Some teachers get into the early ed business because they want to TEACH and SHARE KNOWLEDGE and MAKE THINGS BETTER, all with the greatest of good intentions. I say, also with the best of intentions, BACK OFF! Our purpose as teachers of children from birth to 8, is to set it up, make it safe, get out of the way, and LET LEARNING HAPPEN.

Real Learning – Real Learning happens through SARA – Selection, Action, Reflection, and Application. If learning is to be of the highest quality and the greatest value, THE CHILD must be the center, the composer, the playwright, the ‘boss’ of it. Teachers need to learn to let learning come from the child’s choices and the child’s self-determined methods of Movement, Sensory Exploration, Manipulation, Construction (and destruction), Role Play, and Expression.

Learning happens all day long in the early ed community, because children learn something from everything they experience, but Center or Choice Time is the traditional meat of the learning sandwich. It should take place for at least one-third of the day’s schedule. It is that STAGED but not ORCHESTRATED time in which children and teachers share in the experience of purposeful play (using the methods listed above).

During Center/Choice Time teachers need to:

• Observe and Listen
• Narrate the Action as Needed
• Keep Their Hands and Personal Opinions to Themselves
• Ask the Right Kinds of Questions*
• Document the Learning that Happens**

*Always giving a child immediate answers and facts without encouraging his own research through play, is both presumptuous and wrong. Ask, Don’t Tell. The right kinds of questions are open-ended and ask what, how, who, and what would happen if.   What are you working on? How did you make that? Who might use that? What would happen if you . . . ? Questions that require one-word answers have their place, but they are limited in value. They determine proof of memory, speech, and recognition skills, but they do not determine proof of real (SARA) learning.

**Document the learning AND THE PROGRESS OF THE LEARNING by writing down the child’s words, taking pictures of the action and any product the child creates from the action, and displaying the words and works for the child, the other children, and any classroom visitors to see. Put post-it notes and Word Walls up with the children’s words so they can begin to make the action-object-language-print connection. Encourage them to record these moments in their journals through drawings and beginning, personal, original, phonetic or pretend writing. Make notes of the learning in their portfolios and share with parents and on ‘formal’ assessment report forms.

It is hard for teachers whose hearts are in the right place and who want so much to share and care for young children to remove themselves a bit from the learning process, but if you want to engender real and high quality learning, play Mother, May I and take one giant step back.