Educating Young Children Volume 1 – Spring 2025 | Page 57

Before my present position as principal of an elementary school in rural North Carolina, I served as one of six demonstration kindergarten teachers for the North Carolina Office of Early Learning. From firsthand experience in my classroom and from observations of demonstration teacher colleagues as well as a handful of dedicated teachers I have taught with, I can confidently say that center‐ or play‐based instruction and content standards are not mutually exclusive. In fact, in each of these settings, the two seemingly opposites coexist seamlessly.

As a demonstration teacher, one of my responsibilities was to host teachers, instructional specialists, and administrators in guided observations of my classroom. Visitors quickly noticed that my classroom was not the typical kindergarten classroom. Children spent very little time sitting at tables quietly completing seatwork. Instead, much of their time was spent working in teacher‐led small groups, content‐based stations, or in the hour‐and‐a‐half block of time for developmental centers. Children moved about the classroom independently, gathering materials they needed for a project. There was the constant ebb and flow of busyness and noise as children settled into a task, often one of their choosing. During literacy and math stations, children had the autonomy to select which content‐based station activity they wanted to engage in on a given day. They understood the process of learning; eight or more stations might be going on simultaneously, and once finished, the children would independently transition themselves into developmental centers without much more than a hiccup. In our classroom, the children did a lot of talking and asking questions, and I spent a lot of time listening, observing, and asking questions that encouraged children to think deeply about their own or others’ questions, areas of interest, and yes, content. We built a community of learners— an environment in which we were all respected for the strengths we brought and the growth we were all making, teachers included.