Exploring CS and CT in Pre-K with Gail Lovely

In this interview with Gail Lovely, we discuss navigating appropriate behavior with digital technologies, some considerations for early and pre readers, how to respond to concerns about screen time, metaphors of education as playpens and playgrounds, learning CS/coding through literacy, and much more.

Welcome back to another episode of the CSK8 podcast.
My name is Jared O'Leary, and this week's interview, I speak with Gayle.
Lovely.
In our conversation,
we talk about navigating appropriate behavior with digital technologies,
some considerations for early and pre readers, how to respond to concerns
about screen time with young kids, some metaphors of education as playgrounds
and playpens thinking through learning computer science
and coding through literacy, as well as many of the topics.
Now, the focus of this particular conversation is with pre-K kids.
So you may have noticed in this podcast that with the previous interview
and with this interview, the topics are not just limited to grades
K through eight.
However, that is kind of the primary focus for most of the episodes.
So I hope you enjoyed this episode.
I enjoyed the conversation with Gayle,
and we're going to begin with Gayle introducing herself.
I'm Gayle Lovely, and I'm an independent educator
and I focus on developmentally appropriate and wise use of technology,
particularly with very young children,
And I'm really focusing
more and more on the younger end of that range
because there's a real need and not a lot of supply of ideas
and methodologies and strategies to help to do that.
I do a lot of classroom coaching and professional development
and even some visioning innovations and schools to help them kind of
get a good grip on what the possibilities and the meaningfulness of that might be.
How I got there is an interesting journey.
I started with my first very first computer class was
when I was an undergrad at UCLA in the 1970s and we did
coding with punch cards in the basement of an engineering building.
It was a very different kind of coding than we do today,
but that was really an interesting beginning to my journey.
I was a pretty early adopter.
I started teaching in 1980
and by 1983 I was in the first graduating class of Master's
in Educational computing with a title at Pepperdine University.
And that was really a life
changing time for me when I began to see the possibilities
of how technology could fit in my role as an elementary school teacher.
I was teaching in those days in inner city Los Angeles.
It was a tumultuous time in schools and it was a tumultuous time in Los Angeles.
I was working really hard to try to help my students.
I had my
first computer because Apple give every school
in California a computer and nobody else wanted it.
So I got a computer and realized that had some potential.
And by the mid 1980s I had my first classroom role.
But I think that that beginning of my journey where I just had to find
my own way, was powerful and empowering
to me to begin to see the possibilities.
What interested you in switching from working in the classroom
to becoming an independent educator?
Oh, what motivated me, how I changed from being a classroom teacher
to really being more independent was kind of a sad story, but a meaningful one.
I was teaching in inner city L.A.
and I had 37 second graders under my care,
and it was a tough, tough year.
And I happened to have good resources that I had gotten on my own.
The robot turtle and the apple tree.
And we were doing some powerful things.
I think there were two children of the 37 who spoke English in their home.
The others half, about half spoke Korean and half spoke Spanish.
And I didn't know any any Korean at all.
And I knew a little bit of Spanish, but it was very difficult.
And I had this robot and we decided or I decided maybe the unifier
is that we all learn to speak robot, which at that time was logo.
I didn't couch it as being English or Korean or Spanish, but it was robot
and it was logo and these little ones, seven, eight and nine year olds,
because some have been repeated already, were eager
to command that robot.
And we had a shared language
and it changed everything.
The children started to cooperate across language boundaries.
They started to be excited about being there.
They saw that they had control of something in their world,
probably for the first time.
And it was an incredibly powerful time in my learning as an educator as well.
Well, that was all well and good.
But then what happened the next year?
What ultimately drove me out of this classroom
building
came back the next year and they've moved on to the next grade
and they would come back in tears because I'd gone back to classrooms
where it wasn't lively learning, it wasn't student centered, it wasn't powerful,
they weren't in control, and they knew there was another way.
And they were very upset.
And I realized I could stay in my classroom
and I could change how 37 children felt about education each year.
If I changed teachers, I had the possibility
of changing hundreds of children's experiences.
And though I knew I would miss the kids,
I decided that was what I needed to do.
And it was a heartbreaking decision.
So after nine years of teaching in the classroom, which wasn't that many,
I took on a new mission, which is change teachers.
And it
wasn't because I thought teachers were deficient.
I felt like they had the same experience as the children, which is they
didn't know there was another way.
There wasn't another option.
Yeah, that story resonated with me in a lot of ways.
Also, living in the Southwest, I have had a lot of classes where
the majority, if not all of the kids do not speak any English at all
when they first come in the door.
And in Arizona, there's actually a law
that says unless you're teaching a foreign language
class, you can't speak a language other than English,
which is probably well intentioned, but also kind of prevents you from helping out
a kid who could probably really use words in their native language.
Yeah.
And then I also went into higher education
because I wanted to help more kids than that.
I could work with indirectly, like helping the teachers could help the kids.
And then that's also why I ended up doing a professional development now.
So that definitely resonated with me.
It was a it's a hard decision because let's face it,
there's nothing like watching children.
I mean, it's great to see adults have a light bulb moment,
but the children are so much more willing to share that joyfulness of making it
through the struggle and then suddenly getting it or inventing it or finding it.
We adults tend to hide that moment because we think it doesn't
show our strength as learners,
and it shows that we haven't learned yet and we hold back that passion.
I think I still I have to admit, it's been
I've been out of full time classroom work for a long time.
But when school starts, I still have this
yearning to
be doing the the nitty gritty stuff, putting up the bulletin boards
and organizing supplies and anticipating the children.
I still miss that. Yeah.
Or even the random questions like one of my the funniest ones that I received.
We were singing a song about like apple pie or something like that.
And then a kid raised their hand was like, Is it okay if I eat my cat?
What would I know?
Do you really mean that? Yeah.
And people it's like this, that this everyone smile will be a meme
about things you never thought you'd say and
do not like the death.
Yeah, you know, all those kinds of things that kids.
And especially because I work
not entirely with little ones, but now primarily with little ones.
They don't.
They don't hide any of that.
So it's pretty it's pretty fun.
