Leading and Caring for Children

This cluster addresses how we behave well in our most challenging times as we endeavor to treat children as we would like to be treated — less as underlings and more as fellow travelers on the planet.

Enterprise Talk Guidelines

This is what I have learned about how to actually change my own behavior with children to become more authentically me and act towards them in a way that is congruent with my values. You’ll find here a one page summary of Enterprise Talk and wall charts to post around you as reminders. The article on it is below.

Enterprise Talk: a handrail to authenticity and integrity

Authenticity: Am I being aware, open, and present in this moment of stress? Or am I acting habitually?
Integrity: If I hold certain values, am I practicing those values in this moment of stress? Am I walking my talk?

I wrote this in celebration of Lilian Katz, in which I discuss the significance of being carefully intentional when we talk to children. Since we adults are bigger, more privileged, and can be a bull in a china shop, we might look carefully at ourselves when we use our often unrecognized power. Download the pdf, on this page, too. This work is transformation.

 

Cultivating Conversations with Children

You know people who are surrounded by children because the children love being with them so much. Do you want that for you, too? After long study, really long study, I finally learned how to have meaningful conversations with any child I encounter. By meaningful, I mean that in one single conversation both the child’s life and the adult’s life are changed in a beneficial way. This is a complete course of study designed to change adult behavior. This is work is transformation, too, so it seems college credit is appropriate for doing the work in red.

If you are currently enrolled in a relevant higher education program, it may be possible to petition for independent study credit by documenting one’s work through the challenges linked here. Goals, objectives, assignments, and evaluation are all included.

Levels of Abstraction

Continuing up one more step in understanding the essentials, I offer a slide show presentation of Marion Blank’s Levels of Abstraction as applied to casual commenting and selecting children’s books. Here’s how some cultures prepare young children for the world of ideas and evaluating what is available in the library and online. No matter what you are searching for at my site, the utility of this for your future may surprise you. It sure changed me.

 

Troubling Behavior

Leadership and Care is my name for what is commonly called behavior management or discipline, which are ways we often label the strategies employed to deal with troubling behavior. After being educated by over a hundred very difficult children, I found that what I once thought was “correcting them” was not that at all. I found my role to be more accurately described as leadership for the child and the child’s community — merging healthy, loving communication and clearly understood acts of care.

If you are currently enrolled in a relevant higher education program, it may be possible to petition for independent study credit by documenting one’s work through the challenges linked here. Goals, objectives, assignments, and evaluation are all included.

Emotion Vocabulary

One handout from the Troubling Behavior materials has become widely used across the world.
I put together a one-page list of English words describing feelings organized by category and intensity. View in browser. Download pdf.

 

 

Active Listening

Also from the Troubling Behavior materials is a companion piece: a convention to optimize one’s effectiveness in providing care when times get emotional. This isn’t a way to solve any problem; it’s an opportunity for closeness, and it’s worth learning to do well.

 

Interviewing Prospective Staff

Rather than hire a teacher based on an abstract discussion of values and pedagogy, you can show them these four short videos and see what they truly understand. Each is a sophisticated provocation about the essentials of early childhood pedagogy. The videos reside on Vimeo, so they can be accessed anywhere, and the supportive materials reside on this page.

Talking to Children About Their Art

Here is what I have learned about being an authentic art educator for preschool aged children. Using tempera paint as an example I offer a protocol for responding to children as soon as possible after completing a work. We ought to treat children as we would treat adults.

 

Next Guides for Enterprise Talk