As summer begins, college students and toddlers alike will gather at MacDonough Elementary School for the Kindergarten Kickstart, a pre-K summer education program designed and directed by University students. At first glance, the program, which was started in 2012 by Professor of Psychology Anna Shusterman, may appear to be a standard summer day program populated by pre-K children and staffed by college students and a few teachers and held in local education centers, but it incorporates a distinctive mix of standardized testing measures and individualized learning in its curriculum.

“I taught a service learning class where my students did early math games in preschools,” Shusterman said, recounting the program’s origins. “The purpose of the service learning portion was to get hands-on with research. If you play these number games from these articles as research tasks with kids, what variation do you see? What gets reported in the papers and what are people sweeping under the rug? What [is] a three-year-old is like and why are developmental research tasks like this?…. [It] was another piece of information for them to use in understanding cognitive development.”

Since the program’s inception, MacDonough principal Jon Romeo has helped to coordinate the program even after its expansion into other local schools.

“We were thrilled at the prospect for giving students the experience they needed to meet with success in kindergarten, especially those with limited preschool experiences,” Romeo said.

The program also enlists the help of local school staff such as Amy Waterman, the Director of the Family Resource Center, which provides information, resources, and care to families with young children in the Middletown catchment area.

“My initial reactions included being very excited and supportive,” Waterman wrote in an email to the Argus. “Quality care that focuses on play and having the opportunity to get to know families and have families get better acquainted with the school is very important during this important transitional time [and] is not always done successfully.”

Since its inception, the program has grown in scope and ambition, adding teachers and supporters along the way.

“The second year, the Liberty Bank foundation put out a call for grants for early literacy programs that were for each school district,” Shusterman said. “Each could submit one proposal. So it percolated from the superintendents to the principle to me to submit Kickstart as Middletown’s early literacy program proposal. To meet the scale of what the grant was asking for we expanded it in our proposal from McDonough to Farm Hill, which had the next [highest] level of free and reduced lunch students.”

Since its first years, the program has occupied several different locations. Due to renovations at MacDonough and Farm Hill, the program will be held at Middletown’s Adult Education Center this summer. According to Waterman, the location was chosen due to its proximity to Farm Hill and McDonough, the elementary schools that the majority of Kickstart students will attend after kindergarten.

“We weighed many different possible locations while considering where in the community the building is located and how developmentally appropriate the classrooms would be for the children,” Waterman wrote. “Because part of Farm Hill’s district and all of MacDonough’s district is in the North End, I wanted to stay in the downtown area. The Adult Education Center is a perfect fit.”

Regardless, the program is still staffed by University students, catering to an academic understanding of early education.

“Every year there’s something new and different and interesting that throws a wrench into a stable plan, so as far as I’m concerned the program has a conceptual home which is here but it will be nomadic and go wherever there’s a good space,” Shusterman said.

As the program has grown, Shusterman and her teaching cohort have developed higher aspirations for its uses as a teaching and learning tool. Each year, the program has incorporated more ambitious teaching methods, including administering a psychological growth and development test, the DIAL-4, for every child at the beginning and end of the program.

“My current vision is that there is a core, which is running an excellent summer pre-K program based on best practices, that exposes Wesleyan students to early childhood education and lets them get some hands-on experience in it,” Shusterman said. “And layered on that is this ‘research incubator’ that I’m developing now….It’s a place where we really take developmental science into new interventions that people are designing based on the latest development[s], and we see if we can help children’s progress in domains like self-regulation, numeracy, oral language—concepts where we have a lot of developmental science but there hasn’t been a lot of work to figure out how to bridge the research and the practice.  We’re using Kickstart as a place to foster that, and… make the rubber hit the road.”

The program’s application of psychology to development has expanded to its pedagogical techniques.

“The research incubator was what always made me want to do it,” Shushterman said. “We don’t need to reinvent the wheel. Rather, we only need to reinvent some small wheels in a way that’s connected to research… In the first year, the question was ‘can we do it, will it work, or would all the children end up in the emergency room?’  It wasn’t clear whether we could pull it off, what problems we would encounter; the idea of getting growth on a standardized measure was gravy.”

Shusterman listed the means of testing.

