond to each baby’s needs and personality. They also are one of baby’s key role models, which means they need to speak in simple, yet rich and grammatically correct sentences.

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Hiring the most talented and dedicated teachers, and maintaining a 1:3 ratio isn’t the cheapest way to run a childcare center. To the contrary, it’s expensive. But our goal at LePort Montessori isn’t just to run a childcare facility. Our aim is to offer an enriched, Montessori educational environment as your baby’s home away from home.

This means only intelligent, high-energy, passionate yet patient individuals can qualify to work in our program. Hard to find? Yes—we review scores of resumes and conduct dozens of multiple-round interviews. But then that’s our responsibility: finding the best possible individuals to guide your child during his critical early years. Luckily, with our reputation as the highest-quality, most authentic Montessori school in Orange County, and one who provides an excellent, supportive work environment for teachers, we usually have our pick of applicants!

School of hard blocks: educating children through gaming

Penelope Trunk, an American mother, has allowed her sons to educate themselves with video games. David Owen speaks to the woman who used Minecraft as a spelling tool.

“Why aren’t people worried that kids go to school all day, then come home and do homework for hours? It’s unnatural. If you look at what’s better for kids, homework or video games, it’s video games. Hands down.”

Remember the days when your mum insisted that you skip school and play video games all day? No, neither do I. Yet for the children of Penelope Trunk, controversial US blogger and entrepreneurial life coach, it’s an everyday reality.

While other children traipse off to school five days a week and occupy their evenings with homework, Penelope’s two sons, aged seven and ten, remain at home on their Wisconsin farm, their education left entirely in their own hands. More often than not, this involves playing Minecraft.

“I started doing research into school reform because I was so pissed off about the state of our schools,” Penelope tells me. “All the research pointed to homeschooling. It pointed to self-directed learning. Kids learn best when you let them learn how they want. So I took my kids out of school and, surprise surprise, they wanted to learn by playing video games all day.”

As a product of a traditional education, I was ready to balk at Penelope’s contentious approach to homeschooling. Yet it soon becomes clear that it isn’t merely a fanciful protest against a struggling US education system. Penelope is adamant that video games are giving her sons a more effective education than they would receive in school.

“One of the scariest things I did was not teach my son to read. He learned to read from video games. The only way he could tell when a Pokémon was going to evolve was to find out at what level that happens. He figured it out. In Minecraft the only way to progress is to enter commands. If they don’t learn it, then they can’t get where they want to go. My son learned to spell from Minecraft.”

It’s a bold claim that has been met with derision from some quarters. Indeed, it’s difficult to believe that as a child I could have learned to read from the likes of ‘But our Princess is in another castle!’

Penelope is defiant, and attributes much more to video games than just teaching her sons to read and write. Her sons have learned how to run their own small businesses from their game-playing experiences.

“If you think about it, all video games are little businesses. They have their own economies. You have to figure out how to get people to do what you want.” As a result, Penelope’s sons now earn their own money to put towards their gaming costs. “My older son sells pigs and goats, my younger son sells eggs. It’s not enough to buy all the stuff they want, but they contribute.”

The theory begins to make sense when I realise that, although Penelope believes unequivocally in the educational value of video games, her ideas are not exclusive to them. It’s about incentivising children to learn in a way that they find engaging – something that can’t always be said about school. Brimming with natural curiosity, children will seek learning on their own terms. Video games just happen to be an appealing option.

“If you worry about kids making bad choices, the first thing you should do is give them the option to make good choices. Clearly you can learn to type faster by playing a video game than what they teach in school. Clearly kids will learn to problem solve if you put them in front of a video game instead of spoon-feeding them class material and giving them a test.”

Good problems, bad problems

I begin to worry that we’re dealing too much in generalisations. While Penelope’s sons favour games with more pronounced educational and creative virtues such as Minecraft, can other genres, such as shooters, be educational? Penelope prickles at the question.

“What are good problems and what are bad problems? Anything that makes you solve problems and work hard to figure out the game and progress is educational.”

In some ways it sounds like a contemporary take on archaic walkabout rites of passage, the classic Pokémon trainer leaving home scenario, liberal parenting gone mad. Certainly Penelope will have a hard time convincing people of her methods. Statistics show that only 58% of parents believe that video games are educational.

“They’re morons,” says Penelope of the sceptical. “Those parents are morons. There’s plenty of academic research that shows the educational value of video games. What’s the difference between a book and a video game? If your kid reads books for 18 hours a day, is he a social loser? Yes. So in the same way if your kid plays 18 hours of video games a day, maybe your kid’s a loser. But there’s no difference in the value of the material.”

In fact, Penelope doesn’t believe that kids will choose to play video games all their waking hours, in the same way that she doesn’t think it’s healthy for them to be stuck in school all day. “I think the best thing you can do is respect a kid’s ability to choose how they want to learn. Kids won’t play 14 hours a day. Their necks will hurt, they’ll want to eat, play with their friends.

“Why aren’t people worried that kids go to school all day, then come home and do homework for hours? It’s unnatural. If you look at what’s better for kids, homework or video games, it’s video games. Hands down.”

While tough to swallow at first (for parents, at least), Penelope’s views are merely at the more extreme end of a nascent body of research.

In February, PhD students at The University of Padua published a paper showing that playing action video games (they tested using Rayman Raving Rabbids) helps dyslexic children to read more quickly. Penelope herself refers on her blog to a study from Iowa State University which shows that surgeons made fewer procedural errors if they played as little as three hours of video games a week. The Netherlands-based Leiden University has just released a study showing that FPS games can improve memory capacity of players.

Such research is not enough to vindicate Penelope’s idiosyncratic approach to homeschooling. Yet beneath the abstruse ideas and spiky rhetoric, it offers a fascinating, relevant case study.

Penelope sums it up for me. “Kids learn best when they’re self-directed. All learning is about incentivising a child. Each of us is an excellent learner if we’re learning in a way that interests us. For kids, that can be video games.”

It’s hardly time to dismantle our school systems and replace textbooks with PlayStations. Certainly there needs to be more thinking in terms of differing financial circumstances, availability of working parents, the dangers of children left to their own devices in different environments. However, it seems that there is something to be said for the promotion of heterogeneous learning, and video games are perfectly positioned to play a prime role.

Games have been stigmatised for so many years as the scourge of youth in countless different ways, but Penelope’s success with her own sons, coupled with a growing body of mainstream research, shows that it might be time to reconsider how we think about the application of video games in our children’s lives.

http://www.vg247.com/2013/05/03/school-of-hard-blocks-educating-children-through-gaming/