Elementary Principals Are Getting a Crash Course in How Young Kids Learn Best
Young children need different conditions than older students to thrive. Some school leaders are adapting their practices to reflect that reality.
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When Joel Francik became principal of Central Elementary School in 2019, all of his prior education experience had been in middle school — first as a teacher, then as an assistant principal.
He wanted the job, he said, because he thought he could make a bigger difference in students’ lives if he met them earlier in their schooling. But he didn’t know a whole lot about how kids in elementary school — particularly those in the early grades — learned best or what they really needed.
A few years later, when Kristi Dominguez became superintendent of Francik’s district, the Ferndale School District in northwest Washington state, she noticed that in his kindergarten classrooms, students sat at desks, often doing worksheets.
“We had desks in rows,” Francik confirmed.
That, plus the way the 4-year-old classrooms in Washington’s program were sequestered in different school buildings in the district, set off “red flags” for Dominguez, who has a background in early childhood education.
Dominguez moved quickly to make changes to the way the district approached the early grades. One of the decisions she made was to have principals at all six of the district’s elementary schools participate in a nearly yearlong leadership training program focused on child development and early learning.
Like Francik, many elementary school principals come into the role any prior knowledge of — or experience in — early childhood. But not all districts have an early learning champion like Dominguez at the helm. As a result, some elementary school leaders never learn how to tailor their leadership style and school culture to meet the needs of their youngest students.
The issue has only become more urgent in recent years, as increasing numbers of elementary schools now have co-located pre-K classrooms as well, creating an even younger population for school leaders to oversee.
Francik and his principal colleagues participated in the , which seeks to help elementary school administrators develop and then deepen their knowledge and understanding of the early grades, with a focus on children in pre-K to third grade.
The program is facilitated by the , a think tank originally housed at the University of Washington in Seattle and now based at the University of Colorado Denver. The center launched an in-person version of the program in 2013 for Washington administrators before shifting to a virtual environment in 2021, making it more easily accessible to school and district leaders all across the country.
The program seeks to help elementary school administrators develop and then deepen their knowledge and understanding of the early grades, with a focus on children in pre-K to third grade.
Most school leaders “go through certain preparation programs that don’t talk about child development,” said Kristie Kauerz, founding executive director of the National P-3 Center. The result, she added, is school leaders who take the same approach to kindergarten as they do fourth grade.
Dominguez didn’t want that to be the reality in her district.
As Francik went through the 10-month training program (it has recently changed to run for seven months at a time), he began to realize how important the early grades are to future outcomes. He talked to and heard from school leaders in other states about how they were integrating early learning into their buildings, how they were funding pre-K, what was working, and where they were struggling.
“The biggest lightbulb for me,” Francik said, “was play-based learning. Play-based learning is the work of kids.”
He began to realize that, as children play, they use math concepts; practice communication; hone social-emotional skills by sharing, compromising and working through conflict; and sharpen their fine-motor skills by coloring and painting.
Today, individual desks are nowhere to be found in Francik’s kindergarten classrooms. Kids sit in groups at tables, allowing for more collaboration and communication throughout the day. Students aren’t asked to sit still for more than 10 minutes at a time, since that isn’t developmentally appropriate for them.
“We are not desks in rows anymore,” he said. “We are a classroom where students are able to move and flow based on needs. We have academics being taught still, just not in rows. There’s lots of movement, lots of choice.”
And in all TK through second grade classrooms in his school, students get one hour every single day to pursue their own interests in the classroom. At the end of the hour, they come back together to reflect, sharing celebrations and struggles.
Next year, Central Elementary will bring that same model to its third graders too. Rather than the practices of the older grades being “pushed down” to the early grades, the early grades are now influencing the whole school building.
A similar approach is being used at Chicago Academy Elementary in Chicago Public Schools.
Principal Joyce Pae, a former high school teacher and administrator, had three pre-K classrooms in her school but little to no guidance about how to integrate them into the rest of the building. She joined the Building Early Learning Leaders program — offered by VOCEL, a Chicago-based early learning nonprofit — for elementary school leaders at CPS in hopes of learning more about how to serve children in the early grades.
The was launched in response to the city’s universal pre-K rollout, after VOCEL staff heard elementary school leaders repeatedly expressing, “I don’t feel equipped for pre-K,” said Jesse Ilhardt, executive director of VOCEL. “We started talking to some principals, and they were pretty frank with us: ‘We don’t know anything about early childhood education,’ ” Ilhardt said. “Some even told us they avoid pre-K classrooms, steer clear to leave them on their own island.”
