Where Hedgehogs Play and Learning Stays
Becky Gall on Finding Joy Each Day in the Early Childhood Program
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Transcript
Audio description: Mrs. Becky Gall speaks to one of her students while children are laughing and chatting in the background.
It's a sunny day in the Early Childhood Program natural classrooms and time for Ms. Becky Gall's class, nicknamed the Hedgehogs, to have a snack. Some are running around the meadow. Others are going down the slide built into the hillside or climbing on logs.
In what would appear to me, an outsider, to be free range chaos, the children are respecting boundaries, stopping at landmarks that they know are out of bounds, being careful with their bodies around their friends. And at Mrs. Gall's call, they gather round.
I spent an afternoon with Becky Gall and her Hedgehogs, where learning was woven into all the interactions, like math concepts taught through a snack of crackers and cheese.
Lisa Ha: You think of preschool teachers having to have a lot of directive over their class. And I was noticing a lot more questions and inquiry-based interactions. Is that something that you are doing consciously with your kids?
Becky Gall: Part of my teaching philosophy is inquiry based. A lot of times there's just really natural ways to weave in our curriculum into everyday interaction. So we are talking about numbers and letters as we see them just generally in the environment.
The kids will kind of ask questions of me, and I’ll kind of ask them, I'll say, “Hey, you know, I want you to answer that question.” Or, “When you figure that out, come back and tell me,” and having the kids take ownership over their own learning. And as much as I can step out of the way, I like to.
LH: I was imagining myself in the same situation and, I would just say, “Here are your snacks. Go do your thing.” And that's not what you do.
BG: [chuckling] Right, right.
LH: You're very much like, wondering, “How many crackers are in this sleeve.” And doing math, and teaching them concepts like greater than and less than. And for me, I would be like, well, this is my time to take a mental break. It doesn't appear that you're doing that. [laughs]
BG: No, no no. And the thing that I love about teaching preschool is that it's just so personal. So it's like those moments, actually, where we get to gather over a meal or we get to gather over a snack.
It just opens up just a tremendous dialog and opportunity to just continue your teaching. But more than that, I feel like if you're doing it right, you forget that you're teaching. And the kids are walking out with a greater understanding of mathematics and all of that good stuff.
But yeah, I would say that those social moments are absolutely part of the curriculum. We do a lot of social-emotional learning.
LH: Yeah, and just being flexible to what the kids are experiencing. Rather than, “This person hit this other person, we need to address that,” you're calling everybody in for a community meeting.
BG: Yeah. Right.
LH: And is this something that you have always done? Is this something that you've just kind of played around with?
BG: You know, I started working with elementary students and ended up finding my way and — kind of like moving backward. And my style of teaching has definitely evolved. I started out as a special education teacher where we did a lot of direct instruction. And this is absolutely the antithesis of direct instruction.
Well, that's actually not true. You know, explicit indirect instruction has its place in preschool.
But I think that as I started working with younger kids, asking really big questions, and bringing the kids back to, for example, the community meeting and stuff like that, that's something that I started doing maybe a couple of years ago. Because, over the last several years we've been talking a lot about our class as a family, and how we have to respect each other. And that's really important so that we can build solid friendships and things like that.
Because I think that one of the things that I care the most about in my teaching practice is interacting with students in a respectful way that instills them with a feeling, so that they can detect healthy relationships when they get older and they can detect unhealthy relationships. So if they're treated with respect, by me and by their classmates, when they encounter people that don't treat them right, they're going to have a feeling of, “this doesn't feel good.”
This doesn't feel good. I might walk away from it. Or maybe I'm going to sit at a different lunch table next time or whatever.
LH: Many things struck me about that particular interaction with the community meeting. One is being flexible to what the needs of the class were. Another was that they all knew the ground rules.
BG: Yes they did. They totally do. We review those a lot of the time. And one of the things I think that is actually a part of my teaching practice is instilling in the kids that they have these core qualities, and helping to tap into them.
We are people of character. We have character. What does kindness look like and sound like in our classroom? And we're going to practice those things.
My specific language is expected and unexpected. So we expect people to speak to us kindly, expect people to respect our belongings, things like that. It's unexpected when someone does the opposite, out of our classroom contract. It does remind me a lot of the family. It's kind of like how a parent would hold you to a high and achievable standard.
I expect this of you because I know you're capable of it. And you will rise to the occasion because you are a person of character.
The other thing that is a big part of the way that I teach is I use the elevated language in the classroom. Maybe I'll use a word like, “ecstatic,” and we'll build up to it. We'll say, I'm not just happy. I'm not just excited. I am ecstatic, right? Like the biggest version of, the word that we know. I just love it when the kids apply that.
LH: What is different about preschool in general? What do we know about kids that we didn't know before?
BG: This is a time where your children are developing their core values. So we get the kids when they are brand new to the world, and they are being introduced to social relationships in the context of a classroom in a way that's different than maybe being in lower school or being elementary school. We get this really precious bubble of time.
And the kids are like uncut gems, and they come with all their gorgeous qualities. And that, we as teachers and professionals in early childhood, our job is just to polish. So children come with all these wonderful temperaments.
And so, if my kids come to school and in my lesson plan — maybe we're going to be doing an author study, but everyone is going through something socially at that moment — we’re packing up the author study. And we're doing social emotional learning.
