The balancing act: How two kindergarten teachers manage to meet BOTH their students’ developmental needs AND their state’s curriculum mandates

Lisa S. Goldstein, Ph.D.
University of Texas at Austin


Presented at the 2005 Association for Childhood Education International Annual Meeting, Washington, DC

Abstract

This paper highlights the experiences and decisionmaking processes of two kindergarten teachers working to balance their commitment to developmentally appropriate teaching practices and their responsibility to prepare their students to meet district expectations and state benchmarks for academic achievement. Building on Bredekamp’s (1997) notion of early childhood educators as decisionmakers, the findings from this qualitative study indicate that each kindergarten teacher used a number of different strategies to balance developmentally appropriate practice and standards-based curriculum in her classroom; participants’ decisions about which strategy to use were fluid, flexible, and informed by their personal beliefs about their students’ needs and their district’s demands.

            Since its inception over a century ago, kindergarten in the United States has been shaped by a commitment to creating learning environments that support young children’s development in the cognitive, social, physical, and emotional domains. However, the influence of these developmentally appropriate practices in kindergarten curriculum and pedagogy is currently being challenged.  Shifts in our national educational climate have led to a focus on predetermined learning outcomes, an emphasis on accountability, and an understanding of education that highlights the importance of mastery of academic skills.  Originally confined to the upper elementary grades (grades 3-6), this orientation toward education has gradually trickled down through the primary grades and, finally, into kindergarten.

            This trend has presented kindergarten teachers with new challenges.  In addition to providing educational experiences that support children’s learning, growth, and development in the cognitive, emotional, social, and physical domains, now kindergarten teachers must also work to ensure that their students have had suitable exposure to all of the knowledge and skills deemed necessary by the state and school district. 

            In the larger qualitative study from which this paper is drawn, I set out to learn more about kindergarten teachers’ experiences in this new educational climate.  Using interviews and classroom observations, I (1) examined kindergarten teachers’ understandings of the challenges they face as they balance their commitment to developmentally appropriate teaching practices and their responsibility to prepare their students to meet district expectations and benchmarks for academic achievement and (2) documented the pedagogical decisions that emerged from those understandings.  In this paper, I focus specifically on two kindergarten teachers working at the same school site in a large, urban public school district in Texas, examining closely their efforts to create classroom environments that balance these two seemingly opposite sets of expectations and goals.  I found that each teacher developed a range of solutions to this pedagogical dilemma, and made professional decisions that reflected fluid and flexible understandings of the needs of her students and the demands of their school district.

Teaching kindergarten today

            Kindergarten teachers in the US are under increasing pressure as they deal with conflicting demands and with changing expectations for curriculum and practices.  Graue (2001) documents some of these struggles, highlighting the teachers’ perceptions of the tension between child-centered and teacher-centered practices, the disjuncture between kindergarten teachers’ philosophical beliefs about best practices and the increasingly structured and narrow curriculum dictated by local school districts, and the powerful influence on practice exerted by pressures from parents, school administrators, and principals. 

            Kindergarten teaching, always a demanding endeavor, is now profoundly complex.  And kindergarten teachers, always committed to doing what is right for the children in their care, are now balancing tensions, managing dilemmas, and confronting curricular and pedagogical challenges that many had never anticipated.  Recent research indicates that managing these tensions and negotiating these disjunctures is difficult.  A kindergarten teacher interviewed by Da Ros-Voseles, Danyi and Aurillo (2003) stated that she felt “torn between what she knew children needed and the principal’s mandates” (p. 36).  Pointing out that “kindergartners are now expected to learn what had once been in the domain of a first grade curriculum,” DeVault (2003, p. 91) expresses concern about these shifts not only in terms of their impact on children but also in terms of their impact on teachers.  A practicing kindergarten teacher herself, DeVault encourages all kindergarten teachers to stay true to their beliefs and to continue to create classroom environments grounded in their knowledge of what young children need to know and how they learn best.

