Teacher Tom on the Power of Curiosity and Community Centered Learning in Education

• The importance of curiosity and play-based learning in early childhood education
• The value of diverse perspectives and the impact of mentors in shaping educational approaches
• The power of asking questions and the benefits of project-based learning for children’s development
• The role of observation and the development of critical thinking in educational settings
• The significance of children learning from each other and the impact of collaborative learning environments The importance of fostering critical thinking and self-motivation in early childhood education.
• The role of play-based learning in honoring each child’s learning and ability.
• The impact of community-building in early childhood education on lifelong connections and the development of democratic citizens.
• The significance of the environment as the ‘third teacher’ and its role in shaping the learning experience.
• The Reggio Emilia approach as a model for creating peace and honoring community, democracy, and fairness in early childhood education. Outdoor learning enhances brain function and sharpens cognitive abilities.
• Loose parts theory promotes creativity and democratic learning environments.
• Reimagining education involves creating community-centered learning spaces for children of all ages.
• Self-motivation and purposeful learning are essential for fostering a sense of purpose in children.
• Play-based learning allows children to curate their own curriculum and discover their passions.
• The journey of growth in education involves embracing change and continuous learning.

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Connect with Teacher Tom

Blog: http://teachertomsblog.blogspot.com/

Website: https://www.teachertomsworld.com/about

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/theteachertom

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Episode Transcript:

Brittney (00:00)
Hi and welcome to conscious pathways the podcast where we explore the intersection of education and social justice through transformative conversations. I’m your host Brittany and I am so ecstatic that you are joining me on yet another episode. I want to give a special shout out and thank you to my Patreon subscribers who do get access to this episode a little bit early. They also get access to ask an expert which is a section where you can ask me or one of my expert guests any specific questions and we can answer them live on the podcast. And just other great goodies for just $5 a month, which is a little bit cheaper than a cup of coffee here in San Diego. Today I am joined by just someone who’s been such an inspiration to me for years since I just started my teaching journey.

Teacher Tom is an early childhood educator, international speaker, education consultant, teacher of teachers, parent educator, and author. He is best known, however, for his namesake blog, Teacher Tom’s Blog, where he posts daily since 2009, chronicling his life and times of his little preschool in the rain -soaked Pacific Northwest corner of the USA.

For nearly two decades, Teacher Tom was the sole employee of the Woodland Park Cooperative School, a parent owned and operated, knit together by Teacher Tom’s democratic, progressively play -based pedagogy. Teacher Tom came into teaching through the back door, so to speak, having enrolled his own child into the Cooperative Preschool, where he began working daily with 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. Today, teacher Tom shares his play -based pedagogy with online courses through early childhood educators, produces online early childhood conferences, consults with organizations about his family school program, and inspires early years audiences around the world.

And that’s really exactly what he does. He’s been such an inspiration. I know for me, when I was a baby educator, just my first couple of years and just looking for ways to learn more, look at who was doing things out there, different pedagogies. Teacher Tom’s blog was one that I consistently went through and really went to for knowledge. And there were things that I would take from his blogs that I would implement in my classrooms and I would see progress and I would just see. So it’s been such an honor to have teacher Tom join me on this podcast this week and share his knowledge. This is clearly something that he is very passionate about and loves just like we all are in our passion about early childhood education. So let’s hop into that interview.

Brittney (02:48)
Hello and welcome to Conscious Pathways. I am joined by the wonderful teacher Tom. Thank you so much for joining me.

Teacher Tom (02:55)
I’m happy to be here, Brittney. Thanks for inviting me.

Brittney (02:57)
I am so excited to have you here. I have been, I think I started following your blog early on in my teaching career, because I was just online trying to figure out, you know, this early childhood teaching, preschool teaching, trying to find like, okay, who else is out here doing this thing? Who is, you know, what’s going on in the world? What should I be doing? And I think I found one of your blogs and I was just like, wow, this is great. So.

Teacher Tom (03:20)
Well, thank you.

Brittney (03:23)
Yeah, so it’s such an honor to have you on and I like that the blog is still on Blogspot. It just brings me back.

Teacher Tom (03:32)
It’s not only a blog spot, but I’m using like the most basic template you can possibly use.

Brittney (03:37)
I love it every time I go on and it’s like, it has not changed. I love it. It brings me the utmost joy. Yes, yes. But tell me a little bit about how you got your start in education.

Teacher Tom (03:48)
Old -fashioned.

Okay. I, you know, it was not part of my plans in life. So, you know, we talk about, you know, it’s a cliche to say life as a journey, but it is. And, you know, I spent the first, you know, three decades, three and a half decades of my life, you know, trying to be a writer, trying to be, you know, being a little bit junior business executive. You know, I was a baseball coach. I did all kinds of things like that. And, but it was when our daughter was born in 1996.

I was lucky. My wife was able to support the family with one income. And so I got to be a stay at home parent. And which is, you know, for a man, it’s a really big deal, right? It’s just like, I remember my father saying to me that he thought I was the luckiest man alive. And as a boy, when your father says that to you, you know, you might be doing the right thing. And so that felt really good. And anyway, I really was into the stay at home parent aspect.

Brittney (04:34)
Yeah.

Mm -hmm.

Mm -hmm.

Teacher Tom (04:52)
I love the idea of staying at home, being basically an introvert. I just had these visions that I would spend my days, you know, cuddling and making snacks and teaching her how to, you know, to cook with me or to, you know, all these kinds of things. And that was my idea. But probably before she was even two years old, she would start getting up in the morning and saying, Papa, this morning, let’s do something. Let’s go somewhere.

Brittney (05:10)
Mm -hmm.

Teacher Tom (05:22)
And so, you know, I didn’t know what that meant. And so I would, you know, we would go to parks, we’d go to the local playgrounds and, you know, there’d be some other kids there once in a while. And one day I was chatting with one of the parents there and she said that her kid was enrolled in a preschool called a cooperative preschool. And the cooperative preschool, for those listeners who don’t know, is really one where the parents get to go to school with their kids. And, you know,

Brittney (05:26)
Mm -hmm.

Teacher Tom (05:51)
that had been one of my issues is whenever I brought up the idea of preschool with my wife, she would say, but her daughter is one of the lucky ones. She doesn’t need to go be dropped off at preschool. My mother -in -law said the same thing. My mother said the same thing. So, you know, you don’t go against those women, right? Those are the powerful women in your life and you do, you listen to them. And so, you know, so when I found out about this, I said, can I go, can we go? They were all like, yes, if you go with her, you can. And so that began my journey.

Brittney (06:08)
Yeah.

Teacher Tom (06:20)
up seeing what early childhood education could look like. I got very lucky as the teacher of the class, Chris David, who is to this day, I consider my most important mentor, was a master play -based educator. She really understood it. She was well -versed. She was experienced. And, you know, I still wasn’t thinking about becoming an educator myself, but after three years in her classroom, as our daughter was preparing to move on to kindergarten, she said to me, she had one day, she just pulled me aside. She said, what are you going to do?

when your daughter’s in school all day. And I said, I started thinking, do I want to go back to sitting at a computer writing? It seemed so lonely, so hollow. I really was into, my daughter had taught me about the importance of connecting in life, finding that place, even as an introvert, where you can go and get some energy. So you can go get some ideas where you get, and being with young children, I realized I was with the geniuses, right? The smartest people in the world.

Brittney (06:51)
Mm -hmm.

Mm -hmm.

Mm -hmm.

Teacher Tom (07:19)
And she said to me, she said, well, have you thought about becoming a preschool teacher? And I, it was flattering. And it took me about 48 hours to suddenly realize that’s what I want to be. And so, you know, so then I, you know, did some coursework and that even before I’d finished my degree, I was, I’d already been hired by the Woodland Park Cooperative Preschool. And, you know, in our profession in early years, there’s a dearth of teachers. There even was then back in the nineties, and it’s even worse now.

So I’ve done a lot of continuing education, but that’s what got me into it, right? That’s what got me going. And I just went in those classrooms and I just imitated my mentor. People would walk in my class and say, this could be teacher Chris’s class. I’d sing the same songs. I would use the same phrases. And there’s nothing wrong with that. So that’s the beginning of the journey. And now over time, I’ve kind of developed my own things, but it’s all grounded in that early.

Brittney (07:47)
Mm -hmm.

You

Yep.

Mm -hmm.

Teacher Tom (08:15)
experience.

Brittney (08:18)
Yeah, yeah, I love that you have such a great mentor. And I think that that’s one of the greatest ways that we learn. I remember going through my teacher preparation programs and we learned a lot about theory and I love theory. I’m a big theory proponent. Like I’m constantly wanting to learn more about theory. And when I teach about child development, I’m like, okay, let’s understand the theory of why children are the way they are. Let’s understand how their brains work. Let’s understand developmentally where they are. Theory, absolutely important. Yes.

