Dr. Dale Farran has spent the better part of the last 50 years researching early childhood education. But some of her most famous research has come about rather recently, as she directs the evaluation of the Tennessee Voluntary PreK Program. This study is one of the most fascinating pieces of recent research in early childhood education.
With a randomly controlled trial, Farran’s team found that after an initial PreK year, children who participated scored higher than children who didn’t. After the two groups converged for their kindergarten year, however, that difference disappeared. That’s not too surprising – a “fade out” effect is often observed in early childhood research.
Where this study really started making waves was with the follow-up data. After the participating children completed their third-grade year, Farran and her team found that the PreK group actually scored *below* the other children on the math and science sections of their standardized tests – and by statistically significant margins. By the sixth-grade year, more alarm bells sounded. The PreK participants were scoring below the nonparticipants on not only math and science (and by a greater factor than was seen in third grade) but now, also on English language arts as well. Perhaps more concerning, they were also getting in more trouble at school and receiving more expulsions.
While some may have been tempted to bury unexpected results, Dr. Farran and her team decided to get curious and ask what could be learned. The rest of us get to make the same choice – ignore the research, or get curious and find something to learn.
Dr. Dale Farran is an emeritus professor at Vanderbilt University. She was also the Human Development and Family Studies Department Chair at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro, and Head of the Child Development Research Department at Kamehameha Schools in Hawaii. Dale also held various positions including Investigator and Professor at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. She currently serves on the DREME Team (Development and Research in Early Mathematics Education) based at Stanford University. In addition to editing several books and writing over 90 scholarly articles and book chapters, she has also influenced policy, practice, and advocacy by writing noteworthy articles for outlets like the Brookings Institution and Defending the Early Years, as well as being covered extensively by NPR, the Atlantic, and other national news organizations.
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Notes from the Show:
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Please note: Some have mistakenly assumed the data from this study or from the other titles in this list to be evidence against the need for early care and education. On the contrary, the data and analyses actually show a great need for the *right kind* of care and education. It’s all about using the right ingredients, as this quote I shared from Farran almost a decade ago illustrates.
Find the most recent iteration of the results from the Tennesee PreK Study in this journal article.
Here’s NPR’s most recent write-up: A Top Researcher Says it’s Time to Rethink Our Entire Approach to Preschool
If you missed Episode 50, catch it here: Rethinking the Entire Approach to Preschool (Diving into the NPR Article). It’s the most-listened-to NJC episode to date.
Dale’s guest piece for Defending the Early Years: Early Developmental Competencies: Or Why PreK Doesn’t Have Lasting Effects
The Working Paper we mentioned coming out of Annenberg at Brown: Why Are Preschool Programs Becoming Less Effective?
DREME – Development and Research in Early Mathematics Education
Why We Play
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Transcript:
This transcript was created with Podium.
Highlights:
(00:03) – Research and Experience in Early Childhood
(08:34) – Surprising Results in Early Education
(17:13) – Quality in Early Childhood Education
(26:04) – Creating Engaging Early Childhood Activities
(30:11) – Importance of Early Childhood Development
(43:08) – Fostering Child Agency Through Play
(52:40) – Supporting Math Skills Through Play
(01:00:40) – Shifting Focus in Early Education
Transcript:
00:03 – Amanda Morgan (Host)
I’m Amanda Morgan and this is Not Just Cute the podcast where we discuss all kinds of topics to help bridge the gap that exists between what we know and what we do in early childhood education. We’re starting conversations with academics, authors, decision makers, educators and parents so that together we can improve the quality of early childhood education while at the same time protecting and respecting the childhood experience. Dr Dale Farron has spent the better part of the last 50 years researching early childhood education, but some of her most famous research has come about rather recently, as she directs the evaluation of the Tennessee Voluntary Pre-K Program. This study is one of the most fascinating pieces of recent research in early childhood education. Here’s a quick summary. As Tennessee expanded its state pre-K program in 2009 and 2010, they found there were far more families interested in enrolling their children than they could accommodate. As a result, children throughout the state were randomly assigned a spot in their local pre-K programs and others were not.
01:22
Researchers like Farron realized they had a golden opportunity here, one rarely found in social science a randomly controlled trial. Here was a large sample of children about 3,000, across the state of Tennessee. About half would attend the pre-K program and about half would not. But the deciding factor that separated them was as random as the flip of a coin, making the test and control groups more comparable than would be found in many similar studies, where program assignment is often determined by other factors like family preferences, education levels or economics, thereby inserting additional variables into the equation. So what did they find with this randomly controlled trial?
02:13
Here’s where it really gets interesting. After the pre-K year, children who participated scored higher than the children who didn’t. That’s just what you’d hope for, right. But after the two groups converged for their kindergarten year, that difference disappeared. Now that’s actually not too surprising. A fade-out effect is often observed in early childhood research, and it’s one of those pesky puzzles researchers often wrestle with. But where this study really started making waves was with the follow-up data. After the participating children completed their third grade year, Farron and her team found that the pre-K group actually scored below the other children on the math and science sections of their standardized tests, and by statistically significant margins. By the sixth grade year, more alarm bells sounded. The pre-K participants were scoring below the non-participants on not only math and science, and by a greater factor than was seen in the third grade data, but now they were also scoring lower on English language arts as well. Perhaps more concerning, they were also getting in more trouble at school and receiving more expulsions.
03:34
While some may have been tempted to bury the unexpected results, dr Farron and her team decided to get curious and ask what could be learned. The rest of us get to make the same choice ignore the research or get curious and find something to learn. I am so excited to have Dr Dale Farron on today’s episode to talk about some of her observations and what she’s come to believe current research is telling us about how we can best serve our youngest learners. Before we jump in, a quick reminder that this is a fantastic time to prepare your why we Play letters for the new year. These letters will help you jumpstart important conversations in your learning community about the importance and power of play. People don’t value what they don’t understand. If you want to help parents and colleagues better understand the value of play, the why we Play letters were created just for you. Learn more and grab a free sample letter at notjustcutecom. Forward slash whyweplay.