            DeVault’s recommendation that kindergarten teachers think carefully about their beliefs and their professional knowledge base in the face of these new challenges echoes Bredekamp’s (1997) notion of early childhood educators as decisionmakers.  Bredekamp points out that excellent early childhood education requires numerous and complex judgments “constructed each day by teachers in relation to a specific group of children and within a specific social and cultural context” (1997, p. 41).  Implicit in Bredekamp’s image of professional decisionmaking is the notion of multiplicity:  every pedagogical dilemma can be resolved using any number of suitable and appropriate approaches, and different teachers will develop idiosyncratic solutions that reflect their own beliefs and personal practical knowledge, the needs of their students, and the multiple demands and constraints of their professional contexts.

            Bredekamp’s early childhood educator as decisionmaker model is also apparent in the findings of Wien’s detailed qualitative study of six Canadian primary grade teachers’ experiences balancing their personal commitments to developmentally appropriate early childhood education and their obligation to meet the prescriptive and rigid expectations for curriculum and assessment put in place by their school districts (Wein, 2004).  Although the professional challenges facing them were very similar, Wien found that her participants experienced and responded to those challenges in a wide variety of ways:  some participants elected to created a holistic practice that nested the standards within a child-centered approach to teaching and learning; some participants preferred partial integration of standards and child-centered practices; and some participants opted to reorganize their practices to center around the standards.

            Wien’s findings with Canadian teachers raise important questions about the decisionmaking strategies used by US early childhood educators in today’s challenging educational climate.  When kindergarten teachers are asked to act as decisionmakers under particularly demanding and potentially contradictory curricular and instructional circumstances, what kind of practices result?  What kinds of educational experiences are made available to the children in their classes?  I designed this study to explore these questions with a group of US kindergarten teachers.

Research methodology

            The teachers in this study are employed by the Rockville Independent School District (RISD), a large district serving a mid-sized city in Texas.  In recent years, Texas has invested a great deal of effort and money in the development of a fully–aligned, standardized curriculum and assessment system for grades kindergarten – 12.  The curriculum, called the Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills (TEKS), outlines the core content to be taught at each grade level across all disciplines.  Beginning in third grade, Texas students are assessed on their mastery of the knowledge and skills mandated for their grade level in certain subject areas.  These tests, called the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills (TAKS) are linked to academic promotion for individual students at certain grades, and are also used as a measure of school quality for comparing school districts across the state.

            In order to support their teachers in their efforts to guide their students to mastery of the TEKS and to ensure that all students in the district were being afforded equal access to quality learning experiences, the Rockville school district developed a set of Instructional Planning Guides (IPGs) aligned with the TEKS for each grade level.  The authors of the IPGs looked carefully at the TEKS and at the district-adopted textbooks and materials, and then created guidelines indicating the knowledge and skills that should be taught each week in every subject at every grade level.  Generally speaking, the IPGs are extremely detailed, even indicating the appropriate textbook pages related to the TEKS being taught.  The district-wide expectation is that all teachers will be following the IPGs for their grade level and subject, though in reality there is a fair amount of variance in the degree to which teachers are held to this expectation.  Kindergarten teachers in Rockville are expected to continue to attend to the developmental needs of the children in their classes as they always have done, and they are also expected to ensure that they master the kindergarten TEKS in order to be ready for first grade.

            Because this study aimed to examine the variety of ways in which kindergarten teachers balance those competing commitments and responsibilities, any interested kindergarten teacher in the Rockville Independent School District was considered to be a potential participant in the study.  The first group of participants—which includes Jenny and Ann, the teachers discussed in this paper—was recruited through my existing relationships with local elementary school principals and teachers. 

            Jenny and Ann teach at Burns Elementary School; the school enrolls approximately 850 students, 76% of whom are white.  Nestled in an affluent suburban neighborhood on the western edge of a Rockville, Burns Elementary School regularly regularly receives a “Recognized” rating based on students’ scores the statewide standardized achievement tests.

            Jenny and Ann are experienced kindergarten teachers.  Both are White, English-speaking women; Jenny is in her 20s and Ann, who is also the mother of three adolescent children, is in her 40s. At the time these data were gathered, they had been teaching together on the kindergarten team at Burns Elementary School for four years.  Both have taught at other school sites and other grade levels prior to taking kindergarten positions at Burns.