“There’s…an executive function test called the HTKS, [which] stands for ‘head, toes, knees, and shoulders,’” Shusterman said. “It’s a Simon-Says kind of game. It’s a good indicator of inhibitory control and working memory, so they’ve developed a layered intervention to try to boost those skills. I’m hoping to incorporate some of their intervention this summer.”

The new learning metrics come from a variety of labs and institutions, many of whom see Kickstart as a place to develop and implement their pedagogical procedures.

“The socio-emotional skill comes from a center at Yale,” Shusterman said. “They have a tool that they’ve designed called the ‘RULER,’ they’re in the midst of developing a pre-K version. It’s a set of practices for a classroom to teach socioemotional skills to the kids. We’re using their early version of the Pre-K Ruler this summer….They’re pretty excited that there’s a place open to intelligently facilitating their intelligent interventions.”

Student instructors each bring a certain set of skills to the program depending on their background at Wes. Stephanie Blumenstock ’16, who has worked on the program since 2014, spoke of the student-instructors’ roles in shaping the program.

The program has not lost sight of its primary goals as a juvenile education experience in Middletown, where many families cannot afford to send their children to for-profit educational programs.

”We had workshops at the Family Fridays with people who were involved who talked about how to practice numeracy with your kids and gave them pointers on how to encourage the development of those skills so that the parents knew what was going on,” Blumenstock said. And beyond that, these parents may be at risk for not being as involved in their kids’ school lives, and [Kickstart] gets them integrated into the school community and makes them feel more comfortable talking to teachers and [administrators].”

The approach seems to work, and Blumenstock recounted how the program had worked to foster social and developmental skills among children who don’t receive as much attention at home.

“We had a boy last year who a lot of times would have trouble separating from his dad in the morning, because he didn’t get up a lot of time to spend with him at home,” Blumenstock said. “So there was one such day where he was crying and walking around by himself and his good friend found the stuffed animal on the floor that he always liked to play with, and he brought it over and said, ‘Look, it’s your favorite!’  It melted my heart. I don’t remember if it actually worked but it was very, very cute.”

The program aims not just to implement progressive learning strategies, but to use those strategies to shrink the achievement gap between kids of varying backgrounds.

“We know that summer is a time where poorer kids are getting less enrichment, and there’s a loss in test scores in K-12,” Shusterman said. “No one’s actually testing this to see if there is summer learning loss at this age, but presumably there would be. School buildings are empty, college students are looking for things to do that are enriching and interesting. It also doesn’t have all the problems that TFA has where you’re displacing existing teaching corps. It was a win-win-win.”

The program thus accommodates children from a wider variety of backgrounds and experiences than a typical summer program.

“Due to the limited spaces, during Kindergarten registration I work to recruit potential students who either have had limited or no preschool, [and to] recruit students who may not have care during the summer months,” Waterman said.

But despite the learning benchmarks administered as bookends to the sessions, the program itself aims to be non-standardized and adaptive. Shusterman explicitly intends the program to go against recent trends of standardization in education.

“We are not geared towards any particular developmental standards,” Shusterman said. “Whereas in kindergarten you might need to have all the kids sitting around the circle, in Kickstart we try to encourage a kid to sit down during circle time, but if he [or] she doesn’t want to, we won’t make them because we want them to really enjoy being there, and we want to be that sort of child-centered environment where a kid is able to make choices. So I think what we are doing is more idealistic than a lot of school settings.”

Indeed, Kickstart seems to be tapping into a trend that promotes non-linear and adaptive forms of education as a counter to the harms of increased standardization in schools.

“Maybe the way to learn how to sit in your chair for 30 minutes is not to practice sitting in your chair,” Shusterman said. “Development is not linear, but when you have a lot of technocrats regulating the educational scene, if you need to learn to hold a pencil, then you have to practice holding a pencil. But if you don’t have the fine motor control to hold a pencil, you need to play with play-doh [and] sand, learn to scribble, do all kinds of things to develop your fine motor skills.… All domains of development are like that, but it’s largely ignored when you have a hyper-regulated test oriented educational setting. Kickstart is our bubble where we get to explore the utopian view of how it could be.”

