5 Q’s for J.M. Holland

J.M. Holland is a National Board Certified pre-K teacher in a Head Start center in Richmond, Va., who will be supervising teachers in18 classrooms this year. He is a member of the Center for Teacher Leadership and is pursuing his doctorate at Virginia Commonwealth University. He blogs for Inside Pre-K and for his personal blog Lead from the Start, where he weaves ideas about teaching and schooling in and out of thoughts about painting. John is a professional artist. His writings can feel like artwork too.

A few weeks ago, John asked me to answer five questions about media and early education as part of a series of interviews on the Inside Pre-K blog. I asked if I could turn the tables. Here are five questions he’s answered for Early Ed Watch.

It’s unusual to find men teaching preschool. What should we do to change that?

As with any issue in education a lack of men in preschool classrooms can be addressed through treating symptoms or treating root causes. For example, in addressing the achievement gap the Harlem Children’s Zone is an approach that addresses causes; NCLB treated the symptoms, test scores. In medicine, addressing symptoms only works if the body has the capacity to cure itself. Obviously the achievement gap and lack of men in preschool are not something that will fix themselves even if we provide grants to hire men or require more men in classrooms.

So what are the root causes?

The struggle for gender equity has always focused on putting more women in men’s jobs. Only recently, in fields like teaching and nursing have men begun to step into the shoes of women. Women’s reasoning for entering the workplace of men has been clear: men make more money, have more respect, and have more power. The reasoning behind men entering the roles of women is much less clear. We pay plumbers more than child care workers. Why? Because we value our working plumbing more than children. It’s that simple when approached from an economic standpoint. It’s about the money.

The other issue is that men are discouraged from exploring their capacity to nurture as an avenue for employment. It is discouraged from a young age through lack of example and sometimes the dampening of boys’ capacity for empathy. As a society we associate nurturing behaviors with weakness and our culture rewards strength. A man who is caring towards children is considered less masculine and so less valuable, according to his peers, as a member of society. This is where the tired cliche of “woman’s work” turns on its head. Not that only women should care for children but that caring for children is a skill or capacity that is squashed in men from a young age. It is societal and until we begin to help boys grow up whole, we will never have men in younger classrooms. This is especially true in the community I work in. For some kids, I have been their first introduction to what a caring man can be. I have even been able to help some kids with fathers because the fathers are more comfortable volunteering in my classroom. The father sees how he can care without being weak and nurture without giving up his masculinity and become a more caring person.

This is changing, slowly, but I wonder if it may be changing too slowly. My supervisor has actively sought out men to hire and this year we expanded the number of men in our program to six. Of course that is six out of over 140 employees.

Do you think people have misconceptions about Head Start? If so, what’s the biggest one out there?

I absolutely believe people have misconceptions about Head Start mostly based on misunderstandings of the purpose of Head Start.

The biggest misconception seems to be the comparison of Head Start to public schools and its biggest symptom, the fade effect. Head Start is a social service organization that is meant to provide comprehensive services to low-income children and families including, in some programs, pregnant mothers, infants, toddlers, and their families. Besides education, Head Start provides health services, social services, parent education, dental services, nutrition services, and mental health services. Every family in our school-based program has a teacher and a family home visitor who helps them to set goals and develop action plans to achieve their goals. Children receive dental examinations, which can be incredibly important because dental pain can distract children from learning. Children learn pro-social behaviors that are key to their future school success. Some children have never eaten fresh green vegetables before entering our program. You may laugh to read this but it’s true. All of these interventions combine to propel children’s learning forward at an incredibly fast rate. Some kids leave my class having gained more than two years developmentally.

Then they enter kindergarten and we take all that support away.

Opponents wonder why poor Head Start children, who made progress while in Head Start but are still living in the same circumstances, stop progressing academically. This is what poverty is about, day to day life overcoming you.

Head Start was intended to be one of those reforms that address root causes of inequality, the effects of poverty. Besides all of these factors, many Head Start children continue to beat the fade factor mostly because their parents have learned how to swim, while others start to drown as they are sucked by the undertow of poverty in families that didn’t learn how to swim before they were kicked out of the Head Start lifeboat.

How can you tell that a preschooler is truly engaged?

Finally, an easy question. Kids are truly engaged when they are completely still and focused, or really really active and moving around. They can talk constantly, not say anything, ask questions or just look at you. Sometimes they smile, sometimes they crinkle their little brows, sometimes they get frustrated, but there is always a connection there. A child may be connecting with a concept, a person, an experience, a material, or their imagination. It is though this connection that understanding and learning takes place and that new neural pathways are formed. Learning is not always evident in the concrete evidence of this connection which is why some tests are unreliable. Often there is excitement, joy, but sometimes there isn’t and that is why some parents and teachers have such a hard time with discipline in their homes and classrooms. Kids often learn by doing where as adults can learn by thinking about thier actions. They confuse what they want kids to do, or how adults learn, and how kids learn.

How has your teaching changed since your first days in the Head Start classroom?

In 1995 I was a long-term substitute in a Head Start classroom. I was forbidden to teach letters. If children wanted to learn letters I could help them learn them but, I could not design experiences with intention of teaching them. I was not permitted to display letters on the walls and any activity had to be hand drawn. This is one of the hooks that got me excited about Head Start, that my artistic abilities would have a definite purpose, teaching. Then I went to grad school for two years. When I became a teacher in 1997 I was expected to not only teach letters, but letter sounds, rhyming etc. and there was an assessment to make sure I did it.

Teaching has become much less about caring for children and providing kids experiences so that they could learn and more about directly teaching children required knowledge. I have become a data driven teacher, using assessment data to guide my instruction and judge my effectiveness. I have gotten pretty good at it too. I understand why it is important but still, I hope that we can find more spaces for the soul of the child in the classroom.

If you could wave a magic wand, what problem in the education system would you fix first? Why?

This may seem strange but I would fix “high needs schools” through a global approach similar to the Harlem Children’s Zone that addresses the child’s needs before they are born. I would implement locally designed universal access preschool programs designed to address the needs of kids from birth through high school with a focus on equitable funding, and high quality teaching. I don’t have much faith in federal programs as a way to address education issues because I have seen how top-down reform for the powerless can be perverted, twisted, and co-opted by the powerful. This is why I would count on local communities to change their schools for the better. One of the reasons the Harlem Children’s Zone is working is because it was invented by someone from that community, to address the needs of that community. I just don’t think the federal government can do that. I know first hand how hard it is to have Congress for your school board instead of your neighbor. So, whatever I did would be a bottom-up change.