Nonverbal Communication

 I  volunteer at the Long Island Children's Museum, a magical place where children actively engage in tons of fascinating and fun exhibits. Week after week, I have a blast interacting with children of all ages and entering their world of wonder, curiosity and play.  This week, I worked in Tot Spot, a play space dedicated to the youngest museum visitors.  While a facilitator conducted conversations with parents in a separate area, I and other volunteers monitored the babies and toddlers.  I connected with two youngsters in particular, a 9 month old girl and a 2 year old boy.  Each of them had some difficulty separating from their parents, but I managed to win them over and they both became attached to me.  The boy had only a few words and the girl was non-verbal.  Yet we communicated with ease and  really enjoyed each other.   That got me thinking about nonverbal communication.  I know it's essential  to children's sense of security and connection, but how specifically does it work?

For the most part, our interactions with others, including children, are natural and spontaneous.  We initiate or respond to conversations and actions freely, without lots of forethought.  So it's difficult to look back and identify the specific behaviors that led to my connection with the two small children at the museum. But that's what I've tried to do because I think it can help us learn a lot.  

I met the girl first.  She was sitting in a stroller while her older sister moved around playing.  I suggested to the mom that she put the baby in the cushioned pit with infant toys.  I got into the pit with her and starting rolling a toy to her, saying "Whee!" We made eye contact.  She grabbed the toy and tossed it.  I used simple language to talk about what we were doing as we continued this game, and that was it!  We connected!  Eventually another baby bumped into her and she cried, so I scooped her up and took her to another area.  That's where I  met the boy.

I sat the baby on the floor right next to me, near some shelves of plastic foods.  I took the foods out one by one, named them, and gave them to her to hold.  As she dropped them, I put them in a basket and she continued to explore.  The little boy was also taking food from the shelves.  I asked his father his name, and used that often in speaking to him.  I made eye contact, and basically narrated what he was doing.  "You're putting broccoli in your basket...Your basket is almost full.."  I challenged him to try new things "Can you walk in the garden?  Would you like to plant the banana..etc." (you had to be there).  Anyway, I continued chatting with him and the baby, and they both played near me.  The baby was bouncing up and down as she grabbed new toys, and the boy and I were laughing as he tried new activities.  

I've identified 5 strategies that helped me communicate with these nonverbal children: 

1.  Enter their world.  With the girl, I got into the infant pit and played with the toys.  With the boy, I narrated his actions and used simple questions to extend his play.  With both, I brought my body down to their eye level.

2.  Make eye contact. Smile. It's magic, it works. 

3.  Keep your body relaxed and your voice pleasant.  I was there to help them have fun and keep them safe.  Both of those messages are relayed by tone of voice and body language.

4.   Treat the child like a communicative partner.   Talk.  Narrate what he's doing.  Ask simple questions.  Wait for an answer, even if it's nonverbal.

5.  Respond appropriately to their body language and facial expressions.  When the baby cried, I moved her to another area.  When she was bouncing and grabbing, I knew she was happy.  When the boy stiffened up after I suggested he try the slide, I let it go.  When he looked for more toys to put on the conveyor belt, I knew he was having fun.

Nonverbal communication is a powerful teaching tool.  Young children are experts at interpreting our body language, tone, and facial expressions.  We don't need to tell them  how we feel and what we value, because they know by watching us.  I recently read that if our nonverbal communication differs from our verbal communication, a child will believe the nonverbal cues.  If we want our children to trust us, we must be genuine with them.  At the same time, by understanding what our children are communicating with their behaviors, tone, gestures, and facial expressions, we can meet their needs for security and connection and open the doors to rich learning and growth.

Early Childhood Education: A Teacher's Role

In "Early Childhood:  A Plea from the Field" , I wrote about the importance of the early learning years, and how early childhood educators are so often misunderstood and under-appreciated.  It's harder to measure learning in early childhood because there are no products to assess achievement; no tests, quizzes, homework, etc.  The early childhood curriculum is more focused on building developmental skills.  It's about process, not content.  And since children learn through play, an outsider to the field may not understand the teacher's role in the classroom.  What does the teacher do while the children play?

I began to understand how children learn through play when I was an undergraduate doing field work for a developmental psychology course.  I was volunteering at an inner city nursery school in Binghamton, NY.  One day I was playing catch with a three year old boy.  As we played, the teacher said to me, "Use language, Georgia."  So I started labeling what we were doing:  "Catch the ball.  Good catch.  Now throw it to me.  I missed! ", on and on, adding new words such as high, low, far, close, etc. in the context of our play.  Aha! That's how you learn through play.  Not only did the child have words to put to our actions, but he learned about the effects of his muscles on the trajectory of the ball.

Children learn enormous amounts about the world around them through play.  A gifted, qualified teacher can help her students rack up major educational advantages. Early childhood professionals understand the continuum of child development.  They know the steps needed to achieve goals. Through observations and interactions, they determine each child's place on that developmental continuum and create an environment for optimal learning.  

