Review Of Early Childhood Classroom Observation: Fill & Download for Free

In full honesty, her entire life’s work was dedicated to not only ECCE, but the entire range of child development, through adolescence. Montessori truly innovated the concept of early childhood education and was far ahead of her time in her respect for the child as an individual. From her first assignment working as a doctor with what we would now call “children at risk”, Montessori saw an innate need to interact with each other and their surroundings.Through careful, steady observations, she began to understand what would take other doctors and educators decades to catch up to: children are born with independence and a drive to learn from the earliest ages. Over time, she founded her own school, Casa del Bambini, which still exists to this day in Bergamo, Italy. This was the foundation for what eventually led to developing teacher training, and the founding of the “Montessori Method,” though unfortunately it was never copyrighted (for this reason, be sure to pick a school that is accredited by either AMS or AMI).Her primary contributions to the field were focused on recognizing the independence, creativity and innate curiosity of a child, eventually developing the phrase “follow the child.” She taught that the early childhood time frame, specifically ages 3–6, was a sensitive period for acquiring knowledge, as well as development social and emotional skills. Children are observed by their teachers, who let them proceed at a pace that matches their ability and interest, while at the same time staging the environment with materials that follow and encourage a thorough, multi-subject curriculum. She also believed that children respond better to work with manipulative, beautiful materials, which is why you will see a high quality, wooden, sometimes brightly painted materials for children to use in their classroom.Another core original idea was the concept of a prepared environment. Every teacher prepares their environment, but most models focus on the teacher’s interaction with the environment, where as Dr. Montessori firmly believed that the environment should be built around the child. The furniture should be appropriately sized, the materials are appropriately sized, and they are given the freedom to move throughout their classroom with a variety of work spaces, such as small tables and chairs, work rugs for the floor, etc.There is so, so much more to learn and love about what Montessori shared with and taught to the world. However, it is not just about philosophy and belief, but also about science. Dr. Montessori was the first female doctor in Italy, and was a trained scientist first, not initially planning to move into the world of education. This means that all of her observations, teachings, decisions and more were founded in science, not philosophy. To learn in greater detail how Dr. Montessori’s observations and teachings have been validated by science in the years since her establishment of the method, including long after her own passing in 1952, I highly recommend locating and reading Montessori: The Science behind the Genius, by Angeline S. Lillard, PhD, published by the Oxford University Press (the 3rd edition was released in 2017, so it is fairly recently updated). Dr. Lillard is a leading developmental psychologist, as well as a trained Montessori teacher and parent. I recommend this book because it is based on detailed, authenticated and peer reviewed research that finds modern day cognitive science “catching up” to what Montessori taught and lectured about over 50 years ago.

OP: Why do stereotypical nerds and geeks wear eyeglasses?I wrote a post about this on The Nerd Manual. I’ll save you the click; here it is:The Power of GlassesIf you do a Google image search for “nerd” the majority of hits will feature someone wearing glasses, but if you take a look at any large group of nerds you'll notice that, while a lot of them wear glasses, most of them don't (and even fewer if you're at a cosplay convention). On the other hand, if you looked into the eyes of nerds not wearing glasses, you would find that many of them wear contacts. So what gives? Are nerdy glasses a myth?Not exactly. The four-eyes stereotype has roots in the not too distant past when contact lenses were thick pieces of hard plastic that scratched your retina and laser eye surgery wasn't even a dream, so if you were myopic you wore eyeglasses. But did that make you a nerd? No, but several studies have shown that people with higher IQ and higher levels of education also have poor eyesight*, which means there was a time when that room full of nerds would also mean a lot more glasses. The difference today: most people, even nerds, don't wear glasses because we have comfy contacts that we can sleep in, and laser keratotomy is an outpatient surgery that won't break the bank.Cohn, S.J. et al. “Myopia and intelligence: a pleiotropic relationship? (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/3417304).”Teasdale, T.W. and Fuchs Goldschmidt. “Degree of myopia in relation to intelligence and educational level (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/2904062).”Czepita, Damian et al. “Are children with myopia more intelligent? A literature review (http://www.pum.edu.pl/__data/assets/pdf_file/0008/13211/54-01-01.pdf).”Still, what is it about bad eyesight that goes hand in hand with nerdiness?There are people who suggest that since myopia allows people to see small details close up, it leads to mental patterns of inspection and analysis, and possibly intelligence. Other people believe intelligent children spend more time reading or looking closely at things, which causes their myopia.ElizabethAab (http://motherboard.vice.com/blog/why-do-nerds-wear-glasses) offers a more complicated answer, suggesting that poor eyesight influences a person's behavior toward nerdiness in early childhood because it changes her position in the classroom; "your 10 year old self inched closer to the chalkboard. Once there, the teacher called on you more, you asked more questions, you talked less with your neighbors, you doodled less with your crayons…You became a nerd! By the time your vision was corrected your position at the front of the classroom, and in your class, was set. You would always be a nerd."While I agree with Aab's idea, I believe interaction with the teacher is only a piece of the puzzle. Consider how the other students react to a kid wearing glasses. In 2012, F. C. Jellesma, a professor at the University of Amsterdam, conducted a review* of the effects that eyeglasses had on children's perceptions of people; not only did she discover that children view eyeglass wearers as more intellectual, the children also were less likely to want to be their friends and felt that people wearing glasses were not as good looking.Jellesma, F. C. "Do glasses change children's perceptions? Effects of eyeglasses on peer- and self-perception (http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/17405629.2012.700199#preview)."Given this social bias, it's easy to see how the child saddled with glasses will find herself fighting an uphill battle if she wants to make friends among her peers. Often, children will simply accept the roles thrust upon them and seek solace in books and the positive reinforcement offered by their teachers. Once on this path, it's difficult to change direction. Perhaps it's slightly dramatic to suggest that glasses are a talisman imbuing their wearers with gifts of intellect and observation while also branding them as an outcast. But nerds will tell you, it's not much of a stretch.

