In PHQP-0011 Continuity Matters, Jeff highlights the power of stable caregiving for kids’ wellbeing and learning. Plus, he marvels at a kid’s trash bag STEM play, revisits actor-observer bias pitfalls, explores fostering iterative learning, hunts for a string game collaborator, and more.

Episode Video

Watch Now: PHQP_0011 Continuity Matters

Episode Notes

• Continuity Of Care
• Continuity Of Care
• The Hidden Impact Of Actor-Observer Bias In Early Learning
• 6 Helpful Ways To Support Self-Directed Learning Through The Iterative Process

The Continuity Matters Transcript

Welcome to the Playvolution HQ podcast. I’m Jeff Johnson. Thanks for pushing play on with the show.

So, trash bag play, trash bag stem play. I teased this at the end of the last episode. Again, this is something I observed recently.

A kid, probably 11 years old, he’s doing his after-school chores. His job is to go carry the trash out. In his walk from his front door to the trash receptacle, he’s got this white hefty trash bag.

I don’t know if it was a hefty brand. It could have been another brand. He’s got this trash bag, and he’s doing all this stuff with it.

He’s lifting it up high with one hand and lifting up it as high as he can with the other hand. And then he’s doing this thing with his wrist, moving his wrist back and forth, and the bag will spin one way and then unwind and spin the other way. And then he’s doing this full loop, his arm swinging around in a circle and looping the bag up in the air.

And I’m just waiting for it to hit the ground and splatter everywhere, but it doesn’t. And this is delightful to see because what this dude is doing, and he might not know it specifically, he’s doing STEM experimentation. He’s practicing with the physics of trash bags and the laws of motion.

And that’s kind of cool to see because kids are wired for this kind of stuff. It’s built into them. And so instead of creating lessons, even for kids of that age, to push these ideas on them, we might be better off creating environments that support their exploration and discovery of these ideas.

So there’s that, something to think about. The trash bag STEM play observation was a lot of fun. Topic number one, this is our penultimate core value, part 11.

I think next week will be the last one, at least for a while. Number 11 is continuity matters. So what we’re talking about here is continuity of care.

There’s some links in the episode notes about this. Familiarity breeds confidence. Young children need a stable set of caregivers, optimally.

And I know that’s not always possible, but best practices is we want to have kids with the fewest amount of caregivers as possible because children are emotionally dependent on the people taking care of them. And if there’s too many of them, they get kind of confused and their behavior expectations between one and another is kind of hard to understand and navigate. And if people are always coming and going in their lives, it can get emotionally confusing.

But when we’re with a core group of caregivers in our early years, we build confidence in them because we build these deeper relationships. And this is one of the tragedies of high turnover in early learning programs is that it doesn’t allow children to build these long-term relationships with their caregivers. Trust fuels learning.

And so if you have a caregiver that you have a solid long-term relationship with, you are more likely to learn because it’s lower level Maslow stuff. First, we have to feel safe, secure, nurtured, loved. We have to eat.

We have to have the right amount of sleep and all of that before we’re ready to take a learning risk. And if we don’t have a dependence or a comfort level with our caregivers, it’s really hard to take that learning risk as a young person or even as an adult. It’s easier to learn from somebody you trust.

When stress rises, learning drops. So the more anxious and frustrated and stressed in general a person is, the less likely they’re going to be learning everything because they go into survival mode. And again, with high turnover in programs, that becomes a problem.

The other way this happens is a lot of times kids get shuffled between, there might be continuity in a program, but children might be shuffled between a number of programs. So in my family child care days, we worked with kids that were with us for part of the week or part of a day, and then they formal preschool for another part of the day and maybe grandma’s one day a week. And going back and forth between lots of different environments can have the same impact that not having that continuity has on kids in a single program.

And so anyway, that stress rises and learning drops. And so anything we can do to build that continuity. And when we’re talking continuity, ideally we’re talking continuity over years.

