Teaching 4 year olds and teaching 18 year olds. Same or different?

I have been spending time in our infant school recently; and the transition from my usual world of High School teenagers was striking, as you may imagine. The immediate vulnerability, the immediate trust, and the exuberance of the 4 -6 year olds was delightful; but I was also conscious that this initial reaction of mine was as an adult or a parent; not as a primary teacher. So I put aside the ‘cute and lovely’ sentiment (true as it may be) and applied a more analytical lens, to see what what happening from an educational perspective.

The differences were obvious – the cartoon shows the very, very different remote learning experience, but in truth the face-to-face differences are equally evident. Certainly the sound levels are very different! – and the contrast between classes of 5 year olds and 18 year olds is such that infant and high school teaching are really utterly different jobs.

But as I spent time watching, listening, and talking with the students, it was clear that underlying the differences are much more important similarities. The first thing was the sheer range within any class; in one language class I went from a table where reading fluency was basic, to another where, when I asked a student what she was doing, she told me she was “looking for homophones” (really, I kid you not!). The in-your-face challenge to teach classes like this is faced in High School TOK classes, for example, when we have those who read philosophy for fun, with those who have only basic English skills. In both Infant and High School cases, the challenge is to provide support and challenge while retaining dignity and humility for all students, and also create an integrated, collaborative class atmosphere. It’s not easy – and it’s probably harder in cases where a year’s difference between the oldest and youngest in the class is a sizeable proportion of the child’s life – but it can be done.

What struck me most, though, was the almost identical strategies around helping students come to understand ideas in ways that go beyond memorisation – in edu-speak, that’s concept acquisition. The difference between living and non-living seems obvious to adults, but if you were to look up the difference then the challenges of teaching this to infants becomes obvious. So the trick is to let students puzzle over examples and non-examples of living things – and use that as the leaping off point. You can learn a great deal about what a student understands through one-on-one conversations where the teacher asks students to categorise things; you find, for example, that some think the sun is alive because it moves across the sky, or because it has a face (as evident in lots of drawings). Or you might find that some believe that a tree cannot be alive because it is very hard, not soft, or because it does not walk like humans, or dogs. Teacher can then ask questions that challenge these misconceptions, and so lead to deeper understandings; and because the starting point is students’ current understanding of life, not an abstract definition of life – it’s meaningful and authentic. The same idea applies to older students too; in maths when we ask them to sort shapes into trapeziums or rhombuses – where does a square go? The abstraction into definition and necessary characteristics may seem different, but actually, it’s the same pedagogy. Sometimes exactly the same task can work right across the age range just by varying the examples (say, when we ask students to categorise activities as scientific or non-scientific) because the important understandings that we are seeking are ones that need revisiting and deepening; we call it the spiral curriculum as we address the same things in more profound ways. And of course, varying examples is also a way of dealing with the issue of differing capabilities in the same class.

The previous paragraph, by the way, explains what we mean by conceptually based teaching and learning. It’s the pedagogy we use to ensure that students develop rich conceptual frameworks whereby individual nodes of knowledge are connected to make meaning, and not isolated into irrelevant trivia.

So what I saw with our youngest children was superficially different to what I see with older students; but in a more profound sense it was exactly the same. I left with a renewed appreciation of the craft that it’s easy to take for granted; with an admiration for the teachers who run classes of 22 small children (when any parents knows how difficult it can be with even one); humbled by their persistent kindness and patience; a better understanding that there are principles of pedagogy that apply across the age range; and of course with a spring in my step from spending time with children finding their way in life so joyfully.