In fact, one of the greatest things I was because I was working,
I had a contract, I was working with a school in Oklahoma every month.
I was flying in and working with their preschool kids and teachers.
And I'll never forget this little boy, three years old.
And we had just introduced a robot.
So he they were playing with these simple on board programing robots, you know,
button pushing robots.
And he came up and he said, I love my robot
because I'm the boss of it.
And that is the perfect statement, right?
He's in charge of his learning.
He's in charge of the tech.
It's three years old and he gets it.
What's the story of an experience that you had
when you were teaching or when you were doing
professional development that continues to impact you today?
Well, I certainly think that the idea or experience
about that first second grade class, when I first use technology
with children is one that still informs my practice a lot
because here here was technology as a unifier,
this very diverse group of
human beings were brought together by the technology.
And I think in today's world where so often we hear
about technology as a divider.
So I think it's really important to remember the alternative possibility,
which it can be a great unifier if it wasn't long after that happened
that there was a young parent who came to a parent workshop.
I did.
She had a child who had a medical condition that was incredibly rare.
We were able to find another family with a child with a similar condition.
And those children will they were 12 year olds.
We're able to find someone like them, and I've never forgotten that either,
which is it's important to be able to across those kinds of perceived
or real barriers, but also to find others who are similar.
You know, when I started teaching, I felt like I was alone,
like I was the only one working as hard as I was.
I was the only one trying these things.
I was the only one taking risks.
But I do think in today's technology world, there's
a lot more opportunity to reach out and find others if you choose to.
I mean, there's Twitter and Facebook and there's lots of other tools
that can help you find people who are having the same struggles
or having different struggles that you can help.
And I think that those are powerful things to remember
based on past experiences for me.
Yeah, I know a lot of special area teachers
as in like teachers who specialize in a specific content area
and the only teacher in that school that does that content area is
sometimes this disconnect where it's like, okay, I'm the only one who does this
and they just feel isolated and using some kind of a platform,
whether it's like, is this platform or going on a siesta groups
or a hashtag or whatever, connecting with other educators through that, it's
it can really help with that isolated or that feeling of being isolated.
Right.
And I think if we model that, then then our students also find
that as well, which is there are people out there
who can support whatever it is you're needing
and that that can be to the detriment or the advantage.
And it's our role as the adults in the system to help kids
make good choices about how they use that that connectivity and that unification
or the possibility of that, to me still inspires a lot of my work.
Yeah.
In an interview that's going to release before this with John Stapleton,
we talked about how some districts have a tendency
to kind of like block the ability to access those communities.
So if there's commenting abilities from outsiders,
so from people outside of the district, then there's this tendency to be like,
no, we don't want that kids might receive
an inappropriate comment or things like that.
But I really think instead of preventing that kind of connection, building
and collaboration outside of a district, you should really kind of
just take a digital citizenship approach and go, okay,
if we run into this kind of content that's not school appropriate,
how do we handle that?
Because it's going to happen whether we want it to or not.
At some point
when they leave the school,
and if we can prepare them to deal with that,
then that can potentially help down the road.
Oh, I totally agree with teachers.
I think it's really important to not make it such a safe place
that we don't know how to cope when we leave the safe place.
Right.
And I think that starts with the very youngest.
And one of the things we do with even three year olds is the digital camera.
And the device is such a powerful tool because it freezes the moment
that they can
then talk about it or reflect on it in their three or four year old way.
And then we have we teach children as young as three
that when their job is to take a picture of their friend,
does your picture show your friend in the right way?
And so the conversation that happens
next is to show the picture to your friend and have a conversation, if that's okay.
Because who owns the picture is who's in the picture.
And that's how we teach three year olds.
But that goes all the way back to your comment about older
children and adults, about how you deal with those kinds of decisions
and how you share on that.
You don't take a picture
that has the side of the friend's head when you really want to show their face.
Those kinds of things
seem very minor, but with three year old, that's where we start.
Simple things like that.
And I think that that helps to build the understanding and the culture
towards the bigger issues that you're talking about, which is,
you know, how do you protect the gentle lines and beings and
how do you help them to not be the ones who are doing the hurting?
And I imagine right now an administrator might be listening to this and just going,
Yeah, but you don't have to deal with the parents who get irate with me.
I get that. I understand that.
But in the long run, I still think it's better to engage
in those conversations
rather than kind of pat all of the walls and furniture
and make sure nobody gets hurt.
Yeah, I agree.
But I think we also and I think we also need to teach
what to do when something makes them feel icky.
Yeah, well, for lack of a better word.
And so how
what should they do if they see something that makes them feel uncomfortable
and it isn't just walk away, it's to let an adult know and then walk away.
In a way, if we want to know if there's something
really awful getting through whatever firewalls or whatever
protective mechanisms, if there are some in place,
we also want them to know that they should tell someone.
And so we start with that.
And so I think there are some things
we can do to bring kids up with good problem solving.
And I do understand I am a parent.
My kids are now grown, but I do understand
the want to protect them from all the ugliness in the world.
Right.
But I think they also need to prepare to know what to do when it does happen.
It's like we teach our kids to look both ways
and hold our hands crossing the street. Right.
But at some point they're going to cross the street without us.
That's why we teach them to look both ways and not just hold our hand as holding.
If they can't cross
until they're holding our hand, then they can only go when we let them go.
But if we teach them, you have to look both ways.
Got to get a green light at the crosswalk and we hold hands which are little.
Then eventually they have those other skills as well.
That was golden and that was awesome.
Oh, thanks.
Really good.
Well, let's be clear.
The easiest way when you're overwhelmed as a parent
or as an educator is to lock the doors by other windows
and keep the course going straight.
And the truth is, the messiness is the important part.
That's a whole nother conversation.
But, you know, the pushing down of curriculum
and the amount of pressure on people to do more and more and more and have more
and more roles pushes out the feeling of permission and freedom to explore.
Yeah.
And I think interestingly, almost every guest has mentioned that
that the messiness and how school tends to suppress
that creativity and whatnot, at least they've talked about it in some way.
It seems to be a recurring theme.
Well, and frankly, it's not a new theme.
It's just more obvious.