 

As summer begins, college students and toddlers alike will gather at MacDonough Elementary School for the Kindergarten Kickstart, a pre-K summer education program designed and directed by University students. At first glance, the program, which was started in 2012 by Professor of Psychology Anna Shusterman, may appear to be a standard summer day program populated by pre-K children and staffed by college students and a few teachers and held in local education centers, but it incorporates a distinctive mix of standardized testing measures and individualized learning in its curriculum.

“I taught a service learning class where my students did early math games in preschools,” Shusterman said, recounting the program’s origins. “The purpose of the service learning portion was to get hands-on with research. If you play these number games from these articles as research tasks with kids, what variation do you see? What gets reported in the papers and what are people sweeping under the rug? What [is] a three-year-old is like and why are developmental research tasks like this?…. [It] was another piece of information for them to use in understanding cognitive development.”

Since the program’s inception, MacDonough principal Jon Romeo has helped to coordinate the program even after its expansion into other local schools.

“We were thrilled at the prospect for giving students the experience they needed to meet with success in kindergarten, especially those with limited preschool experiences,” Romeo said.

The program also enlists the help of local school staff such as Amy Waterman, the Director of the Family Resource Center, which provides information, resources, and care to families with young children in the Middletown catchment area.

“My initial reactions included being very excited and supportive,” Waterman wrote in an email to the Argus. “Quality care that focuses on play and having the opportunity to get to know families and have families get better acquainted with the school is very important during this important transitional time [and] is not always done successfully.”

Since its inception, the program has grown in scope and ambition, adding teachers and supporters along the way.

“The second year, the Liberty Bank foundation put out a call for grants for early literacy programs that were for each school district,” Shusterman said. “Each could submit one proposal. So it percolated from the superintendents to the principle to me to submit Kickstart as Middletown’s early literacy program proposal. To meet the scale of what the grant was asking for we expanded it in our proposal from McDonough to Farm Hill, which had the next [highest] level of free and reduced lunch students.”

Since its first years, the program has occupied several different locations. Due to renovations at MacDonough and Farm Hill, the program will be held at Middletown’s Adult Education Center this summer. According to Waterman, the location was chosen due to its proximity to Farm Hill and McDonough, the elementary schools that the majority of Kickstart students will attend after kindergarten.

“We weighed many different possible locations while considering where in the community the building is located and how developmentally appropriate the classrooms would be for the children,” Waterman wrote. “Because part of Farm Hill’s district and all of MacDonough’s district is in the North End, I wanted to stay in the downtown area. The Adult Education Center is a perfect fit.”

Regardless, the program is still staffed by University students, catering to an academic understanding of early education.

“Every year there’s something new and different and interesting that throws a wrench into a stable plan, so as far as I’m concerned the program has a conceptual home which is here but it will be nomadic and go wherever there’s a good space,” Shusterman said.

As the program has grown, Shusterman and her teaching cohort have developed higher aspirations for its uses as a teaching and learning tool. Each year, the program has incorporated more ambitious teaching methods, including administering a psychological growth and development test, the DIAL-4, for every child at the beginning and end of the program.

“My current vision is that there is a core, which is running an excellent summer pre-K program based on best practices, that exposes Wesleyan students to early childhood education and lets them get some hands-on experience in it,” Shusterman said. “And layered on that is this ‘research incubator’ that I’m developing now….It’s a place where we really take developmental science into new interventions that people are designing based on the latest development[s], and we see if we can help children’s progress in domains like self-regulation, numeracy, oral language—concepts where we have a lot of developmental science but there hasn’t been a lot of work to figure out how to bridge the research and the practice.  We’re using Kickstart as a place to foster that, and… make the rubber hit the road.”

The program’s application of psychology to development has expanded to its pedagogical techniques.

“The research incubator was what always made me want to do it,” Shushterman said. “We don’t need to reinvent the wheel. Rather, we only need to reinvent some small wheels in a way that’s connected to research… In the first year, the question was ‘can we do it, will it work, or would all the children end up in the emergency room?’  It wasn’t clear whether we could pull it off, what problems we would encounter; the idea of getting growth on a standardized measure was gravy.”

Shusterman listed the means of testing.