The assumption of natural desire to nurture.This is definitely a knife that slices both ways; women rail against the stereotypical assumptions that make paths to nursing and teaching easy for them even while those professions are financially devalued. But to be a man who finds his satisfaction in roles that revolve around nurture? Whoa, Nellie. You must be a perv.I don’t agree with Joshua Engel’s conclusion in his answer, but I really like a good bit of his description of privilege:“Privilege” means “You’ve never had your life made harder because of some trait you cannot change”. You’ve never been talked out of going into a high-paying career because you were male. You’ve never lacked for role models in prestigious positions. You’ve never been told that a character on a movie screen was wrong because they were the same gender as you, because your gender couldn’t possibly be heroic or brave or strong.…And most obviously, you’ve never had your sexuality used as a threat. You aren’t constantly on the lookout that you could be raped, and that the most likely person to do so was somebody you were on a date with. You don’t have to be vigilant every instant of your social life, and continually aware that if your vigilance slips, you will be publicly accused of having deserved it.Some substitutions are called for — men are not told that they can’t be heroic or brave or strong, but they are told that they can’t be caring, emotional, or empathetic in the same way women caregivers are. In caregiving professions, men’s sexuality is routinely seen as a threat; for all that they don’t have to be vigilant every instant of their social lives they must spend their professional lives on tippytoes lest accusations of sexual misconduct be leveled against them. But fundamentally I think this description sums up several aspects of what we normally think of as privilege, and we can examine the question of female privilege in caregiving using those substituted criteria.In teaching, it is acceptable to be a male teacher at the middle school and high school levels. At these ages, the job of the teacher is more purely about academics. But in elementary school, where the role of schools and teachers in nurture and socialization is indicated by the presence of social skills grades on report cards right alongside the academic ones, male teachers are not only rare but often stigmatized.But we also talked about the challenges of being a man who teaches young children and why more men don’t choose this career path. Of course, compensation levels aren’t high for teachers of any gender, which makes teaching a hard sell for many people. And friends and family would sometimes respond with disbelief when we explained our career choice. For example, while making small talk at a family wedding, I was asked my profession and mentioned that I teach pre-K. My interlocutor nearly choked on her champagne, paused as if to ensure that she had heard my answer correctly, and then bluntly asked, “Why would a man want to teach young kids?”But behind closed doors, my male colleagues also discussed what we agreed was the largest, though often unspoken, barrier to recruiting more men into the field—a legitimate fear that male teachers might be labeled as potential sexual predators and even falsely accused of sexual abuse of children. We were acutely aware that just one allegation of misconduct, even if proved false, had the potential to wreak havoc on a teacher’s personal and professional life.In interviews I conducted with male teachers of young children as part of my graduate studies, every man I talked with brought up the stigma of being a potential danger to children. Teachers told me that you have to “watch yourself” at all times in a way female teachers don’t because an innocent gesture, such as a hug, could be perceived by others as suspicious. One veteran kindergarten teacher in D.C. put it more bluntly, saying, “Some people assume if you’re a man teaching young kids that you’re somehow a pedophile or weirdo pervert or something.”[1]Anecdotally, there is a perception that within elementary schools men move to administration from the classroom because of their privilege; administrators are more highly paid and more prestigious and therefore the disparity in male:female ratio between a school’s administrators and its teachers is the result of the expression of male privilege. To some extent that may be true, but it is also more than a bit of the other way around: a series of interviews with males teaching grades K-3 found that “very few men enter the field as a way to become an administrator” and “Men are more likely to accept promotions to escape the scrutiny associated with daily teaching”.[2]Let’s move on to nursing. Although stereotypes in nursing have been changing over the last couple of decades, I’ll quote freely and sporadically from a 2013 literature review in the American Journal of nursing that examined the status of Men in Nursing with the aim of increasing recruitment and lowering barriers to entry.