I mean, best practice for an infant is for that infant to be with the same caregiver or same group of caregivers for their first three or four years of life if possible. And this happens kind of naturally organically in family child care programs. It’s a little bit more challenging in center-based programs, but there are some programs that set up their programs so that the teachers stay with that same cohort of kids for multiple years and the environment changes as the kids develop.

And the research seems to be pretty clear, this is best practice for those children, but it’s a little bit more challenging to program. So there aren’t a lot of programs doing it. Back in the day, I think there were a couple of states I know of that were thinking about making this the new norm, this mixed age groups and continuity of care, things we’ve talked about in this in the last episode, but I don’t think they ever got any traction.

If you know more about that than I do, reach out to me. The link is in the show notes to contact me. Change shakes foundations.

And so when you’re 23 months old and you’ve been with a caregiver for a long time, and then for whatever recent things change, that caregiver leaves the program or that child leaves the program and goes to another one, that child can be shaken for quite a while until they build up this new relationship with the new caregiver. Stable care equals better outcomes. And so that’s kind of a good takeaway.

The more stable the care, the more we have that continuity of care, the better the outcomes for the child. The more learning, the more emotionally connected they’re going to be, those kind of things. And I guess another final takeaway is that staff turnover really, really does hurt.

And I mean, I’ve worked with programs that have had huge, 100 plus percent a year turnover rates. I’ve talked to directors who feel often that their staffing is like a revolving door. People are always coming and going.

And I don’t know what the answers are for solving staffing problems. I just know that they exist and they have a negative impact on children. And so that turnover is a problem, but also the moving children to a new caregiver every time they have a birthday is also a big problem.

And that’s something that we programmatically could deal with if we so chose. Topic two, the hidden impact of actor-observer bias. And so what is this? We’re going to transition here.

We’re not going to transition there. That’s not what we wanted to transition. We’re going to transition there later.

So this is a post I put together and put out on the Pull Evolution HQ site a while ago. There is a link in the episode notes. The impact of actor-observer bias in early learning.

And so this is just basically a one-page PDF handout together. And it goes through this. So actor-observer bias is the tendency to attribute our own behavior to external factors while explaining others’ behavior as a reflection on their character.

We talked about this. I believe it was, I know for a fact it was in episode eight, if you want to go back and listen to that. And there’s other posts that go more into the topic.

But this has a negative impact and a lot of impacts on kids. So one of the things we can look at is how we can control our tendency to fall victim to the actor-observer bias. And this handout goes through some ideas.

And so how it shows up in early learnings. A child who refuses to participate may be seen as defiant, but they may be feeling overwhelmed or uncertain. Another one here is a high-energy child who is always in motion may be labeled as a behavior problem, but they are simply needing more physical activity.

Or a child crying after a minor setback may be seen as overly sensitive when in fact they’re dealing with frustrations or unmet needs. And so there’s a lot going on there. Again, that handout is there.

I don’t want to spend a ton of time on it. Just wanted to let you know it is there as a resource if you are so inclined to check it out. Next up on our list of things to talk about is supporting self-directed learning through the iterative process.

Oh my goodness, I got blurry and now I’m unblurred. I feel so much better when I’m not blurry. And so this is another article I put together at the Playvolution HQ site.

The link in the show notes, of course. And so this is about the iterative process. So the process is this cycle of trying, failing, evaluating, and then refining.

And so kids kind of naturally use this iterative process to accomplish things. This is basically the scientific method in a lot of ways in action. And iterative learning is what a lot of technology companies use.

They’ll try something. They’ll make an attempt to use it. Something will fail.

They’ll learn from their failures. They’ll come back after making adjustments and try again and eventually end up with a new solid project. Children supported in learning through the iterative process grow into confident, capable problem solvers who aren’t afraid to take on new challenges.

That’s what we’re really looking for. We want to create environments that support kids in taking advantage of this cycle. This is a handout I put together.

