Conference thoughts part 2

This post is a continuation of my last post.  Recently, I wrote that when practitioners go to conference sessions, they often look for activities that they can use in their classroom---immediately.  It is perfectly fine to be inspired by others, but early childhood educators need to make the activities their own.  They do that by examining their own values and assumptions around those activities that they choose to recreate in their classroom.

The same is true for strategies.  We were asked in our Teaching with the Body in Mind session at the National Association for the Education of Young Children annual conference last month for strategies for handling loud/boisterous/big-body play. Believe it or not, the four of us each had different strategies that we could name.  Interestingly, we all pretty much agreed on the values and assumptions around this type of play (see last post), but we all approached handling it in a way that fit the context and our own perception/tolerance of this type of play.

Now I cannot speak for the others, but I will tell you how I answered the question around strategies for handling big-body play.  For the most part, I rarely intervened when there was a potential conflict.  For example, in the photo below, two children were crossing the board in opposite directions.  There was a potential for conflict, but I did not intervene.  Instead, I started with the assumption that they could work it out themselves.   I stayed close, waited and kept silent.  However, I was always on the  ready to put my camera down if they needed help.

They actually worked it out themselves with very little verbal negotiation; they negotiated with their bodies in a relational field that was the defined by the board.  Now, if I had intervened too soon, I would have robbed them of the opportunity to practice reading each other's cues and figuring out what to do with those cues.  I supposed I could have asked them to verbalize the cues they noticed from the other or I could have narrated what I saw, but I do think the verbal dialogue/narration, especially from me, can be a distraction from their own body dialogue/narration.

This strategy of wait and see and trust the children to negotiate their differences worked the best for me in my classroom.  In fact, I would say that it worked well over 90% of the time.

However, there were those times when I did step in.  Those times happened when the children seemed stuck; when there was a great power differential between the children; or when I thought someone was going to get hurt physically or emotionally.  Below is a case in point.  Two children were driving across the board from opposite ends.  Their wheels met and neither one was going to budge.  At first, they just pushed their wheels against each other.  But as the confrontation got more serious, they started to use their driving sticks like swords.  One child in particular was getting very upset.  At this point, I put the camera down and intervened.

I cannot tell you exactly how I intervened.  I can tell you that I did not assume that either one had the right to cross the board first.  Rather, this was a conflict that they both were going to work out themselves---with a little help.  To that end, I probably got between the two children and began asking questions individually to each child about what was going on.  I probably restated that child's position to the other child and asked that child the same question and then what they thought about each other's responses.  I imagined we went back and forth many times before they were able reach a solution.

The vexing question that everybody asks is: "What happens if they cannot agree on a solution?" Instead of answering, I beg the question because it always depends on the context.  And the context includes more than what is happening in the moment.  If the children have had plenty of practice in working through potential conflicts---as illustrated by the first example---that vexing question rarely surfaces.

Actual conflicts in an early childhood classroom are inevitable.  They produce moments with great learning potential, especially in the social and emotional domain.   However, potential conflicts are many times more inevitable.  I contend that if we as adults trust the children to handle and negotiate those potential conflicts without adult interference, there will be fewer actual conflicts.