            Jenny, Ann, and the other study participants were observed during the course of their typical working day engaging in their usual teaching practices with the kindergarten students in their classrooms. Most observation sessions lasted between 1 and 4 hours; each participant was observed 5-10 times.  During each observation I documented aspects of the participant’s practice including the skills and knowledge selected for each lesson and the ways in which the participant organized the classroom and educational materials, created conditions for learning, and structured instructional activities.  I took notes on a laptop computer or in a notebook during these observations, describing in detail what was occurring in the classroom.

            Based on these observations, specific interview questions were crafted for each participant.  The goals of the interviews were (1) to allow the participants to discuss their teaching practices, offering insight into their planning, decisionmaking, and problem-solving; (2) to allow the participants to offer explanations or clarifications regarding instructional experiences I observed in their classrooms; and (3) to explore in detail the pedagogical and curricular challenges facing the participants as kindergarten teachers.  Interviews lasted 45 – 60 minutes and were audiotaped and transcribed.  The data in this paper are drawn from these interviews.

            When field notes and interviews were completed, the data were analyzed using the constant comparative method (Strauss & Corbin, 1990):  they were examined repeatedly to determine central themes, coded accordingly, and then re-read to look for disconfirming evidence.  Going back into the data with this focus allowed me to uncover relevant information that had been overlooked in earlier readings.

Making decisions

            The two kindergarten teachers whose experiences are the focus of this paper, Jenny and Ann, felt very committed to providing child-directed, play-based, developmentally appropriate educational experiences for the children in their classrooms.  For example, after informing me that some of the kindergarten classrooms in the district had had their housekeeping centers taken away, Jenny described what she would do if the district tried to remove her housekeeping center, or, indeed, any of her centers:  “I would quit.  Because that’s not kindergarten.  I didn’t sign up to teach first grade.  I want to teach kindergarten.”

            At the same time, Ann and Jenny were also keenly aware of the state’s requirements regarding the knowledge and skills to be taught in kindergarten, the instructional plans designed and mandated by the district to ensure the students would meet those requirements, and their obligation to remain aligned with these policies.  Jenny expressed concern that these expectations were putting kindergarteners under a great deal of “pressure to read and to do simple math by the end of the year.”

            Ann and Jenny were working hard to balance these conflicting goals, and both were facing similar challenges in doing so.  However, despite all these challenges, neither was ready to admit defeat: as Jenny said, “I’ve tried to squeeze it all in.”   My observations and conversations with Ann and Jenny about their efforts to meet the state’s standardized expectations for curriculum and academic skills and to satisfy their own commitment to creating developmentally appropriate educational experiences for their students simultaneously helped me to identify four of their strategies for “squeezing it all in:”  maintenance, integration, demarcation, and acquiescence.

Maintenance

            Ann and Jenny were able to maintain many of their longstanding practices and activities despite the recent shifts toward increased emphasis on coverage of the prescribed content and skills.  In these cases, the skills and content mandated for kindergarten were aligned with skills and content that were already part of Jenny’s and Ann’s practices.   For example, the skills and knowledge that have formed the core of the morning routine in Jenny’s classroom since she entered the teaching profession 4 years ago—calendar time, counting exercises, reading and editing the Morning Message and other typical kindergarten fare—are skills and knowledge included in the state-mandated kindergarten curricula for language arts, mathematics, and science.  Jenny points out that the TEKS require kindergartners “to do this special unit on weather.  Well, we talk about the weather every day.  So I don’t worry about [doing a special unit].” 

            This maintenance approach is facilitated in two ways.  First, the authors of the TEKS took into consideration the kinds of knowledge and skills that were traditionally taught in kindergarten and made efforts to synchronize the document with the tried-and-true practices already in use.  Second, in some content areas the district-adopted textbooks and supplemental materials were written expressly to align with the TEKS.  For example, Jenny informed me that the district’s Instructional Planning Guide (IPG) for Kindergarten Language Arts indicates that teachers are “just supposed to follow the order of the stories [in the reading textbook].  I mean, how hard is that?” 

