The Process Of Learning About Relationships

One of the aspects I like most about teaching in a cooperative preschool is that parents directly witness their child's processes: creating art, building with blocks, exploring sensory materials, assembling puzzles, and working with others. As a teacher, I don't need to be constantly "documenting" a student's work and reporting to parents about how and what their child is doing. As a parent I saw this as a primary advantage as well, not having to rely exclusively on the teacher for information about my child, but rather seeing with my own eyes, or the perspective of my fellow parent-teachers, how my child was doing in her process of getting along with the world.

Practicing working together is the most important thing we do in preschool.   This artwork won't be going home with the kids as a kind of "product report" on what they did today. In fact nothing of this will go home other than the experience gained from the process.

We usually talk about process v. product in relation to art, but in preschool it really applies to everything we do. I know that conscientious teachers strive to include process in their documentation and reporting on a child's work, attempting to show or demonstrate, for instance, not just that a child built an elaborate castle from blocks, but how it came about. The reality, however, of a teacher or two with a classroom full of children quite often means that what parents are left with are progress reports on product. This is especially true as report cards and 30 minute parent-teacher conferences come to dominate what is typically a one-way flow of information about the results of tests, homework, and grades.

I suppose I drove my daughter Josephine's kindergarten teacher a little crazy at times in the way I almost dismissed her official reports, preferring frequent, casual hallway conversations about how, not what, she was doing. In fact, when I sat down for parent-teacher conferences, I always let the teachers know that I was far more interested in discussing how she was getting along with her classmates than anything to do with grades. After all, social skills have far more to do with success in life than do academic ones, and that's information that awfully hard to package up into a report.

Some of the kids negotiate a process that involves "covering all the white parts."

It continues to be incredibly valuable to me as a parent, even as Josephine is now a young woman, to have been an eye-witness to her preschool trials and struggles, especially in the area of exploring relationships. As any psychologist will tell you, this is where you need to go for therapy to work, and many of our issues in adult relationships can be traced right back to those earliest ones. I can't tell you how often, over the years, that I've found myself reminding Josephine of events and friendships from our cooperative preschool days as we've discussed her current social challenges.

Some teams are find themselves more interested in the patterns they can make together with the tracks made by the golf balls as they roll through the paint.

It might sound odd at first, but I often discourage parent-teachers from reading books (or at least, reading book after book) to kids during class. Of course, I have nothing against books, but our classroom time is relatively short and sitting on a lap, in a corner, listening to a story tends to be a rather isolating activity, even if you're sitting in a cluster of other kids. Plus, I know that the kids I teach are being read to at home, so there isn't that concern. As I see it, the primary reason we're at school in the first place is to practice our relationship skills, to experiment with ourselves amidst the other people: that is something one really can't do at home, or at least not nearly as well as we can at school where the playmates aren't hand selected, where there are dozens of individual agendas and personalities to be accommodated, where one must constantly strive to find one's place, to learn to assert oneself, and to know when and how to join right in. 

While for others, they are more interested in the contact they make with their friends across the way, all part of the process of learning to get along with the other people.

The only way to learn these things is to practice, which is a the sort of lifelong process in which most of us find ourselves engaged, both socially and in our jobs. This is why process is always more important than product, and process is something best understood with one's own eyes.

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"You Raise Them To Be Independent"

You raise them to be independent, then you’re terrified when they are. ~My mom

The sailcloth of our Woodland Park community of children is woven from our day-to-day shared experiences: routines, expectations, rules, art projects, sensory table play, building, dramatic games, and songs. But every now and then we need to unfurl that sail and test ourselves by sharing extraordinary experiences, like field trips.

Occasionally, our destination requires carpooling, but the best field trips are the ones we can get to by either walking or taking public transportation, usually the bus, but when our new light rail link started running a few years back, we made an entire day of just riding the bus, the train, then the bus again. In fact, when I survey the kids at the end of the day, it's normally the travel they say they remember most.

Our maiden voyage each year takes place in October and is usually some version of visiting a pumpkin patch. As the big day approaches, invariably some parents tell me their children are nervous -- these tend to be the parents of the younger kids, and that makes sense. They've come to trust our school, but we can't expect them to have complete confidence in the stability of our little boat on the high seas beyond our safe harbor. Even more nervous than the kids, I know, are parents who are trusting the rest of us to bring their child back safe and sound, which we've been doing for well over a decade, but I know that doesn't make it any easier.