Teacher Tom (08:40)
Yeah.

Brittney (08:47)
But I think a lot of my knowledge came from just being in the classroom doing the thing. So observing how other teachers did this, how they talked to students, observing, you know, and just really finding mentors that aligned with my own kind of personal, you know, pedagogy and education, that really skyrocketed my journey as a teacher, because I had teachers that I worked with where I was like, I’m not sure if…

I’m necessarily vibing with this way that we’re working with children and not really having the vocabulary to understand like why it wasn’t in alignment with my own values. But then, you know, working with other teachers, working with more play -based, you know, reggio schools, I was like, okay, I get it now. It clicked. Mm -hmm.

Teacher Tom (09:17)
Yeah, yeah.

Mm -hmm.

Yeah, well, you need both, right? You need to have the good examples and the sort of more, I’m not going to say bad examples, just the people who are on a different part of the journey is how I’m going to view it. Because, you know, because being in a cooperative, you’re there with, you know, 20 parents, right? As well as the teacher. And you’re seeing lots of different styles and approaches. And many of them, many parents are just natural pedagogues, right? They’re just really good at it. They just come in and you go, my God, that’s, that’s who I want to be when I grow up.

Brittney (09:39)
Yes. Yes.

Mm -hmm. Yeah.

Mm -hmm.

Yes.

Teacher Tom (09:58)
And then others, you hear them shout at a kid or do something or be bossy or commanding or dictatorial in some ways. And you’re going, you know, I don’t want to end up being that guy.

Brittney (09:59)
Mm -hmm.

Mm.

Yeah, yeah, I agree. It’s important to see both of those. And then, you know, I’m always talking about, you know, with teachers who are coming into the field, just make a list of what your values are, make a list of what’s important to you. And when you have that list, that’s going to be your guiding star, right? That’s going to be the thing that that keeps you on that track of like, am I am I doing things that are in my values? And if I’m not, then like, why not? Let me ask some strategic questions and find out why.

Teacher Tom (10:24)
Yeah.

Right? Yeah.

Yeah, well, it’s interesting too, because I find that one of the things that has become increasingly important to me, and I realized I was doing it back then without consciously doing that, is when you come across somebody who’s doing something differently than you or might not immediately vibe, start asking questions. Asking them questions and really observing what they’re doing, because they have a reason for it. And their perspective might teach you something, because that’s all we have, right?

Brittney (10:43)
Mm -hmm.

Mm -hmm. Yes.

Mm -hmm.

Yes. Mm -hmm.

Teacher Tom (11:02)
All we have is our own perspective, really. And I have this, you know, I really like our conversations about white male privilege, because I’ve got it all, right? I’m a middle -aged, middle -class, white American male. So I’ve got all those privileges. And so when I make the assumption that I’m the smartest guy in the room, that’s just, that’s because society has been telling me that. And I, when I was a boy, I remember thinking that all the time. I’m just so smart. I’m good at math. I’m good at music. I’m good at all this stuff.

Brittney (11:11)
Mm -hmm. Mm.

Hmm.

Teacher Tom (11:32)
But that’s because now I understand that that was not the perspective of 99 % of my classmates. And I really found myself, I constantly am looking for, that’s why I read a lot. We were talking before we went on the air about what we love to read, is that every time you read something, you’re getting a whole world, you’re getting a completely whole world perspective change. You don’t have to agree with it. You just have to see that it’s there and why it’s there.

Brittney (11:39)
Yep. Yep.

Mm -hmm. Yes.

Mm -hmm.

Yeah.

you touched on something so important, that is perspectives and how that does shape our behavior, that shapes the language that we use, that shapes the relationships that we find, right? And how we find relationships and how we forge relationships, right? And that a lot of that comes from our own perspective and our own background and kind of that lens that we see the world in. And especially when we’re working with.

you know, parents within early childhood education, we’re working with, you know, other teachers who have different perspectives. We’re also working with other families and parents that have other perspectives and different cultures and different backgrounds. And, you know, it’s something I’m always saying in my trainings that we need to just be curious. We need to just ask some questions, right? Because they might just have a whole other perspective that you might not even be thinking about. That’s not even your your lens. Like if you think about a camera, it’s not even in your like your realm of view. You can’t even view it, right?

Teacher Tom (12:54)
Right.

Brittney (12:55)
And so you don’t always have to agree with their perspective. You don’t always have to agree with, you know, why they’re making certain decisions or why they do certain things. But it’s important that we’re curious and we ask questions and we genuinely just try to find out like, okay, where are you coming from on this? So that I can understand a little bit and I can maybe either shift my perspective or just understand. And it’s a powerful thing to do.

Teacher Tom (13:10)
Yeah.

Or include the other perspective. I think that’s the part that really excites me the most is I was talking to an Ojibwe educator named Hopi Martin a few years back. And he said to me, he goes, he goes, the way our people look at it is that, you know, imagine you’re sitting at a campfire and you’re looking at the fire. And I ask you about that fire. And you tell me about the color, the heat, the size, the smell, all the stuff you can perceive of that fire.

Brittney (13:22)
Yes.

Mm.

Teacher Tom (13:47)
Because, but then I’ve got to ask the person sitting next to you, because they’re going to see it from a little bit different perspective. And I’ve got to go all the way around that fire. And I got to hear each one of the perspectives as I go around the fire before I really understand that fire. And then, and then after I’ve done that, what we look at it is that you got to then ask the birds and the trees. You got to ask the worms underground. You get asked the trees themselves. So you’ll never have the full perspective. You’ll never have all the perspectives.

Brittney (13:55)
Hmm.

Hmm.

Cheers.

Teacher Tom (14:14)
But if you’re just in the process, he said, to me, the way that metaphor works for me is I just think, I get smarter every time I get to hear with somebody else their perspective. I get bigger. The world gets bigger for me. And sometimes, gosh, you know this is true. Sometimes somebody will say something you go like, well, that’s BS. And then a few years later, something will come up and you go, now I know what they were talking about. Now I know. So it’s always like, never just shut it down.

Brittney (14:23)
Yes.

Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, that reminds me of this concept that I’ll sometimes train about as well as like that cultural humility, right? And that ability to understand that I will never be proficient in someone else’s culture, right? And so, you know, be as a black woman, I can’t even say that I’m fully proficient in, you know, this culture, because my experience as you know, a black woman who is from Southern California and has been here.

good majority of my life. It’s going to be different than a Black woman’s experience coming from Alabama, right? Our cultures are going to be different. Our language is going to be slightly different. And so I can’t say, I can’t just go there and say that, yeah, I know everything about what it is to be, you know, a Black woman from the South because I don’t, right? And, you know, just like I, I can’t say that I know everything about everyone’s experience, you know, who comes from Mexico, just because I live next to the border, like I can’t and I don’t. But what I can do is I can be really curious. Yes.

Teacher Tom (15:12)
Absolutely.

Right, right.

Yeah. Like you say, if you get curious, curious. I mean, to me, that’s everything. That’s what play -based learning is all about. It’s taking advantage of that natural curiosity we have. And I was just talking to Dinesha Jones not long ago, Dr. Dinesha Jones. Yeah, she’s wonderful. And she was just talking, she was just saying, schools just seems to kill curiosity. It seems to kill curiosity in children.

Brittney (15:40)
Yes.

love her.

Mm. Yeah.

Teacher Tom (15:59)
And we have these, we work with the youngest ones, right? And they ask questions about everything. Like, why do we have toes? Why is up up? They ask these really profound questions. And when we listen with curiosity, we see how profound those questions are. As adults so often, I think what we do is we sort of dismiss them like, well, I can’t go into the whole conversation about evolution, about toes and all that kind of stuff. Or.

Brittney (16:04)
Mm -hmm.

Yeah.

Mm -hmm.

yet.

Teacher Tom (16:27)
or up is up because perspective and all this stuff. But the truth is, is just being with that question and that sense of wonder about the world. I think that’s the piece that we also get so wrapped up in getting answers. And to me, I love that we don’t know really how the brain works. And people always are talking about, they go, neuroscience, neuroscience. They know what’s sparking off and they know that something’s going on here and there and there’s neurons and.

Brittney (16:28)
Yeah.

Mm -hmm.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Mm -hmm.

Teacher Tom (16:54)
and there’s synapses and all this kind of stuff going on in those regions of the brain and this part’s good. We don’t know how the mind is constructed. We have no idea. Everything’s a guess. And I love that. I absolutely think that’s powerful to just sit with the wonder. Again, before we went on the air, we were talking about taking a little break from media, taking a little break from social media and stuff like that and how powerful that can be. That’s the problem with having the computer in your pocket.

Brittney (16:56)
Mm -hmm.