            Jenny and Ann are able to maintain unchanged all of their practices that are aligned with the state-mandated curricula.  Careful thought and planning on the part of the state and the district led to the development of a set of standards, some of which kindergarten teachers could meet without extra effort or shifts in their decisionmaking or tried-and-true instructional routines.

Integration

            The integration approach requires the teacher to craft a careful synthesis in which the standards are thoroughly embedded in meaningful child-directed activities. Integration is the strategy most commonly presented in the literature as a solution to the problem of balancing DAP and standards in classroom practices (Wien, 2004).  The standards determine the knowledge and skills that must be taught and the guidelines for developmentally appropriate practices (Bredekamp & Copple, 1997) indicate the most effective ways to teach young children:  these two bodies of knowledge are brought together to form a coherent approach to teaching. 

            Ann offers an example of how this thinking plays out at Burns Elementary.  After she described her willingness to replace the district-mandated materials with activities that she believes will be more effective with her children, I asked about the principal’s comfort with Ann’s departure from the Instructional Planning Guide.  Ann informed me that  “as long as we get to that same end result that the IPGs are directing us towards [the administrators] are going to let us do it even if it is a different way to get there.”  Ann’s principal is willing to allow the Burns kindergarten teachers to use their best judgment to select the activities, materials, and experiences that will be most useful in guiding the children to the mandated outcomes.

            In Ann’s class, skills from the Kindergarten mathematics TEKS are regularly taught, practiced, and reinforced through engaging games. Because the games are intrinsically rewarding, the children are motivated to continue to play, thereby extending and deepening their learning.  In these math lessons there are no worksheets for the children to rush through, endure, or stare at blankly, and there is no need for Ann to remind the children to stay on task, to do their work, or to finish up.

            Although Ann makes it appear effortless, integrating the standards into child-centered, play-based practices is very challenging.  Integration demands a detailed knowledge of the standards, a storehouse of ideas for learning activities, a wealth of personal practical knowledge to bring to bear on the process of synthesis, the professional confidence to create a classroom environment that might look very different from other kindergarten teachers’, and an administration willing to allow teachers to use their professional judgment. 

Demarcation

            When using demarcation approach, kindergarten teachers draw clear boundaries around those activities designed to teach knowledge and skills linked to the state’s academic standards and around those activities designed to offer children developmentally appropriate learning experiences.  Demarcation is one of the hallmarks of Jenny’s practice, seen daily in her morning instructional block.  Jenny breaks the block into two separate instructional periods:  stations and free centers.  Stations are learning centers strictly dedicated to activities linked to the IPGs, the TEKS, and to the mastery of the fine motor skills (such as cutting, gluing, and so on) that would be necessary for success in first grade.  Children were grouped by ability and rotated through 4 different centers during this hour-long instructional period.  Free centers, by contrast, arre child-directed, play-based activity centers such as blocks, house corner, library, and art center.  During free centers, children were allowed to choose which classmates they worked with, which centers they went to, and, within reason, what they accomplished in each center.  Free centers were scheduled immediately after stations each day and lasted for 30 – 45 minutes.

            At first I understood Jenny’s use of demarcation in her classroom as an either-or approach to teaching kindergarten.   The daily schedule indicated that it was either time for stations or for free centers.  Learning activities were either academic or developmentally appropriate.  The values, the beliefs about children, and theories of learning undergirding literacy stations and the values, the beliefs about children, and theories of learning undergirding free centers are mutually incompatible and the only way that these two perspectives could co-exist in the same classroom would be to keep them clearly separated.

            However, putting Jenny’s use of demarcation into the larger context of her practices helped me to see things in a different light.  Rather than being an example of an either-or approach, Jenny’s morning instructional block can be understood as representing a both-and approach (Bredekamp & Copple, 1997) to balancing DAP and standards.  Having both stations and free centers each morning allows Jenny to ensure that her students are having both academically-oriented and developmentally appropriate learning experiences on a daily basis.  She is able to satisfy both the district’s expectations and her own professional commitments without sacrificing the integrity of either.

