Small Talk

topics: Reading and Literacy, Special Education, Teacher Preparation

Fall 2006 Ideas in Action, by Kurt Brobeck

David Dickinson is that rare creature in education: a male with a particular interest in early childhood education. As might be guessed, Dickinson’s path into the field was an indirect one. A comparative religion major as an undergraduate at Oberlin, Dickinson also minored in education. “I was interested in the big picture issues, like how cultures shape people’s thinking,” he says. “At the same time, I was interested in children and especially in trying to make a difference for children in low-income communities.”

While an undergraduate, Dickinson spent a semester in Philadelphia working in the public schools. After graduation, he moved into teaching. “I was drawn to the elementary grades,” he relates. “It was really only when I moved to graduate school that I ended up gravitating into the early childhood area. And that was because I got interested in language development.”

One moment was particularly galvanizing. “When I was teaching in West Philadelphia, I was working with an all African American population from working class homes. I remember one girl, Sherry, a fifth-grade girl who was able to decode sounds pretty well. I remember one day when she was able to sound out the word “prairie.” I asked her if she knew what it meant, and she had no idea. It was a completely unknown word to her. This was the kind of thing a lot of the kids I was dealing with were facing. They didn’t have the language background and skills they needed for deep understanding, and they were right on the cusp of moving into middle school. Then I applied to Harvard and the person I went to work with there was particularly interested in language issues.”

Dickinson received his Ed.D. from Harvard in 1982 and went on to teach at Boston, Tufts, and Clark universities before moving to the Education Development Center in 1994. In 2002, he joined the faculty at Boston College, from which Peabody recruited him in 2005. He teaches in Peabody’s doctoral program in language, literacy, and culture. Dickinson’s Handbook of Early Literacy Research (Guilford Press), which he co-edited with Susan B. Neuman of the University of Michigan, was published last year. The two also co-edited the first volume, published in 2001.

This fall Dickinson is embarking on a major new collaboration with Ann Kaiser, professor of special education. Armed with a grant of nearly $3 million from the Institute of Education Sciences, the two are initiating a four-year curriculum study involving 60 Head Start classrooms in Birmingham, Alabama.

“We’re going to implement a curriculum that I helped to write with Judy Schickedanz called Opening the World of Learning (OWL),” he says. “It provides a lot of guidance to teachers in ways that help children build their knowledge of the world and their vocabulary as well as basic literacy skills,” says Dickinson. Forty of the 60 Head Start classrooms will use this curriculum while the other twenty will serve as the control group.

In addition, half of the OWL classrooms will adopt elements of Kaiser’s Enhanced Milieu Teaching. “Ann has been developing this over a number of years, and she’s used it for children with significant language delays or behavior problems, as well as children with autism and with Down Syndrome. We’ll be targeting the lowest children in these classrooms in a very focused way that we think can have major effects on their language and early literacy development,” says Dickinson.

This is the first time Dickinson will have done such an intensive intervention. “Prior to this I did a descriptive study where we followed low-income children from age three up into middle school,” he says. “We observed their experiences in homes and classrooms and found that the experiences in the classrooms accounted for as much variation in outcomes in kindergarten and then fourth and seventh grade as did our measures of the home background. People would never have expected that the preschool quality measures could match the impact of the parents.”

Another swing of the pendulum

The so-called “reading wars” of the 1990s are over, and the skills-centered approach to reading instruction has largely been enshrined in No Child Left Behind, including the Reading First and Early Reading First programs. For Dickinson, this is mostly a good thing, although he voices some reservations.

What concerns Dickinson most is the question of how to build vocabulary and language skills. “As the importance of phonemic awareness and alphabet knowledge has become well established it’s turned into performance standards for preschools and kindergarten. So preschools are now under pressure for instruction that they never experienced before. The danger is that teachers start doing direct instruction in letters and numbers and colors and sounds, but it doesn’t include these broader language skills. There’s the potential for a narrowing of the preschool curriculum to things that schools were pretty good at doing already.”

This is your brain on words

So just how important is a quality preschool experience to long-term learning? “We’re just beginning to understand the possible impact that rich learning experiences in preschool can have on children. It may be very critical,” says Dickinson. He points to several longitudinal studies that suggest a well-done preschool program does have lasting effects. “The well-known one, from High Scope, has followed children out from four-year old programs into adult life, and you see enduring effects. The Abecedarian Project has followed people to age 21. Whether the effects are around academics, or whether they’re around children acquiring the abilities to regulate their attention, to relate to others, to function in groups, that’s not so evident.”