She added: “What we experienced was that leaders were hungry for preparedness earlier than the district was able to provide it.”
During the BELL program, principals, assistant principals and instructional coaches from across the city come together over the course of a year to build knowledge and skills about early learning. The most valuable piece for Pae, she said, was the one-on-one coaching. Someone from VOCEL walked with Pae through her school’s pre-K classrooms, pointing out what was happening that she might have missed.
“To the untrained eye, what looks like kids playing in the classroom is actually lots of social-emotional development,” Pae said, reflecting on what she learned from that walkthrough experience. She also saw how math and literacy concepts were woven into play.
Pae did those walkthroughs with a coach about once a quarter, she said, typically following some reading and discussion about developmentally appropriate practices in early childhood. During one of those walkthroughs, Pae asked her coach about something that had been bothering her. She’d noticed that preschool teachers had started using the interactive whiteboards in their classrooms for read-alouds.
“I was like, ‘I don’t like that, but I don’t know if that’s because I’m stuck in a certain way of thinking,’ ” Pae recalled telling her coach.
The coach confirmed Pae’s suspicions. By switching storytime to a smartboard, students were missing out on critical learning opportunities, such as holding a book, turning the pages and realizing that stories are read from left to right.
“Those were all things kids need to acquire that they’ll lose if they’re watching a story be read aloud and it just flips magically to the next page,” Pae said. “I had a hunch. She was able to name it, then take us back to standards.”
The BELL experience, and the new knowledge and understanding it left her with, has had a lasting impact on Pae. She is more aware of the needs of the youngest students in her building, she said. She sees the way pre-K teachers help students name their emotions and cooperate with classmates — and how that can “provide the building blocks for a child to be successful, not only in school but in society.”
“It’s totally changed the lens through which I viewed every grade level and also the adults in the building,” Pae said.
During professional development meetings with staff, Pae now builds in “moments of play” and socialization. She’s seen how those practices — plus encouraging natural curiosity and providing real-world context — help young children thrive, and she believes it will have the same effect on adults too.
“It turns out what works best for our youngest learners and what’s effective for them is actually good for everyone,” Pae said.
Even though many school principals are inexperienced with the early grades, an idea that came up repeatedly in interviews is that no school leader intends to leave out certain groups of learners.
“Every principal wants to do right by children,” said Dominguez, the superintendent in Washington.
But how a principal defines what is “right” is often based on their own experiences in school. And because school principals are already stretched thin, managing facilities and staff and an ever-expanding list of responsibilities, they can be genuinely interested in better serving their youngest learners but unable to make early childhood development a priority.
“There’s an understandable desire in school leaders that [they] want to know more and do better but have so little time to devote,” said Ilhardt.
Pae, who has actually devoted the time, said she understands why the focus just never makes it to the top of the list for some school administrators. In Chicago, because the pre-K program is state-funded, those classrooms can feel very separate from the rest of the elementary school, even when they are in the same building. “It can easily be the last thing you think about,” Pae said.
Since Kauerz launched the National P-3 Leadership program, others like it — mostly local spinoffs, she said — have cropped up around the country. The programs aren’t intended to be a heavy lift for leaders; they are designed to offer a time and space for elementary school administrators to learn about and discuss early learning practices, free of judgment.
In the early days of the National P-3 program, Kauerz said, it was full of leaders who either already prioritized their youngest students or were being urged to do so by superiors who did, Kauerz said. As the years have passed, that’s shifted.
“We’re starting to penetrate into the ranks of non-believers who are changing their minds,” she said, noting that the program has served about 500 principals across the U.S. “But there’s a lot of principals to go.”
The BELL program has so far worked with leaders in 53 of Chicago’s 473 elementary schools. It has a long way to go too, but the work is meaningful, worthwhile and full of “aha moments,” Ilhardt said.
“There is so much focus and responsibility put on parents, caregivers and families to prepare young children for school,” Ilhardt said. “We have a responsibility, also, to ensure that schools are ready for young children, and that schools are really designed for children to be their best selves in those school buildings. That looks different than the design for children at older grade levels.”
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Emily Tate Sullivan is a contract early care and education correspondent at 91ɬ.