04:46
I absolutely loved talking with Dr Farron. She’s one of my favorite researchers to nerd out on. You may remember episode 50, where I talked about an NPR feature of her work. If you haven’t listened to that one yet, I’d highly recommend you listen to it after this one. It’s episode 50, rethinking the Entire Approach to Preschool. Whether you’ve been following Dale’s work like I have, or this is your first introduction, I know you’re going to love what she has to share. You can find this episode’s show notes, which will be full of links, tidbits and resources, at notjustcutecom. Forward slash podcast. Forward slash, episode 61.
05:27
If you’ve been wondering if there’s a mismatch between what our youngest learners really need and what we sometimes think they need, you are in the right place. Let’s jump in. Well, Dale Farron, welcome to the podcast. I am thrilled to be talking with you today and I am so happy to be here. Thank you. As I mentioned when I reached out to you, I’m kind of nerd fangirling over here because I’ve been following your research for years and have found so many things that you’ve written and said so fascinating. So I am just really thrilled that you would come and share firsthand straight from you here on the podcast.
06:04 – Dale Farran (Guest)
You are way too kind, thank you.
06:07 – Amanda Morgan (Host)
Well, because a lot of the people who listen here are early childhood professionals, I always love to start by having people share just briefly their path in their own profession, because there’s so many different directions and so many different facets to supporting early childhood education. So could you tell a little bit about your pathway?
06:28 – Dale Farran (Guest)
So actually and then I have to be careful not to get too long my first job dealt with a special program for underachieving seventh and eighth grade boys, and I think that’s what convinced me that I needed to go younger, and so my dissertation back in Philadelphia back in the mid-70s involved children between the ages of four and six in what were then called open classrooms, and I have never ceased being fascinated. The period between the developmental period between about two and a half and eight, is just, it’s endlessly interesting, and I’ve had the very good fortune that to be able to work in that, in that sphere, all my life, and I have to tell you I have never been bored.
07:27 – Amanda Morgan (Host)
And so all, has your whole career, been focused on the research arm of early childhood?
07:33 – Dale Farran (Guest)
Well, it really has, I for, for when I first went to Vanderbilt for the first five years, I actually directed the on-campus school as well as having a faculty appointment directed the on-campus school as well as having a faculty appointment and so periodically I like being back in classrooms and not necessarily directing them. That’s a lot of work, it’s a lot. That’s a lot of work, but I cannot just look at numbers. I work with wonderful, wonderful people who are incredible with numbers, incredible with analyses, and I’m just so grateful to them. But I need to be grounded. So I’ve collected a lot of observational data in several hundred classrooms, and it means that when I think about the numbers, I think about children, not just what the numbers are.
08:29 – Amanda Morgan (Host)
I love that. That must be part of why I’m so drawn to your work. You can feel that. So, as I mentioned in the introduction, your work with the Tennessee pre-K study is just a constant talking point in early childhood education over the last several years, so I’m curious when you first started that study, what did you expect to find starting out?
08:43 – Dale Farran (Guest)
So what a great question. It’s so interesting that even after years of being in classrooms, you can still be incredibly naive about expectations and not truly having thought through things. But when we began, tennessee was new to the to instituting pre-K. So our study began in 2009, 2010, but Tennessee only had a pre-K from 2005. So it was relatively new and I’ll back up a minute.
09:34
I had been in Hawaii and then I came back to North Carolina at UNC Greensboro, just when Title I was amended to allow money to be spent from Title I funds for school districts to open pre-K programs. At that time I worked with a number of teachers who were like feeling really isolated and like they didn’t know what they were doing and whatever. And they did run wonderful classrooms. I mean wonderful classrooms. There was some hints that things might be moving in the wrong direction, but basically those classrooms were warm, there was, there was a lot of inventive early childhood sort of things going on, you know, and teachers were constantly changing things in the centers and getting exciting opportunities. So that’s sort of what I expected the Tennessee pre-K program to look like and we partnered at that time with the Tennessee Department of Education. So we had really strong partners at DOE who themselves, you know, since the program was new, wanted to know how it was working.
10:45
But we all expected. We all expected that it would work. That was based on past histories, with classrooms that I then found out really weren’t operating like that anymore. But initially we all expected it to work and our initial results, as the kids went into kindergarten, suggested that it had. The kids certainly knew they were more kindergarten ready, if you will, with the school readiness skills than children who had not been in pre-K. So we thought, okay, then it works. And people really loved us initially because, look, here’s a randomized, controlled trial. You actually had control and treatment children who were equivalent, who are completely the same, and those who had had pre-K went into kindergarten more ready for kindergarten. I mean, what could be better?
11:44 – Amanda Morgan (Host)
Right. So that short-term outcome was exactly what everybody was hoping for. We show that this program is effective in getting children ready for kindergarten.
11:52 – Dale Farran (Guest)
Yep, and even the kindergarten teachers in there. So we didn’t have any sort of we couldn’t, if you think about it, since the control children a lot of them stayed home we couldn’t have any sort of teacher ratings of how they did in classrooms or social skills. So we got those kinds of ratings from the kindergarten teachers in the fall when the kids were, and the children who had been to pre-K were rated differently by their kindergarten teachers from the children who had not. So we thought, ok, we’ve got it on both soft skills and hard skills. We’re good, you know.
12:29 – Amanda Morgan (Host)
And so then, as you began to follow up, that’s when the surprising data begins to emerge. And so what was your response, and I guess, the response of others? You said people loved you at first. So that implies there’s something else as that data that was more surprising and unexpected. As that started to come out, what were the responses?
12:48 – Dale Farran (Guest)
Oh, I lost. Oddly enough, I lost some good friends.
12:55 – Amanda Morgan (Host)
Really.
12:56 – Dale Farran (Guest)
Yes, I had. I heard from others that people call me a pariah, that people said things like when did Dale stop loving children?
13:07 – Amanda Morgan (Host)
Oh no, I know.
13:09 – Dale Farran (Guest)
And I thought well, this is called science.
