Zhang Jun
is an associate professor at Nanjing Normal University and concurrently serves as the principal of Nanjing Heqin Kindergarten. Participated in the formulation of China's "3-6-year-old children's learning and development guide " and " compulsory education primary school science curriculum standard " and other documents.
The most basic professional ability of a preschool teacher is that he has the ability to emit light and heat, he can see children in his eyes, he can discover the unique highlights of each child, and he can have heart-to-heart communication with the children. .
1. Two basic abilities of kindergarten teachers
Observation and evaluation, practical reflection
Early childhood education is to comply with the child's nature and then guide his development. Let your child do what he likes. Of course, it’s not just about letting him do it. We have to think about how to let him develop by letting him do what he likes.
Education does not need to be pretentious, nor does it need to have this or that feature or this and that model. Education is to live and grow with children. Who doesn't know this? Therefore, the true meaning of early childhood education may lie in those seemingly ordinary lives and seemingly simple truths.
Therefore, I think it is not that difficult to be a kindergarten teacher. If our teachers want to adapt to the child's nature and promote his development, then I think we must see the child's needs and interests, and at the same time you can also discover the value of education from it. This is Requires an ability to observe and evaluate.
You can see the child's interests, needs, and problems. You can evaluate the child's current situation and level. Once you understand him, we can then think about how to support him. All this may happen unconsciously in life. Of course, as to its actual effect, we need to reflect on whether the child has developed and whether I have promoted the child's development.
Assessment does not increase the burden on your work, it helps you reduce the burden. Why? Because through assessment, you can understand it better, and the more you understand and are familiar with the person you educate, the easier it is to communicate with you. If you want to educate him and influence him, you must understand him, and this understanding is through observation and evaluation.
2. How to become a more professional preschool teacher
I talked about observing and understanding children before. It is an instinct. Of course, this is just a bottom line. To become a more professional teacher, then this PCK (subject teaching knowledge or teaching content knowledge Pedagogical Content Knowledge) is really important.
You need to know the learning and development of children in each of the five major areas, what is its development process, and where the child is currently in this development process. This requires a professional framework to help you position it. So what do we do in our kindergarten work? What is PCK in our preschool field? It is our "Learning and Development Guide for Children Aged 3-6". We streamlined the 32 goals in the five major areas of the guide into 25 development concerns, and then we connected the dots into lines.
To give an example, the first development concern in the health field is the ability to identify and regulate emotions. What does the teacher need most? He needs to know how the emotional recognition and regulation abilities of kindergarten children develop from small classes to large classes.
We describe such a development process to the teacher, such as from passively reacting emotionally to situations, to becoming aware of the causes of emotions, being able to gradually express emotions in language or in a non-exaggerated way, and then being able to respond to the causes of emotions. Self-regulation, and the experience of emotions becomes increasingly complex and sophisticated. This is a line that teachers must be clear in their hearts. With this line in mind, it will be very clear when observing children: what stage of development is a crying child at? What stage is a child who cries but can explain the reasons? A child who is good at regulating his emotions is at what stage? What stage.
Based on this development process, we give teachers a step forward for children. This is not said by experts, but done by experts and teachers together. We are not top-down, but top-down. In other words, the following behaviors were recorded by teachers during their daily observations. It verifies this theoretical framework and helps us better modify and improve this theoretical framework. Our assessment guidelines are also dynamic and constantly changing. This is what we do to help teachers conduct observation and assessment.
Thinking is human instinct, but to turn this thinking into professional thinking, the premise is that you must give teachers professional autonomy. This professional autonomy is not only a right but also a responsibility. So in our kindergarten, there are two sentences that have become mantras. One is "What you do, you have the final say." Experts are not shields. They do not mean that you should do what the experts say should be done. The other is "Don't ask about right or wrong, just ask about thinking." It doesn't matter if you make a mistake in
, but what kind of thinking this mistake can give you and what you can gain from it are what we care more about. To be honest, there are a lot of teaching and research in our kindergarten, and these are opportunities for everyone to exchange their ideas. At the same time, our kindergarten curriculum is also a class-based curriculum. Each class has the right to make curriculum decisions, but the prerequisite is to be able to think. Every week's teaching plan requires thinking about how to determine the focus of this week's lessons based on the children's behavior and existing problems last week. Therefore, all the documents we ask teachers to write are all practical information. They are not copied, but are all imagined.
We have two sentences, if you can see the children, you can find the lessons. In fact, this is a delaying measure that we give our teachers when they doubt their professional self-confidence. When he cannot control his classroom.
It doesn’t matter if you don’t do well in class, life is a course. It doesn't matter if you don't have teaching skills, we start by developing the teacher's ability to observe and evaluate. So when you see the child, see the child's interests and needs, see the child's problems, you find the possibility of education. This is the curriculum.
In every course story, I have to ask everyone the "Three Questions of the Soul": where are the children, where is the learning, and where is the course. Including our teacher Tian’s wedding, I didn’t let her go. I asked her where the children were.
One day our teacher sent me a message and said: "Teacher Zhang, you always ask these three questions, but I don't know why you ask these three questions. Is there any difference between them?" I think this teacher is very cute and knows what he means. I know it, but I don’t know it. In fact, I haven’t thought about this problem seriously. I said let me think about it. Then I thought about it all night, and I gave him this answer.