I look forward to field trip days, which typically come about once a month. Frankly, I enjoy being able to skip the usual set-up that goes into preparing for a normal school day, often taking the opportunity to sleep in a little. And I know I'm going to need to be as alert as possible. Being out in the world with 20+ preschoolers is a huge responsibility, even if they are already experts at keeping their adults in sight and avoiding the most significant danger we'll face: traffic. There's also the constant concern that someone will be left behind, despite our yellow field trip t-shirt, our constant counting, and our many chaperones. I'm always drained at the end of a field trip day, as are the kids. As are the parents, even those who didn't chaperone.

It's stressful, but worth it. The things we learn or experience are wonderful, of course, things like rowing a boat together at the Center for Wooden Boats or discovering coyote scat in the Magnuson Park wetlands, but the real value is in the adventure, which is, after all, the story of Maurice Sendak's Where The Wild Things Are. Often we go places to which the children have already been with their families, but when we go there together, getting there under our own power, sharing an experience, it becomes something we "own" as a community, becoming a common resource for our every day routines, expectations, rules, art projects, sensory table play, building, dramatic games, and songs.

And while field trips help bind us together, at the same time I know they are hard on the parents who are left behind, those who are preparing those meals that will still be hot when we return. In many cases, these field trips are the first time they've sent their kids off into the world like this, as part of a group, on public buses, going to public places, having experiences amongst the Wild Things. It's hard, I know, but the only thing that really helps is experience.

Like their children, parents will feel more and more comfortable as the year goes on. Like it or not, the older our children get, the farther out into the world they will go, increasingly without us -- believe me, as the parent of a 16-year-old, I know! We raise them up to set them free, and as a parent, at some level, it will always be terrifying.

That, more than anything else, is why we take field trips: it's another baby step toward independence for everyone.

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The Technology Of Treating Children Like Fully Formed Human Beings

I remember my first formal exposure to the "technology" of treating children like fully formed human beings -- and I often do think of it as a kind of technology in that it's the application of scientific knowledge for practical purposes. I'd previously been exposed to this technology via my daughter's preschool teacher, with whom I'd been working as a cooperative classroom parent for many months, but, as technology often does for the uninitiated, it just looked like magic, something Teacher Chris was able to do because she was Teacher Chris.

I was in one of Tom Drummond's classes at North Seattle Community College and he began to explain the ultimate ineffectiveness of "directive" statements. You know the kind, "Sit over here," "Stand there," "Pick that up," the sorts of adult communications with which most of our childhoods were filled. I had a small epiphany as he explained our assignment to us, which was to simply keep track of the number of directive statements we made during our next classroom day. And even as I had the epiphany that this was a part of Teacher Chris' magic trick, I doubted that it could really work, at least not all time, not for all kids, not for all ages. It was good that our assignment was simply about ourselves, about listening to our words, practicing using this new technology, not being burdened with the complications of having to make judgments about how the children were responding, just focusing on ourselves and the words we were using.

It felt incredibly awkward, then, replacing my directive statements with informative ones. For instance, instead of saying, "Pick up that block," I would try to make the more cumbersome informative statement, "I see a block on the floor and it's clean up time." One of the basic ideas, Tom explained, was that unlike directive statements which tend to shut things down, informative statements create a space in which the kids get to do their own thinking, make their own decisions about their own behavior, instead of merely engaging in the power struggle that inevitably emerges from being bossed around. It made sense to me even while it felt strange and artificial. It was true, I couldn't help but notice, that when I took the time to be informative, children were far less likely to push back rebelliously, and instead take a beat (which, I've learned means they are taking a moment to process the information you've given them) then pick up that block and put it away. 

I discovered, on my own, the truth of Tom's assertion that the ultimate weakness of relying upon directive statements is that, over time, they need to be escalated in intensity. I recall standing in our school's parking lot with a much more experienced parent as she yelled angrily after her kids, "Get your butts over here!" only to have them giggle and scamper away. When she grumbled, "I never thought I'd be the kind of parent who spanked her kids, but I'm almost there," I saw a glimpse of a place I didn't want to go.