13:12
I mean, shouldn’t we be grappling with the fact of these issues and not trying to make them go away or just hide them and say we don’t believe them, or just hide them and say they’re, you know, we don’t believe them. So it was tough, but it was good that there were many people who also were really interested in what we were doing. But there was yeah, with our third grade results came out, which is when we first saw the negative results begin to emerge. You know, there were times when we just we got tricked into talking about things that then later wound up in the New York Times or whatever. But then there was another columnist I don’t know if you remember this who quoted me when I was saying the difference between what we’re doing now in pre-K with what we did in the Abbasidarian program, where I also I worked for 10 years with Abbasidarian I know that I know that program well the difference between then and now is the difference between grass and Easter grass. Right, at least that got published as well. So that was fun.
14:26 – Amanda Morgan (Host)
That has been one of my favorite quotes.
14:28
I use that all the time that we can’t just give two things that look similar.
14:32
We really have to know what are those key ingredients that are so important that if we want to give them something that is wonderful and nutritious, as you talk about with spinach versus Easter grass, then we need to know what’s in it.
14:46
It needs to be the ingredients. So so, going with that and I do have to say with all that pressure, one of the things that I love about this story is not only the fascinating science that comes out of it, but that approach that you just mentioned, that you got something that was unexpected and you were willing to be curious about it. You were willing to think again, as Adam Grant would say, and be curious and find out. Let’s dig into this and what can we learn, rather than running from something that wasn’t what you expected, that you said there’s something here. So, as you looked at those programs, well, I’ve read several things, but I wanna hear from you what could account for that difference? If we look at this program, we think, hey, it’s prepared children for kindergarten, but then we start to see these negative outcomes, and so you’re willing to go back and look at that and say what do we need to know, what do we need to learn from this and what are some of the takeaways that you have had?
15:39 – Dale Farran (Guest)
Well, there are so many different answers to your question so you can interrupt me so that I don’t just talk forever and ever. But I want to say one thing. It’s not just to our credit, it’s also the credit goes to my colleagues. One of the DOE people, who was just lovely when we started the process, said to my statistician methodologist colleague, mark Lipsy, mark, do you believe in pre-K which? He’s such a nerd. It completely startled him and he said and and I think so, for instance, I I am fully aware of, uh, a randomized, the only randomized control trial that’s been done in north carolina.
16:36
Uh, that began to get the negative effects in kindergarten that we saw, and then the state stopped funding it so they didn’t follow those kids, which is such a shame because we won’t know whether those effects persisted or got worse or got better. And so this unwillingness to examine what you’ve got and to keep following it to see how it turns out, it’s just so opposite to what you hope policies are based on. But anyway, back to your question. So I wanted to get, I wanted to say there are, you know, there are other studies out there, but they’re, they’re, they’re stopped before they really get started.
17:25
Well so all right, so back. What was your question?
17:30 – Amanda Morgan (Host)
Well, you know I I’m just curious what you would sum up as. What is that difference? The takeaway that we need to learn, yeah, so, so, let’s, let’s start with that’s.
17:40 – Dale Farran (Guest)
That’s why there’s so many answers to this question.
17:42
Let’s start with school readiness skills. So what is really fascinating to me is kindergarten. So 30 years ago, 25 years ago, kindergarten teachers were surveyed and they would tell you in national surveys, they would tell you that what they cared about most was that children came into their classroom confident, ready to learn, self-reliant and self-regulated, because they didn’t care that they had a lot of cognitive school readiness skills, because that was going to happen in kindergarten. What they needed to have were children who wanted, who were eager to learn over the year. And then, when they were surveyed kindergarten teachers, fewer than 20% of them said that children should be actually be taught to read in kindergarten.
18:39
The last survey, which was about five years ago, 86% of kindergarten teachers said children need to read before they leave kindergarten, which is shocking to me because developmentally that’s not even true. So that pressure has been put on the kindergarten teachers and it shows. So those school readiness skills that we measure with our tests, which are quick and therefore very discrete, concrete skills that get measured are really perhaps what kindergarten teachers used to sort of rely on, but now they are being taught in the absence of teaching those things that kindergarten teachers thought really mattered. You know, and I don’t think, in the current way that I’ve seen classrooms being taught, particularly for children from impoverished families. I don’t think that the ways those the instruction is happening, I don’t think that prepares children to be self-regulated, motivated, confident learners.
19:50 – Amanda Morgan (Host)
Sadly, and so it’s really about finding what are the critical elements that young children need in early childhood, and if those are the critical elements, then those who are at higher risk or who have less resources that they need whatever those critical elements are as much or more than anyone else. And so when we know what those critical elements are, then we know what creates a quality program, and one of the things that I noticed in your writing was that there were measures that would tell us that many of these weren’t quality classrooms by certain quality measures. But what your work is pointing out is that are we measuring the right things? Are we really getting the quality elements that really make for quality if we’re really trying to help young children? So what would you say are those critical elements for young children to get in those early years?
20:38 – Dale Farran (Guest)
So I’ve tried to argue this and people don’t like it. I don’t think we have enough data yet that tells us how to make a quality classroom, particularly if it’s within an elementary school. The pressure in those elementary schools for those teachers to behave like kindergarten first fourth grade teachers and to have their children behave like much older children is almost impossible to resist. It’s really difficult and so it’s interesting.
21:20
I had a conversation with a reporter in New York City, you know for their universal pre-K program in New York and we were talking about. She said well, my child goes to one of the pre-K programs. I said, oh, she said it’s really lovely. She said we have, we have. They have they’re in a classroom where they have a door to the outside and they do art outside and they can, and they have their own playground. And I thought you have no idea how rare that is. It’s because your child goes to a school that serves higher income families. Yes, it is astounding the I’m sorry, but the implicit bias that takes place in classrooms about what children need and what parents will tolerate their children experiencing, to controlling the experiences their children have and won’t tolerate the negativity and the sitting on your you know bum to you know an hour at a time, and teachers know that, and so they actually respond to the understood expectations that higher income families, better educated families, would have for their children.
22:44 – Amanda Morgan (Host)
Yeah, that’s something that has struck me frequently, that that we have a lot of research, actually, that is, you know, we think about Montessori, right, as she worked with impoverished children and then who are the children who get Montessori classrooms?
