THE HAPPIEST PRESCHOOL: A Manual for Teachers by Martha Heineman Pieper, Ph.D. and preschool director Kelly Perez pushes back against the pedagogy that makes preschool a preparation for college application. As they point out: “Unfortunately, many teachers are thrown into their classrooms with management techniques that ignore their natural impulse to connect with kids. Often this means you are expected to teach to the test, and are required to keep children orderly at all times, making you feel like policing and power struggles are just part of everyday experience.”
Aimed mainly at preschool teachers (it can be useful for kindergarten as well), the book uses scores of anecdotes drawn from real-life teaching experience to rethink how they should interact with their students. Their pedagogical approach is summed up in the acronym S.M.A.R.T.: Stay Positive, Model Kindness, Acknowledge and Accept Feelings, Loving Regulation, Time With.
The 276-page book is divided into eight chapters, dealing with everything from classroom management to bullying, washing hands, and socializing. They promise that the skills taught in the book will help preschool teachers “foster happy, creative, curious, compassionate, and positively engaged students.”
Even where their approach contradicts the established literature, Pieper’s and Perez’s techniques can be effective. For example, they write, “By the end of the year, your children will have met and often exceeded academic benchmarks, but through ways that come naturally, and not with worksheets, drilling, testing, formal learning of any kind, or directed play. Parents report with delight that Smart Love students go on to later grades as competent, eager learners.” In fact, such outcomes often depend mainly on the child’s inborn traits, such as temperament, the Big Five psychological traits, and IQ. But, as they note (and as the book’s photos show), most of their students come from a specific middle-class neighborhood in Chicago—so the preschool’s academic impact is likely to be the same on most of the students.
The SMART love paradigm also involves having older children teach younger ones (an approach that historically accords with cultural norms for most societies) and keeping the parents involved. By extension, THE HAPPIEST PRESCHOOL: A Manual for Teachers is based on both common sense about children as well as hands-on experience in teaching them. Authors Martha Heineman Pieper and Kelly Perez take as their premise a pedagogy where children learn by imitation, with teachers being the models for imparting social skills and academic learning through fun and trust. In the end, this book is an invaluable guide to teachers and parents alike—and hopefully policy-makers as well.
Martha Heineman Pieper and Kelly Perez provide useful guidance in THE HAPPIEST PRESCHOOL: A Manual for Teachers, which values making a connection with preschool students and developing their social skills over focusing on exam scores.
~Kevin Baldeosingh for IndieReader