Mm -hmm. Yeah.

Mm -hmm.

Teacher Tom (17:22)
right, this little computer in your pocket all the time, is that if somebody says to you, did Hank Iran hit the most home runs? Well, you know, there’s no question about it now. You can’t have a discussion about it because somebody is going to look that up. And the answers are right at our fingertips and I love answers. But more important to me are the questions and being able to formulate really powerful questions.

Brittney (17:23)
Yep.

Mm -hmm.

Yeah.

Mm -hmm.

questions.

that’s reminding me of something that I’ve been recently doing in classrooms more often now is, you know, I’ll be just like sitting with children and kind of observing them play and, you know, just being around them. And I’ll just start posing random questions. Like, I wonder why, you know, the trees are growing like this. I wonder what bees eat, you know, just throwing out random little questions.

Teacher Tom (18:00)
Yeah.

Yeah, and I love the way you phrased that too, because it wasn’t really a question. You were just reflecting, it was one, I wonder, right? You were expressing your sense of wonder about the world, which is a great role modeling thing to do. I tell people that all the time, is that when we ask a question is a little bit like commanding. We’re insisting on an answer, usually, right? When you say, what color is this, right? I mean, there are open -ended questions, but I wonder is such a,

Brittney (18:13)
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Mm -hmm. Yeah.

Mm -hmm. Yep, usually, yeah. Mm -hmm.

Teacher Tom (18:34)
beautiful way to interact with young children because it’s like a loose part. They can take it or leave it.

Brittney (18:35)
Yeah.

Yes, exactly. Exactly. Oftentimes they just kind of leave it every once in a while. I’ll ask you a question like, well, that’s because of this. And someone will say, no, actually. You know, it sparks, it sparks a lively debate, you know, and it could be, you know, things, serious things, it could be silly things. And, you know, just kind of throwing it out there. Like you said, they’ll take it or leave it, you know, if they’re interested in it, then, you know.

Teacher Tom (18:49)
Yeah, exactly.

Right.

Brittney (19:07)
who knows, it might spark a whole project and it might spark a whole investigation into something that they hadn’t really thought about before. I think sometimes, I love the idea of project -based learning and a lot of my background is in regio school, so really child -driven, child -directed and play -based, all those really beautiful things. But I think when we’re first getting into these topics, we can take it very literally.

Teacher Tom (19:12)
Yeah.

Mm -hmm.

Yeah.

Brittney (19:34)
And we’re like, well, I have to give them a project. Then we have to do this for this amount of time and then have to move on to the next project next month. And it’s like, not really. That’s, that’s not the heart and soul of the thing. Really. It’s a lot of, you know, we were kind of talking about this before too, and how, you know, with dog training and how, you know, just kind of, it makes you approach things in different ways. And so I always think about something that Caesar Milan always says, like, he’s like, I’m not training the dog. I’m training the people. And.

Teacher Tom (19:37)
Right.

No. Yeah.

Yes, absolutely.

Brittney (20:02)
It’s so true. It’s like, okay, I have to train the adults in the room to kind of, you know, let go of our preconceived notions about how things have to be, and to really just approach it with that same sense of curiosity, approach it with that same sense of wonder, and allow the child to kind of take that in whatever direction they’re kind of thinking of. But you’ll be amazed at the directions that kids take these projects and these ideas when…

They are fully free to think and create and ask questions and try things out and fail and try again. They’re learning. It’s just, it’s a beautiful sight to see. Like you’re just watching it in real time. And it’s so much less work as you on the educator. Cause when in the beginning, I remember in the beginning, I was just like, I have to do all these things and I have to do this. I have to train at the, I have to switch out the toys every so often. I have to go do this, I have to plan this, I have to cut this out. And it’s like.

I was like running myself ragged in those first couple years just like doing the most when I didn’t have to. You don’t have to do all of that.

Teacher Tom (20:58)
Yeah.

Right? Well, and it frees you up to be, I think, what we should be as researchers. We should be observers. We should be people there. You know, you can still do an assessment. You just don’t have to interrupt the kid for it. You’re sitting there saying, I see that that kid’s now able to climb, you know, three steps up that ladder or whatever it is and just take note of what’s going on and be present. And when you’re a researcher, then you’re the learner, right? That makes you put you in the position of being curious. And if everybody’s curious, it’s in the learning environment.

Brittney (21:10)
Yes.

Yes.

Mm -hmm. Yeah.

Mm -hmm.

Teacher Tom (21:32)
And you mentioned project -based. To me, project -based is very clear from, you know, I’ve spent a lot of the last decade reading everything I can about the way humans learn, the way, you know, what’s the science on this? What are those? It’s amazing how little of that actually finds its way into traditional schools, the actual science of how people learn. And project -based learning is the best way to learn. I mean, it really is. And it usually involves not just sitting someplace.

Brittney (21:33)
Yeah.

Hmm.

Yeah.

Yeah, so surprising.

Mm -hmm.

Teacher Tom (22:00)
getting a list of things that you need to remember or write answers. Usually what it’s all about is people coming together and asking a group question like, how do we do this? Right. What do we do now? And sometimes it’s a simple thing. It’s it’s you know, when the kids are on the playground and they’re they’re you know, they’re digging trenches and they’re you know, they’re digging trenches. We always had this cast iron water pump at the top of the sloped sandpit and which is wonderful.

Brittney (22:03)
Yeah. Mm -hmm.

Yes.

Teacher Tom (22:30)
Because they all know that once the water starts flowing, it’s going to go downhill. And to listen to them say, we want the water to go over here. Now let’s dig a deep hole here and let’s make it stop here. And they were doing this. They were doing what everybody would call STEM learning, right? They were doing pure engineering. They were doing technology. They were doing mathematic calculations and all of this. And then they got to test it with their full bodies by pumping that water.

Brittney (22:42)
Mm -hmm.

Mm -hmm. Yeah.

Teacher Tom (22:57)
and running down the hill following it. And then if it wouldn’t do what they wanted, then they’d figure out, they’d start digging real fast to make it go where they wanted it to go. And everybody’s in on this, right? It’s a project that they’ve got together. And I can see a lot of people might say, but how that can’t be useful, but it’s infinitely useful because now they know the physics is in their bodies. It might not, they might not know the words of the physics. They might not be, you know, but when they get to high school or college and the physics, the textbook comes up with those.

Brittney (22:58)
Okay.

Mm -hmm.

It’s infinitely useful.

Mm -hmm.

Teacher Tom (23:26)
they will intuitively, they’ll know it now. Not intuitively is the wrong word. They’ll know it in their bodies. Their bodies will already know this information. And then their brains can go, aha, that’s what my body’s been trying to tell me. Now I’ve got words for it.

Brittney (23:30)
Yeah.

Yes.

Mm -hmm.

Yep. Exactly, exactly. It is, yeah, it is infinitely useful. There’s so many really beautiful things that happen when we just kind of take, take a little bit of the over -structuredness out of education and allow children to be curious and to ask questions and to try trial and error, right? And the beautiful things that when we do that, you see that they start working together more, right? You know,

Teacher Tom (24:05)
Mm -hmm.

Brittney (24:06)
I’ve been in classrooms for it’s like pulling teeth to get the kids to work together. You know, because they’re, they’re all trying to do their own thing. And it’s like, well, we haven’t created an environment where this is natural to them. Like it makes sense, right? We’ve created this environment where, you know, they’re constantly going to the adult to solve their problems. So they don’t have to go to each other to help to problem solve together because the grownup will always do that. And again, it’s just so much additional work as.

Teacher Tom (24:28)
Yeah.

Brittney (24:35)
you the teacher or you the adult in the room because you’re, you know, now you’re suddenly wearing every hat in the room. You’re like, okay, well, I got to solve all the problems and then I have to do this and have to feed everyone and it’s just like, teaching is hard enough as it is, you don’t need to make it even harder on yourself.

Teacher Tom (24:48)
Yeah. Well, and I, you know, and I encourage teachers just do this all the time is when. When there’s some project that needs to get done around the school. You know, or some or child ask you to do something their first thought should be. Can another child do this? Can the children do this themselves? For example, you know there’s always in a preschool. I don’t teach children how to read at preschool. I don’t think it’s development appropriate. We do lots of things that are that are that are literacy, you know that are.

Brittney (25:07)
Mm. Yeah.

Mm -hmm.

Teacher Tom (25:17)
that support literacy like dramatic play and we read to the children and all of those kinds of things. And there’s plenty of books around and there’s always a few that have taught themselves how to read. And so if a child comes to me and says, teacher Tom, what does this say? My answer is almost always, well, Wyatt can read and let them go, go to Wyatt. Or if somebody says, teacher Tom, we want to tie this rope onto here. And I’ll say, well, you know, Sally can tie.