And I still had doubts, even as I began to practice with my own preschooler, who soon detected the change in my approach and began to object to it as "teacher talk." I felt a little guilty, like a magician letting the public in on my trick, as I explained to her what I was trying to do. I remember my 5-year-old agreeing that it sounded like a good idea. She especially appreciated that I wouldn't be bossing her around, even suggesting she would be happy to help me by pointing out when I slipped up. I thought for sure that I'd ruined everything by letting the cat out of the bag, but if anything, the opposite happened. She became my ally in making "teacher talk" a more natural part of my day-to-day language until I've arrived at a point in my life when parents refer to "Teacher Tom magic." 

And still, despite all the evidence, despite all my ever-increasing expertise in using it, I was suspicious that the technology of treating children as fully formed human beings would stop working as they got older and more sophisticated. 

The father of one of my daughter's classmates was a high school teacher, a good one by all accounts; jovial, casual, humorous. I think I would have liked being in his class. As our kids approached middle school he explained his philosophy of dealing with teens to me: "Oh, I'm their best friend until they cross the line, then Bam! I come down like a house of bricks." By this time, I'd become quite confident in the use of my "teacher talk" technology when it came to preschoolers, had seen its effectiveness with my own eyes, had even customized it for my own use, but listening to this guy who everyone admired, I wondered if maybe I was, at least as a parent, going to need to adopt some of this "house of bricks" technique as my own. Well, here I am today, the parent of a 16-year-old, a kid learning to navigate all the regular high school stuff we worry about, and I've yet to feel the need to "come down" like a house of bricks. In fact, just as I did when she was 5, I find it much more productive to lay it all out for my daughter as honestly and informatively as possible, revealing my emotions, my dilemma as a parent, my concerns for her safety or her morals or her future or her reputation or whatever. No one makes great decisions all the time, but she's had a lifetime of practice, and most of the time she comes up with perfectly reasonable solutions.

None of this is magic. Like all technology it still works, often even better, when everyone knows how it works.

I've now finally come to a point at which I have complete trust in the technology of treating children like fully formed human beings. Indeed, it's a technology that works on all fully formed human beings no matter what their age and it starts with the assumption that I can never, whatever your age, command you into doing anything. My primary responsibility is to speak informatively, and to leave a space in which thinking can take place.

And still people say to me, "You're lucky. You teach privileged children," often insisting that there are some children out there who are so "damaged," who have had so little love or attention or whatever in their lives that they are somehow not ready to be treated as fully formed humans, that they need commands and punishment; that they need to learn obedience. I'm left with nothing to say, of course, because they're right in the sense that I teach the children I teach, and without a classroom of older, more damaged kids with whom to experiment, I have nothing but "Sez you!" on which to fall back. Still, I will say that much of the damage probably comes from being either abused or neglected, neither of which will be repaired by being bossed around.

This brings me around to an article I want to share with you, especially those who doubt this technology, who tend to dismiss it as "namby pamby" or "weenie," even if they are just shadows of words that haunt you when things aren't going well with the fully formed human beings with whom you are interacting. This is a long article about a high school that its principal describes as "the dumping ground," one that was once run by gangs. It's a story about how "punishing misbehavior just doesn't work. You're simply adding trauma to an already traumatized kid." It's the story of how magically this technology is working when applied to poor, disadvantaged, abused, and neglected kids.

The first time that principal Jim Sporleder tried the New Approach to Student Discipline at Lincoln High School in Walla Walla, WA, he was blown away. Because it worked. In fact, it worked so well that he never when back to the the Old Approach to Student Discipline.

If you have any doubts, and even if you don't, this is the article to read. There's a lot great information in here; science about how and why the technology works, even on the most "hardened" kids. If you're already a devotee of this technology, it's still worth the time. This is not written to tug at the heartstrings, but it did mine. I found myself tearing up over and over at the epiphanies of teachers and students, at how they had to overcome a lifetime of believing in the myth of "tough love" and "punishment with dignity," at how the "magic trick" is being revealed to the kids themselves making them experts in their own "recovery." It's a story of teachers and children learning to use this technology together to change their lives, one they all say "is just the beginning." It's my story as well.

