Strengthening Kindergarten to Improve PreK-3rd Grade Experiences

“The vast majority of people in our school communities want to create equity oriented educational systems. When we put the pieces together we create the conditions to act. This joyful, developmentally appropriate aligned equity focus, early learning and elementary continuum. The results are incredibly hopeful.”

Anya Hurwitz, Ed.D., of Sobrato Early Academic Language offered this insight during this GLR Learning Tuesdays session, Strengthening Kindergarten to Improve Children’s PreK-3rd Grade Experiences. She shared her dream that “When we truly ground [our efforts] in assets, in seeing children for all of their potential across their multiple languages, cultures, and worlds and seeing teachers for all their potential,” we create a stronger kindergarten and a stronger PreK through third grade experience.

The panelists were asked what a well-aligned, joyful and developmentally informed PreK through third continuum means for dual language learners, children with disabilities and children from families with low incomes. Gloria Corral of the Parent Institute for Quality Education explained it this way, “children’s ability to thrive is based on their ability to feel welcome, for their families to feel welcome, for their culture and the community to be valued….Seeing the community and the family as an asset meaning they have different stories, they have different contacts, they have different cultures perhaps — there’s richness in that.” And finally that we must “see families as an integral part of the learning that happens at school and those 18 hours outside of school.” For Shantel Meek, Ph.D., of the Children’s Equity Project of Arizona State University, there are five dimensions where they focus their work — access to early intervention and preschool special education, identification of needs, quality of services, discipline, inclusion and receiving services in a general education setting. About this work, Meek says, “there are some really clear, established inequities that we have seen, that have been consistent in services and systems for kids with disabilities in the K–12 system or the PreK–12 system.”

For the panelists there is much work to be done, but this is a hopeful space. Meek explains this hope saying, “Things are complex. Yes, we know that there is a divide between what we know and what we’re doing right. This is not an intractable problem…and so there’s hope in that, and hope that we can choose to do better and use the information we have to really align practice and policy.”

This was the sixth and final 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.