Winter Staff Development Day: A Chance to Reflect
By Melanie Burchby, Teacher
A staff development day gives teachers a time to pause and reconnect with one another as they consider their practice. They are able to discuss their challenges and rediscover the enthusiasm for teaching that brings them into the classroom each day. As Jennifer Winters, director, put it at the beginning of the winter staff development day on Feb. 10, 2014, these days provide “a chance to reflect on what we’re doing, how we do it and how we can do it better.”
During a day’s break from Bing’s busy schedule, teachers shared anecdotes from their classrooms and discussed issues ranging from work/life balance to children’s media exposure. They also saw presentations by two researchers conducting studies at Bing, Maria Barth and Molly Lewis. The staff ended the day by viewing a presentation on children’s block building that Winters and Bing teacher Todd Erickson presented at last year’s National Association for the Education of Young Children annual conference in Washington, D.C.
The first research presentation, by Barth, a fourth-year Stanford graduate student who worked with the late psychology professor Nalini Ambady, PhD, was of a study on children’s interpersonal perceptions and judgments. The fact that young children are dependent on others to learn about the world around them makes them vulnerable to misinformation. Children’s sensitivity to inaccuracy acts as a cognitive mechanism to protect against this. Preschool-aged children are sensitive to speakers’ inaccuracies, such as labeling objects with incorrect names, and apply their impressions to future interactions with those speakers. The current study is seeking to determine whether children are unbiased truth-seekers when the information they are looking for is in regards to themselves.
Similar studies of adults have found that adults prefer and are more likely to endorse self-enhancing information and positive feedback, and tend to be overconfident of their performance. This prompted researchers to wonder whether children prefer positive feedback, even when it is inaccurate. To test this, they designed an experiment with three puppets and a matching game. The first puppet’s feedback on how the child performed on the game was always accurate. The child then played with two inaccurate puppets. One inaccurate puppet always told the child he was right even if it wasn’t true. The other inaccurate puppet did the opposite, telling the child he was wrong regardless of whether it was true or not.
Researchers predicted that young children would prefer the inaccurate positive puppet—the one that always told them they were correct. Indeed, preliminary data suggested that more 3-year-olds than 4-year-olds reported that the puppet that consistently rewarded them knew the most about playing the game. Researchers are currently examining these differences in relation to children’s responses to a self-esteem scale. This study, once completed, could have implications for differentiation of instruction for children with varying self-esteem levels, as well as providing insight into the developmental pathway of self-enhancement.
Lewis, a third-year Stanford graduate student working with psychology professor Michael Frank, PhD, began her presentation by asking her audience to consider what the characteristics of an ideal language would be. She noted that from the speaker’s perspective, language would be simplest to use if it had only one short word that could mean anything. This however would make it impossible for the listener to discern the speaker’s meaning. In contrast, in a listener’s ideal language, every meaning would have its own unique word so that no word was ambiguous. Yet neither of these scenarios describes actual language. In language, there are many words, some short and some long, often with ambiguous meanings. So Lewis and her research team asked whether it would make language easier for both speaker and listener to have a complexity bias—that is, to use longer words to refer to more complex concepts.
The study examined whether adults and children have a complexity bias when learning new words. The research team found that adults were indeed more likely to assign a long word to a more complex-looking object. To explore this bias in children, researchers showed children a puppet and pictures of two of its toys on an iPad. They found that when children were asked to identify the toy with a longer nonsense name, they tended to pick the one with more complex features. This has led Lewis and her team to the preliminary conclusion that complexity bias develops during the preschool years.
Later in the afternoon, teachers turned their attention to one of the most common activities at Bing: building with blocks. They enjoyed the opportunity to observe and contemplate the work that children do in the block area at Bing as well as the ways in which their colleagues support that work. As they watched the video clips created by Chia-wa Yeh, head teacher, they got to witness the exciting ideas that children have around blocks with a degree of removal not possible in the midst of a busy classroom. Winters and Erickson structured the videos to reflect the stages of block building: carrying, stacking, bridging, creating enclosures and building representational structures. The videos captured the spirit and imagination the children bring to their buildings. “I built…” began one young boy—yet as he started to name his finished structure it toppled. Without missing a beat he finished, “I’m building!” Screening the presentation was a valuable opportunity for teachers to laugh together, as well as notice differences in children’s learning styles and colleagues’ varying approaches with time to appreciate nuances and discuss details.