To De-Pressurize Kindergarten, Here Are Four Must-Do’s

In an op-ed for USA Today that came out this morning, I wrote about kindergarten — a topic of heightened interest over the past six months as news stories, magazine pieces and research reports have sounded alarms about classrooms for 5-year-olds becoming pressure cookers.

In the piece I outlined four imperatives for improving the experience for all children, not to mention teachers:

• Allow playtime and learning to be one and the same.
• Make preschool affordable for working families.
• Provide full-day kindergarten.
• Build a bridge between preschool and kindergarten.

These actions are interrelated. They will make the biggest impact if they are implemented together. For example, without a better bridge between preschool and kindergarten, teachers may not get the resources, support and mentoring they need to create classroom environments that provide simultaneous playtime and learning time. Until we have more children coming to kindergarten with preschool under their belt, kindergarten teachers will continue to feel pressure to cram as much academic preparation into the day as possible. Until full-day kindergarten is available to students around the country, teachers will feel so squeezed by the 9 a.m.-to-12 p.m. schedule that they may feel little choice but to drill their students and eliminate unstructured time and recess.

It’s no accident that these actions are pillars of the PreK-3rd approach. Our hope is that as more school districts adopt these strategies, stories about pressure-cooker kindergartens will start to become a thing of the past and children will find themselves immersed in the kind of vibrant, playful and purposeful learning environments they deserve.