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Intelligence Is Not Enough

We must remember that intelligence is not enough. Intelligence plus character -- that is the goal of true education.  The complete education gives one not only power of concentration, but worthy objectives upon which to concentrate. The broad education will, therefore, transmit to one not only the accumulated knowledge of the race but also the accumulated experience of social living.

If we are not careful, our colleagues will produce a group of closed-minded, unscientific, illogical propagandists, consumed with immoral acts. Be careful, brethren! Be careful, teachers!  ~MLK

It's a small wonder, a miracle indeed, when they discover an aspect of "we," often at first stumbling across it like over a super cool toy left in the middle of the living room floor.

Even if it's as simple as saying, "We are going up here now." Even that gives me confidence about our future.

The ones with siblings just a little bit older tend to learn it first, the joy of connecting with another child, and find their classmates a little slow sometimes. These are the ones who might take the lead, practicing the sentences that begin with the invitation of "Let's . . .," working their human power to bring themselves together with those other suns around whom the universe so recently revolved.

This is the work we're here to do: to make me into we, because otherwise it makes no sense. 

There are things, so many things, over which to disagree. It's hard enough learning how to do that without having to also overcome closed minds that reject the universal language of objective "scientific" truth in favor of illogical propaganda. The same is to be said for that set of moral values we must share if we're to make this democracy work, let alone our day-to-day lives: non-violence, equal opportunity, fairness, the values without which the promises of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness simply cannot be fulfilled.

It's true we attempt in school to transmit our "accumulated knowledge," but without also working diligently to transmit the "accumulated experience of social living," we risk creating sociopathic monsters, people rendered less than human by their inability to join us in our work of making me into we, instead seeking to exploit, to use up, to devour their fellow man in a dangerously misguided attempt to fill up that abyss that opens inside each of us when we stand all alone in the world. If we don't fill it with love, it becomes a vacuum for wrath, greed, sloth, pride, lust, envy, and gluttony.

When a boy and a girl and a tiger find themselves together and one of them says, "Let's go up there," and then they all pick up, still together, and go up there, sitting once more together I see the work of we being done and I don't worry about our world so much.

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Learning To Garden With Young Children

When my wife and I purchased our first house, we wound up with a gorgeous lawn, beautiful shrubbery, fantastic trees and many beds for growing annuals. I almost immediately killed the lawn, my first of many. I don't think I did too much damage to the established plants and trees, but after that first year, the beds were largely just an inadvertent science experiment in which various kinds of weeds battled it out for supremacy, but that initial summer we had a flower garden for the ages.

Okay, that may be an exaggeration, but it was my one shining example of gardening success. It was mostly petunias, but in the classic "granny garden" ethic in which I was raised, there were cosmos and daisies and geraniums and lobelia and marigolds and poppies and a little bit of just about everything else that grows here in the Pacific Northwest. I was out there every single day from early Spring through early Fall, watering, weeding, fertilizing, deadheading, and just generally sitting there with my shoes off in the increasingly spotty grass just watching it grow. I learned then, that this is the secret to a successful garden: daily attention.

By the following Spring the newness had begun to wear off. I started like a ball-o-fire, but soon found myself resenting the flower bed as much as I had grown to resent the never-ending obligations of mowing, pruning, and raking. But at least I'd learned what it takes, even if it turned out to not be the hobby for me.

Like it or not, small schools like ours do tend to take on the strengths and weaknesses of the teacher, especially if that teacher has been there for a long time. Woodland Park has alway had a garden, but for most of my tenure that has meant a handful of plants that thrive on neglect and loads of empty beds that were just perfect for mixing up some mud. When we got serious about the outdoor part of our program 5 years ago, our community reclaimed our old garden space, spruced it up, and declared "gardening" to be part of our curriculum. We always have a number of avid gardeners within our parent community, folks who know what they're doing, and since I'm not one of those, we've relied on the time and energy of those people for whatever gardening success we've had.

And while I wouldn't call our preschool gardening a failure, despite good intentions and often yeoman-like efforts, it has never really thrived, at least not as a part of the curriculum. For that, I blame myself. No matter how many willing hands I have to help me, it's my job to "hold the vision," and since my experience in gardening is limited, my vision tends to be fairly limited as well. It probably hasn't helped that we've moved the entire garden, plants and all, three times during those five years: first from the old space to the new, then two years ago from a less than ideal spot to a sunnier spot.