Brittney (25:19)
Yes. Mm -hmm. Yes. Yes.

Mm -hmm. Yeah.

Mm. Yep.

Yeah.

Teacher Tom (25:45)
And then suddenly, then almost always the response is, yeah, you’re right. And they run off to Sally and get her to tie the knot for him. And I think that’s what makes, well, my favorite example is that, you know, as a preschool teacher, we go through art supplies, right? And I would order these boxes of art supplies and they would all show up on one day, you know, FedEx would show up and pile all the boxes, usually in some inconvenient place. And…

Brittney (25:46)
Mm -hmm.

Mm -hmm.

Mm -hmm.

Yep.

Teacher Tom (26:13)
Always for years, I would shove them off into a corner and I’d tell myself every day, right? We’re busy. We already talked about how busy we are. We’ve got so much to do. I’d say, well, you know, tomorrow I’ll do this or I’ll come in early the next day and put it away. And sometimes those boxes would sit there, you know, for weeks, if not months. And, you know, with holes torn in the sides, because I’d reach in to just grab something out to use in the classroom. They never made it to the storage room. And then one day the guy, the delivery man, put them in the middle of the classroom.

Brittney (26:16)
Mm -hmm.

Mm -hmm.

Yeah.

Teacher Tom (26:42)
He didn’t put them in the hallway, all right, he put them right where we were. And so we got in there, the kids are like looking at these boxes. And I said, teacher Tom, what is this? And I said, they look like boxes. I knew what they were, but I just made statements of fact, they look like boxes. And they said, what’s in them? And I said, the only way to find out is to open them. So here we did, then we spent like two hours, because the boxes are really taped shut, they’re hard to get open. And we didn’t have.

Brittney (26:51)
Hmm.

Wow. Mm -hmm.

Teacher Tom (27:07)
And the children had no tools for this, so they had to be innovative. I didn’t give them knives or scissors or anything. And so they’re sitting there wrestling with these boxes, working together, strategizing, coming up with ways. And then finally, there was one box that I knew it either had jugs of temper paint or jugs of white glue in it. And they’re struggling with this. And finally, they pull one out and they go, it’s paint. And they all start celebrating that it’s paint. And then they go and put it over on a bench on the side of the room and they get out the next box. And then as they go through the boxes,

Brittney (27:12)
Yeah.

Mm -hmm.

Mm -hmm.

Teacher Tom (27:37)
not only are they unpacking them, but they’re starting to organize the materials along this bench so that they’re all sorted the way they thought it should be sorted. And it was pretty much right. The paper was all in one place. The brushes were all in one place. And then some of the kids would be coming over and saying, let’s use that tomorrow. I’d like to play with that tomorrow. Let’s do that. And they started planning the curriculum, right? Because they saw what was available. They’re going, OK, let’s do that. the foam paints. Let’s do foam painting. And from then on, that was just when the supplies arrived, it was up to the kids.

Brittney (27:44)
Wow.

Teacher Tom (28:07)
and I would let them decide where to put it, how to put it away, how to unpack it. And for me, it’s a useful project. It’s a meaningful, personally meaningful project. And look what they’re doing. They’re planning their own future. Self -motivated, working together. I mean, it isn’t that we want out of the world. Isn’t that what citizens should be? People who are self -motivated and a good teammate.

Brittney (28:08)
Wow.

Mm -hmm.

Mm -hmm.

Yeah.

Yes!

Mm hmm. Yeah, I’m always saying like, it’s important that we’re being intentional when we’re in the classroom. So what is it, you know, if I’m bringing something into the classroom, like, what is my intention? What am I hoping that the children kind of gain out of this, right? And is it that I want them to be, you know, obedient and that I want them to follow by word and not ask any questions and to just do as I say, you know, again, without any thought to like, why I’m asking this.

Not necessarily. I don’t want that. I don’t want that for our society. I don’t want that for my classroom. I don’t want that for our future. I want critical thinkers. I want people who ask questions. I want people, you know, again, one of my other favorite things into the classroom is sometimes, you know, as you’re just an adult, you do get into that mindset of like, you have a schedule, you have things you have to get to do, you have to, you know, like I have to go outside, we’re out of ratio, I have to do this, right? Those are just things that just need to happen. Safety things that just kind of need.

Teacher Tom (29:22)
Yeah, safety things, yeah.

Brittney (29:27)
to happen and so sometimes you just get into this like we have to go, go, go, go, go. And, you know, children have no concept of time. So to them, they’re just like, I want to do these things and I’m going this slowly. But one of my favorite things when I can, when I have those, those beautiful moments where, you know, a child is like, well, why are we doing this? Or I have this idea, or they’re kind of pushing, you know, the boundary and kind of asking those types of questions or, you know, like, well,

Teacher Tom (29:34)
That’s right.

Brittney (29:56)
I don’t want to do this because of this reason. You know, it does make me sit and reflect and like, hmm, you know what? You’re right. Maybe we don’t have to do this right now. I think I was just in my adult brain on my own with adult schedule. And now that you mentioned it, I don’t think we have to do that right now. You’re right. Obviously there’s times when like, again, it’s a safety thing. Like we either need to do this or it’s a ratio. Like there’s, there’s things that need to happen. But one of my favorite moments is when.

Teacher Tom (30:14)
Yeah, you’re right.

Brittney (30:23)
know, a child can remind me that we can do things differently. And I’m like, valid point. Okay. Let’s read.

Teacher Tom (30:26)
Well, you know, and in connection with social justice, I mean, to me, what you remind me of when you’re saying that is I want critical thinkers, which means I want them, I need them to challenge and question my authority. I need them to do that. They shouldn’t just automatically just say, because I said something, and I want them to know, like from day one, the two -year -olds walk in the class, and I tell this story a lot, so.

Brittney (30:34)
Mm -hmm.

Mm -hmm.

Yeah.

Mm -hmm.

Teacher Tom (30:54)
People who’ve heard me talk before may have heard this before, but I always make sure that I have my box of plastic farm animals available when the two -year -olds arrive on the first day of class. And I pick up the pig and I say, the pig says moo. Right? And all of them laugh, right? Because they know that’s not right. And they say, no, teacher Tom, the cow says moo. I mean, they tell me right away, because I want them to listen to what I say.

Brittney (31:05)
Mm.

Yep.

Mm -hmm.

Yeah.

Teacher Tom (31:24)
And if what I say doesn’t match what they already know, I want them to know it’s not just their right, but their responsibility. And I think that’s really important. It’s their responsibility as part of a member of this community to call me on it. And so, you know, one of the parents one time told me that he always saw his job with his kid is to really finally hone their BS detectors. And, you know, that’s a little cruder way of putting it, but to me,

Brittney (31:28)
Mm -hmm.

Yes.

Mm.

Teacher Tom (31:51)
I think a lot of times we think as educators or as parents even, we think that, you know, God, you know, we don’t want kids challenging our authority. You know, it’s those naughty kids, rotten kids, they won’t listen to me. And I just feel like it’s, that’s not the kind of citizens we want, right? That’s not the kind of people we want living in our communities. We need people who will stand up and say, that’s not right. We don’t want them to lose, we don’t want to lose their curiosity. I think we also don’t want them to lose their essential.

Brittney (32:08)
Mm -hmm.

Yeah.

Mm -hmm.

Teacher Tom (32:21)
sense of fairness, right? Which for me is equity, equality, justice, all of these things that we talk about in early years, every child wants to discuss fairness. And they know when things aren’t fair. They know when it’s not fair. I mean, sometimes that’s not fair because somebody’s playing with something and they want it. So there’s a little bit of teaching that goes in there, what fairness is. But that is really one of the most fundamental things they want to learn about, they’re curious about.

Brittney (32:23)
Yes.

Mm -hmm.

Yeah. Yep.

Teacher Tom (32:50)
is fairness. And so when we can create an environment where fairness is just woven through everything we do, I mean, that’s why, you know, I let the kids make their own rules. I mean, from day one, I don’t make any rules. I mean, there are some rules that are safety based that our insurance company requires, but I don’t tell the kids those. I just figure my job is to like handle it, right? If there’s a rusty nail sticking out, that’s a hazard. I’ve got to get rid of the rusty nail.

Brittney (32:50)
Mm -hmm.

Mm -hmm.

Mm -hmm. Yep.

Yep. Yep.

Teacher Tom (33:16)
That’s my job, our broken glass on the playground, urban playgrounds always have broken glass, so I have to make sure that’s cleaned up. But when it comes to things like, you know, well, can we hit each other? Right? I don’t make that rule whether you can or cannot. Now, I know that the safety rule might say they can’t, but always on that first day of class, 100 % of the time, somebody comes to me and says, you hit me. And that’s my chance to just say, I can tell you didn’t like that.