So the more integrative project space student centered
I was, the more the children were engaged and the more they engaged their learning.
And by providing good learning options,
good projects that ideas said of the learning was.
But I still try to find ways to make that work in today's world,
which is much more stringent and much less autonomy for teachers.
But within the context of this very heavily loaded
standards based curricula that we see everywhere,
I think there's still room for being messy and doing projects.
And I think that's one of the hopes that I have for the not too distant
future, is that somehow the pendulum is swinging a little bit back.
And I think that technology and computers, science and computational thinking
and the things we're doing with technology give us a little bit of wiggle room.
And I think that makerspace is which are really
what we were doing in our own classrooms in the old days,
are part of giving that permission to be messy and nonlinear.
And I think that there's great hope that we're coming back around
to saying that that kind of learning has a role within the structure.
Because let's be clear,
there are things that need to be taught and things that need to be learned
so that we don't have any equal education for some.
And I think there's room for both.
I think for that pendulum to swing back, we're going to need politicians
to lighten up on some of the demands they're putting in terms of performance
pay and focusing on test scores and adding more tests, etc., etc..
Until that starts to loosen its hold on education, it's going to be difficult
for teachers because that seems to be like the primary factor that's preventing
focusing on creativity and actual learning rather than learning for a test.
Yeah, I think it's an issue much bigger than this.
Probably this interview.
But I do think that
I really think teachers
need to stand up and speak up for what's right for themselves and for kids.
But I can't that's not fair for me to say.
I'm not a classroom teacher anymore.
So but I do wish educators in general would dance to stop the madness.
I mean, they are with like in Arizona, they had the red for Ed
and there were thousands of teachers, if I remember correctly,
who were marching at the Capitol.
So like teachers in Oklahoma were protesting like it's
starting to happen not just for pay, but also just like,
look, the the demands you're trying to put on us by adding more
subject areas, more tests and all in the same amount of time
and for low pay, like it's just not going to work.
Yeah, but I do think that technologies
and the interest in our society,
in technology as an important thing for kids to know
and understand does give us space for kids to tinker
and to try and fail and learn from that in a place
that isn't highly tested or highly pressured at this point.
And I think that that's a good thing.
So I've I've worked with grades K through graduate,
so I haven't worked formally with kids younger than
what would be like five, sometimes a late four year old and even with the kinder
and sometimes as old as like second grade, teachers have expressed concern like,
well, how do you get kids to learn how to code or engage in computational
thinking or computer science if they don't know how to read yet?
So I'm wondering, what would you say to somebody who is concerned
about doing any of those things with a pre reader?
I will say and begin that I'm not an expert in computer science,
but I will say that I know a fair bit about young learners
and their developmental needs and related to problem
solving, critical thinking, literacy and so forth.
And I think that there's an incredible intersection
that is where the sweet spot is, which is this idea about executive
functioning, critical thinking, problem solving and literacy and numeracy,
which is so much overlap with pre-code and coding computational thing.
All of that is about decision making and symbolic logic and thinking
that is shared between all of those without any really missteps at all.
So let me let me be a little clearer because I think that's pretty high level
executive functions
are like goals, directives, behaviors and intentions.
So being able to switch your attention,
paying attention to things that are important, having some impulse
control, let's face it, the three and four year olds and five year olds,
a lot of what we do in classrooms is about around those functions,
even if it's we're doing reading, we're still dealing
with and helping to encourage those functions in young children.
Critical thinking and problem solving happens from the moment kids
arrive at the school and where they put things
and how they put them and how they talk to each other
and how they interact and how they solve problems is a huge portion of what we do.
But if we start thinking about computational thinking and pre coding,
the subsets of that come down to things that are
the subset skills of executive functioning critical
thinking in general, there's no there, there isn't a mismatch.
So if we think about just symbolic language, we're talking about pre readers,
they're still learning things like letters make sounds and sounds put together
to make words and words that are written in our spoken language, that are written.
And if you think about symbolic language and pre coding,
we're learning things like an arrow that points one way
means a direction, and an arrow points another way means another direction.
And a red button probably means stop and a green button means go.
And so red is stop and green is go.
And letters that face one way or mean something in the letter,
this is another way.
A, B and a D are not the same.
And it's all about directionality.
All of that meshes together so perfectly.
We think about computational thinking and patterns and pattern recognition.
Everything.
And early learning is about a pattern, not just a simple like red
blue, red, blue, red blue or a b ab.
But when I do this, that happens.
What I do that this happens.
So those are patterns in behavior, patterns in science, patterns in words.
So all of that fits in with what we're doing in tree coding,
which is looking for patterns and syntax and how we make technology
do what we wanted to do.
Of course, the order of things we call I guess, algorithms, right?
Is this is also in literacy and numeracy.
The numbers have in order the size of things have orders,
the words have letters.
In a certain order the story has order.
So the order of action is also an order of words and language.
So if we think about it maybe a little more precisely
or more concretely, so a three or four year
old is still learning which way is right and which way is less.
It's very common to have even five year olds and some six year olds and older
still thinking about which way is right and which is left
when we do coding of pre coding, when I'm only thinking about our own right
and left, we're also thinking about objects right or left
the robot as an example, right and left
that's saying something from someone else's perspective or something else.
This perspective isn't only about directionality,
but it's about point of view, which is what we're teaching in literacy
or the way the numbers are, which will teach him in numeracy filter
that Young may not yet grasp 1 to 1 correspondence.
You've seen this even if you don't work with young children
that someone can count to ten, but they have no idea what seven means.
They just know the parent.
These these phrases or these sounds right.
But if we're going to move the bot from here to there and it has to move
as we think it's going to take a certain number of steps, which is great
math still, we're going to have to know that 1 to 1 correspondence.
I have to push the button four times to go four steps.
Four now means something literally, not figuratively.
So we we begin to see how that ties in.
And then also certainly in a direct programable robot,
there is this idea about consequences and actions
and that that is a big part of what we're doing in so many other things.
So I see this really tight, tight fit.
It's not a stretch at all.
If we step it up one step a little bit older
and we look at something like say scratch Junior, scratch
genius blocks are color coded as if they're parts of speech.
There are action blocks. Those are verbs.
