By Elena Haase Cox, Teacher
At Bing Nursery School’s spring staff development day, the staff gathered to learn about, reflect upon, and discuss topics that are of central importance to our work. We began with a presentation about intrinsic motivation, moved on to a conversation about supporting neurodiverse children in our classrooms, and concluded with a talk by Veronica Boyce, a researcher in Stanford’s Language and Cognition Lab. Throughout the day, staff and presenters shared thoughtful insights, delved into compelling research, and engaged in rich conversation and learning that is sure to inform and expand our work within and for the Bing community.
Adrienne Lomangino, Bing head teacher and pedagogical specialist, opened the day by sharing a presentation titled “Lively Minds at Play: Intrinsic Motivation.” She discussed how young children actively construct their knowledge of the world through their engagement with it; they constantly encounter new situations and experiences, and they are “wired” to navigate and engage with these experiences through play. For children, learning through play is intrinsically motivated; they play because of the inherent satisfaction it brings—and not because of external pressures or the promise of rewards. Intrinsic motivation “is the ideal setting for building knowledge and skills,” according to Lomangino, and this makes play a rich resource for learning. Repeated experiences with playful learning create “lively minds” and help children “become engaged, resilient, lifelong learners.”
Drawing on research by psychologists Richard Ryan and Edward Deci, Lomangino talked about Self-Determination Theory (SDT), a framework they developed for understanding motivation. Ryan and Deci identified three factors that drive an individual’s sense of motivation and well-being: autonomy (the freedom to make choices), competence (feeling capable in what you are doing), and relatedness (the sense of being cared for and connected to others). While the model was originally created with older learners in mind, we discussed that it seems fundamental to young children’s engagement with learning. With SDT as a reference point, we watched three videos of children’s play at Bing. In a video of children playing on the boat in East Room, we observed autonomy, as children confidently expressed the roles they had chosen in the game. In a video of children from Center Room engaging in doctor play, we noticed competence, as they navigated the classroom and put materials to novel use with a creative plan in mind. In a video of children painting in the Twos classroom, we observed relatedness, as children clearly noticed and thought about what others were doing, shared materials, and replicated one another’s designs.
Next, Bing teachers and staff gathered in small groups for a conversation about how we can best support the neurodivergent children in our classroom communities. Questions were given to each team to guide our discussion, including: “What strengths do neurodivergent children bring?” “What do we already do at Bing to support our neurodiverse community?” “What questions do you have about supporting children?” These prompts sparked meaningful conversations for each classroom team, which were shared with the entire staff when we gathered for a whole-group reflection.
Our work as teachers begins before children enter the classroom. Several teams expressed how important it is to create an environment that is accessible for all of our students and supports diverse learners in getting the most from school. Several teams pointed out that many of the practices built into the Bing philosophy—such as freedom of choice and movement, the gift of time, and the open-endedness of materials—inherently offer the kind of flexibility that is welcoming and inclusive of children with diverse abilities, experiences, and needs. As teachers, our responsibility is to build individual relationships with each child, which means adjusting our approaches and classroom routines to invite full participation. Only by taking the time to truly get to know each child can we understand their strengths and areas of continued learning and offer the support that will serve them best.
Teachers from the different teams conveyed their appreciation for the diverse perspectives that are represented in our classrooms, and highlighted the strengths neurodivergent children bring. We plan to continue this conversation at Bing, advance our learning, and enact practices that best support neurodivergent children, uplifting our community as a whole.
At day’s end, we gathered for a presentation by Veronica Boyce, a fourth-year PhD student in the Language and Cognition Lab. Titled “4- to 5-Year-Old Children Can Successfully Communicate Using Ad-Hoc Referential Expressions,” the research helped to bolster our understanding of how children’s communication skills develop.
Boyce’s study included an “iterated knowledge game,” in which two partners describe abstract images to each other. Researchers previously found that when adults play these games, the descriptions become shorter over repeated rounds as pairs develop shared references and nicknames for the different pictures. But what about young children? Do they use metaphors and build on repeated references in the same way?
To explore this question, Boyce invited pairs of 4- and 5-year-old children to play a game. For each round, the children were presented with two geometric images of people engaged in different activities. One child’s role was to give a clue describing one of the images; the other child had to guess which picture was being referred to. The partners swapped roles after each round, taking turns being the “describer” and the “guesser.”
Boyce found that the children could successfully convey information about the target image to their partner, with the correct image being guessed 80% of the time. Examples of clues children offered include “someone flying a plane without a cover” and “a man with one foot and a line and a square and a triangle.” The researchers found consistency in children’s descriptions of the images, with individual children giving similar clues for the same image across multiple rounds; they also found that children’s clues tended to be more similar to their partner’s clues than to the clues given by other pairs of children for the same picture, indicating that children are “influenced by their partner’s prior descriptions.” Boyce plans to expand this research to include more children to better understand the differences between how adults and children approach and develop communication.
The spring staff development day was full of reflection, discovery, and conversation. Bing staff dove deep into our current practices, while considering future directions and how we can continue to support learning and growth as a community.