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>> Okay, now that you've finished the reading, we're going to talk through them a bit.

Grace will start by talking through the information about how children spend their time in the classroom. And then I'll come back and talk a little more about interactions. >> As we've been discussing, we know how critically important teachers are in the lives of children. Recent research has taught us some interesting things about the role of teachers in early childhood classrooms. First, as we look at how children in these programs spend their time we see that the average child spends much of their day engaged in routine activities that offer few opportunities for learning. Second, we see that most children spend very little time interacting with adults in the classroom. And finally, when we look at the overall quality of the time they're spending, we see children are not consistently exposed to the kinds of stimulating activities and interactions that we know are needed to support social and cognitive development. Before we explain these findings in more detail, it's important to let you know more about where this research comes from. As you read in the Early Developments articles, these studies were conducted in over 700 early childhood classrooms in 11 states. They included state pre-k and Head Start programs, programs in schools, and programs in the community. The teachers and children were diverse and fairly representative of publicly funded early childhood programs nationwide. So the findings from this study are really relevant to most teachers working in early childhood programs today. One startling finding from this research was how children spend their time in the classroom. As you saw in the article, this chart shows the type of activities children

are engaged in on a typical day. There are a couple of interesting things about this chart. First, you can see that among all the types of activities, children spend the most time in literacy and social studies. Though they spend a fair amount of time in art and music, as well. However, strikingly, this chart shows that children spend 44% of their time, almost half their day, engaged in non-instructional activities. It's important to note that the researchers recorded lots of things as an instructional activity. So for example, if a teacher was sitting and talking to students at lunch time, it would've been coded as oral language. Or if they were singing a song, it would've been coded as music. So the 44% of the time on non-instructional activities suggests that we have some work to do to help our students get the most out of each school day. Of course we wouldn't expect that number to be zero. Certainly there is some time each day that needs to be spent in routines and meals. But this figure tells us that we're probably spending too much time in those kinds of activities. And that when children are engaged in routines and meals, we need to do a better job of thinking through how to create learning opportunities within those routines. Another finding from this study was that children were not engaged in interactions with adults as often as you would hope. As you remember from your reading the results of this study show that for 73% of the school day there was no interaction between the teachers and students. So that means students were on their own and were not talking to or interacting with adults at all for almost three quarters of the day. This is concerning, because although we know that children can and should learn some things on their own, and with peers, they really learn the most

when they're engaged with adults who can help them maximize learning opportunities. When we look in more detail at the 27% of the day in which children were interacting with adults, the vast majority of this time was spent in what researchers called minimal interaction. These were very brief interactions, like the teacher asking the child what she wants to do during center time and the child responding that she wants to play in blocks. Only 8% of the time were interactions with adults what we would think of as elaborate, meaning that the teacher and the child might have a sustained conversation or interaction. Yet we know that it's those elaborated interactions between teachers and children that are the most beneficial to children. So, if for the majority of the day, they are either not interacting with teachers at all or only minimally, they're really missing out on a lot of opportunities to learn from the adults around them. >> Okay, so as Grace just talked about, this study told us that at least in many publicly funded early childhood educations programs across the country, children are not spending much interacting with adults. Let's now begin to think in more depth about the quality of teacher-child interactions in these classrooms. When we take a look at this graph, we get a sense of the overall classroom quality broken down into the four areas of the intentional teaching framework. There are two important points as we look at this. First, when we look at the Emotional Support and Classroom Organization, overall, classrooms seem to be doing okay. But there is still a lot of variability. So, although many children are in emotionally supportive and well organized classrooms, many others aren't. The second striking finding here is that the quality of both

Instructional Supports, and the Content Specific Instructional Supports, which here focus explicitly on language and literacy, are really quite low. Many, many children across the country just aren't getting the types of instructional interactions that we know they need to be best prepared for kindergarten. There are lots of reasons why this may be the case. Few early childhood courses really teach teachers about instructional interactions. And not all early childhood curricula support these interactions either. We'll come back to these issues at points throughout the course. Although we aren't going to cover all the areas in this course, we encourage you to be thinking about the ways that you can help ensure that children in your classroom are receiving effective teacher-child interactions across all four areas. Alright, so, by now you might be feeling just a little depressed about all that's wrong with early childhood. We shared this information, because we think it's important to learn from research about how we can improve. But the other really important thing that this research has told us is that teachers who do offer their students emotionally and instructionally supportive interactions can make a remarkable difference in their students' lives. We'll take a look at just one example of how this works. As a part of this study, researchers looked up which parts of preschool classroom were most important for helping students develop social and early academic skills, such as knowing letter names, and sounds, how to count to ten, and having a rich vocabulary. The elements of the classroom that mattered the most was the quality of teachers' interactions with their children. This mattered more than things like class size, teacher's education level, and

adult-child ratio. Interactions mattered more than curricula or the materials in the classroom. Again this research really boils down to pretty simple message. Teachers matter and what you do each day in the classroom really makes a difference for the children in your care. The types of interactions between teachers and students that we'll be studying in this course matter for all children. And we know they matter in particular for children who are at risk of school failure or those most likely to have difficulty in learning in later years. And you the teacher are really the primary person holding the keys to improvement in your classroom for your students. You are the agent of change. We've talked about how critically important children's day to day interactions with adults are. In particular your effective and thoughtful interactions with children who need your support the most will really make a significant difference in their lives. So, part of the purpose of this course is for you to know just how critically important you are. Alright, so now you've had a chance to learn more about how the pre-k day is spent. We want you to take a moment to reflect on your initial predictions in comparison to what the research told us, and also what other learners' predictions were. So here's a chart that shows the correct answer according to the research you read, as well as the percentage of participants from our full online course that answered the questions correctly before the reading. Here we want to take a moment to encourage you to participate in a discussion about these readings. Now that you've reviewed the relevant research about how children spend their time, take a moment to reflect on the research, and how it applies to your own experiences. Post your reactions to the discussion question, and then

you can come back and watch the next video.

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