Or, you know, a talented preschool teacher will take the author study and figure out how to meet the needs of the social emotional, whatever need they have in that arena. And would try and select high-quality literature to support that or recall stories that have problem-solving elements.
So anyway, the flexibility is so, so, so amazing. And that's something that the kids need, like the outdoor teaching model. That is what we know for a fact is best for children.
At St. Anne’s — this is something I do want to note — I could never go back to teaching inside ever again. I am a total convert. It is so good for children. They have so much room to roam, and we have so many more high-quality conversations about things.
For example, you can talk about wildlife, regional wildlife in Charlottesville, but we have the woods to go into. And just within the last week we saw an eastern box turtle, we saw an eastern worm snake. And we talked about that, all of this science in action.
That is what's best for kids. They learn through play. And so even what appears like unstructured play is extremely, extremely complex in just the interaction that the kids are having, the learning that’s taking place.
LH: And the boundaries, the self-control that you're instilling in these kids so that they know where they can go, where they can’t go. I was very impressed.
BG: Yeah, you know, I definitely like to teach with very clearly established boundaries, both social and physical boundaries. So, for example — and this is just like a silly amount of detail — I like to speak in rhyme to the kids because if it rhymes, they remember it.
We've just got little rhymes like, “stop at the top,” “meet me at the edge of the hedge,” “wait at the gate,” things like that. And the kids can operate completely independently within those sets of instructions. And it makes them really proud.
Everything that I feel about preschool, and even just what I'm sharing now, comes back to a sense of community. I feel like my relationships with my students are very, very much like a mother hen with her hens.
But I love the independence that the kids have because it really makes this place theirs. And not mine, it's ours.
LH: I'm glad that you brought up the rhyming. What role does your poetry play in your teaching?
BG: Oh my gosh. My poetry that I write is entirely inspired by my students. Entirely every single line. And now that I have a daughter, that is in the mix too.
But the power of their imagination and the feelings that they have is —
It’s so funny, even just talking about this is giving me a little bit of a chill, because I just care about them so much. I love the limitlessness that children have.
And the poetry that I write, when I examine it, is not written for them. It's written for broken adults. A lot of my poetry is about making mistakes and celebrating them. Like almost exclusively.
Yeah, so I got that poem about learning how to cook and how everything's a mess and the powders flying in the air…
Three Cups of I Tried
By Becky Gall
Let’s start in the kitchen,
Whip up something new,
Drizzle mud on your pudding,
Make a green lizard stew.
But before you're an expert,
A master, the best,
You'll first make an awful,
Most terrible mess.
Your biscuits will burn,
Your bread, it won't rise,
Mincing the onions,
Will bring tears to your eyes.
Your temper will boil,
You might snap your whisk.
When you're cracking the eggs,
You'll get shell in your dish.
But is any great chef
Worth their salt will advise,
Toss out cookie cutters,
Use your brain! Improvise!
Chop up expectations,
Set your worries aside,
For every pinch of I did it,
Add three cups of I tried.
BG: I think that, my poetry is inspired by my students because they have not hardened to anything yet. And so I feel like it's my job as their teacher to tell them repeatedly that they do not have limits. And that joy is in everything. And the minute somebody tells you you can't do anything, you just say, “This is my way. You can do it your way. I'm going to do it my way. I find joy here, and if you don't, that's fine.”
What I say to my students is, art comes from the heart.
Art is when your paint drips all over. You get it on your pants. In your shoes. Right? And the kids come to me and go, “It got all over me!”
And I'm just like, “How gorgeous is that? How beautiful. I didn't even think about a shoe with a big red stripe on it! You get to flaunt that all day, and if you decide you want to wash it at home, that's great, but thank you for letting me be a part of it.”
LH: Anything I didn't ask you about your teaching philosophy that you think would be important?
BG: One thing is that I really feel like my teaching, we’re just constantly in the pursuit of joy. So if we are not experiencing some kind of color or shade of joy in what we're doing, we're doing it wrong. So we need to come back together and figure it out. What isn't working about this?
And so we actually do that quite a bit. I'll ask for a lot of student input and be like, “You know what, you guys? I notice that we are not enjoying this. This is starting to feel like work.”
And I'll ask and I'll say, “Why is that?” And they'll say, “It's taking so long!” And I'll say, “Oh, it's too long. Okay. So what do you think we should do?” Is there a part of it you think we could cut out or to set aside and do later — it's just very collaborative. Very, very collaborative.
And I think hearing their voice is really important, and they love being heard.
LH: Right, yeah. As a parent, I might get as far as asking the question, but then I would start problem solving. You’re asking them to help continue to problem solve, which I think is so special.
BG: It's really fun! Sometimes the kids will ask me, they'll be like, “Ms. Becky, what do you do as a job?”
And I’ll say, “Do you know that my job is to be here with my best friends in nature all day? How lucky am I?” It feels like community and friendship. My class and I, we talk about that sometimes. We do these sweet little moments where we just drop everything and we look at each other and just go, “How grateful are we to get to do this together? This is so great.”
Becky Gall is a Pre-School teacher, poet, and a winner of a 2024 Golden Apple teaching award. I’m Lisa Ha. For more information about St. Anne’s-Belfield, visit stab.org.
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