I just got it pinned into this article that’s got that cycle there that you can check out if you want to look more into it. So an example is Samantha, age five, to learn how to tie her shoes. She loops the laces, but they’re slipping apart and she’s not finishing the bow right.

And after evaluating her grip and tightening the laces, she tries again and eventually masters the skill of tying her shoes. So it’s just trying something, failing, evaluating, making changes, and trying again as the process. So here are the six helpful ways to create environments that foster this iterative learning process.

One is we embrace failure. And this is kind of hard. We’re living in a world where failure is something that we often shy away from, but we want to encourage kids to make mistakes because we learn from mistakes.

You make a mistake and you learn what didn’t work. And that’s valuable. We can also create environments and provide open-ended materials.

So again, loose parts. This is what we’re talking about there. Lots of stuff to fiddle around with is a great way to take advantage of the iterative process.

We need time and space. This is something I guess I come back to over and over again when it comes to setting up kids’ play environments, is we need more time and we need more space. And anything we can do as adult organizers of those environments is beneficial to the kids.

So anything you can give them more time and space to explore, we’re going to be doing them a favor. One, we can model the process. We can use this process ourself.

When we make mistakes and need to try something a different way, we kind of call attention to it so that kids see that this is a way of doing things. We can encourage peer learning. Children can learn a lot by observing and collaborating with others.

Peer interactions inspire new ideas and strategies. And like we talked about in the last episode, when we touched on mixed age groups, those peer experiences and mixed age groups are extra beneficial because of the ZDP, Zone of Proximal Development, and more knowledgeable other, that Vygotsky stuff. Another thing we can do is finally, we can offer gentle guidance.

Not jumping in with solutions, but prompting with open-ended questions and being supportive of their attempts to figure out what’s going to work. Having all the answers of an adult isn’t necessarily the best strategy for supporting learning. And that’s what the iterative process is.

And again, the article goes on a little bit more there. You can check out for yourself if you are so inclined and dang, I just, oh boy, that’s frustrating because the transition over here, look, let me show you now. Transition over to this article, I was just talking about all this stuff, even have the highlighted stuff there.

Transition didn’t work the way it was supposed to. It’s one thing I’m not liking about the software I’m using. I apologize for that, but I’m not going to rerecord the episode because we’re too far into it now.

Wrapping things up for this episode. Sorry about that. By episode 20, I’ll have figured out how to use the software probably.

String Collaborator. I mentioned last week that I’m working on collecting kids’ games. There’s all those string games, Cat’s Cradles, and then the other ones where you make all the different shapes with strings.

There’s a lot of good videos out there on these, but for some of the shapes, the figures, some of the videos are lacking. So I’d really like to find somebody that’s really into this kind of stuff who might be willing to collaborate with me on making some fresh videos that I can use in my post, and then whoever the helper person might be might be able to find a way to use too. So if you are that person or you know somebody who might be that person that’s really into and knowledgeable about string games, I’d really like to have a connection made there.

You can reach out to me with the contact information in the show notes because I don’t really know string games. Translation works this time. So my Amazon idea of the week is this.

If you’re looking for good super glue, and I don’t know why you aren’t, this has been the best super glue ever used, and I’m kind of a super glue connoisseur. This is kind of a jelly super glue, and it’s really done, it’s done me, I’ve been, I’ve been, I don’t know, overjoyed over the moon. Is that what I say about things sometimes? I mean, look, it hasn’t changed my life, but it’s made my life better.

So that’s a product you might want to check out if you’re going to shop through the Amazon link and support the show. Share it if you like it. I appreciate it.

Share the podcast. Share the website. It’s greatly appreciated.

Next week, we’re going to talk about children wanting power. Of course, we adults want power too. Power is something we all kind of would like more of in our life, I think.

We’ll wrap up with the dad joke of the week. Here it goes. What did the janitor say when he jumped out of the closet? Supplies.

Supplies. This here has been the Playvolution HQ podcast. Thanks for listening. Back soon. Bye-bye.

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