Acquiescence

            Acquiescence is not meant to indicate reluctant acceptance of the standards themselves, but to describe teachers’ decision to concede to the use of developmentally inappropriate instructional materials and practices in order to teach the knowledge and skills contained in the standards.  Kindergarten teachers who are under a great deal of pressure to help their young students master the academic skills presented in the state-mandated curriculum may acquiesce to the demands of their principal, the district, or the parent community and teach the TEKS to their students using worksheets, closed-ended activities, or other product-oriented teaching strategies thought to demonstrate concrete, visible evidence of children’s learning. 

            Ann frequently referred to kindergarten colleagues at other schools in the district who were expected to use acquiescence as their sole approach to fulfilling their obligation to meet the state standards.  She described schools in which the kindergarten teachers were required to cover the curriculum according to the district’s plan, saying that they “have to do the IPGs daily and that’s what their bible is and if they don’t do it then they are in trouble.  Whether the kids are ready for it or not [they] just keep moving.” 

            Compared to some of their colleagues at other schools, Ann and Jenny are not tightly constrained by the district’s requirements, however they too use the acquiescence approach.  For Jenny and Ann, the main motivation to choose acquiescence is to satisfy parents’ desire to see evidence that their children are engaging traditional academic activities that will prepare them for first grade.  “They will come and say ‘I want my child to be reading more,’ or ‘I want my child to be having math plus and minus homework,’” Jenny reports.  The parents of Ann’s kindergarteners are also interested in seeing tangible evidence of their children’s academic skill development. 

            Ann and Jenny understand and respect the preferences of her students’ parents and are willing to find mutually satisfactory compromises.  For example, Ann admits, “I do do worksheets occasionally….  The parents like them because they look like real work.”   However, both Jenny and Ann have limits to their acquiescence.  Ann, for example, is willing to have her students do worksheets, but only carefully and deliberately selected worksheets that “have a real good purpose behind them.”   Jenny and Ann have clear and strongly-held professional beliefs that undergird their practices; those beliefs are the foundation of their decisionmaking regardless of parent demand.

Discussion and implications

            In their efforts to meet both their students’ developmental needs and the demands of their district and state, I found Jenny and Ann using all four of these approaches, sometimes all within the same day.  Unlike the teachers in Wien’s (2004) study who were characterized as balancing DAP and standards in one of four ways—using a linear and lockstep approach, resisting the standards, holding the linear approach and a more integrated approach in tension, or integrating the curriculum thoroughly—Ann and Jenny are not limited to any single approach or perspective.  Jenny and Ann rely on their own “professional judgments, not on following a list of described practices as if they constituted a recipe” (Bredekamp, 1997, p. 41).  Their instructional decisions are based on the thoughtful consideration of many factors, and their relationships with the standards and with DAP are fluid and flexible.  Like pedagogical Swiss Army knives, Jenny and Ann are equipped with the right tool for any teaching challenge (Jackson, 1990/1969).

            The experiences reported by Jenny and Ann add to our knowledge about the challenges faced by kindergarten teachers as they work to balance the tension between their commitment to developmentally appropriate teaching practices and their responsibility to prepare their students to meet district expectations and state benchmarks for academic achievement.  To paraphrase Sue Bredekamp, for Ann and Jenny “resolving apparent contradictions is just another part of [their] day at work” (Bredekamp, 1997, p. 51).  Maintaining those practices that are aligned with the state frameworks, integrating the frameworks and developmentally appropriate practices, clearly demarcating the parts of the day devoted to meeting the state standards and the parts oriented toward meeting children’s developmental needs, and acquiescing to the expectations outlined in the state frameworks and engaging in practices that are not developmentally appropriate are four possible strategies useful in resolving the apparent contradictions that are part of teaching kindergarten today. 