There are things like shrink grow adjectives or speed.
Adjectives.
And we have nouns, each other characters, and we have a setting
which is the screen.
It's exactly what we're teaching and how sentences work, how sentences work.
So we really can see those those connections so clearly.
For me, it makes a whole lot of sense.
And it's not about adding something, but it's giving a new tool
to practice and learn and explore the things that we value already.
And with young children and teaching and learning and the tools that you've
mentioned use like icons or symbols
rather than words when engaging in the programing language,
which is great for pre readers and even kids who are learning English.
Correct.
And so while in my first robot classroom experience,
we used a written language logo, so
you had to type s C to go forward for some of the children I was working
with, those were simply symbols F and D together meant move forward.
They didn't. It was no different than using an arrow.
But it's true that a lot of the best tools, in my opinion, for early learning
in technologies and the technologies or the tools themselves are language free
in that they don't have English symbols on them,
they don't have Spanish signal symbols on them.
They are simply symbolic tools.
So they have arrows or color codes or whatever.
And most of the ones that we have,
the very end learners don't have any screens at all either.
So they're directly programed by the bots themselves.
And so speaking of screens,
how do you respond to parents who are concerned about screen time?
Two ways.
I think the parents need to take a moment and pause
and think about which screens are their children using,
where are they using them and what are they using them for?
I wrote a book a few years ago that's now out of print
called Using an iPad with Your Preschooler,
which was written particularly to help parents
understand that it could do more with a tablet or a phone than hand
their child videos to watch passively,
but that there were a lot of other opportunities.
And I think that we still see a lot of this
passive use of technology with young children.
I will say the most egregious use of that I ever saw with children
in strollers at Disney World watching videos is here.
They are in the most rich environment of of
sound and smell and taste and everything.
And they were watching videos in a stroller.
You know,
I know there's a time
when you really need
your child to sit down
and just do something so you can take a phone
call or cook dinner or whatever it is.
But we need to be thoughtful
about how screens are being used where and to do what in classrooms.
There's very little screen time in elementary school.
We have very few opportunities for children to spend much time on the screen.
I worked with a school with 1 to 1 technology.
Every child has an iPad starting at three years old.
They had very little screen time, even though they each have their own
because there were so many other things to do as well.
They're busy, but there weren't.
There was never almost never passive screen time
when those children were getting their screen time
when they got home and they were sitting in front of televisions.
And so we need to make sure it's really about screen time
and not about technology.
Now, as far as screen time in the classroom, our screen
time in learning settings, when we're talking about computational
thinking and computer science and coding and coding, it's not passive at all.
It doesn't do anything unless you do something.
And so it forces engagement or it does nothing.
If you if you've got a board and you're not pushing
buttons, it's just going to sit there, you know,
And if you're looking at the screen to program it
and you don't put anything in, it's not going to move.
In this part of technology use, the screen is almost never passive.
I do think there's another warning here, and that's about how that interaction is.
I don't know if you know Marina Baer's book Coding as a Playground
highly recommended.
He talks about technology use as playpens and playgrounds
for think about a child in a playpen.
They are safer, their choices are more controlled.
There's only so much they can do.
Think about children in a playground.
It's still somewhat controlled.
They're not out in the woods. They're safer.
But there's room to play and there's different ways
to play with the things that are there.
And there's more experimentation and there's usually more than one child.
So there's collaboration, cooperation, communication.
And I think if we think of not just screen time,
but the role of screen and what the child is doing,
we want to be careful about not just using playpen choices.
So a play Pinterest would be an on screen activity
where they're moving a character in a maze in a programing like fashion.
So characters here, you want the character to go there, so you're going to push
on the screen an arrow pointing this way three times an airplane that way
two times, and bingo, you win the prize to set this character to the goal.
But the app or the website or the tool only allows one answer that's a playpen.
The child isn't really learning coding by doing that.
The child is learning to follow someone else's code.
So there's only one way.
So we have to be cautious, not just about the amount of time
on the screen, but the quality of the child interaction.
And I think that hopefully at some point we'll move towards that
discussion more than just how much time that are being said.
I do understand why parents are concerned, and parents are concerned
because they see how children use screens at home and we have not done
a very good job of helping them see how screens can be used in school.
In education, we don't
have enough time to market to parents all the good things
that happen in our classrooms because we're already too busy.
But I think the more we begin to show the things children can do
and are doing, then the power changes and parents see that.
Another possibility.
I'd like to see something more about applying the
we talked a little bit about or I talk a little bit
about literacy and numeracy and how those overlap,
but I think it's important to also talk a little bit
about using technology with young learners.
Doesn't have to be a separate time.
It can be part of what they're already doing.
We have certain structures we see a lot in early childhood,
so the teachers have circle time with all the children.
There's no reason that technology can't be part of that.
There's no reason why we can't have robotic times in children
as young as three can do robots all by themselves.
It doesn't always have to be the center of the teachers attention.
But I think that this integrating it and making it more normal
is a powerful idea.
It's not normal to us as adults.
We didn't have technology like this when we were in with little
when we were little learners and we tend to teach the way
we were taught or the opposite of the way we were taught, depending on
if we had a good experience for bad experience. Right?
But I do think that it's important to think about, you know,
if I'm reading this story or we're learning about maps
that we can do maps with a robot and it makes sense.
We want those opportunities, The cross-pollination
of those two things to be purposeful, not just thematic.
How do you help teachers find those connections?
Because if they are asked to integrate, there's often this will like,
how do I do it?
I don't know what I'm supposed to do
because they haven't seen this pairing of technology in a classroom.
Like you
said, they might not have grown up with this access to these kind of devices.
So they may not have seen ways that it could potentially look like
in a classroom.
It's a really good question and something to think about all the time, which is
what are the entry points to using technology?
Well, in an already full environment, I think that one of those big entry points
is counterintuitive in that I think
literacy is the best entry point as opposed to STEM.
And I'm not saying not STEM,
I'm just saying STEM is a big push right now
in early learning.
If you don't have literacy, you don't have anything.
There's nothing like a bot using a bot to retell a story to move
along physically,
along the path of the story, to have multiple bots, be
multiple characters and move in different ways.