Brittney (33:19)
Mm -hmm.

Mm. Yeah.

Mm -hmm.

Teacher Tom (33:46)
Does anybody like to be hit? Nobody likes to be hit. Why don’t we just all agree not to hit each other? And then, you know, I write down our list of agreements. They’re not even rules, right? And then right on the spot, their sense of fairness is like, well, and it’s also a little bit of that golden rule thing too. You know, no kicking, no biting, no taking things from other people. They really put together their own list and it’s got all the stuff you would have put on there. Except now, instead of now me saying no hitting,

Brittney (33:46)
Yeah.

Mm -hmm.

Mm -hmm.

Mm -hmm.

Teacher Tom (34:15)
When a child hits somebody else, I can say, we all agreed not to hit each other. And that puts it back on them. That puts them back in that sense of that it’s my job, my responsibility, my right and responsibility to be part of this community and to keep it going. And so I really, so people often say, you know, that this kind of sense of the liberation pedagogy and all that kind of stuff doesn’t work in early years. I say they’re wrong. I say this is the best place to be doing it.

Brittney (34:19)
Yeah. Yes.

Mm -hmm.

Yeah.

Mm -hmm.

Absolutely. Yes. Yes. And, you know, I’m always saying it doesn’t mean that we’re bringing in these really intense topics to young children. So we’re not, you know, bringing, we’re not talking about school shootings to young children or anything like that. But, you know, it’s these, these kinds of topics, like about fairness, about community, about belonging, about who belongs in our community, about what we want to see in our community. Like those are ways that are, those are things that are already in restorative justice practices that we do.

Teacher Tom (34:54)
Right.

All right.

Brittney (35:11)
for older levels, we can do the same things for younger levels, right? We might not be doing restorative circles in the same kind of structured way, but we might be taking those same tenets of, you know what, what does our community need and want? And what do we want to see? What behaviors do we want to see? And what behaviors do we all agree we don’t want to see? And I’ve done this with my classroom too, and it’s really interesting to kind of see.

Teacher Tom (35:31)
Yeah, right.

Brittney (35:37)
the different rules that they kind of come up with on the spot of, yeah, everyone should chew with their mouth shut. And they’re like, yeah. Yeah.

Teacher Tom (35:40)
Yeah. Right. they often are way more strict than we would be, right? With one another, they come up with every little nuance. It’s like, you know, no throwing rocks at people, no throwing wood at people, no throwing pine cones at people, you know. And they want to list every little thing. But that’s OK, because to me, that’s part of that. It’s not formal, but it’s part of that discussion, right? Well, let’s clarify this. Let’s be as clear as we can about what we.

Brittney (35:53)
Mm -hmm.

Yeah.

Mm -hmm. Yeah.

Teacher Tom (36:08)
want and don’t want out of our community. And to me, that’s the kind of citizen that democracies need, right? That’s the way we should be looking at our world. It shouldn’t be they and it should be us. And we are coming together with all our different wonderful perspectives. One of my favorite stories out of that, you said, you don’t formally sit down and do this, but if you have a topic that is of…

Brittney (36:11)
Mm -hmm.

Yes. Yes.

Mm -hmm.

Mm -hmm.

Teacher Tom (36:35)
value to the children is that is important to them. They’re going to sit down for 45 minutes or an hour and they’re going to talk it to death. I’d never forget there was one time there was a group of boys. There was a few girls involved, but mostly those boys and they were playing a game they called bad guys. No, wait, they were playing superheroes. That’s what it was. They were playing superheroes, right? They were playing superheroes. And you know, what that usually means is like standing boldly and

Brittney (36:38)
Mm -hmm. yeah. Yep.

Yeah. Yeah.

Teacher Tom (37:04)
flexing your muscles and bragging about your powers, right? But one day, one of the mothers came to me and she said, my daughter, Hilde, told me she’s scared of the superheroes and she wants to make a rule. See how empowered she felt. She wants to make a rule to ban superheroes. Now I knew how that would go, right? Because we’re not going to get consensus on that, but that’s okay. So I said, okay, and this mother knew our way of doing things. So she said, I said, well, just tell Hilde.

Brittney (37:06)
Mm -hmm. Yep.

Mmm.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Mm -hmm.

Teacher Tom (37:32)
that when she feels like it, she can raise her hand at circle time and suggest the rule and we’ll have a discussion about it. And it took about three days before she had the courage, she raised her hand and she said, I wanna make a rule, no superheroes. And the room just felt silent. And then suddenly this group of boys that had been playing were right up next to me and they all just shout, no. And then what was interesting is that then there was another group of kids from the other part of the room that said, yes.

Brittney (37:39)
Mm -hmm.

Mm -hmm.

Teacher Tom (38:02)
And you could see Hilde look around like she’d been worried that she was the only one. To hear that suddenly there were other people who were feeling, who had this thing. And so, you know, there was a lot of yelling and, you know, up in arms. And I kind of calmed her down. I said, let’s just take turns. Hilde, why do you think we should have that rule? And she said, well, they scare me. And I’ll never forget, and this is such a lesson in perspective. One of these boys up in the front, he just looked crushed. He looked like he was about to cry. And he said, but we save people.

Brittney (38:15)
Mm -hmm.

Mm.

Teacher Tom (38:33)
And suddenly then the conversation became, you know, we went around and we let everybody talk about, you know, how they, you know, everybody got to share what they, and then one boy very cleverly said, what if you don’t care? And we turned it, and so we said, okay, we decided we’d move all the superhero, pro superhero kids over to one side of the rug and the kids who wanted to make the rule on the other side and all the kids who didn’t care got to sit in the middle, which was the majority, right?

Brittney (38:47)
I love that.

Mm -hmm.

Yeah.

Teacher Tom (39:03)
which is kind of the way the world works. And it was such a great visualization for all of us to sit there looking at each other and seeing where we were. And then as we went through and each person shared why they like superheroes, why they don’t like it, you would see people start moving. They would start, you know, like they would say, you know, I kind of agree with that person. They would move to that agree. And then they would move back. And then by the end, we had a lot in the middle and we realized we couldn’t make the rule ultimately. But the conversation was enough, right? The conversation suddenly changed everything.

Brittney (39:14)
Mm -hmm.

Mm -hmm.

Yeah.

Teacher Tom (39:33)
One of the boys was running, boldly being a superhero a few days later, the cape behind him. And he ran by this other boy, a boy named Jack, who just cringed. But this time Owen stopped and he looked at Jack and he said, Jack, I’m sorry I scared you. And Jack goes, that’s okay, it was just for a second. And suddenly then that just broke the barrier between them. They suddenly understood.

Brittney (39:46)
Mm.

Teacher Tom (40:03)
least they understood there was another perspective out there that wasn’t threatening to them.

Brittney (40:04)
Mm -hmm.

Yeah. Yeah. And that’s a, that’s such a beautiful story for a lot of reasons, because it wanted, you know, you could have just taken that that parents feedback and like, okay, we’re gonna stop, you know, superhero play, you know, forever. And there wouldn’t be discussion about it. And then for weeks on end, you would have had to be running around these, you know, particular kids being like, superheroes. And then what’s going to happen? Like all the early childhood educators know, when you put the rule of like, no, don’t do this, what are they going to do?

Teacher Tom (40:28)
Yeah, right.

I’m not going to do it. Or one time when we were having, it was a different, similar kind of example, and they had been playing bad guys. That’s why I said that at first it was bad guys, same game, right? Still powers and posing fiercely. And one girl complained about it, and his mother came to me like three or four days later, and she said, last night, when we were saying our prayers at night, my son said to me, Henry, Henry said to me,

Brittney (40:39)
gonna do it more.

Yeah, same thing.

Mm -hmm.

Teacher Tom (41:07)
He wasn’t gonna play bad guys anymore because what was his name? Charlize doesn’t like it.

And they switched to superheroes. It was the same game. But suddenly he had changed it and it changed it for her as well. It’s having the conversation. And this is what I think we forget in our democratic society is that when we sit down together with other people, we’re probably not going to change anybody’s minds. It’s hard to change people’s minds. We have our beliefs for a reason. We know what we have.

Brittney (41:20)
well.

Mm -hmm.

Yes.

Mm -hmm.

Mm -hmm. Yeah.

Teacher Tom (41:43)
But what we can do is open up this concept of, we can expand this concept of who we are, right? As a community, as a society. And in preschool, we’re talking communities. But I try to always think about community as just a smaller version of society, or it should be.

Brittney (41:52)
Mm.