[3] I’ve cherry-picked, of course, and it’s not all bad … but I think a lot will sound terribly, terribly familiar. We’ll begin at the beginning, with penetrance:Whereas women have made some strides moving into historically male-dominated professions such as medicine-with the 2010 Bureau of Labor Statistics showing that women account for 32% of physicians and surgeons and represented more than 47% of first-year medical students in 2010-2011 men still represent fewer than 10% of the RNs licensed since 2000 and fewer than 12% of the students enrolled in baccalaureate nursing programs.Ouch. That’s some gender disparity. Of course, it most likely reflects a disparity in the ratio of applicants, but why is that?In studying the stages through which men are socialized into nursing, LaRocco found that in the first stage, prior to considering nursing, which typically occurs in high school, counselors failed to recommend nursing as a career option to the male students.I’m hearing “Oh no dear, you don’t want a career in STEM. That’s too challenging for your pretty little brain.”Before choosing nursing as a career, many of the men said they were encouraged by family and friends to consider such careers as physician, physical therapist, or physician assistant, though none reported that it was difficult to find information about nursing programs or that their inquiries into such programs were rebuffed. Several cited as influential role models close relatives who were nurses, and five of the 20 had mothers who were nurses.So apparently we’ve stopped asking women why they want to be doctors and pushing them to be nurses instead, but …. not so much the other way around.Although the higher rate of male than female attrition in nursing school is a complex issue requiring further study, research suggests that it may result in part from male role strain and isolation in a female-dominated environment.Isolation in a single-gender dominated environment. Where have I heard that before … ?In their interviews with male nursing students and predominantly female nursing instructors, Dyck and colleagues found evidence of role strain stemming from a gay, emasculated stereotype that the students perceived the public projected onto male nursing students, doing "a disservice both to students who are gay (assuming them to be both feminine and emasculated) and those who are not (ascribing to them a sexual orientation that they do not self-identify with).I am reminded of a notable instance where a female engineer in an ad campaign was perceived as “must be a model because no engineer is so attractive”. #iLookLikeAnEngineer [4] [5]A lack of male representation in nursing textbooks exacerbates male alienation in the field.andMale nursing students frequently experience loneliness and isolation, which they associate with being men in a predominantly female environment, and they express a desire to interact more often with male role models. Some feel that they have little support outside of their immediate families.So we already saw that many men who go into nursing have relatives who serve as influential role models, but role models of their own gender? Not so much.According to Dyck and colleagues, many male nursing students felt that their curriculum emphasized emotions and that failure to meet instructor expectations for self-reflection and emotional expression (as in journal writing) could lead to ostracism or failure. These male students viewed reflective activities as interfering with learning and counter to their preferences for task achievement over verbal expression.andUnfortunately, nursing faculty may fail to notice the different ways male and female students express caring or to recognize the possibility that male students could be marginalized by being expected to adhere to feminine expressions of caring. As the senior nursing students participating in the phenomenological study by Paterson and colleagues noted, male caring may be "'less touchy feely' and more of a friendship than female caring," but "this form of caring is not always recognized within the profession as 'true blue' and as valuable as female caring."Doesn’t that sound a lot like “women tend to work and interact differently on teams than men, and their less assertive and more collaborative defaults can negatively impact perception of their productivity and value”?Lest we forget, the obligatory “you might be a perv”:Patient care delivered by male nurses or nursing students raises issues related to sexuality and touch. Patterson and Morin found that male nursing students who had completed their obstetrics rotation reported fearing that their touch would be perceived as sexual rather than professional; these students said they tended to seek help from female colleagues when performing intimate assessments. Similarly, fear of being seen as seductive challenged male students to find appropriate ways of touching their patients. O'Lynn noted male students feared allegations of sexual impropriety when caring for female patients. Evans observed that the stereotype of men as sexual aggressors made men keenly aware of the fact that their caring touch could be misinterpreted as sexual. Harding identified the following concerns expressed by male nurses specifically related to touch:* the feminization of touch* the sexualization of men's touch* men's vulnerability to accusations of sexual misconduct* the failure of nursing education to provide male students with strategies for dealing with intimate touch and protecting themselves from false accusationsYes, you may be saying, but those are professions — those are the exception, and they’re something that people choose. (Why is it more wrong for women to face obstacles in their chosen profession than men to face obstacles in their chosen profession?) But in the family, men also have to struggle against the assumption of nurturing privilege. For all that society