I've seen that with kids as young as five and six.
I think that literacy is an entry point to me
is one of the highlights of possibilities because it is.
Literacy is also not just child created.
They can be books that teachers are reading aloud
that we're using as venues for technology that can be powerful as well.
So I think there's some entry point there and I'm really passionate about that.
I have been working on a whole lot of not just computer
science entry points, but technology in general and three points.
As an example, if you read Magic School books,
lots of people know Magic School Bus, Magic School Bus book about volcanoes
doesn't have a single image of a volcano in it, just illustrations.
So if you're a child in Arizona who's never seen a volcano,
how do you how do you make sense of that?
Unless we had a
QR code on the page about volcanoes, it takes you to a video of a volcano.
You can see it, or a link to a scientist
who's talking about volcanoes with older kids.
I and there's lots of possibilities.
And so that kind of praying together, the technologies
within the same unit make sense.
I think there's a tie for robots, but not always
just because you can make a robot go from point A to point B doesn't mean
it's the best way to tell the story of exploration
or colonization or whatever.
It's a hook, and I think we want to be careful about it just in end.
Kind of tied together the magic school bus idea.
The volcano, like kids, could very easily create an interactive diorama.
So dioramas like a like a shoebox
diorama is a very popular thing among elementary classes.
Why not create something like that in Scott's junior where it's like,
okay, when I click on the volcano, how will volcano erupt?
What does that look like? What does that sound like?
What do the other sprites do?
And then go to another page. What happens after a volcano erupts?
Like those are all entry points that you can kind of talk about and make
and explore through computer science or coding?
Exactly. Exactly.
And even taking student drawings and doing voiceovers.
They can be crayon drawings and voiceovers and then put the animation
on top of that or green screen is another great possibility.
I was online in talking a lady.
She was using green screen and a simple button top robot.
And they they covered the robot with green so that they could
then make the robot be moving characters across the screen in the green screen.
And I thought, well, that was pretty clever to put those all together.
So it wasn't child's hands
that they had to do this other layer of thinking about how the robot
would have to move to make this story tell the story
so that burying the technology into the context of storytelling,
I think is is pretty powerful.
And we know the more we combine things, the deeper the learning,
not the shallower learning that they have to apply it.
And that example, they'd have to if it's a prerecorded thing,
they'd have to time it.
The movements of the robot with it, like only move after the
recording says this, or if they're doing it live,
they have to try and say it live with whatever they preprogram into it.
So you can have very simple technologies.
I mean, a push button pop robot is pretty simple.
So the end user
not to create for the end user, but you can still do some amazing things.
I mean, so I think that that's an important part.
I think the other important thing that we shouldn't overlook
is in most classrooms, I've not yet been in the classroom
where every child has their own robot in elementary or preschool.
And so there's this added thing that happens when we have children
work together, which is that I think one needs to work together,
but to they have to also explain and justify their choices to each other.
And that is where we start to solidify what we understand
and what we don't yet understand and how we learn from each other.
And that's where the most empowering things happen.
And that's the messy part.
You know, it's not just following the steps.
When I first started programing computers on my own
back in the RadioShack days, and you would get a book
and you could type in these hundreds of lines of code
and then in the end you would get a simple computer game or artillery game
where you could change the angle of the gun and in the distance
it would shoot and you could knock out the brick wall or whatever it was,
and we just would type pages and pages of code in.
And some people learn to code that way.
I just learned to type.
So we want to make sure we
get kids to learn to code and not just learn to type.
So I think it's important that application level is integrated
and thoughtfully included in what we're doing.
How do you help administrators kind of understand this approach
if they haven't seen an integration of computational thinking or computer
science in terms of if if it looks messy and they're used to like desks and rows
and everybody quietly working on the exact same thing, how how do you discuss this
with an administrator who is just not used to that, that messy way of learning?
So my two biggest successes on that one
was having a group of high level administrators
have a problem to solve using a simple robot,
and we had to work together to solve this problem.
I step and took notes on things they were saying to each other
and when they were done and they had finally,
finally been successful with whatever the task was,
and we sat down and talked about the thinking they had to do.
And we I started on this whiteboard and they started with we had
we had to do angle, you know, we had to do with the estimate, whatever.
And then I shared some of the things I had written down,
which was collaboration words and collaboration words and encouraging words.
And when it got quiet and they were all stumped on what happened next.
And pretty soon we had filled this whole whiteboard
and they got it because they could see on the wall,
that's the things that the children would be doing
that they valued beyond the technology piece.
So I think that's part of it.
I think the other thing that helps sometimes
is for administrators and teachers
to have time to share their fears
and so that those can be put back into context
and to also share where they feel a need.
So I was working with a private school
who had a specific kind of focus.
They were private school because of the cultural focus that they had.
And so my examples needed to make sure to leverage what was important to them.
But they don't want to lose.
And by using that as the basis,
the leap forward was a much bigger leap than if I had just focused on the tech.
So like everything else, if it's something important to you
and you're more more able to integrate it into what's what's going on.
So in that particular case, it was like a room full of teachers
from this private school who embraced the tech
they had because it was related to this very high cultural need or interest span.
And so the technology faded into the background and was just a vehicle
literally and
figuratively, for carrying forward the cultural mission.
Yeah, Yeah.
I think both of those examples are brilliant.
Tying it into the school values and expectations, whatnot is great.
And anytime you can get a minister engaging in what kids are doing,
I mean that's wonderful.
I was fortunate in that I had a couple of principals who would do that.
They'd come in and sit in my class
and they'd engage in whatever the kids were doing.
They wanted to learn alongside them and they got a lot out of that experience.
Yeah, and that's good that they got out
that I know that their days are just as busy as teachers Day
and it's hard.
And someone asked me once
if I could wave a magic wand what would be one change in education?
What my one change might be
that every school board member, everybody who works in the school
district has to spend one day a month in real classrooms
because everybody learns from that.
And if we mandate it, then everybody I mean, everyone from the people
who are cleaning the school, the people who are feeding the children
to the the head of school, to the
the school board members, the benefactors,
because that's where time
it's an ise of the children and what they're doing
and what the teachers are doing to encourage.