But something has happened this year. For one thing, we had a couple of very dedicated gardener parents put their focus on things, digging-in during the early Spring to really fill those beds with a variety of interesting, mostly edible plants, usually working with small teams of children. To a certain degree, this has happened every year, but perhaps the most important thing they've done is to actually keep track of what we've planted and where. And as summer approaches, our garden is turning out to be the place to be. We haven't harvested much food so far, just some snap peas, but we can see things coming: onions, raspberries, strawberries, lettuces and cabbages. Our herbs are bursting out of their beds and our snap pea vines are starting to climb charmingly over the child-sized archway built for the purpose.

Gardening with young children can be a harrowing experience. All it takes is one child, off the radar for a few minutes, to essentially upend all of your hard work. All it takes is one child not understanding the designation between garden bed and pathway. But over the years, my greatest frustrations with gardening and young children is simply that for most of our school year, there isn't much going on out there, and just as things really get going, we break for the Summer, leaving our herbage to an ever-changing group of kids who are only there three days a week. The lessons of the garden, it seemed to me, were those of life cycles, of patience, of consistency, and of gentleness, but our school schedule really isn't set up for that. But this Summer I'm starting to see it differently. As the early Spring work of our gardening parents literally bears fruit, I'm beginning to understand the importance of having a garden in our midst.

It's not that we have to bear witness to every stage in the lifecycle of our garden, from sprout to seed, because that is happening all the time, all around us, at homes, in parks, in the woods, and in our school. No, the importance of our garden is to spend time there, puttering around, dropping to our knees and simply being with the plants.

Yes, our plants are experiencing a kind of drought-flood cycle right now as the kids water the diddly-o-dandy out of them for our three days on, leaving it to go dry during the subsequent four days. It's good we have well-drained soil in there. Yes, we've tried sprouting our own wheat grass seeds, but that was done in peat pots beside the garden, a place for experimentation, whereas the garden itself is more for exploration. As I mentioned, we have harvested a few snap peas and a couple carrots that wintered over, and we're keeping an eye on our berries, but most of our gardening has been done with our eyes, not our hands. We've played with ladybugs in the garden, releasing them one at a time from the bag of 1,500 we purchased from a nursery. And yesterday, we used acrylic paint pens to decorate the wood of the raised beds, the terra cotta pots, and various rocks and stones; not gardening exactly, but being in the garden, breathing the garden, being with the garden.

That was the best part, after all, of my one successful gardening cycle, sitting there in the grass watching the flowers grow. I'm starting to understand that this is what gardening with young children is all about.

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A Typical Day

There are days after which I feel like things could have been better. Those are most days.

Last week, the first week of two in this kick-off session of our 2013 Summer Program, included none of those days. We had perfect weather, eager engagement from both kids and adults, and a kind of wide-eyed docility that often characterizes the beginnings of things as everyone feels things out.

Our Summer Program is more or less run by a half dozen or so key parents. All week, the gist of our "hallway" conversation was along the lines of, "This is going very well, isn't it?"

Yesterday, the temperature got turned down by 10 degrees on our all-outdoor program, we were rained upon, the kids were feeling more confident and assertive, and the mix of stations and activities felt kind of clunky. It wasn't a bad day by any means, but I was back in the game of settling disputes, reminding children of how to treat one another, and dealing with kids goofing off during circle time: a more typical day at Woodland Park.

I'm far from a perfectionist, but that doesn't mean I don't notice the flaws and hiccups, which is why the end of each day usually leaves me feeling an emotion into which a dose of dissatisfaction is mixed. I suppose that's the nature of most human activity, at least if you're engaged in something you care about. I rarely felt that way when I worked for "the man." Back then, my concerns at the end of the day were mostly about myself, what my boss thought of me, how much of my work I'd managed to divvy up to other people, and whether or not the thing that was threatening to be a failure could be made to look like an act of god, or failing that, the fault of someone else. That's no way to live, of course; it's the recipe for a bad night's sleep, a perpetually guilty conscience, and an end of the week emotion that was pretty much all dissatisfaction, with just a hint of relief over whatever it was I'd gotten away with, which is why those drinks after work on Friday were often the highlight of the week. 

