The Preschool Learning Lab on campus used to have almost as many students working as it had children.
That has changed, as the lab has expanded to 40 hours per week with six students working at a time, Patty Clarkson, director of the lab, said.
Now, she said, it is a better experience for the students to practice teaching children, which is what they will be doing for their careers.
The expansion of the lab opens up opportunities for students to learn how to teach, play and talk with children. Before the expansion, students found it hard to get quality interactions with the children. There were so many adult bodies and the children were only there for two hours, three days a week, Clarkson said.
“The challenge for the college students was that there were so many of them that the responsibilities of the lab got spread out,” Clarkson said. “There wasn’t as much opportunity to really dig in and be part of the lab and really help out.”
The most important thing for the students to learn in the preschool lab class is how to develop relationships with children because without this it becomes difficult for the students to support the children’s learning, Clarkson said.
The lab is open 40 hours per week and children can enroll from four to eight hours a day, Clarkson said. The college students are spread out in sections of six at a time.
“This gives them much more responsibility to carry the whole program and really get experience with all the different aspects of the program,” Clarkson said. “We rotate them through different areas and layer on different responsibilities each week.”
There were a lot of challenges with the old system, Clarkson said. The children, approximately 25 to 28 at a time, were only in the lab for two hours. This made it difficult for the 20 college students to absorb any real sort of responsibility with it spread out so widely.
“It’s kind of like a small circus venue, if you will, because there’s a lot of activities going on and there’s a lot of adults around so it didn’t really lend itself to a lot of peer-to-peer interaction for the children,” Clarkson said.
With fewer students in the lab at a time, the students have much more responsibility and are able to focus on more things. The ultimate goal is to have the students facilitating the whole lab, Clarkson said.
The new expansion of hours allows students to really focus on learning to run the lab on their own. This includes supporting the children’s play by coming up with intentional activities that act as an extension to the play, Clarkson said.
“On the outside, it may look to you that the children are just playing with the cars but we know that we are helping guide their play toward speed, such as timing the speed of cars,” Clarkson said. “Then we say how far did this car travel? And we have them measure that and write out ‘Red car went 14 inches.’”
The students are helping the children to get the idea of basic concepts such as longer and shorter, Clarkson said. By having the children write these things out they are learning to sort, measure and differentiate between numbers and letters.
“It’s a whole climate that we build here where children are constantly exposed to those kinds of intentional teaching moments,” Clarkson said.
Students enrolled in the class are all child development majors. Sophomore Morgan Doshier wants to pursue a teaching credential working with preschool-aged children, she said. The preschool lab class is beneficial because of the direct interaction with the kids that other classes do not offer, Doshier said.
Not only do students get the chance to teach the children in the classroom, but they also get to watch the children’s interactions with each another using a one-way mirror, Doshier said.
“One of our classes, CD 131, we get to observe the kids behind the booth, which is good to see the interactions and everything, but it’s nice to be in with the kids and learning as you go,” Doshier said. “What’s right and what’s wrong, what works and what doesn’t.”
The Preschool Learning Lab is unlike any other preschool not on a college campus, child development associate professor Jennifer Jipson said. Its value is that it helps train amazing preschool teachers which can lead to a larger change in school systems overall.
“It makes such a difference in my classes,” Jipson said. “I teach infant development and some of the students are currently working in the lab and just being able to have that personal experience really helps them understand and appreciate the scholarly material they learn in class more.”
For students to develop relationships with the children, they first have to learn how to talk with children while they play with them, Clarkson said. They play with cars and blocks, they play in the kitchen or outside on a tire swing one-on-one with the children, rather than just standing back and watching the children play.
“It’s a different language in how you support the child,” Clarkson said. “They’re going to bring you a paper that they drew and say ‘Do you like my paper?’ and we would say ‘Looks like you worked really hard on that paper, tell me more about that paper.’”
Students get overwhelmed coming into the lab at first because they are worried they will say or do something wrong, Clarkson said.
Being thrown in with the children is a little scary at first, but you learn how to act with the children by being in the environment, Doshier said.
The Preschool Learning Lab teaches students how to teach, talk and play with children which is what they will be doing in their careers, Clarkson said. At the beginning of the quarter, students observe specific interactions between the children to help them learn how to deal with the situations they will encounter in the lab.
“As the quarter goes on, you see the students become more comfortable and start practicing themselves how to say things,” Clarkson said. “They get into some really tight spots with the children, but I let the students figure it out because that’s ‘Learn By Doing.’”
Kristina Martin contributed to this article.