That's really,
I think where the power in a previous interview was with John Stapleton,
I talked about how I had an administrator I got into an argument with
because she felt like pedagogy was so important
that you didn't really need to know content knowledge to teach a subject area.
And I strongly disagreed and said, Well, how would you teach a banned class
if you didn't know how to play any of the instruments or read music?
And she said she would to get along just fine because she's has good pedagogy.
And so she happened to substitute for me
when I was doing some observations at other schools.
And so when I went back after that day when she was substituting for me,
I was like, Oh, so what did she teach you? And what?
She just kind of sat at the desk and is on her phone the whole time.
She didn't do anything.
It's like, Oh, so it's almost like she needed some content knowledge to help you.
Well, yeah, so I get your argument.
But the flipside is also true, which is we need to be willing to say,
I don't know, let's figure it out together. Yeah.
And some of the the context that I talk about
in the interview that I was referring to, what I was arguing for with
the administrator is all of the coding teachers were asking for more time
for professional development to further understand content knowledge
because they felt like the kids were getting to a point
where they could not help them.
And so I was trying to argue for like, Hey, they're asking for this.
We need more time for this. And she was saying, No, you're fine.
You just need pedagogy.
You don't need the actual content knowledge.
Oh yeah,
Well, it's wonderful that
the teachers wanted to learn more and we should be embracing that.
Right, right, right.
If you think you're done learning and you're a teacher, then you should be
then people, right?
I think you've got to have a thirst for learning good teacher.
And I think that's one of the reasons I technology can be a real rejuvenate
for some teachers, for some educators because here's a new way.
I don't have to do it the old way or have a new thing to try.
And that's exciting because I love learning and sometimes it'll fail.
I mean, I have a technology black Thumb that's unbelievable.
And we're almost 40 years I've been working in Ed Tech.
And I think that that's the other thing that holds teachers back.
All of us back is nobody likes to make a mistake in front of others.
But I think the more we encourage
learning as not linear and that we do make mistakes
and that when it doesn't work is when you learn how it works, then
I think that that's kind of the key and the backbone of all of this.
We code not because we'll be successful with every code, but we code
because we solve problems and learn more about how things work.
And that part of the lesson, something
we as adults probably need even more than the children we work with.
So what trends or changes in education excite
you and which ones are you kind of concerned or leery about?
I think I'm leery about that continued
push down of curriculum and content
and the tests being the only way to measure success.
I continue to feel like that is the number one
negative driver in education today.
The fact that we are testing children as young as three in deciding
if they're capable or incapable once really, Are they ready or not?
Ready or not ready yet is a really big problem.
I think the move away from being playful
and and
building and encouraging playful learning opportunities and longer term projects
and explanations and explorations and that those are becoming more
and more difficult for teachers to justify, even though teachers know
in their heart, in their heads that that's the most powerful learning
is problematic and maybe a bigger problem
than any individual teacher can.
And I think that's the
the biggest thing that I worry about and sometimes lose sleep over.
I think the biggest success is that we have tools
now that very young children can do, think about very big ideas with.
They can explore things that we do before, and I'm really
quite passionate about the possibilities that exist with tools
that are not thousands of dollars and then don't because their costs aren't
high, don't have pressures to use them all the time, but use them well and wisely.
I think that that is incredibly powerful and hopeful thing going forward.
I do think there's a cautionary tale about this whole idea of computer science.
I think the term computer science is a very scary one for a lot of people
because it's like, Oh, I have
to be a programmer or oh, I have to be able to build it, or I have.
I think that maybe it's a little harsh and maybe the softening of that
can be beneficial, maybe not so much the high school or middle school.
But I think if we're talking about the pre-K, fifth or sixth grade group,
then if it's more about the problem solving and the computational thinking
that that might be more a better entry place, I wonder sometimes
when you look at CISPA and even if everything starts at K
that that is some of that is because traditionally
if you think about computer science,
it isn't something that you would think of doing with a four year old.
But if you think about computational thinking, it's what we're already doing
with four year old.
And I think
we need to think about bridging that gap because I do think it's a stumbling block.
Yeah, you hear that? Anyone who's at CSKA esty.
Yeah, well,
I mean, I found in that if the Early Learning Network,
I think 2012 and it remains
the only age based across all technologies
organization of Esty and because of that we kind of struggle sometimes.
But I'm hopeful.
I can seem to be hopeful that by reaching out to you, you know,
we had this opportunity to talk about it because I think
people think of the pictures babies and they are just babies.
But babies are learning what the world looks like.
A three and four year old who's in formal schooling,
preschool or pre-K is learning what education is.
And if we wait until they're eight, ten,
as a learning tool or a tool
for exploration and discovery, then we're missing out.
We're telling them that's not something for school.
So I think it's really powerful opportunity going forward
because we have the tools now.
Yeah, almost too many tools.
It's hard to pick.
Exactly. Exactly.
I've begun trying to think about how to help others, look at technologies
and make better choices without picking favorites in brands.
I'm doing a session here in Florida at the FTC conference in January 2020,
and it's about that about looking at this affordances that the robots
bring to early learning and how how to think about the different
kinds of robots and how they functional they do or how you interact with them
and how that fits or doesn't fit so people can make better choices.
Yeah, thinking through those affordances is extremely important and actually,
the interview with John Stapleton, we also kind of talk about affordances
and constraints
of platforms and languages and whatnot and how they can impact learning.
It's it's such a key thing to think about.
And a lot of people just think about, well, what's the cheapest thing I can get
or what's the most popular thing?
But we really need to be thinking critically about the tools that we use,
especially in the limited amount time that we have with kids.
Well, and it's a financial responsibility.
If you're a librarian, I suppose you buy
books based on popularity and topics
that are important and curriculum needs and all of that.
But we need to do all that.
Plus think about the interfaces and think about the possibilities beyond.
I think those are tricky.
There are lots of places I've been where the school, the pressure
on the teachers, on using stuff because it was expensive.
That's it.
Those are powerful conversations.
You know, I'm
going to buy you this thing and it's going to cost us this much money.
How often will you use it as opposed to what's the benefit?
