Pre-K has changed. Can teachers keep up? (quotes Deborah Stipek)

Earlier this fall, I visited Emma Markarian’s prekindergarten classroom in the Bronx to see some 4-year-olds in action. The 15 preschoolers spread out to different activity centers across the classroom. In the block area, the youngsters learned essential math skills (including what it means to add or subtract a block from a structure), physical science skills (balance, height, and weight), and literacy skills (they label and describe all of their structures, like castles and skyscrapers)—all through play. Markarian flitted between centers, asking probing questions. “That’s a tall building? Is it taller than you? Do we need to add or take away to make this building shorter than Jacob?”

At a time when the pre-K debate is often framed as play versus study, Markarian offers evidence of an elusive middle ground: Her formal training in her native Russia was infused with the conviction that young children learn most easily and naturally through purposeful play, a precept she puts into practice every day in her sunny, busy classroom. 

As public prekindergarten expands in New York City and other parts of the country, teachers face competing tensions: On the one hand, there’s new pressure to teach more challenging academic material at younger and younger ages. On the other, there’s mounting concern about the wisdom of shoehorning kindergarten and even first-grade content into the preschool years. Today’s pre-K instructors, for instance, feel much more compelled to teach children their numbers up to 100 or how to begin sounding out words than they used to.

Increasingly, early education experts agree that the best solution is to follow Markarian’s model: Mold and challenge young minds, but do it through purposeful play. That’s not as easy as it sounds.

“That kind of teaching is much more difficult, and it takes a lot of training,” said Deborah Stipek, a professor of education at Stanford University. It’s much easier to lecture and pass out worksheets or to let kids engage in nonpurposeful and disorganized play—simply ensuring “they don’t beat each other over the head with blocks,” she says. “Really effective teaching is both playful and organized.”

Read the full story in Slate.

Deborah Stipek is the I. James Quillen Dean and Judy Koch Professor of Education at the Stanford Graduate School of Education.