“There’s…an executive function test called the HTKS, [which] stands for ‘head, toes, knees, and shoulders,’” Shusterman said. “It’s a Simon-Says kind of game. It’s a good indicator of inhibitory control and working memory, so they’ve developed a layered intervention to try to boost those skills. I’m hoping to incorporate some of their intervention this summer.”

The new learning metrics come from a variety of labs and institutions, many of whom see Kickstart as a place to develop and implement their pedagogical procedures.

“The socio-emotional skill comes from a center at Yale,” Shusterman said. “They have a tool that they’ve designed called the ‘RULER,’ they’re in the midst of developing a pre-K version. It’s a set of practices for a classroom to teach socioemotional skills to the kids. We’re using their early version of the Pre-K Ruler this summer….They’re pretty excited that there’s a place open to intelligently facilitating their intelligent interventions.”

Student instructors each bring a certain set of skills to the program depending on their background at Wes. Stephanie Blumenstock ’16, who has worked on the program since 2014, spoke of the student-instructors’ roles in shaping the program.

The program has not lost sight of its primary goals as a juvenile education experience in Middletown, where many families cannot afford to send their children to for-profit educational programs.

”We had workshops at the Family Fridays with people who were involved who talked about how to practice numeracy with your kids and gave them pointers on how to encourage the development of those skills so that the parents knew what was going on,” Blumenstock said. And beyond that, these parents may be at risk for not being as involved in their kids’ school lives, and [Kickstart] gets them integrated into the school community and makes them feel more comfortable talking to teachers and [administrators].”

The approach seems to work, and Blumenstock recounted how the program had worked to foster social and developmental skills among children who don’t receive as much attention at home.

“We had a boy last year who a lot of times would have trouble separating from his dad in the morning, because he didn’t get up a lot of time to spend with him at home,” Blumenstock said. “So there was one such day where he was crying and walking around by himself and his good friend found the stuffed animal on the floor that he always liked to play with, and he brought it over and said, ‘Look, it’s your favorite!’  It melted my heart. I don’t remember if it actually worked but it was very, very cute.”

The program aims not just to implement progressive learning strategies, but to use those strategies to shrink the achievement gap between kids of varying backgrounds.

“We know that summer is a time where poorer kids are getting less enrichment, and there’s a loss in test scores in K-12,” Shusterman said. “No one’s actually testing this to see if there is summer learning loss at this age, but presumably there would be. School buildings are empty, college students are looking for things to do that are enriching and interesting. It also doesn’t have all the problems that TFA has where you’re displacing existing teaching corps. It was a win-win-win.”

The program thus accommodates children from a wider variety of backgrounds and experiences than a typical summer program.

“Due to the limited spaces, during Kindergarten registration I work to recruit potential students who either have had limited or no preschool, [and to] recruit students who may not have care during the summer months,” Waterman said.

But despite the learning benchmarks administered as bookends to the sessions, the program itself aims to be non-standardized and adaptive. Shusterman explicitly intends the program to go against recent trends of standardization in education.

“We are not geared towards any particular developmental standards,” Shusterman said. “Whereas in kindergarten you might need to have all the kids sitting around the circle, in Kickstart we try to encourage a kid to sit down during circle time, but if he [or] she doesn’t want to, we won’t make them because we want them to really enjoy being there, and we want to be that sort of child-centered environment where a kid is able to make choices. So I think what we are doing is more idealistic than a lot of school settings.”

Indeed, Kickstart seems to be tapping into a trend that promotes non-linear and adaptive forms of education as a counter to the harms of increased standardization in schools.

“Maybe the way to learn how to sit in your chair for 30 minutes is not to practice sitting in your chair,” Shusterman said. “Development is not linear, but when you have a lot of technocrats regulating the educational scene, if you need to learn to hold a pencil, then you have to practice holding a pencil. But if you don’t have the fine motor control to hold a pencil, you need to play with play-doh [and] sand, learn to scribble, do all kinds of things to develop your fine motor skills.… All domains of development are like that, but it’s largely ignored when you have a hyper-regulated test oriented educational setting. Kickstart is our bubble where we get to explore the utopian view of how it could be.”