Fostering love of learning in early elementary

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:This is more teacher dependant in my opinion, than anything else. I felt the same way, and had actually planned to keep my September bday DD in one extra year of "Reggio" based preschool versus Kindergarten last year. Pandemic and virtual opportunity changed this - as we decided to give our in-boundary school a try and not stress over what our kid accomplished academically. The teacher we had was amazing. I could not have asked for a better experience, albeit online, for my kids introduction to academics. I was not as thrilled with the assistant teacher, and had she been at the helm, the experience would have been entirely different.

Point being - you can end up with amazing and not so great teachers in public and private, it's the luck of the draw; some privates do claim to foster a love of learning, as do some publics. In practice it is not exactly so. There are a few DC publics/charters that do seem to veer that way and are by far better than some privates, which may actually be a more stressful learning environment in some respects. My kid does not go there, but I visited Murch, and it was amazing. I have also heard some great things about Mundo Verde and other charters.

I’m a teacher and I completely agree with this. Love of learning is infectious. The attitude/enthusiasm/mindset of the teacher matters very much in the early years. Look for excellent school leadership that sets a tone for the whole school. Public/private doesn’t matter if the faculty is top-notch.

This remains true for middle and high school. But, by middle school, your child will be developmentally in a different place and his/her peers will start to be a bigger influence than the adults in their life ( who are still important, but in different ways). By middle school, you want to be sure your child has at least a pool of classmates who are invested in learning and school, because they will absorb the attitudes of their peers. I watched my own kids gravitate away from the peers who blew off school and thought it was all stupid and thankfully they had alternative social groups to remake close friendships with kids who do care, value the same things academically. By high school,
Make sure that cohort is there, whether public or private. What I’ll say is that private doesn’t guarantee this kind of kid. Many could be achievement-oriented, but not intellectually incurious and more interested in making the grade. Take the time to get to know school communities and school leadership before you choose. It’s not just test scores/size of tuition/college acceptances that matter. It’s the culture of the school.

Question: how does one come to know the culture of the school, before attending/sending a child there? As well, how does one know if the faculty is top notch? These are not things we can find out easily without experience in the school itself. Word of mouth only tells you so much.

I agree with your whole statement, except - I was close with kids who did not like school and indeed most dropped out during high school. Yet I had access to high level classes and continued to enjoy them at the same time. I now believe that the peers in those classes were overly achievement oriented and honestly seemed more incurious than the dropouts. This was a public school. The peers were there, but I avoided them, in other words... As you point out, a worry about a private school might be that you do end up with only status and achievement oriented kids, and they don't love learning. They love success.

Some ways to see excellent teaching or a love of learning culture in an elementary school:

--go for a tour and look at the students during class, especially kindergarten. Do they look purposeful and engaged and mostly happy? Or do they look stressed and bored( thumb-sucking, excessive foot bouncing or bothering kids sitting next to them, heads down on desks)

--observe classes. Are teachers asking open-ended questions? Are they responding to "wrong" or "strange" answers from the students constructively and with curiosity? Are students allowed a degree of choice in their activities, or is everything proscribed?

--ask about how students are assessed. Is it all paper and pencil tests, or are projects used for assessment of learning goals?

--upper elementary: do you see evidence in the curriculum of any cross-discipline teaching? Or is math only done in math class, science only done in science, writing only done in English...

I've run out of time, but will come back to this thread with more ideas on how to evaluate the learning culture of a school later

Great advice! Thank you!