            It must be noted that these four approaches were derived from relatively brief periods of observation and conversation with Jenny and Ann.  Had I spent more time in their classrooms it is possible that I would have identified additional approaches that were not in evidence during my fieldwork period.  Further, it is important to note that these approaches were derived from the observation of only two teachers.  It is likely that observation of a greater number of kindergarten teachers working in a wider variety of school and community contexts would lead to the identification of additional approaches to resolving those contradictions.

            That both Jenny and Ann employ a variety of strategies for resolving the apparent contradictions they face daily in their practices adds new empirical evidence to our conversations about early childhood educators’ decisionmaking.  For example, on any given day Jenny will create clear demarcations between the standards-based stations and the play-based free centers offered to her students and yet she will also hold opening activities in which the new academic standards and the long-standing practices of kindergarten are existing side-by-side; while just across the hall Ann will create carefully integrated learning experiences in which play and learning are indistinguishable to the children and yet she will also expect the children to complete worksheets.  Rather than see these as contradictions or internal inconsistencies, I prefer to identify this fluidity and flexibility as evidence of sophisticated pedagogical decisionmaking.  No practice is entirely flawless and none is entirely corrupt; in order to meet the varied needs of their students, teachers need to have access to a full range of practices and select the tool that best fits the given situation.   

            I believe the most significant contribution that Jenny and Ann make to the field of early childhood education is to demonstrate that kindergarten teaching is more complex and nuanced than has been portrayed in current scholarship.  Thus far, researchers—myself included—have positioned kindergarten teachers between two opposing and contradictory goals:  either meeting the needs of their students through developmentally appropriate practices OR meeting the academic expectations mandated by their school district or state (Goldstein, 2005; Wien, 2004).  By contrast, Jenny and Ann represent themselves as teaching kindergarten in a context that makes multiple demands and requires them to manage and negotiate a number of obligations and priorities at any given moment. 

            The data presented in this paper show Jenny and Ann taking many factors—not only developmentally appropriate practices and state standards—into consideration as they make teaching decisions.  Jenny and Ann draw on their own beliefs about how children learn best, on their personal practical knowledge and their wisdom of practice, and on their knowledge of the particular, specific children in their class, including information about their ethnic, cultural and linguistic background, their family structure, their exceptionalities, their strengths and growth areas, and their interests and preferences.  Ann and Jenny also consider the state standards, the district’s Instructional Planning Guides, the materials made available to them as kindergarten teachers in the district, and the time constraints within their daily schedule.

            Though scholars have portrayed kindergarten teaching as complicated and difficult, I believe that we have in fact oversimplified the situation.  Attending carefully to the details of Ann’s and Jenny’s stories can help us begin to understand the myriad demands and challenges kindergarten teachers encounter in their daily professional lives.  I encourage the field of early childhood education to give more thorough consideration to the experiences of kindergarten teachers in today’s educational climate, and to strive to craft scholarly representations of these teachers’ work with young children that capture as fully as possible the multiplicity and complexity of kindergarten teaching.

References

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Bredekamp, S. & Copple, C. (Eds.) (1997.) Developmentally appropriate practice in early childhood programs, Revised edition. Washington, DC: National Association for the Education of Young Children.

Da Ros-Voseles, D.A., Danyi, D., & Aurillo, J. (2003.) Aligning professional preparation and practice: Bringing constructivist learning to kindergarten. Dimensions of Early Childhood, 31, 2, 33-38.

DeVault, L. (2003.) The tide is high but we can hold on: One kindergarten teacher’s thoughts on the rising tide of academic expectations. Young Children, 58, 6, 90-93.

Goldstein, L.S. (2005.). Under pressure: Challenges facing kindergarten teachers. Paper presented at the Hawaii International Conference on Education, Honolulu, HI.

Graue, E. (2001.) What’s going on in the children’s garden? Kindergarten today. Young Children, 56, 3, 67-73.

Jackson, P. (1990/1969.). Life in classrooms. New York: Teachers College Press.

Strauss, A. & Corbin, J. (1990.) Basics of qualitative research: Grounded theory procedures and techniques. Newbury Park, CA: Sage.

Wien, C.A. (2004.) Negotiating standards in the primary classroom: The teacher’s dilemma. New York: Teachers College Press.