Let's think about learning to read for example. Learning to read is a process that begins at birth and is not completed until the college years.  Since reading is a form of communication, it is intimately connected to the other components of language:  listening, speaking, and writing.  So the first step in learning to read is to build a rich vocabulary of spoken words.  A baby listens to the sounds around her and begins to connect them with things and actions.  As a socially motivated being, she coos and babbles in an attempt to become  a communicative partner.  When paired with a responsive adult, she learns the meaning of words and eventually tries them out on her own.  

This is the very beginning, the foundation of reading.  A skilled early childhood teacher creates a literacy enriched environment that can maximize her students' potential for language acquisition.  She listens to the children's conversations and imaginative play roles, and introduces words and opportunities for extending learning.  If children are playing doctor for example, the teacher can add props such as a stethoscope, band-aids, mini flashlight.  She can give the children a clipboard and notepad for prescriptions, maybe an eye chart or xrays.  She can transcribe the children's role-playing ideas and encourage them to dictate stories.  She can include books about doctor visits in the class library and read them at story time. She can invite a doctor to visit the class, and encourage children to ask questions.  

The doctor scenario is a rough outline of how children's play can be enriched to promote their emerging literacy skills.  Meaningful vocabulary, concepts, and experiences with print are naturally woven into the children's self-directed activities.  Early childhood teachers have an arsenal of such activities to promote every aspect of developmental learning, including math, science, social studies, art, music, and social-emotional skills.  Every corner of the classroom, and every minute of the day, is carefully and intentionally planned to promote learning that is fun, active, and appropriate to the students.

It might be important to point out what the teacher has not done.  She hasn't ignored the children's play.  She hasn't given the children worksheets, coloring sheets, or other two dimensional pencil and paper tasks.  She hasn't lectured, or followed up a book with closed-ended questions.  She hasn't limited the children's experiences to conform with what she knows and thinks.  She isn't "playing school", watering down elementary curriculum to fit younger children.

An early childhood teacher is more of a facilitator of learning than a source and sharer of knowledge.  Her work is thoroughly connected to the children's current interests and developmental levels. Children and teachers are collaborators in uncovering lessons from classroom experiences.  The rewards can be remarkable:  a timid child gaining confidence; a pre-reading child dictating a detailed story, a child who has learned to use scissors, grasp a pencil, write his name.  There are also many intangible rewards, which may be hard to see. But we know that it is in the early childhood classroom that children learn about respect, responsibility, kindness and compassion.

No one enters the field of early childhood education to make a lot of money.  Teaching young children is as much a calling as it is a job, and early childhood educators are among the most committed, caring, hard-working and talented folks around.  Learning looks different in the early years, and it takes a qualified professional to understand that.

Kids Are People Too

Growing up, my favorite show to watch on TV was The Little Rascals.  I have a whole repertoire of quotes from those short movies, and to this day love watching them.  The Little Rascals are independent, resilient, resourceful, and really funny kids.  They made me feel like being a kid wasn't a handicap.  After all, kids don't have the freedoms, rights, and choices of adults.  Kids can feel powerless in a confusing world.  But the Little Rascals were not helpless.  In their world, kids could do and be and have just about anything.

Happily for me, my grandchildren are also fans of The Little Rascals. (Unhappily for my children, they're also quoting some of their favorite lines.) We watch episodes on youtube, and the kids laugh so hard they sometimes fall off the couch.  Recently, we watched a newer, color movie version which happened to be really good.  There were several cameos of famous people, such as Whoopi Goldberg as Buckwheat's mother.  In one scene, Spanky and some of the kids pretended to be adults so they could apply for a bank loan to rebuild their clubhouse.  The banker was played by Mel Brooks, and of course he saw through their disguise immediately.  As a busy banker, he was impatient and dismissive with them, and Spanky said, "Hey mister, you can't talk to people like that.".  And Brooks yelled back, "You're not people, you're a kid!".

Few of us would be rude enough to make that statement in real life, but the truth is that many of us convey that exact message to kids non-verbally.  And they get it.  For example, many adults seem to think it's okay to use swear words or hold adult conversations in the presence of small children because they assume that the kids don't understand.  Wrong.  Children are highly attuned to our tone, facial expressions, and body language, and even if they don't have a grasp of all the vocabulary we use, they understand what we are communicating.  Anyone who has learned a second language knows that sometimes you can get the gist of a conversation without grasping all the words.  Children have strong, innate communicative abilities.  Underestimating those abilities is disrespectful.  

Children entering toddler and early childhood programs are not empty buckets waiting to be filled up with knowledge.  Even our youngest students bring with them a world of experiences and understandings.   Ask any mother how quickly the first year of life goes by --zoom!  And in that time, our children are gathering tons of information about their bodies, about the people and things in their surroundings, and about communication.   Developmentally appropriate practice, which is the professionally accepted approach to early childhood education, means using the developmental levels of our students as a starting point for teaching.   Lesson plans are based on the children's interests and personal experiences.  So, let's say a holiday is coming up and we want to learn and celebrate in class.  The first step is to find out what the children already know about the holiday, what experiences they've had with it, and then develop activities to extend their knowledge.  All learning is about making connections between new concepts and prior knowledge.