Mm -hmm. Yep. Yep. Absolutely. It should just be like a smaller little society. And we see that in, especially in early childhood. We see it when children are able to kind of express themselves freely and make their own rules and kind of engage in these types of dialogue. You see like, you know, they start caring for each other and, you know, very…

kind of very special ways that they start showing this care for each other and being more observant. Whereas if I were the adult in the room who was constantly, you know, you can’t hit so and so or go say sorry to so and so and just all these different, if I’m constantly the one who’s moving the needle on that, you know, society in a community can’t exist on just one person, right? It requires everyone to work together and everyone to see each other’s humanity and everyone to value each other’s input. And that’s the beautiful thing within early childhood is that.

You know, children can learn that there’s different roles for different spaces, that roles can change, that, you know, roles can change, that they have the ability to kind of affect change within that classroom. That’s one of my favorite things in, you know, the reggio schools that I’ve worked at is usually that first day you walk into the classroom and it just kind of looks like a sad beige classroom. There’s no art on the walls. Everything’s just kind of like wood and bare.

Teacher Tom (42:59)
Yeah.

Yeah.

huh.

Brittney (43:23)
but you just have to remind parents, like, I swear, it’s going to look more like a classroom, just give it time, right? And as the school year goes on, you know, the children’s artwork is on the walls and, you know, the tables are kind of spattered in paint that was supposed to be washable, but somehow stained the table. It’s never washable. It never is. It says it right, big bold letters, washable. And you’re just like, well, why is it still here? But.

Teacher Tom (43:28)
Right.

It’s never washable.

Brittney (43:50)
you know, you’re you’re seeing the classroom come to life because of the children’s additions, you know, the classroom has shifted and changed because you know, like, the kids are, you know, taking the blocks from this area to another area, it seems like maybe they like to use these two things together. And just seeing how, you know, their actions affect change in that classroom and form that community. It’s a powerful thing. And you know, I’ve had classes that they still get together like, you know, they’re, you know, in elementary school, they’re like,

Teacher Tom (43:53)
to.

Yeah.

Brittney (44:19)
third, fourth grade now, which is wild. But I’ve had these kinds of classrooms where they still meet up with each other. They still hang out with each other. All the families are still friends. And that’s a beautiful thing to know that in our little classroom, we forged a community that forged these lifelong connections that they take with them pretty much wherever they go. That’s the power of these little communities that you can build.

Teacher Tom (44:20)
huh. Yeah.

Yeah.

It’s so, I mean, it’s so beautiful. And the other thing that I love about Reggio is that it was founded for the purpose of creating peace. It was a response to World War II and it was all about educating for peace. And you know, that’s what we’re talking about. That’s why play -based learning is so important and powerful because it honors each child’s learning, each child’s ability, and it also honors community.

Brittney (44:57)
Mm -hmm. Yes.

Mm -hmm.

yet.

Yes, absolutely. I love the ways that Reggio does honor community, that it honors people, that it honors democracy and, like you said, peace and just the beautiful lessons that it has. It’s shifted and changed along the way. It shifts and changed from school to school based on the school’s needs and the school’s capacity. But…

I do love that it has those tenants and everywhere I go, even, you know, I’ve worked outside of the classroom, I’ve worked, you know, in nonprofits and just kind of worked in a number of different ways, but that’s something that I always take with me is that, you know, those tenants, but most importantly, like the environment, being your third teacher and really, really like, how is your environment hindering their learning or how is your environment helping their learning or how can I improve this environment? Like it’s an integral part of our learning.

Teacher Tom (46:03)
yeah.

Brittney (46:04)
It’s just the way that our environment is set up. Like, do I actually set this up to be successful?

Teacher Tom (46:09)
Right, right. Or, you know, yeah. I mean, sometimes it’s as simple as, you know, did I build a racetrack in my classroom and that’s why they’re running around. And I’ll never forget moving. We lived in a small, we lived, we had a, well, we did kind of live. We had the small classroom and our outdoor space was this small little courtyard with a high stone concrete kind of wall. It was very echoey. We were always trying to figure out ways to make it less echoey, but that’s okay. But you know, the…

Brittney (46:12)
Yes.

Hmm, yeah.

Mm -hmm.

Teacher Tom (46:37)
The good part as an educator is you’re out there, you’re hearing everything. You know what’s going on in any corner of the room. You don’t even have to look. And then we moved to a place with a giant playground, big outdoor space with lots of natural stuff. And I remember thinking my new teacher needs me to be a new teacher, right? My fellow, my third teacher, suddenly now it’s like stuff could be going on that I couldn’t hear. And so I had to focus more on my visual senses than my, you know, I’d been relying so much on my ears.

Brittney (46:42)
Mm -hmm. Yeah.

Mm, yeah.

Teacher Tom (47:07)
to kind of keep track of what was going on. And now suddenly I had to shift the way I positioned my body because she was requiring that of me. I always refer to my third teacher with the female pronouns. Maybe I shouldn’t, but I’ve always thought of her that way.

Brittney (47:14)
Mm -hmm. Yeah.

Hehehe.

I love it. And yeah, just that third teacher, it’s important and you know, it will tell you things if you listen. You know, if you’re listening. yeah, yeah, yeah. I remember like one of my first classrooms that I, me and my co -teacher had designed and we had this beautiful design and everything was so great. And very quickly we learned that.

Teacher Tom (47:30)
Yeah. yeah. When it tells kids things all the time, right? You have a long narrow hallway. What does that say? It says run.

Brittney (47:49)
there was this very small, narrow kind of strip in between where the kids could just run. And they were just booking it, just back and forth like, yeah, we’re running. And being the teachers we are, we’re like, okay, see how excited bodies. Maybe let’s redirect this energy, right? But eventually we kind of found ways to stop the corridor of running.

Teacher Tom (47:52)
huh.

Yeah. huh.

You

Yeah. What I did was, we had this long hallway that was between our classroom and getting outside, right? And it was an unfortunate part of our layout, right? It was part of our third teacher that was a challenge, is I couldn’t just have indoor, outdoor be a natural flow because it was too far away. So we had to go out from the classroom, out to the outdoors. And I…

Brittney (48:19)
Mm -hmm.

Yes. Yep.

Mm -hmm.

Teacher Tom (48:34)
And the first day I said, okay, let’s go outside. They just killed each other, right? They just all tried to get through that door at the same time and they were trampling and falling and crying. And so what I realized, I thought, okay, how am I gonna do this? One way would be to block things and to organize things. What I did was I just started letting them go one at a time and they got to run. That was it. We weren’t gonna tell them not to run. It was like, just like, okay. And I tried to, Sophia’s turn and she would just.

Brittney (48:40)
Yeah.

Mm -hmm.

Mm -hmm.

Nice. Yeah.

Teacher Tom (49:01)
book it down the hall to get down there. It’s Micah’s turn and he’d go booking down the hall. Because we have to learn to work with those teachers, right? They have their limitations just like we do. And I love the way, I’m so happy that the theory of loose parts has become as popular as it has because that is a theory about environment, right? That is a theory that comes out of architecture actually, which is so fascinating to me. Simon Nicholson was a landscape architect.

Brittney (49:02)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Exactly. Exactly.

Yes.

Yeah.

Teacher Tom (49:30)
In 1977 or so, he wrote an article called The Theory of Loose Parts, How Not to Cheat Children. And it was so profound. It’s actually a really radical concept about how architecture, his idea, his basic idea was that, you know, in architecture, but in all of the arts, we turn over the fun part to the experts, right? He called them the…

Brittney (49:39)
Wow.

Mm -hmm.

Teacher Tom (49:58)
the chosen few or something like that. The chosen few got to design the building and the rest of us just went to the building and appreciated it. And he said, you know, what if we create places where everything’s movable, where everybody who comes to this space, whether it’s a library or a school or a museum, and each person gets to have the fun of rearranging the space and organizing it. And that becomes, when you think about it, an incredibly profound democratic idea, right?

Brittney (50:06)
Mm.

Mm -hmm. Yes.

Teacher Tom (50:27)
We should all walk into those spaces and be able to create them the way we want. That’s why loose parts are without scripts built into them, right? Because so many of the toys, like if you give a child a Lego set that you can build into a Death Star, there’s only one thing you can do with that toy, right? I mean, we all know there are other things you can do, but most kids, most of the time, find a parent to help them build the Death Star and it sits on their dresser for, you know, until they go off to college. Even then, I know some…

Brittney (50:36)
Yeah.

Mm -hmm. Yeah? Mm -hmm.

Mm -hmm.

Teacher Tom (50:56)
Some kids have taken their death stars with them to college. I know. But it’s, you know, LEGO’s, the whole idea of LEGOs was that you could build anything you wanted with these little plastic blocks. And so I used to take, you know, so anyway, but take the scripts out of it and just suddenly, you know, if a child’s out there and there’s a pine cone and a piece of wood and a broken car with no wheels on it, what are they gonna, there are so, I watch children play with these things all the time and.

Brittney (51:05)
Yeah. Yeah.