And you mentioned pressures on teachers.
I'm wondering what kind of advice you might give to somebody
who is in education and is kind of approaching burnout
or would rather just not try and approach that at all and prevent
any kind of burnout?
Because there's a lot of educators that I know who are not teaching
after just a few years.
It's it's
one of those fields where you're either in it
for the long haul or you're in it for a pretty short term.
Yes, it is.
It is It is a challenging thing teaching.
And I think that the loss of autonomy
that we had when I first started makes it harder.
There's nothing more painful than knowing what you need to do to help some children
and not being able to do it.
And I think that causes burnout.
I think another part of burnout
is social media and email and connections happen 24 hours a day
and we aren't good about putting up boundaries
and saying, Yeah, you can email me parents,
but I'm not answering on the weekends or I turn off my work
email at 5:00 and I'm 100% family time or me time or whatever that is.
And I worked in grad education, I taught graduate school.
So we haven't done a good job of helping new teachers come in.
Understanding it's okay to have boundaries.
And I think that that's part of it.
I think another part of that is that we also have
those probably controversial thing to say, but I'll say it.
I think we also have some things out there that make it seem like
some things are more important than they really are.
So I call it the teacher's pet teacher syndrome.
But it isn't just teachers pay teachers.
But this the classroom needs to be beautiful and perfect
and every piece of paper should have a beautiful font and a nice folder.
And we should do big projects for big holidays
where the kids are doing big things to take it home to families.
And all of those pressures may not be productive.
And I think that it's about helping each other and ourselves
make choices about where we spend their energy
it is does sometimes feel like a little bit of a competition
for who has who has at least an elementary school, the cutest room
or the cutest blog.
I think that we all need to learn
and have the freedom to say, Not now or that's not my passion point.
This is one I'm working on or whatever.
And I'm not to say that it's not okay.
It's not good to have cute and good and well designed because it does matter.
But I think I think there's some pressures that are new in around not too long ago.
Yeah.
And one of your earlier points about disconnecting from the job
or the pressures that's so important I try and only check my email twice a day.
So like once in the morning and once in the afternoon
and I don't get any notifications on my phone.
I'm signed out of all social media stuff and I'll sign in once a day,
check a couple of groups,
see if there's anything I can respond to, and then I'm done.
Sign out immediately afterwards.
The more you can disconnect from it, the easier it's going to be to
maintain your focus when you're in your leisure time
and then maintain your focus when you're not in your leisure time.
And actually working with kids.
And I think we need to model that for kids, too.
So saying to your class, I'm leaving my phone off
until lunch time, then I need to check it or whatever it is we have to be over.
True about that makeover. About that.
Let's face it, being online and social media is a two headed dragon.
Right?
On one side, it can provide support and knowledge and resources,
and the other side it can make you feel inadequate for less than perfect.
We're not always supportive of each other as we could be.
I think that that's that's another piece.
Like we said better before it can be.
You can help them to those who are isolated
and we can give support to each other.
But I think you're right about being able to put up
say, I just don't do this 24 hours a day.
But I think we also need to tell parents that, you know,
parents have things to their kids are their 100% of their world, Right.
So they should have access to teachers all the time.
And that is not a realistic expectation.
And administrators as well.
So I think that that's a whole new topic that I don't I don't see widely discussed.
And it's brought on the back of technology.
So I think that we should be paying attention to it.
And for context, for people who are listening, my comment is
this is coming from somebody who taught for a decade, seven days a week.
So I would teach elementary school in the mornings and afternoons at night.
I would teach drumline on the weekends, Saturday and Sunday,
I would teach private lessons or drum lines.
So I very rarely disconnected.
And I've learned over this time that it's okay to set these boundaries
and it's okay
to have that that point of disconnection and just do something for yourself.
Well, I'd go beyond that and say it's more than just, okay, it's preferable.
Yeah, it's necessary.
I cannot be 100% for everybody everywhere, all the time.
And that's one of the reasons why we see this growth in schools.
Banning technology that kids have in their pockets
is because they're not present in the learning in a classroom.
But we haven't modeled any of those boundaries and behaviors.
And so it's not surprising that that's the way it is.
It is the nature of the design, of the technology, the technology
to keep you engaged with it as much as possible.
So we have to we have to acknowledge that and and make decisions.
Now, remember, I'm old school.
I've been around a long time and we used to worry about bookworms
who wouldn't engage because they're always had their head in a book.
And now wouldn't that be awesome?
We think that would be a really great thing to do.
But I just a little But I do think that if we model uses
collaborative, collaborative uses of technologies and if we model, say, okay,
take out your phone and let's figure out this math problem,
use your calculator on your phone or whatever in high school.
Now let's put it away.
We're going to talk about this or we're going to do this other thing.
We're not going to use them so we can start to model those boundaries.
I don't think that in the early learning that everything needs to be done
technologically.
I think there are times when it's so when crayons and paints and mud
and tricycles are better choices.
But we need to make sense of that and we need to label it as fun, you know?
So I'm curious if if your answer will relate to what you just said, but
what do you wish there's more research on that could inform your own practices.
Oh, well,
I certainly I know things because I've seen it,
and that's not research enough, so I'd love to see research
that informs our practice related to computational
thinking, free coding and coding and literacy specifically.
But I don't want that to result in checklist
of behaviors or lessons in a test to test it.
Yes, I recently saw online people
asking for a pre and post test for computation thinking.
Yeah, and it kind of made my stomach hurt.
Yeah.
I'd also like to see research on the return
to a thicker curriculum, not a broader curriculum.
I'd like to see us get back to where
we don't cover well in middle school or high school.
instead of really focusing on the bigger ideas.
Right.
And then I really would like to research how do we get people who really are good
at teaching to come to teaching and stay in teaching a little bit longer?
I think the churn is not healthy.
You know, it's hard.
First year teaching is hard.
First five years are the hardest, five years.
How do we support and what does the research tell us about
what do we need to do so that really good teachers stay and add on to that.
If you're new to CSS education, IT, it's
going to feel very difficult, especially the first year in the first few years.
But with just continued efforts and working towards improvements
and whatnot, it does get easier every year.
I think that's true of most teaching.
