Words of wisdom from Bella (not her real name), a 12 year old young lady who had severe apraxia,  offered to the graduate speech pathology student who was working with her during a summer intensive therapy program. The graduate student had made a well-meaning comment about Bella’s variable sound production errors, to which Bella responded, “Nobody be perfect.” Profound and relevant. Why the pursuit of perfection? Are those of us who strive for perfection in the product missing something that was right there in the process? Does commenting only on “perfection” guarantee long lasting learning? I think not! Do we miss “moments of brilliance” and “connection” by focusing on the answer given in the teacher’s manual or to our preconceived “correct” response, instead of being open to any answer and being able to connect the dots between where we “are” and where the student’s response “is”? I wonder what would happen if we were more mind ”full” of what “is” . . and mind “less” of what “isn’t”? Would we see the perfection in each student’s thinking more often? © 2010  Dave Krupke  All Rights Reserved

By Dave Krupke and Jeff Knox Education is generally a series of adults asking questions – this has been so since the time of Socrates. Questions are asked with the hope or even expectation that the children will respond with answers that adults have pre-conceived, either by their own thoughts or based on what a subject-area curriculum tells them the answer should be. It can also be said that adults don’t ask questions for which they don’t know the answers. For adults, “sameness” is important – we want children to have the same answers as we do. Some educators feel it is important for children  to be able to explore their world and come up with their own reality. For this to happen, in the home or in a classroom, there must be a sense of shared learning – a perception on the part of both adult and child that curiosity and discovery are fun and have utility for making sense of the world. Shared learning, especially with young children, occurs when adults limit the number of direct questions they ask, such as “what’s this called . . . or what color is that?” When adults ask pointed questions, there [...]

By Dave Krupke During four decades of service as a public-school speech-language pathologist in the mid-west, I have been in many preschool program settings – both regular education and special education. I have seen many focused attempts to teach letter names to 3, 4 and 5 year old children, ranging from making letters in sand tables, in shaving cream, with Elmer’s glue, with chalk, with large crayons, with markers, and by tracing a letter made from sandpaper. There were many teacher attempts to associate these letters with student names in the class and with common objects, but it dawned on me just a few years ago that there was one thing missing – there was little or no purposeful attempt to associate the letter sound with the letter name! As a result, I began asking teachers about why they did not specifically facilitate letter-sound knowledge and the typical response was that they thought that letter names needed to be taught first and the children would learn the sounds later. It struck me that this was a stark example of an unintentional instructional mismatch – the adult concept that letter names should be taught first in a systematic, linear way in [...]