22:56
Primarily, right, a majority of children are not right.
22:59
That we see that kind of a pattern that, like you mentioned, there is this, whether we say it out loud or not, this assumption that these kids need something different, right, and so that there are things that we know from research that create what you and I would see as a high quality classroom, and too often, the children who are getting those classrooms are also the children who already have rich experiences earlier in their childhood in their homes, and that there’s this idea that these kids, other children, need to catch up and so we’re going to give them something different, which is often not what we see is really beneficial for young children.
23:36
And part of my concern, particularly in this moment of time, is that we’ve been seeing that pattern with children from different socioeconomic backgrounds and other high risk right, and my concern right now is I hear a lot of talk about all of the children catching up from COVID right, that all of us need to all of the children need to catch up and my worry is that we’ll see that same poor practice being pushed towards all of the children, because all of the children and it’s a similar situation, right that when we look at young children, who may be quote unquote behind, coming into pre pushing out those things that they missed in order to push in something that we have contrived a notion is what they need, is really unfortunate. So where do you think are the gaps between what we see as quality, that the catching up concept of quality versus what children really need?
24:43 – Dale Farran (Guest)
But you know, this developmental conundrum that you just talked about has been with us for theoretically I mean philosophically and theoretically, for there’s Dewey versus Locke, I mean for a hundred plus years. So the idea that children need to be actively constructing their knowledge versus passively receiving it from somebody else continues to dominate our field. And there’s new brain work out that really shows that children’s brains do when they’re actively involved in learning something versus passively attending. And we used to know that in early childhood we we created interesting things for children to do. I mean, that’s one of the things I always wanted to figure out a scheme where I could rate how interesting the activities were in a classroom, whether they engaged me or not.
26:26
And I can remember wonderful again back in the 80s, wonderful classrooms where a lot of time was spent by the teacher figuring out what new things to put in the centers and then in whole group your morning meeting, which would be short morning meeting, part of it was spent telling children what new things were in the centers, so they would know what they could choose. So they were sort of primed to try this. I mean. I remember, I mean Valentine’s Day setting up in the art center a place where you would make your valentines and then, in another center, you would have actually a mailbox and you would. You could mail out valentines to your friends. I mean, it was, you know, these were active things that got children thinking and doing and interacting with each other. Thinking and doing and interacting with each other.
27:26
Now, now it’s, it’s so interesting. We have data that show that. Uh, cause, we’ve observed classrooms across the year that children start out being very uninterested in whole group instruction and they remain uninterested in whole group instruction. And they remain uninterested in whole group instruction because we rate their level of engagement. They start out being very engaged in what’s going on in centers and then what we see over the year is it decreases almost to the level of whole group because nothing changes in those centers. It’s the teachers have forgotten that their real energy should be going into creating new interesting things for children to think about, not thinking about the curriculum they have to deliver in a whole group setting.
28:22 – Amanda Morgan (Host)
That’s really one of the less effective pieces and it’s the place where we tend to have the most debate and you know what curriculum, what program will we implement when really the most learning is happening in those hands-on, child centered types of activities? So you wrote you wrote a piece for defending the early years, which I thought was fantastic, and in that you used an iceberg model, which is a common model to use, but I love the way that you use that to show that that children really do need a lot of skills, that those academic skills that we think of, it’s not that they aren’t important at all, it’s that there’s so much more that’s below the surface. Do you want to explain a little bit about that model that you used and how you look at those constrained and unconstrained skills?
29:13 – Dale Farran (Guest)
Well, this is a sort of one of those ahas you wake up in the middle of the night with, because suddenly I realized that we tested those school readiness skills because those were the easiest things to assess, but also because we expected that they reflect they were the tip of the iceberg, reflecting these deeper skills, that sort of that what, and they used to be so that what those kids who were curious and active probably had learned more math, had learned more letters and stuff like that, and so so what was showing up on the surface were these skills. But actually they were reflective of a learner, a child who was a real active learner, and and that’s what you wanted. So that’s all you could measure. But you thought that it was actually reflective of some deeper skills.
30:11
But by focusing just on teaching children those top of the water skills, if you will, top of the tip of the iceberg skills, those concrete, discrete 26 letters of the alphabet you know and not even really understanding shapes, just being able to name them, those skills can be taught and detach that tip of the iceberg away from those deeper skills.
30:39
So suddenly you have evidence that children have these concrete skills, but they are no longer reflective of being a real learner, a curious, active, confident, language-dependent learner, language-interested learner, and being able to perceive those. So suddenly we have detached the tip of the iceberg from those underlying skills and we’re not teaching them. And so no wonder when, from all the programs that are happening in the last 20 years, those early skills, the difference between the, the advantage they give the children in entering kindergarten, disappears because those active learners come into kindergarten and they learn those skills. As, as the person who did the head start impact study said, it took the head start children two years to learn what. It took the control kids one year to learn. So um it because it, because you have, you have created this um focus solely on the top of the iceberg and not on what used to be supporting those skills.
31:59 – Amanda Morgan (Host)
And so, as you say, it used to be that we would focus more so on those below-the-surface skills.
32:04
We would focus on building curiosity and relationships and conversations, and curiosity and active hands-on learning and, and as that happened, the byproduct was that we had these measurable skills, but by only focusing on measurable skills, we’ve we’ve missed, and it’s so much deeper, so much broader. There’s so much more below, below the surface, and so it seems like we can do it faster because we’re just going to, we’re going to do it sooner, we’re going to do it earlier. We can, we can train them right and I I do talk about this in one of my, you know, we, we train them like a parlor trick. We can do that and and. In that process, however, we’ve missed everything below the surface and, as you mentioned, some of those control children, as we would say, in a in a research sense, who have not shown that they have maybe those surface skills, but they’ve been building all of this below the surface. They’re going to catch up with those surface skills very quickly and that may be part of that fade out effect that we often see.