The gem is to to get the things that were hard
become easier, and then you discover new things that are hard, which will keep
you always learning, always growing, always having new excitement.
It's not teaching the same lesson
It's about all the new stuff.
And I would love to see that research as well, because I do worry
sometimes a little bit about teachers and teaching and the profession.
Yeah.
What questions do you have for myself or for the field at large?
I really would like to learn more about
how people who don't start from the early childhood perspective
think about computer science in that with younger and younger children,
although I use technology forever, I still come from that world,
the young children world.
And so I really want to work and figure out the entry point
and the crossover point and make sure that we're doing with young
children is setting them up for what you're doing with older children
in the realm of computer science and how we can make it a pre-K
or pre-K 20 experience, and that we're using similar language
or at least understand each world so we can make this more powerful.
And I don't know how it was in California or where you're at in Texas,
but at the K-8 school guards at it was actually a pre-K eight school.
But I never saw a single kid who is pre-kindergarten.
So for whatever reason, they just kind of like it was its own
separate thing that existed on our campus.
But you only saw them walking to and from places every now and then.
They were like, Oh, yes, that's your too.
Well, that happens a lot in some cases.
In the past it's been because they're financed differently.
They really are a subset, a different section of how things are run.
Okay, places.
They still have different credentialing requirements. Okay.
So there are a whole lot of reasons why that may have happened,
that may have nothing to do with the learning, but it also may be that
that's preferred by the people who work for in that age group or their school.
It kind of depends.
But regardless of that, I don't think we'd want to be teaching kids
how to form letters and write things
one way in pre-K and K, and then in first grade, suddenly it's
a whole different method because then it's a learning curve, non purposeful stuff.
I think we need to be careful and find ways
to work together to make sure we're at least starting to build a dotted line
through the whole path.
Yeah, that constant continuity really helps.
I love that I saw kids several years in a row.
It made things so that we could just keep building off of things every single year.
And I knew where that came from in terms of understanding
and I knew where they wanted to go.
So that was helpful for me at least.
So where might people go to connect with you and the organizations
that you work with?
Thanks for asking that question to connect with me.
There are a couple of really easy ways.
Suddenly it clicks.
Dot com is my website
and I post some resources and activities and information there.
You can read more about me if you'd want to.
And I also have another
site which is early learning summit dot com
and I'm really passionate about putting together
people who work with young learners and technology
to work together to learn and discover how powerful that can be
and to come away with resources and skills and interests and strategies.
And that's why I have this Early Learning Summit website.
That's where that that comes from.
In the near future.
I'll be in Florida, in Miami,
in preparation for the FTC conference,
which is FTC dot org, the future ed Tech conference.
The day before that conference starts, I'm having a one day early
learning tech summit, which will be for people who are interested in the 3
to 7 year olds and using technology in Wise's wonderful, playful ways.
And that will be at the Miami Children's Museum.
And you can find out about that
suddenly clicks for the Early Learning Summit website.
And one more way you could find me is I do help lead
or if see the Early Learning Network plan.
I founded it a few years ago and we're a small and hearty
band of educators who are interested in or actually participating
in using technology with young learners from all around the world.
So it's a pretty interesting place to pop in and ask questions or
see what's going on.
But those would be three powerful ways.
And of course, my email is
lovely at some clicks dot com and that's another way to reach them.
And as always, all of the links that Gail just mentioned at the end
are in the show notes, which you can find in your podcast app
by clicking on the link or by visiting Jared earlier.
AECOM In addition, I have included links to other resources
such as some of the communities and books that Gail recommended in this podcast.
I hope you enjoy this episode.
Next week is going to be
an unpacking scholarship episode, and then two weeks from now
we'll have another interview with another guest.
Until then, please consider sharing this resource
and the hundreds of free resources on my website with another course.
Educator Hope you all have a great weekend.
I'll talk to you later.

Guest Bio

Gail Lovely is a pioneer in the field of technology in early learning, beginning her work in the field in 1983. Gail’s degrees in psychology and education from UCLA and her Master’s Degree in Educational Computing from Pepperdine University are tangible evidence of her studies, but her lifelong efforts to help teachers and other educators make developmentally sound choices about methods, tools and strategies provides evidence of her passion for the work. She is known for her practical approach to education, her appreciation and admiration for teaching and learning, and her skill at making the complex understandable and the difficult manageable. Gail knows that technology, used well, provides “food for thought” for young and old alike. Using robots, apps, digital cameras, and other technologies affords new opportunities for learners to explore their ideas and understandings, providing “things to think about and to think with” which can be engaging, challenging and fun. She believes the magic is in the children not the technology, and it is the job of educators to provide thoughtful guidance and enthusiasm to encourage children to explore their thoughts and ideas and have these heard, often with technologies as the amplifier of those thoughts and ideas.

Resources/Links Relevant to This Episode

Other podcast episodes that were mentioned or are relevant to this episode
- Examining Coding Skills of Five-year-old Children
  - In this episode I unpack Metin, Basaran, and Kalyenci’s (2023) publication titled “Examining coding skills of five-year-old children,” which investigates whether gender, parent education, or socioeconomic status has an impact on coding abilities of five-year-olds.
- How to Get Started with Computer Science Education
  - In this episode I provide a framework for how districts and educators can get started with computer science education for free.
- The Place for Joy in Teaching and Learning with Sara Lev
  - In this interview with Sara Lev, we discuss the place for joy in teaching and learning, the impact of remote learning on PBL in early childhood, misconceptions around PBL in early childhood, encouraging curiosity by responding to questions with questions, social and emotional learning, the impact of yoga and meditation on teaching, and so much more.
- More episodes related to pedagogy
- More episodes related to pre-K
- More episodes related to pre and early readers
- More episodes related to professional development
- All other episodes
Communities to reach out to for support or collaboration
- ISTE communities (International Society for Technology in Education)
- Local CSTA chapters (Computer Science Teachers Association)
- Find other CS educators and resources by using the #CSK8 hashtag on Twitter
Coding as a Playground by Marina Umaschi Bers (the book Gail mentioned)
- Note, this is not an affiliate link
Connect with Gail