As educators we are in the business of learning, knowledge, and intelligence, each of which is a key component of thinking. Yet how much do we actually think about the process of thinking, especially as it pertains to young children? In this presentation, Teacher Tom uses a mixture of anecdotes, data, and provocative questions to take a look at the history and purpose of education and specifically at the process of thinking.
He provides a framework for observing how children think under various circumstances, for discussing how we can create environments conducive to thinking, and for examining the role of teachers in a play-based (self-directed) curriculum. Participants will be invited to think deeply about their own thinking, to consider how and why we must be 'researchers' in the classroom, and to learn right alongside the children.
Facilitator Bio:
Tom “Teacher Tom” Hobson is a preschool teacher, writer, speaker, artist, and author. He is best known, however, for his namesake blog Teacher Tom’s Blog, http://teachertomsblog.blogspot.com/, where he has posted daily for nearly a decade, chronicling the life and times of his little preschool in the rain-soaked Pacific Northwest corner of the US.
For the past two decades Teacher Tom was the sole employee of the Woodland Park Cooperative School, a parent-owned and operated school knit together by Teacher Tom’s democratic, progressive play-based pedagogy. The children come to the school as two-year-olds in diapers and leave as “sophisticated” six-year-olds ready for the larger world. Teacher Tom came into teaching through the back door, so to speak, having enrolled his own child in a cooperative preschool, where he began working daily in his daughter’s classroom as an assistant teacher under the tutelage of veteran educators, although he’ll be the first to tell you that most of what he learned came from the children themselves. When it was time for his daughter to move on, he “stayed behind,” where he plans to remain for the rest of his life.
During his holidays and long weekends, Tom travels around the world (Greece, Iceland, Australia, China, Vietnam, New Zealand, Canada, UK, and across the US) sharing his views on early childhood education, play, and pedagogy. He recently authored his first book, aptly named Teacher Tom’s First Book: Teaching and Learning from Preschoolers http://www. teachertomsfirstbook.com/book.html.