32:59 – Dale Farran (Guest)
Oh, amanda, you said it even far better than I could use it. Right, that is really. Yes, that’s, that’s, that’s right. And you know what, if you think about, if you think about so we worry about kids from more high-stressed families, families with less income. Those children do enter kindergarten with fewer of those skills, and so the whole idea that started, even with Head Start, was that well, heck, we’ll bring them up to the same starting point. But we mistook what we should bring them up to the same starting point as having.
33:48
And think about the ways children from less stressed, higher income, more educated families, the way they learn those skills. They learn them in contexts. You’re a family, your child starts paying attention to the letters that are on the refrigerator and you respond really positively and you then begin telling them. It’s very interactive, it’s very often child-driven by curiosity and interest, and you as the adult then provide the information. So the learning is in the context of those other skills, not just. I mean there are very few parents who sit their children down in a whole group, you know, in a didactic setting, and drill them on the letters of the alphabet. So why is it that we expect that that system is good for children from more impoverished circumstances. I’ve said to legislators before, who are often older go into these classrooms If you wouldn’t put your grandchild in it, no one should be there.
35:00 – Amanda Morgan (Host)
And, like you mentioned, that we have to check that, with that implicit bias, that do we have a second set of standard for other children, whatever that other may be, but that all children need the same type of developmental input.
35:13
That is, all children, they all need those quality environments.
35:18
So, as we become more aware of what children actually need and there is, like you mentioned, so much of the research on this side that really those key elements may be play and conversations and relationships and the warmth and responsiveness of a child-centered environment, as we begin to recognize that those sorts of things and those unconstrained skills like you mentioned, those soft skills we may call them, as we recognize that those really are important or even critical to those early childhood years, I’ve talked with some people from different programs administrators who have said, okay, I’m catching the vision.
35:53
I see all this data that tells me what they really need is play, conversations, relationships, curiosity, hands-on learning, and that maybe it’s not those high skills coming into kindergarten on the readiness that we used to call it those academic skills, that maybe those aren’t as valuable. And they said, okay, I start to get that vision. But now what do I say to my administrators and other stakeholders when, from their perspective, the whole point of my pre-K program is kindergarten readiness and academic outputs. So how do we, how do we help people to argue that the academic scores at kindergarten entry may not be very important, but that preschool and pre-kindergarten programs are important? How do we help them make that case?
36:39 – Dale Farran (Guest)
Well, it is really hard because it is so deceiving to think that you’ve been successful when kids know more letters of their alphabet when they come into kindergarten. But in fact, in fact let me just take you down a slightly different path. There’s some work that Michael Little has been doing from NC State where he’s done a lot of interviews with principals and teachers and whatever. In these pre-k programs that are in the public schools, which 94 of the ones in tennessee were in our study, um and the and the. The principals are very happy to have a pre-k program in their school because the children have learned to do school. They don’t have to worry about the. The children have learned how to handle trays in the lunchroom. They’ve learned how to walk down the hall with a bubble in their mouth and not touching their neighbor and not touching the wall and stopping at the junction you know when they’re told to stop. They’re very happy that children’s behavior has been trained to be school like and it’s. It is hard to convince them that having more rambunctious, interested, lively children would be better for the children in the long run, even though it means you know that they’re going to be noisier in the halls. I mean one of the ways we have to I mean, one of the ways I know that some districts have tried to work on this is to create sort of separate wings of their school for the younger children, or or separate entire, whole, separate buildings, like they could be called early learning centers or something like that, so that that that is one way now, but there’s some cautions about that. But that is one way to try to allow the better behaviors, the more appropriate behaviors for the age of the child, to take place. It so, so, uh.
39:00
Nashville I did a lot of work in the nashville with the nashville school system and, and, and they set up these early learning centers and they wanted us to come in and help and, and we did. We conducted a very in-depth research and worked with them for four years on, um, uh, trying to improve the, you know, create classrooms that would be reflective of the kind of values we have for young children. But it took. It took these teachers, who’d all come, who were all licensed teachers. It took them a couple of months before they realized that there was no reason to make children be silent in the halls. There were no fourth graders to disturb, they only had four-year-olds in the building, but they were still making people line up and be quiet and walk, you know, not touching anything, and then suddenly they were sort of liberated. Oh right, wait, we don’t have to do that, you know.
40:01
So I think somehow we’ve got to create a conspiracy of protection around these classrooms. I know there’s I forget her name now a wonderful woman in New York City who says we needed to create a firewall between kindergarten and preschools and the rest of the K-12 system, because what we’re expecting of kindergartens is really not appropriate anymore. I mean, there are a lot of parents who now red – parents of means who can do it – who redshirt their children because, especially their boys, because they think, not for athletic advantage although there is some, but because they think the children will be more able to tolerate the expectations that are so inappropriate they’re now rampant in kindergarten.
40:54 – Amanda Morgan (Host)
And so there’s this tricky, this push down effect that we see, like you said, especially and it’s interesting to think of it that way especially when it is physically located in the same building that we begin to lump them into. Just, they’re just a younger set of elementary school students, you know. We just add them into the student body and the same expectations and it should look the same and sound the same. And so to create that firewall, as you mentioned, to recognize really look at the child who’s right in front of you, recognize that the development is different. It’s not just that their size is different, but their age and their development.
41:24
And I think you hit on something important there, which is that parents of means are often the ones who recognize the dissonance there and put their children somewhere else. And so we end up with, like you said, there’s red shirting, where they give them an extra year or they go to a private program because they can afford it. And so it’s. It’s about I keep using the term quality, and I’m not sure that’s always the most effective word, but it’s to me it’s the quality when we are responsive, when we are developmentally appropriate, when we’re giving them what they actually need to grow and develop properly, and so it’s, when we have those means that we can choose a quality that that we want for all children and that we need to step back and figure out how do we get all children this, this quality program, give them what they need.
42:12
So what are some of the things? So you mentioned physically separating? What are some other things that administrators or educators may need to be aware of to avoid that pushdown effect in, let’s say, in an existing program? So if there’s a teacher listening today and she’s a pre-K teacher and her classroom is in the elementary school building and she’s feeling that everyone else wants her four-year-olds to look like the fourth graders, what are some things that those teachers could keep in mind that might help?