I said that actually I asked these three questions from three different aspects and three different angles. We need to think about where children are and respect their interests and needs. Do you see children in your courses? What kind of role are children? Is he the initiator of the course? Is he the motivator of the course?
At the same time, we need to see the child’s learning, his experience, and Growth, this is where we have to think about learning.
As for the course, it is actually about reflecting on what we ourselves have done for our children and how effective our support and influence is.
3. In addition to professional abilities, what else do preschool teachers need?
I have finished talking about teachers’ professional abilities. Next is the content beyond the test questions: what is beyond abilities.
Teachers who visit our kindergarten or participate in our teaching research will have such questions, which is why your teacher dares to speak, why he thinks so, why he can speak, and why your teacher is so active in writing observation records.What I am particularly proud of is that until now, our kindergarten has not required us to write several observation diaries every month. So what is the secret of teachers’ diligent observation and active thinking, and where does their enthusiasm for work come from?
To be honest, the job of a kindergarten teacher is very low-paying and very hard, but what attracts us to stay here? Job, or even work for a lifetime? The most common answer we may see is our love for our children, but I don’t think so.
In fact, there is something more than love that can attract us teachers to teach for life. What is it? It is curiosity about children, and it is such a developmental change in children that allows us to see the power of life.
So in this sense, I think if you choose to work as a kindergarten teacher, your life will be tied to the life of your child, and your life and work cannot be separated. I often tell teachers that what kind of life you live will determine the environment in which your children will grow up. What attitudes and dreams you have towards life will also be passed on to your children.
If I were asked to answer where teachers’ work enthusiasm comes from, then I would say, from the children. It’s so fun to be with children, and it’s so interesting to see them grow. Although many of our teachers do not have children yet, we can draw a lot of positive power from these children.
Maybe the management of our kindergarten is a relatively Buddhist management. There are no rewards for teachers to publish papers, we have no rewards for award-winning projects, and there are no rewards for any classes. Where do our rewards come from? From the children. So what is the meaning of teachers’ work and what is the secret of our teacher’s growth? Today I will use this sentence as an answer: “The secret is that our teachers and children share life and grow together.” Teachers are still children and have just left When they go to work, they are also growing. How can we give them the strength to grow? It is not the principal who gives them chicken soup, but the children who let them find such a direction and motivation for growth.
Teacher Tian’s lawn wedding is very popular on the Internet. I really don’t want her to be too popular because there will be a lot of misunderstandings. We really don’t want to be unconventional and original, so I hope everyone can see what is behind it from this case. Teachers and children grow together in a shared life.
Why did their class do this cultural theme? The children noticed that the teacher was taking wedding photos, and they were getting married. Some children said: "I want to watch Teacher Tian get married." This sentence touched the softest part of our teacher's heart. In this place, she is willing to reveal her private life to children. What’s behind this? It’s our teacher-student relationship, the shared life between our teachers and their children.
I went to their class to take a look, and the very delicate wedding photos were dirty by the children, but I believe the teacher is still very sweet in his heart, because most people keep their wedding photos in their own drawers. Few people will pay attention and want to see it. Therefore, the teacher is willing to share his life with the children, and the children are also willing to participate in the teacher's life. Isn't this what we most want to see?
In our kindergarten class, there is a family portrait on the wall when entering the door. This is The biggest comfort for children in small classes in the early days of kindergarten. But the teacher also took a family photo of the whole class on the day when all the children came and hung it on the wall to let the children know that "home" is not only your family of three, but also our Primary 2 class. The teacher's sports meeting was over, and the teacher also printed out the family photos of the teachers participating in the sports meeting and pasted them next to the class family photo. It told us that this is the home of our Heqin Kindergarten.
Teachers who have been to our kindergarten know that our environment is very simple, because we do not advocate teachers working overtime to do these things. We want teachers to spend all their time observing children, living together and sharing life with children.But we are not saying that we should not create environments. Our philosophy is to create environments with children as the center. If children cannot interact with the environment you create, no matter how hard you work, it will be in vain. We will not do anything that children are not interested in, have nothing to do with children’s lives, and are just for adults to watch. Children really pay attention to the environment because it is their own environment.
What exactly is the professional growth of teachers? It is both simple and complex. Three years ago, I visited a kindergarten in Japan. I was the new principal at the time and I didn’t know where the road ahead was, so I asked the principal how you train teachers. He said that we did not train teachers, teachers just grow up slowly at work. I felt at the time that he was perfunctory with me.
Today, three years later, many kindergarten teachers come to visit us and ask me the same questions about how you train teachers. Then I said from the bottom of my heart that we did not train teachers. Teachers achieve such unconscious growth through living with children.
What we do is to give teachers space and rights, so that teachers can discover their own strength and see their own future. The basis of all this is because he is with the child every day, he sees the child, he sees the child, and he is able to cultivate the child and promote the child's growth with his own thinking.
I like this sentence very much: "Fortunate people are healed by childhood throughout their lives, and unfortunate people are healed by childhood throughout their lives." So, are we doing the happiest job?
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