reflection
For almost two years, I have worked as an assistant preschool teacher part-time at a Waldorf-inspired, nature-based preschool moved outdoors due to COVID. The school’s vision is to ‘nurture social, emotional, physical and cognitive skills by creating a daily rhythm that challenges children through arts, crafts, stories, rhymes, movement games and hours to play and explore the natural world,’ and as a member of the teaching team who has been there longer than almost everyone, I have been committed to trying to execute that vision under the guidance of the lead teacher through many ups and downs. It has been a challenging and rewarding experience from which I’ve learned so much about early childhood and workplace environments of functionality and dysfunctionality.
empathy
Growing my capacity for and practice of empathy has been my biggest takeaway from two years of working with preschool-age youth, it is a skill that is absolutely necessary for positive caregiving/teaching. Empathy is the key to looking beyond the surface level to the root of behavior. It is important to approach every student interaction with the understanding that there are reasons for every behavior, and a real desire to cause trouble is rarely the true cause (this approach is helpful beyond the classroom as well). Empathy allows me to be extremely level-headed in chaotic and troublesome situations (e.g. getting sticks thrown at me, a student ripping another student’s mask off and accidentally choking them) and helps me to provide the gentle but serious guidance necessary regardless of the circumstances.
workplace functionality
When I was first brought on last school year around October, COVID restrictions had wreaked havoc on the structure and staffing of the preschool. Instead of having all the children together as a large group, utilizing indoor and outdoor spaces, the number of students was halved, the outdoor space was split to keep pods of children separate from one another in case of an outbreak, and more teachers were desperately needed. I was hired part-time and worked with a lead teacher to guide children through a daily rhythm. My first year, our pod had quite a bit of challenging behavior which required a lot of energy and support. It was my first time working at a preschool, and I had no prior experience to inform my expectations of how it should go, so I assumed that the way things were run were normal (if anything can be normal during a pandemic), and accepted them as such. The current school year has seen much less challenging behavior and chaos in the routine than the previous year, but I slowly gathered from this year's new full time teachers, who also worked at other locations under the organization’s umbrella, that other classrooms were entirely more organized and less challenging than this one. The resulting workplace drama that has unfolded in the past couple of months has taught me much about workplace dysfunction. A successful workplace, particularly in education, will have: clear lines of communication between employees and expectations regarding communication; regular/daily meetings to reflect on sessions and discuss difficulties, successes and strategies; a clean and organized space; and a culture of collaboration, honesty and trust, among other things.