42:41 – Dale Farran (Guest)
So I think that isolation you know, I’ve worked in teacher education programs programs for years and and I am fully aware that teaching is a really high stakes uh, almost like a critical emergency situation you don’t have a lot of time to think about what to do. I mean, when things come up, it just things come up that were never part of your training program, right, and so teachers look to the person in the next room, the person with more experience Well, how do you handle this? And they, they, they really do begin to model the behaviors of the teachers around them. And what happens with our pre-K teachers is there’s almost no other teachers around them. And what happens with our pre-K teachers is there’s almost no other. Often they’re the only pre-K teacher in the building, or at most there may be two classrooms. It is really hard to hold on to what you know is more appropriate behavior when you are confronted with other people who are telling you the opposite.
43:53 – Amanda Morgan (Host)
So, having a good mentor and a support system, and you may have to look outside of your building to find that.
43:58 – Dale Farran (Guest)
Absolutely, and I also think that if I ran the world I would not put their things All right. So we have some work we’ve done. I would make some absolute requirements for the schools, the elementary schools, in for school behavior learning, but actually, because they really understand, a lot of principals, a lot of classrooms, I’m sorry get placed in schools as an administrative decision and the principal had nothing to say about it one way or the other, and that’s not right. The second, one of the other problems, a whole set of problems, comes with the fact that a lot of these elementary schools are older. The reason they have rooms available is that they’re in older neighborhoods where they’re not as many young children as there used to be, and if it’s an older, impoverished neighborhood, then the school itself is often older and perhaps not well-maintained, and so these classrooms do not have adjoining bathrooms. Often they don’t have a door to the outside, they don’t have a well-equipped playground that is suitable for four and five-year-olds, they don’t have lunches in the classroom, and so we actually looked at a hundred classrooms in an urban setting, and what we found was that if you have to leave the room to go to the bathroom down the hall, and, sadly, instead of taking the boys and then the girls separately and reading a book to the people who were left, teachers tend to take the whole class and they all stand and wait. And if you have to go to the lunchroom the big lunchroom where the lunch ladies are not happy to see these, you know short people the transition time is tripled.
46:30
Now why is that a problem? Because the more transitions there are, the more behavior disapproval we hear. Because teachers have to control children and they’re harder to control when they’re transitioning, that is, when they’re not actively learning, when they’re having to walk down the hall, wait outside the bathroom, walk down the hall again, get to the big cafeteria, be quiet, because there’s a red light, is on the stoplight and everybody’s supposed to not talk now. And you’re supposed to remember what you said you wanted for lunch when you had to order it two hours earlier. You had to order it two hours earlier. All those things lead to so much more negativity on the part of the teacher to have to control their children’s behavior, and they’re much more frequent in school buildings that are unsuited for these classrooms. So I wouldn’t put classrooms in those kinds of buildings if it were up to me.
47:31 – Amanda Morgan (Host)
Yeah, and it was interesting Tell me if I got this right but that you feel I my take was that you feel that some of that increase as you followed your Tennessee group they had an increase in misbehavior and expulsions as they got into sixth grade and that some of that may go back to that negativity that they’re they have more negative experiences with school and less autonomy and agency in their school experiences, beginning from those early programs, and that that you know we may be easy to overlook.
48:01
I think sometimes we see what we think is this well controlled classroom because everyone’s sitting silently with the red light on and they have figured out, like you mentioned, the principals are excited that they’ve figured out how to walk silently in the hall or they’ve figured out how to do these processes, but that when we look at that long-term research that maybe what looks like they’ve figured out is really the slow brewing frustration and negativity about the school experience and what it means to have any control or agency or choice in that school experience. Extremely well said.
48:35 – Dale Farran (Guest)
I think what children are learning in these kinds of settings is compliance to external authority. That is not the same as internal self-regulation, and the way you develop internal self-regulation is to have to be responsible for your own behaviors. I mean my seven-year-old had asthma, right, and she had to take a medication every night and we would put the pills at her plate and every night she would walk, she would stand up and walk away and finally I said to her Alice, you always have to take these pills, why don’t you remember? And she said I don’t have to. And she was right. She was trained that we would remind her, we would go after her to do it. So we have to figure a way. I mean children have to learn agency. They have to figure a way. I mean children have to have to learn agency. They have to have agency.
49:36
And I do think this reactivity to the authority can start very early, very early, and that what we see going awry with the children who’ve been in pre-K, early on in their disciplinary, was violations of school rules.
50:00
And school rules are interesting because they are not things that would ever get you arrested on the street, but are things that have to do with behaving appropriately in schools. So tucking your shirt in, you know, not wearing your hat backwards, I mean, I had a child, I know a child who was suspended once because his teacher was an EDD and the teacher and the child did not call him doctor, right, mm-hmm. So this sort of I think of it as impatience with the authoritarian regime of schools. I do think you’re right. I think it begins in those pre-K programs. Now, by sixth grade, the more the second class of suspensions and expulsions, which have to do with fighting or much more serious allegations had begun to emerge for the children who’d been in pre-K, and then those two began to be different from the ones who hadn’t been. But it started with this, you know, impatience with authority and breaking school rules.
51:16 – Amanda Morgan (Host)
Just that building frustration, and it’s, I find, it interesting, when we talk about building that, that internal locus of control and agency and executive function, all those things that are inside the child rather than outside from authority that the most, I feel the most appropriate way for a young child to experience that type of control and agency in a developmentally appropriate way is through play. Right, that that’s a place where they can control worlds because that’s their domain as they’re playing, and so they have that appropriate. You know we’re saying when we say children need agency, it doesn’t mean let them do whatever they want, but we need to find that appropriate place for them to have that agency and self-control. And play is just perfectly designed for young children to have those appropriate experiences.
52:04
One of your the closing line from the 2022 NPR article that featured a lot of your work the last line got a lot of attention, a lot of your work. The last line got a lot of attention. It says, quoting you, they said we might actually get better results, she says from simply letting little children play. So if the current pre-K programs could immediately implement your advice that we focus on giving them that play, what would that ideal playful program look like to you. If you got to be the researcher in there, finding those exciting activities that you talked about, what would you be observing?
