Promoting High-Quality Math and Science Learning in Kindergarten

CO-SPONSORED BY NEW AMERICA

“Math classrooms should be spaces where children are encouraged to explore, and teachers are masterful at putting the right questions and tasks in front of them to help them to develop a deep understanding of the math they’re learning.”

Jessica Tilli of The School District of Philadelphia offered this insight during this GLR Learning Tuesdays session, Promoting High-Quality Math and Science Learning in Kindergarten. She shared her dream that “every classroom would be doing that work and helping children to really find their love of math, so that they can continue forward.” Yet math anxiety is unfortunately “all too common a story for early childhood educators,” and one that Lauren Solarski, Ph.D., of Loyola University Chicago, herself experienced.

Douglas Clements, Ph.D., of the University of Denver provided a research review and pointed toward math as a predictor of later achievement, critical thinking skills, executive functioning and language abilities. Yet without attention to high-quality math and science, more and earlier, students will not believe that they have the power to succeed when it comes to math and science. Solarski said this must be a space where we are working to “eliminate deficit views of children.” And we must “change adult behaviors, practices, as well as the systems that may impede the inclusion of children,” said Chih-Ing Lim, Ph.D., of STEM Innovation for Inclusion in Early Education and University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

The panelists made a case for:

• Increasing the training and development and changing the practice of educators who teach math and science in the early years.
• Using curriculum that is grounded in children’s thinking and learning.
• Investing more quality time during the school day in math and science.

For Cindy Hoisington of the Education Development Center, this means rebalancing and de-siloing what occurs in our classrooms. Hoisington said, “curriculum alone isn’t enough. Teachers really need to experience these things for themselves. Experience science, being immersed in science inquiry, experience all the joy of it, and that respect for their own thinking and learning abilities, and kind of replace some of those really negative past experiences they have with science with positive ones.”

This was the fifth webinar in the series Promoting Impactful Teaching and Learning in Kindergarten that the Campaign for Grade-Level Reading and New America’s Early & Elementary Education Policy Program have developed to promote impactful teaching and learning in kindergarten.