What If a Work Ethic Begins Very Early?

I have wondered over the years how early childhood programs contribute to a child’s eventual career choice and success as a worker. What would a child have to experience to grow up to be a responsible worker and competent citizen? It seems to me a positive work ethic starts early in a child’s life. Play may be the child’s work essential to constructive development, but work — real work as part of a family, a classroom, or a team — also plays a vital role.

In The New York Times Magazine, November 26, 2006, Paul Tough quotes a charter school educator working with low-income children: “I think we have to teach work ethic in the same way we teach adding fractions with unlike denominators. But once children have got the work ethic and the commitment to others and to education down, it’s actually pretty easy to teach them.”

Early educators can learn valuable aspects of learning from charter and other innovative schools. Here are adaptations to Tough’s summarized list:

• Take advantage of the long child care program day to give children many varied opportunities to learn about their world. Use conversation, speech, film, and books to converse frequently and at length with children.
• Design and implement an appropriate curriculum for the children, and educate the adults — teaching staff, parents, and board members — to help children learn all the time and everywhere.
• Emphasize and model the behavior you want children to exhibit. Teach values realistically and show behaviors that are important to all children.

Help young children learn to take in information by carrying out the SLANT approach to learning taught at the KIPP schools in New York City and elsewhere:

• Sit up — on the floor, at a table, in the book corner, on a lap — as you read to a child or a group of children.
• Listen — avoid talking at the child, but rather engage each child in a dialog and a conversation with eye contact and physical proximity.
• Ask questions — and listen to the answers. Children are never wrong. They answer out of their limited experience, so their replies are limited. Based on what they know, however, their answer is correct. Also, teach them to ask questions.
• Nod — demonstrate how to listen to a child by paying attention to what they say to you. Show how you listen and nod when children in the classroom or family child care home speak to you and to each other.
• Track the speaker with your eyes. Help children focus on the speaker, whether the teacher, another child, or another adult.

Source: Paul Tough, Still Left Behind: What It Will Really Take to Close the Education Gap. The New York Times Magazine, November 26, 2006, 44-51, 69-72, 77. Online: go to www.nytimes.org and search for this article by title, author, or date.

Submitted by Edna Ranck

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