52:38 – Dale Farran (Guest)
So, I think. I think people misinterpret the word play. They they think of it as there’s no involvement by adults, Right. But but you know, as a parent and anybody who’s a parent listening knows that you have a lot of indirect influence on the way your children play. You often structure the play groups on the basis of the children you think are more appropriate for your children to play with. That will that will be more beneficial. You structure the kinds of materials that you buy. Hopefully that’s not everybody. Hopefully you actually sort of organize things in the playroom so that children can learn to focus on things, right. So what you really hope would happen is A first of all, there’s something called associative interactions, that’s when children are interacting with each other, right.
53:48
And then there’s cooperative interactions, so it’s when children it’s not the same as sharing or being nice, it’s it is learning how to abide by rules together.
53:58
I am amazed at at how many of these four-year-old four-year-old classrooms never have games with rules for children to follow.
54:08
And one of the ways that you learn to regulate your behavior is with peers taking your turn, learning to be a good loser, learning to be an appropriate winner, learning how to follow the rules and carry this out and and you’re, and, and if you’re doing it with a group of friends, a group of children, you’re regulating yourselves. You are learning of friends, a group of children you’re regulating yourselves. You are learning how to be regulated by others and regulate yourself in the context of playing a game. You will be amazed how little associative interaction goes on in these classrooms and we have data that shows that the more associative interaction children add, it shows up even at the end of first grade that they have more appropriate behaviors in classrooms. So there is learning to interact with peers, which helps you actually be regulated by them but also regulate yourself, because you want to maintain these friendships. It is completely different from being compliant to adults, but you have to be in the context of doing something together, not just running around the playground.
55:27 – Amanda Morgan (Host)
So, again, that play creates the vehicle for them to have those types of interactions.
55:31 – Dale Farran (Guest)
Right.
55:32 – Amanda Morgan (Host)
That those interactions are what’s so critical, and play just creates that perfect opportunity assuming that it’s set up so that you actually are doing something together.
55:41 – Dale Farran (Guest)
You know um right yeah, it sounds.
55:45 – Amanda Morgan (Host)
It reminds me a lot of the work, um, from kathy hirschpassick.
55:48
Um, that playful, those you’re describing. A lot of those same, those same qualities of. Like you said that there’s this misunderstanding that if the research says we should let children play, that it’s this wild, unhinged and you know, we just put them in a room and let them do whatever they want, but that there’s a lot of skill that goes into preparing the environment, in having these intentional interactions between teacher and child and helping the children scaffolding those interactions that they have with one another, those peer negotiations and all of the social, all of those processes that it is play, but it is very skilled, it’s very intentional in the sense that we are supporting them and building and growing in these various skills and that there are academic skills that are being learned in that process as well. But, as you mentioned, to do it directly and just get to the point that they have these skills and we can check the box, versus having experiences and interactions that in that process they build skills, it’s completely different for those young children the last 10 years.
56:47 – Dale Farran (Guest)
There’s something called the dream network is developmental development and research in early mathematics education, because so little math goes on in classrooms and what math there is is primarily rote counting. So children are not coming out of pre-K or even in kindergarten and first grade with some sort of real understanding of mathematics and what we’ve seen other longitudinal studies that we have. By the time they get into middle school they can be two grade levels behind in terms of their understanding, and then middle school teachers are just completely at a loss. So how do you start teaching sort of the foundations of algebra to children who really don’t truly understand? You know fractions and ratios and numbers and how things work. So we’ve developed these activities that I call stealth math.
57:42
We spent a year a graduate student of mine spent a year watching the math center, math manipulative centers in classrooms and we saw no math going on. Kids took the counting bears and played happy families. They did, you know whatever. So we’ve created these activities that are out to. One of them, for example, is measurement, because we’re trying to broaden what kinds of math skills there are and so you can measure yourself. So you take a measure of your hand or your arm to your elbow, and then you go around the room and you find other things that are the same size as that. So it’s measuring an estimation, okay.
58:31
So these are meant to go into the classroom. They are meant for teachers, for children to learn to do them like games that they then can then do on their own with other children. We’ve had a dickens of a time getting teachers to let go and let children actually do them. They keep, they keep coming in and directing them and teaching them. Anyway. So we’re working on it. We’re working on it. We just we want to. We want to get more of these activities that would be interesting to children, that they can do without needing adult guidance, other than maybe from the very, at the very beginning, sort of learning about how it works, but then after that can be led on their own. But it’s hard.
59:14 – Amanda Morgan (Host)
Yeah, that is one of my favorite breakout sessions that I teach as a math bag activity and part of the reason I love it is because I do get so many teachers who will tell me I came to this class because I don’t know how to teach math. I don’t know, like you said, I don’t, I’m not really doing it and what I really am teaching it there is an activity, but what I’m really teaching is how do you have conversations, how do you get the children in this to think with their math brains, to just say what do you notice? And once you start having these conversations about patterns and about measurements and about groupings and all these different math concepts, you know, once teachers understand that and understand how to facilitate a conversation and ask and not just say here’s what a pattern is, but to ask the children what do you notice? What could you do with this? That they will start to do it on their own because they start to see those same math patterns and concepts and it becomes a part of their play that you see them building with symmetry or you see them pairing things up.
01:00:12
That, like you said, it’s that initial guidance of interactions and then children will play with that same idea throughout the day, throughout the conversation, because it’s authentic to them. It wasn’t a worksheet. They never take the worksheet and go play with it later, right, and do that concept again. But when you have real objects and you talk to them about ideas and you have interactions and it is playful and fun, then they own that and play with it in other parts of your room as well. It’s a whole different way of looking.
