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The following was part of a presentation given by Beth Bye in Washington, D.C. in August, 2000.
Impact
of Early Childhood Environment on Teacher's Interactions with Children
Carlota Schechter, Ed.D.
Saint Joseph College, West Hartford, CT
Context
for the Project
In 1999, Saint Joseph College moved their laboratory preschool, The School
for Young Children, to a new facility. The school serves children from
age three years through kindergarten. The new building was an old elementary
school which was renovated specifically to accommodate the needs of a
child care program and to serve as a laboratory setting for teachers in
training.
Preliminary
Data
The School for Young Children is an observation site for undergraduate
Child Study courses. One assignment for a course on children's lay, engages
college students in coding the types of play that are occurring in the
classrooms. Using a classic play observational method, students observe
each child in the classroom in sequence and record the type of play on
two dimensions (Solitary, Parallel or Group, and Functional, Constructive,
Dramatic, or Games with rules) and the presence or absence of an adult
in the child's activity. Each student is in the classroom for a total
of 2 hours on two separate occasions. They are usually able to observe
each child 2 to 3 separate times during this period.
In the fall of 1998, the last year in the old school, nine college students observed in 5 different classrooms at the School for Young Children (for a total of 391 child observations) and found that adults were interacting with children, on average, for 3% of the observations.
As the faculty advisor to the school I met with the director, Beth Bye, and shared with her my concern over the low number of teacher-child interactions observed. I then went back to my original sources and looked up the typical teacher-child interaction rates. In a review of four studies from the late seventies and early eighties, Johnson, Christie and Yawkey (1987) report that,
| "Given the potential benefits of adult involvement in play, it is disturbing to find that recent observations in American and British preschools revealed that the level of teacher participation in play was low ... These studies found that teachers spent only between 2 and 6 percent of their time involved in children's play." (p.41) |
This finding eased our minds a bit. But these studies were old, and in the intervening years there has been a growth in understanding of the importance of adult involvement in children's play. So we expected that the trend in quality programs would be towards greater adult involvement.
A year later, however, in the fall of 1999, the next group of college students completed the same play observation assignment but in the new building. The new space allowed for many more college students to observe; in 1999 seventeen college students observed eight different classrooms for a total of 860 child observations. We were astonished at the results. This year a full 22% of the child observations involved a teacher.
Beth Bye and I met with the teachers and shared the finding in order to understand the difference. The teachers attributed the difference to the changes in the new space. In the old school the children's cubbies, bathrooms and sinks were down the hall and there were no phones in the classrooms. Thus, there were many times when one of the two teachers had to be out of the room. Teachers had to leave the room to take children to the bathroom, help children with boots, wash their hands or take a phone call. In the new space teachers do not need to leave the room to monitor these activities and thus there is much more time for teachers to be interacting with the children in the classroom. Teachers also felt that the increased size of the rooms allowed for more distinct interest areas, and thus less monitoring of inappropriate child behavior. This change also contributed to the teachers spending more time in productive interactions with children.