It's important to be every bit as thoughtful in talking to children as we are when speaking to adults. We may never know the full impact of our words.  Once, at the beginning of a new school year, a four year old boy said to me, "My teacher last year said I was a tzaddik "(righteous person).  I answered him, "You're still a tzaddik".  To me, it was a nothing conversation.  Days later, his mother repeated it word for word.  She said that another adult might have paid little attention to him " That's nice"; but that my words touched him deeply.  Wow.

It's important to treat children as our conversational equals.  This will:  1) demonstrate that their thoughts and feelings have value; 2) build their self-confidence; and 3) strengthen their own communication skills.  Of course children deserve to be treated with respect.  They're people too!!

Early Childhood Education: A Plea From The Field

Eighty percent of a child's brain development takes place by age three.  Early childhood, which is defined as birth through age eight, is the optimal time of life for building cognitive and social skills.  Teachers and parents can deliberately influence their children's intellectual and social development by creating rich learning environments.  When we combine an understanding of general child development with what we know about the particular temperaments and character traits of individual children, we can manipulate the physical, social, emotional and mental environments and capitalize on children’s readiness to learn.  Clearly, the most important element in this formidable task is the human one; the adults who interact with the child on a daily basis. So to a large extent, the present and future success of young children depends on the knowledge and commitment of their parents and teachers.

Why then are early childhood teachers the lowest paid and least respected in the field of education?  Unfortunately, few people  understand what early childhood education is all about.  Some consider it glorified babysitting that practically any warm body can do well.  Upsetting to me personally are the schools that do not hire professional teachers for their young students. These schools feed into and encourage this misconception.  At this most vulnerable time of life, children deserve well-educated and highly qualified teachers.  I know from experience that teaching preschool is just as complex, demanding, and important as teaching high school. 

What makes a quality early childhood teacher?  Someone with both good instincts and a good educational background.  Someone who grew up with a knack for interacting with young children, maybe working as a babysitter or camp counselor.  Someone who majored in education in college and took courses in developmental psychology, educational philosophy, and pedagogy.  A qualified early childhood educator would have completed a practicum or semester of student teaching.  She would be committed to ongoing professional development throughout her career.  She is someone who understands the range of child development.   She adapts the curriculum to each new class, as well as differentiates instruction according to the needs of individual students.  She identifies at-risk children and children with special needs and she advocates for best practice for all of her students.  ( I purposely used the feminine pronoun because the majority of early childhood teachers are female.  There is a real need for men to join this profession.)

A college background in education gives teachers a rich vocabulary and a grounding in academic subject areas.  Well qualified early childhood teachers tap into children's curiosity and current developmental levels to maximize and extend learning.  They know how children learn and see to it that lessons are active, hands-on, and primarily directed by the children themselves. Their classrooms are lively laboratories of  child exploration and experimentation, where learning is visible and expressed in multiple ways. Interestingly, the older grades are beginning to catch on to the value of early childhood practices.  Elementary and secondary school teachers are learning the benefits of active learning, project based learning, differentiated instruction, and teaching the whole child.  These educational approaches work for every age, and have been employed by early childhood teachers for decades.

Long term studies have demonstrated the lasting effects of quality early childhood education on adults, with higher rates of graduation and income.  Psychologically, we know that our adult behaviors have their roots in our early childhood experiences.  Young children are susceptible to the environments that we create.  They deserve the best teachers:  teachers who are well trained, well paid, and respected for the awesome work that they do.

Learning by Heart

I started this blog as an outlet for my musings on early childhood education.  In my everyday life and experiences, I see boundless examples of the tenets of early childhood education. Education after all is about learning and growth, both in and out of the classroom.  And learning and growth, to my mind, is the purpose of life.

When we think about educating very young children (early childhood is defined as birth to age 8), we are forced to consider the nature of education. What do we want children to learn?  And then we must answer the question, how do children learn? Developmentally appropriate practice, which is the foundation of early childhood education, requires educators to get to know, respect, and appreciate each student's unique strengths, interests, and current skill levels.  Then the teacher can guide and support his/her students   in furthering their skills and knowledge, bringing them closer and closer to discovering and actualizing their best selves.  It's about authentic, individualized learning and growth, and applies to every age and developmental level.  

There are many dimensions to my choice of title, Learning by Heart.  Of course, I love learning (what teacher doesn't?).  I love facilitating learning in others.  I love talking and thinking about teaching and learning.  And I like to think that all this learning is making the world a better place.  So I have an emotional connection to learning.

Learning by heart can also mean learning something so well that it becomes part of you. Things you know by heart are internalized;  you "know" with your whole being.  I'm reading a fantastic book right now called Everyday Holiness, by Alan Morinis.  It's about Mussar, and I found this perfect quote:  "Thoughts do not become part of our lives until they are somehow internalized, as if woven into the flesh of our hearts".  Yes, that's it.  Authentic learning, the learning I see in early childhood education, is learning that takes place for and by the heart.