“There have been several studies in addition to the one that I did that indicate that the richness of language in preschool and kindergarten has effects that appear later in fourth- and fifth-grade reading,” he says. “It’s not clear what the mechanism for that is. It might simply be that the accumulation of good strong vocabularies when children are four and five becomes the pool of words they need for later reading. If they are in rich environments they get them, but if they are not in supportive environments in homes and classrooms they may go without. Classrooms have been repeatedly shown to be pretty weak settings for teaching language and vocabulary skills, so they may not pick up the vocabulary in school. It also may be that if you get children starting to use language productively, they become self-teaching mechanisms.”

Dickinson says that brain-based research is also contributing to our growing understanding about the development of language skills. Studies on neural plasticity have shown that from age three up through middle childhood is a period of maximum density of synapses, as well as a time of high metabolic activity in the brain’s language areas. This may be a time of peak development when children are naturally primed to take advantage of language experiences. It’s possible, Dickinson says, “that getting a rich infusion of language experience at this point will have effects on later language, on literacy, and maybe on phonemic awareness.”

Walking the talk

“Just in the last few years the field has begun to recognize the important of language. Partly that comes from attending to the needs of children from low-income and second language backgrounds where issues of language learning are of particular importance,” Dickinson says.

When asked what forms such supports might take, Dickinson says conversation is critical. “In the longitudinal study I did, the quality of the teacher’s spontaneous conversations with children as they engaged in centers activities was the strongest single predictor of how children did better. Other predictors were things like the quality of conversations during book reading and the intellectual content of group meetings, so the kinds of interactions the teachers engaged the children in are important. All the research on mother-child interactions, or father-child interactions, makes clear that children learn language as they interact with somebody who’s listening to them and supporting them. It seems that that’s probably the most important activity in preschools, too.”

This is a point Dickinson stresses when he works with in-service preschool teachers, something he does often. “What I’ve done, essentially, is create a kind of university course for preschool teachers,” he says. “Many preschool teachers don’t have foundational knowledge about language and literacy development. I focus on the importance of engaging children in extended conversations, on being responsive to them, and on helping children extend their thinking.”

In a pilot study for the Birmingham project, Dickinson has been working with preschool teachers in Lawrence County, Tn. In addition to in-service training, Dickinson has teachers audiotape their interactions with children. He and his graduate students then transcribe these conversations and offer constructive criticism. “I’m trying to help the teachers become more aware of how they interact with the children and the quality of the language that’s coming from the children.”

“This is why I’m so concerned about a narrowing of the curriculum,” says Dickinson. “You can teach a four-year-old to recognize an A, but they’re going to learn to recognize an A in kindergarten, probably. So if all of your games are concentrated around a narrow set of skills, and that comes at the expense of building language skills, conceptual skills, the ability to interact and stay focused on tasks, then we may actually be undermining where the more long-term effects of preschool might be.

“My data suggest that these language skills may be one area that is going to have sustained long-term effects, and if we don’t target these with four-year-olds who are coming from at-risk backgrounds, they may not get it when they get to kindergarten. And they may never quite recover from that.”

A Preschool Teacher Learns to Listen

Pat Dial has 26 years of experience as a teacher, but until last year, she had never taught preschool. She soon realized that teaching does not get easier just because the kids are younger. “It doesn’t matter how many years experience you have. Being a teacher is hard. This is a hard job.”

But Dial found she was up to the challenge and that even with her experience, it is never too late to learn new skills. When her supervisor approached her with the idea of collaborating with David Dickinson she was intrigued. Dickinson talked with her about observing her class, making video and audio recordings of her teaching, and offering assessment and constructive suggestions.

“When I saw the first videotape, I had to sit down,” says Dial. “When centers were going on, I would take over the center. I call it the bulldozer effect. I would not take the time to observe, to stay back, wait, and see what the children were doing.”

According to Dickinson, “Pat is a teacher who was very engaged instructionally. She wanted to make sure kids were learning all the time. But she never let the kids talk. There was not a space for the children in the conversation,” Dickinson says. “But because she’s a really committed, hard working, smart teacher, all I needed to do was have a session with her and say these are the important things, this is what a good conversation looks like, and then start the process of reflection.”

On June 19, Dial shared the podium with Dickinson at the second Tennessee Pre-K Summer Institute, a conference for teachers from across the state sponsored by Peabody and the State of Tennessee. Dickinson presented data showing how important conversations are for building the repository of words students draw on later for academic success, and he shared his methods with teachers for creating more effective classroom conversations. Dial spoke and showed some of the video taken in her classroom.

Two clips offered a before and after look at the casual interactions Dial had with children during centers time. In the first, Dial is directive, practically taking over the children’s play. The second shows her listening, asking questions, and following the children’s lead conversationally. The children, for their part, are considerably more engaged.

“You have to up your level of questioning,” says Dial, who advised the teachers to listen more and talk less, to model appropriate vocabulary, and to use centers and small group time to the maximum.