Mm -hmm.

Mm -hmm.

Teacher Tom (51:25)
I would go through these little phases once in a while where I’d go, I’d say, the playground’s getting kind of junky, there’s a lot of broken stuff out here. And I’d start saying to the kids, okay, should I throw this away? No, we’re still using that. And then I would say, really, I haven’t seen you play with it. They would immediately take it and they’d spend the rest of the day playing with it, right? Figuring out a way to like, look, I build a, you know, I build a bad guy trap or I build a castle for my, you know.

Brittney (51:31)
Mm -hmm.

Yep.

Yeah.

Yep.

It’s it’s it’s astounding just the things that kids do. I remember when I was a kid, like I said, I’ve been doing the the artist way for the last couple of weeks and it’s been helping me reconnect with my inner artist and my inner child. But one of my favorite toys growing up, it was it wasn’t even like a Barbie or anything. It was just a hair tie that I had like fashioned into like this little weird thing. And I put it like a little Barbie dress on it. And it was my.

Teacher Tom (52:12)
huh.

Brittney (52:18)
favorite toy and if my mom tried to throw it away, I would have just had a complete meltdown like, no, that is my favorite thing. And it was the most I had. I had toys, but that I think because I made it. I think that’s why it was special to me. It’s like, no, I made it. I made a toy. This is my thing. But yeah, just the smallest things that all the random things that kids attached to is always just hilarious. And I love it. Like what suddenly becomes their favorite thing.

Teacher Tom (52:24)
I’m sorry.

yeah, sure. Yeah. huh.

Yeah. Yeah, we had this, I used to tell the parents at our school, because we were cooperative. And I would say to the parents, I’d say, if you have something you’re going to throw out, think about the preschool first before you throw it out. You know, something from your garage or attic or basement. And there was one of the moms she had when she was young, she had been a swimmer and water polo enthusiast and had all these trophies. And she was getting to get rid of them. There were junky, cheap little trophies. And she just brought this huge box full of trophies, you know, and the kids,

Brittney (52:54)
Yeah.

Mm.

Teacher Tom (53:11)
They had a blast with them, right? They could do all kinds of things with them. But eventually they get broken and the pieces get thrown away and stuff like that. So there were just bits and pieces. Every once in a while they would find the water polo player poised to throw the ball or something like that. One day, a boy, we had it and I was like, I don’t remember what we were doing with it. And the boy said, can I have that? Because we were calling it a baby. That’s right. We were pretending like it was a baby. Everybody was saying, this is the baby. This is the baby.

Brittney (53:13)
Yep.

Hmm.

Mm -hmm.

Okay.

Teacher Tom (53:39)
And he said, can I have the baby? And so I handed it to him and he said, I’m going to go drown the baby. And you’re, you know, you’re as it, you’re kind of going, huh, now what’s going on here? And he went over and so he said, teacher Tom, I can’t drown the baby. He came back. I can’t drown it. And I was like, okay, you know, I went over, I had to see what was going on. I walked over there and I saw this little plastic figurine floating in a bucket of water. And he said, I can’t drown it. He kept trying to push it under the water. It kept floating back up.

Brittney (53:48)
Yeah. Mm -hmm.

Teacher Tom (54:09)
So it was just so amazing to watch this. What he was doing was, you know, he meant, I go in to sink the baby and he was discovering that plastic floats, right? So he was coming up, but he was learning vocabulary in context, right? He was learning vocabulary. He was learning physics and water displacement and all of these kinds of amazing things just from a broken trophy and a bucket of water.

Brittney (54:16)
Mm. Yep.

Hmm. Yep.

Mm -hmm.

Wow, that is, I love those kinds of moments in the classroom. Like when you just get to explore something, you’re like, what do you mean by this? My favorite question is like, tell me about your idea. Like you’ll just see like kids stacking milk crates on top of each other. I’m like, I need to know what your idea is really fast. What are we planning? Is this a safe choice we’re making? But I have one more question for you. And that is how do you reimagine education?

Teacher Tom (54:42)
Alright.

Right.

Right, right.

Well, I mentioned to you before we started, I’m reading a book called The Extended Mind right now. And a big part of the book is about how much better, the scientists who study this, 100 % of human beings who’ve been tested on this, their brains work better when they’re outdoors. 100%, they can’t find anybody whose brains are not more sharp and by any measure that they’re trying to use to measure this. So obviously that tells me that if our,

Brittney (55:11)
Mm -hmm.

Wow.

Teacher Tom (55:34)
schools, if education was going to follow the science, a lot more outdoor time would be there. And in fact, right now, and this conversation has helped motivate me, I’ve written two books and I’ve just begun work on my third book. And it’s going to address exactly that issue. What if we followed all of the science about how learning works and how brains function, how bodies and brains work together, how

Brittney (55:50)
Okay?

Teacher Tom (56:01)
how human minds work with their environments with other people and all of this kind of stuff. I think if I were going to right off the top of my head give you a nutshell version of what I would do with schools, I would probably fire all the teachers. I would, I’d keep the cafeteria people. I’d keep the gardeners. I’d keep the maintenance people. I would hire the rooms out for professional artists.

Brittney (56:23)
Love it. Love it.

Teacher Tom (56:30)
and carpenters and auto mechanics. And I would create these community centers where kids from the ages, and this is radical, right? From birth to 18 years old, they get to come to this place. And all of these people, the cafeteria people, if an 18 year old comes in and wants to participate, they get them involved with cooking and chopping and all this. When the two year old comes in, they find a way for the two year old to be part of this community. The garden would be growing the food that they’re going to be eating.

Brittney (56:40)
Yes.

Yeah.

Teacher Tom (56:59)
they’d be putting on plays and there’d be musicians. It would be a place for senior citizens to come hang out. Now this is Nirvana, right? The senior citizens would be there to be audiences for the kids, to teach them from their own wealth of knowledge. I imagine, I said auto mechanics, I mean, my idea would be if your car’s, if there’s something wrong with your car, you bring it into the school and there’s a professional mechanic and your own kid might work on the car, right? If that’s what their interest is, if they’re gonna go, I’m gonna go,

Brittney (56:59)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Mm -hmm. Yeah.

Teacher Tom (57:28)
or just wash the car and create this kind of sense of community. My idea would be that at the end of the day, parents don’t just come and pick up their kids. Is they actually come in, they eat their dinner there in their community. They get, they have their cars fixed, they watch their kids musical performances. Maybe they participate with their kids. And that’s what you do in the evenings rather than watching TV or going shopping or something like that is that we create these communities of people who live near each other.

Brittney (57:30)
Mm -hmm.

Hmm.

Teacher Tom (57:57)
coming together in an open and there’s all kinds of, I can think of all kinds of naysayers to that, but that is sort of the vision that I think of, because it’s that sense of community, multi -age, lots of outdoor space, because we already have the physical buildings, but we have these huge grounds at a lot of schools where you could spread out and do all kinds of amazing things. I think a lot about the Sudbury model. I’m sure you’re familiar with the Sudbury or the Democratic Free School model.

Brittney (58:11)
Yep.

Mm -hmm.

Teacher Tom (58:26)
You know, that’s what we do in play based learning is really Sudbury in a lot of ways. And Reggio and I just I feel like. Instead of talking about him as schools, we talk about us community centers as places for community to come together, create community and we’re going to learn most of what we need to learn that way.

Brittney (58:33)
Mm -hmm.

Yeah.

I adore that. I think, because I think I love asking that question because it’s important that we keep dreaming big, that we keep thinking about these types of things and really imagining what the future of education looks like. And I think, you know, it’s important that we don’t get complacent. We don’t get in that mindset as well. This is the way it’s always been. And I guess this is the way we’re going to keep going. Like, now that’s the beauty in education that that’s

things can change. We’re constantly learning about best practices. We’re learning about how children learn. We’re learning about more science is coming out that shows us more about how children are learning and what’s going on. And so we can start listening to that and we can start imagining what does that look like? Does it look like we’re forging these communities? And I could think about some of my best school experiences, the things that really stood out. It wasn’t when I was sitting down.

being bestowed upon knowledge from the adult in the room. It was when my hands were doing the thing, right? When I was, I had, you know, say in what I was learning and that was, it was exciting to me. And those are the moments that really, really stand out and they really stick out and those, they were fun. You know, I had a good time learning and.

Teacher Tom (59:42)
Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Well, I call those moments, the moments that you’ve come alive. And I feel like we live in a world where a lot of people never come alive. And for me, that, you know, we, that to me, the purpose of education, however you want to structure it right now, the purpose, if you ask elected officials or you ask policymakers, they’re almost, or even most parents are going to say, well, you know, to get a job. And, you know, if all it is vocational training, then let’s let the corporations train their own workers. Why are we doing it in a democratic? So why are we all?