01:00:40 – Dale Farran (Guest)
And the real wonderful thing about what you just said is, yes, it has to do with math, but also those were open-ended questions. They were not basic skills. Right answer closed questions, which 90% of what teachers talk about talking classrooms is. You know, what color is this? What number is this? What is that? Or they tell you, or they tell children that’s blue or that’s number three, instead of what you just said, which is, what can we do with this? What do you notice? I worked with an Australian group and they use the term notice and wonder with their children. What do you wonder about? What do you notice that you then wonder about? I would highly recommend people to go to the DREAM network D-R-E M-E. They just put D-R-E-M-E network and you’ll come to it, because there are lots of things there for teaching mathematics to very young children or for helping Let me put it another way helping young children learn mathematics.
01:01:45 – Amanda Morgan (Host)
And when you take that approach, you’re building both of those skills under the iceberg right. What do you wonder? What do you notice? And then those top of the iceberg skills, the math concepts, are they’re building together, You’re getting both at the same time. That’s the whole idea.
01:01:59 – Dale Farran (Guest)
That’s terrific. It’s so great.
01:02:02 – Amanda Morgan (Host)
Well, before we wrap up, I wanted to get some of your thoughts on a working paper that’s come out. It’s not completely published yet, but there’s a working paper from the Annenberg Institute at Brown and the title is why are preschool programs becoming less effective? And it’s another one of those titles that catches people off guard and makes us panic and say wait, you know, don’t these people love children? Right, Kind of a familiar response, and so I found it really fascinating. I’ll make sure and link it in the show notes.
01:02:30
But I was wondering in this in this study they reference your work as well as some others, and part of what they are. There are many factors, but one of the factors that they assert is is at the root of shrinking impacts of of preschool programs. Is that just what you have said? That those early programs like Abbasidarian that you’ve worked with and the Perry Preschool Project, that those programs emphasized caregiver relationships, rich conversations, hands-on learning, and that somewhere around 2000, we’ve shifted to a more academic focus, just like you’ve mentioned, with this emphasis on literacy and math, which is good, but that we’re doing that through teacher directed didactic methods and we’re just focusing on creating kindergartners rather than than what we saw in those earlier gold standard programs. So they’re saying that’s part of the reason that we’re not getting the same result. We’re not putting in the same ingredients. Why would we get the same outcome? And I wondered what your response was to that research, as they cited your project, your work in Tennessee, as one of those examples.
01:03:35 – Dale Farran (Guest)
Well, first of all, the authors of that paper I know them all are really some of the more highly regarded thinkers in the field. They are not just educators, but they are. They’re economists and and they are psychologists and educators. So there there’s a great mixture of people that you know. There are probably eight authors in that paper, something like that, but there’s a really strong mixture of people, with bringing the perspectives together to say the things that you just said, which I hope lends it credibility. It’s not like somebody just coming from one single perspective and saying you know, this is what I believe. This is a divergent group, multidisciplinary group that’s come together and has drawn these conclusions which I agree with. I think they’re right.
01:04:37
You know, in Biden’s first address to Congress, when he was pushing the Build Back Better bill, that he had, that had a lot. That was just I don’t know, I’m going to expand pre-K all over the place he said young children need three and four-year-old children need school. They need two years of school. And I wanted to write back and say oh, no, no, no, no. Three and four-year-old children need care and then they’ll be ready for school, and so we really we need to get back to our, those roots we talked about earlier, where we were really entranced by young children and served as adults, as facilitators of individual children’s learning. Not this sort of group focused, you know, didactic skill approach. Not this sort of group focused, you know didactic skill approach.
01:05:34 – Amanda Morgan (Host)
I often say that I really think we have a lot of people with really good intentions. I think a lot of people say things like that that we’re going to give them school because they have the intention of serving children. They have good intentions, but we need to get them good information, and so I appreciate the work that you’re doing, that others are doing, to get good information to good people with good intentions so that we can make better programs for our young children. The very, the very last thing I want to ask before we go is just I would love to hear anything that you are really excited about now, anything that you’re working on or studying or reading about that’s that’s really getting you excited these days.
01:06:11 – Dale Farran (Guest)
Well. So I don’t think I’ll ever retire. That’s the trouble Everything keeps being interesting. I’m working with a couple of colleagues now. We’re trying to get together, maybe even publish a book that pulls a lot of these ideas together about sort of trying to derail the train that’s rattling down the track at us. So that’s interesting to me. I am working with Kathy Hirspasic on this new approach that’s been funded by Legos to try to make K through 4 instruction more playful, more guided play or and more active. Um, it’s, it’s very, very ambitious. So I’m you know, I’ve got, I’m just hoping that it will work and um, and, and we’re also then trying trying to to work to get more of those sort of playful activities, at least related to math, in more classrooms. So, yeah, it’s a lot of stuff, yeah it keeps you busy.
01:07:19 – Amanda Morgan (Host)
I’m glad, I’m glad to hear that you’re staying busy and I love that there’s that focus that not only do we need to help our preschool, pre-k programs to be more playful, but that that needs, instead of having the push down effect that we’ve had, we need to start trending that upwards, because those early childhood goes much beyond first and second grade. So Exactly. I appreciate that work. Well, thank you so much for talking with me today. This has been such a joy.
01:07:44 – Dale Farran (Guest)
Well, it went by quick as a wink. It was really fun, and you. It’s wonderful to talk with someone who’s thought so deeply about these issues as well. So thank you.
01:07:52 – Amanda Morgan (Host)
Thank you and thank you for your work. I appreciate it.
01:07:55 – Dale Farran (Guest)
All the best.
01:07:57 – Amanda Morgan (Host)
Thank you. Thanks again for listening to Not Just Cute the podcast. You can find show notes at notjustcutecom forward slash podcast forward slash, episode 61. There you’ll find links and other fascinating tidbits I know you’ll love. You can also hit up the show notes for a link to the why we Play letters. Head to notjustcutecom forward slash podcast. Forward slash, episode 61, or go straight to notjustcutecom forward slash why we Play to get signed up and download your free sample letter. I’m Amanda Morgan. You can read more on my blog and sign up for the Not Just Cute newsletter at notjustcutecom. You can also stay tuned for social media updates on Instagram by following me at Amanda underscore Not Just Cute. Thanks for listening today and, as always, thank you for standing up for children and for childhood.