currently presses men to be more involved and take a more equal role in parenting, they may have to work harder to be taken seriously in that role. I am reminded of this question: Why is there a bias towards the wife/mother when there is a conflict in how to raise the kids? When my wife steps into the room she immediately takes over, even if I have been supervising our daughter.Whatever the actual dynamic within that specific family, the cultural bias described there is real. There is an assumption that women “know” how to parent and men “don’t know” how to parent, and then even if men “know” how to parent then if they disagree with their wives it is the mother who “knows” best. I don’t need to cite a bunch of references for that one, I’ve experienced and seen it many times myself. I’ll quote from my own answer to that question:I bring up this example to ask you to keep this in your mind once you have (hopefully) established your more equal parenting decisions. When you have a disagreement, your wife may agree to allow behavior that she deems inappropriate for whatever reason. And maybe it is inappropriate, and maybe it isn’t. BUT, and this is the big BUT, if the rest of society would generally deem that behavior inappropriate, then quite often she is the one who will feel society’s uncomfortable judgment of her parenting skills when your children exhibit that behavior, and not you. That’s not right, but it is how it is.Now, that sounds a lot like it’s male privilege, to be able to make bad parenting decisions and have the fingers point at one’s spouse. But if you are the male who has a strong opinion on some parenting principle … I assure you that in many families, the privilege is all on the female side.Ironically, should the couple split up, the situation is more equal. I’ll defer to John Gragson here, who practices family law: [6]It's my considered judgment, after hearing custody and divorce cases off and on for 18 years, that judges take this responsibility to be even-handed fairly seriously. There is no discernible system-wide bias in favor of women in divorce settlements or custody cases in the courts I've dealt with—in fact I've seen, in custody matters specifically, that the courts tend to favor the men slightly. It's my feeling that men who pursue primary custody get viewed by the courts as unusually involved fathers and might "win" their cases a little more than they otherwise would. The court does have a bias toward people with relatively conservative lifestyles in custody proceedings, but I've seen this work both for and against mothers and fathers alike.But even here, the women-are-nurturers bias can still come into play if the man has allowed these default roles to play out over the course of the couple’s time together:As far as the feeling that men get of being "discriminated against", I think there are a couple things going on there. Everyone always thinks they get screwed by family court, and there's no real objective way to measure who "wins" and "loses" based on the idiosyncratic nature of these cases.Also, as I noted, the court values a conservative lifestyle. If the father went out after the divorce and started living large with his newfound freedom, the court may view him as not very grown-up. Third, but maybe more pervasive and important, is the fact that society at large still has fairly rigid notions of "what men do" and "what women do". Men are supposed to work, women are supposed to change diapers. Men are supposed to be "strong", women are supposed to be "nurturers". Thus, even during the marriage (or pre-litigation relationship as the case may be), the man may have not been actually asserting all the responsibilities of parenthood or even if he has, he may feel his contributions neglected on some level by the incessant pop-culture chatter about how "husbands are no good at this and that" (which is just a variant of the "men are better workers, women are better nurturers" trope).…At any rate, the perception that "the court always gives custody to the mom" or "children belong with their mom" may well dissuade a lot of fathers from aspiring to be custodial parents.Maybe it’s only perception. But if perception contributes to / becomes reality, isn’t that a problem too?I’m a female in STEM in a two-earner household with three kids, and I’m quite, quite familiar with the face of male privilege. It’s true that I’m biased, but I would be hard-pressed to dispute that when comparing facets of male privilege and female privilege, male privilege seems to confer a lot more benefits. Nonetheless, when examining the obstacles and suspicion that men encounter in trying to perform caregiving roles, compared to the ease with which women are accepted into the same capacity … I don’t think it’s reasonable to view the idea that women are naturally entitled to nurture and men have to fight for acceptance of their desire to fill those same positions as anything other than an expression of female privilege.Footnotes[1] There’s a Stigma Around Men Teaching Young Kids. Here’s How We Change It.[2] Under the Glass: Conversations with Men in Early Childhood Education.[3] Men in Nursing[4] I Look Like an Engineer - Wikipedia[5] You May Have Seen My Face on BART – The Coffeelicious – Medium[6] John Gragson's answer to Is there an actual legal difference in the way men and women get treated in court when it comes to divorce, custody and such? Or can differences be explained with social bias if anything?