Brittney (1:00:03)
Yes.

Mm -hmm.

Mm -hmm.

Teacher Tom (1:00:29)
paying for it and doing it as a community. No, we do it because we want good citizens and the best citizens are those who have found their purpose in life. And if what we consider education that especially that, you know, that birth through, you know, 18 years old timeframe as a chance for children to learn what it means to be up, feel like you’re alive and just even for a day, even for a week, but maybe they find the thing that brings them alive for a lifetime. But what they’ll learn is the habit of pursuing, finding a purpose in life.

Brittney (1:00:29)
Mm -hmm. Yep.

Yes.

Yes. Yes.

Mm -hmm.

Teacher Tom (1:00:59)
being self -motivated, and also knowing that everybody else around them is self -motivated too. And just imagine the world we could create if all those purposeful people, those people coming alive or bouncing off of each other.

Brittney (1:01:00)
Yeah.

Mm -hmm.

Thank you.

Yes, coming alive, bouncing, I love it. I love that. I want to see that. I want more kids to experience that and to be a part of it and to just know what it feels like to just have something that you’re passionate about. Like, you know, when you’re working with a kid and you see that they’re doing something that they love. And of course that might change over time, but like you see them coming alive when they’re talking about their special interests, whether it’s, you know.

Teacher Tom (1:01:32)
Of course.

Brittney (1:01:37)
garbage trucks or the trash truck or the dinosaurs or anything like that. Like when they’re talking about the thing that they love more than anything else, you could see it in their eyes. You could see it in they’re just talking to you at like a thousand miles a minute and they can’t stop talking about it. They can’t stop learning about it. And they want all their friends to see it. I had one kid who was like, they motivate their friends and one kid who loved bugs. And so he was learning all about like,

Teacher Tom (1:01:39)
Yeah.

down.

Exactly. They motivate their friends to take an interest in it.

Brittney (1:02:04)
ladybugs he’s like ladybugs eat aphids and now i know that ladybugs eat aphids because you’re just like yeah

Teacher Tom (1:02:09)
Right. I say that all the time. Everything I know about dinosaurs, I’ve learned in conversations with preschoolers. Everything I know. I personally have no interest, but now, like, you know, and to hear, you know, when you’re listening to three -year -olds using words like Jurassic and carnivore and herbaceous and, you know, all these, and they’re talking about concepts like extinction and evolution, and you’re going, you know, nobody would put that in a three -year -old’s curriculum because they…

Brittney (1:02:16)
Mm -hmm. yeah. Yep.

Yeah.

Yeah. Mm -hmm.

Yeah.

No.

Teacher Tom (1:02:39)
because they get to make their own curriculum. And it’s always age appropriate and it’s always perfect when they make it for themselves.

Brittney (1:02:47)
Always, always, always. I love that. That’s the perfect thing to end on. And on that note, where could my audience find you? Where can they find the books or anything you’re working on?

Teacher Tom (1:02:55)
Okay, well so, I have the blog which is called Teacher Tom’s Blog, which I’ve been writing there since 2009 and that’s where you found me, Brittney, that blog spot, the simple one. Teachertomsworld .com, the Teacher Tom’s World, because that’s up with the S in there, teachertomsworld .com is where you’ll find out about where my podcast is, you can get links to my books, you get links to all the other stuff I’m doing, my courses. But really what I’d like to do is just come to my website,

Brittney (1:03:03)
Amazing. Yes.

Yay.

Teacher Tom (1:03:24)
And on the first page, a little pop -up window will come up at the bottom there. And I’ve got a free, you know, teacher Tom’s top 10 posts on PlayBase Learning. Cause I, I realized that I have, you know, I’ve been writing for so long. I probably have 4 ,500 posts on there and it’s impossible for anybody to find stuff they’re looking for. So I tried to curate just like a download for people who want to come and just, you know, and get kind of get inspired or do just, if you’re somebody who doesn’t know anything, it gets you kind of some, you know,

Brittney (1:03:40)
Mm -hmm.

Teacher Tom (1:03:54)
some ground floors kind of stuff. But if you’re somebody who’s, you know, like you, Brittney, or anybody else who’s like really experienced, I hope it’ll inspire you because we need to constantly be getting inspired and teaching can be exhausting, right? As we’ve talked about, and we all need to, we love our work, but it is the most tiring job in the world because we can’t take a day off. You can’t even take a minute off.

Brittney (1:04:05)
Mm -hmm.

Yes.

Yes, absolutely.

Mm -hmm.

Teacher Tom (1:04:22)
because you’re responsible for these young people and you want to be present for them. And at the end of every day, you know, we’re tired and sometimes we need a little inspiration. So that’s kind of my idea behind it. So, you know, they can come to teachertomsworld .com and download that for free and just get a little inspiration.

Brittney (1:04:23)
No. Mm -hmm.

Yeah.

I love that and you were inspiration to me when I first started teaching and you continued to be an inspiration, looking through the blog, just reading the last couple of posts, I was like, wow, this is amazing. This is still the same amazing great quality that it was several years ago. So keep on with the inspiration.

Teacher Tom (1:04:55)
Well, I’d love to, we talked earlier about the journeys, right? And if you, I loved, I think a lot of people would have deleted their first couple of years of posts by now, because when I go back and read the ones from 2009, 2010, there’s a lot of them that embarrassed me. Then I just think, my God, I’ve moved, I’ve grown so much, but I want to leave them there because I want to show that there is, it’s all a journey.

Brittney (1:05:03)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Mm -hmm.

Teacher Tom (1:05:20)
And I didn’t want to, anything I said, if anybody felt like, Tom was judging me or something like that, I’m not judging you. We’re all in a different place in our journey. We’re all just trying our best as parents, as teachers, just as human beings in the world. We’re all just doing the best we can every day. And they might not be doing as good as you want them to do, but that’s not your business, right? Everybody’s doing the best they can.

Brittney (1:05:28)
Mm. Yeah.

Mm -hmm.

Mm -hmm.

Yep, yep, yep, everyone’s doing the best they can. And I always say it, I’m super grateful that MySpace has kind of just exploded because back in the day, MySpace was where all of my teenage thoughts just went. So I’m glad that that’s been eliminated from the internet. So I got a nice fresh start. So I definitely understand, because if that was just existing on the internet, I’d be like, ooh.

Teacher Tom (1:05:54)
You

huh.

no.

Yeah, well, you know, yeah, right. We did well, you know, and you you grew up in the part where you were like, right on the front lines, right? I remember, you know, I remember when my daughter was young, it’s like, it’s she’s she’s 27 now. So you’re I don’t know what you hold your own care. But she was, you know, she’s 27. But I remember when she was when she was young, and I would be like, you know,

Brittney (1:06:10)
Those were inside thoughts, friends. Yeah.

You

Teacher Tom (1:06:38)
You got to be careful because it’s a public place. And a lot of people a little bit older than her didn’t know that. And she said, I’ve seen what they do. I know that it’s a public place. And it’s so, it’s so delightful to watch people her age right now, at least her friends on social media, they are so kind to one another. And that’s not what’s supposed to be happening. But I listened all the way through high school and stuff. I was realizing they want, they understand this is for posterity. Right.

Brittney (1:06:41)
Mm -hmm.

Yeah.

Mm -hmm.

Yeah.

Mm -hmm. No.

Yes. Yes.

Teacher Tom (1:07:08)
These are the stories that people are gonna tell about them. They can save your private thoughts for the journal you’re sticking under your mattress, right? If you’re gonna think something is scary, you know, do that. Anyway, you can cut all that part out of the podcast.

Brittney (1:07:14)
Yeah. Yeah. Yes.

Yes, yes, that’s yeah, no, I get it. I think it was beautiful. But thank you so much. I feel like I could talk to you for hours, but I should probably let you go at some point. Well, thank you.

Teacher Tom (1:07:31)
Well, I could talk to you for hours too, but you know, that’s probably there’s probably something I should be doing.

Brittney (1:07:37)
Probably. I want to thank you so much. I know my friend Amanda, I want to shout out to Amanda. She was very excited that I was going to talk to you today. So hi, Amanda. There’s a shout out for you. And thank you so much for joining me. I hope you have a wonderful, wonderful rest of your day.

Teacher Tom (1:07:38)
Yeah.

good.

You too, Brittney, thank you so much.

Brittney (1:07:54)
Thank you, bye.

Brittney (1:07:56)
Thank you so much for tuning into Conscious Pathways. Don’t forget to like, share, and subscribe to Conscious Pathways wherever you get your podcasts. And please don’t forget to leave a rating or review. It really does help the podcast to grow and reach more listeners just like you. And until next time, don’t forget to navigate your conscious journey with courage and kindness, and I’ll see you there for more transformative conversations in education. Bye.