My dreams, and I dreamed a lot back then, were of an impossible, perfect life in which obligations were few and choices were many.

I was lucky, I think, to have early on recognized my unfitness for the life of business, a life for which I spent too much of my educational life preparing. I then tumbled into self-employment. If I thought I'd been a bad employee when working for the man, I was a worse employee when working for myself. I went from sticking it to the man to sticking it to myself, which is really a miserable place to be, although I sometimes look back on those schedule-free days and miss them. Yes, I was living the dream of being my own boss, setting my own hours, assuming only obligations I placed upon myself, but it was also a daily battle with procrastination, distraction, and finding other things, anything, to avoid actually sitting down and doing the work. Sure my wife was thrilled at the end of each day with the tidiness of our home and garden, the quality and balance of our evening meal, and the personal grooming of her husband (and believe me, she still sometimes reflects longingly on those days), but none of it was progress, none of it was success, none of it had any meaning because at the end of the day I knew it had all been about avoidance. 

My dreams, and I dreamed a lot back then, were of an impossible, perfect life full of import and meaning.

I was lucky again, then, to wind up as a preschool teacher, and not just any preschool teacher, but one working in a cooperative preschool in Seattle, Washington. This is a job I would want to do even if I wasn't being paid. This is a job I'd do no differently if you paid me the salary of a big time CEO, because I'm already doing it as well as I'm capable, which is to say I end each day feeling good, feeling proud, feeling spent, and feeling slightly dissatisfied, knowing there is still something I want to figure out and make better. 

I'd been looking forward to our summer program as a kind of respite from the long days and weeks of the regular school year. After all, we're only meeting three mornings a week. It was going to feel luxurious, I was going to be able to set myself on cruise control, I was going to let my mind work on other things. But that's the person I used to be. I can no longer section things off into work, play, and family. Nope, I'm kind of surprised to realize this morning that it's now just one, big thing called My Life in which all the parts necessarily support one another. Being a teacher takes up just as much of myself teaching three classes a week as it does ten, and frankly, I wouldn't have it any other way.

I have dreams still, of course, but having found this place for me, this place where the obligations are not things to avoid, and where every moment is full of import and meaning, those dreams don't seem at all impossible. In fact, I expect they can all be discovered in a typical day in which things could have been better.

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Creating A Culture Of Inclusion

When my daughter Josephine was a preschooler, she complained, "I wanted to play with her, but when I asked to play, she said, No." This wasn't a once or twice complaint, but one she voiced almost daily, and more often than not she was being rejected by her best friends. 

When I asked her teacher (and my mentor) Chris David about it, she replied, "If you want to play with a preschooler, sometimes the worst question to ask is, Can I play with you? The answer is almost always No." And while I've found this characterization to be a bit of an exaggeration, it is true for most kids some of the time and some kids most of the time. These are years during which children experiment with power and there are few things more powerful than telling someone No.

Instead of asking to play, Chris suggested to "just start playing." If it's dollies, then pick up a doll and start playing too. If it's blocks, start building. If it's painting, then paint. And before long you're not just playing beside someone, you're playing with them.

Yesterday, I wrote about a couple of the ways I help children enter into play with one another, which can be a very challenging proposition at any age. Some kids are naturals at it, and if you take the time to observe you'll find that most of these master players do it just the way Chris suggested I coach Josephine. Perhaps they take a moment to survey the scene, but typically it isn't very long before they've dropped to their knees and gotten busy. They don't try to change the game in progress, they don't try to get their hands on a toy that's already in use, and they definitely don't ask for permission.

When I suggested this approach to Josephine, however, she answered, "But I have to say something!" I've since found this to be true of a lot of children. It might just be temperament or it could be that they've internalized some adult social conventions, but whatever the case, there are some kids who seem constitutionally incapable of simply dropping into the midst of things. They feel the need to announce themselves or their intentions or to otherwise make themselves heard as they enter into play.

So we strategized what kinds of things she could say that didn't present a yes or no option.

"What are you playing?"

"You're playing with blocks."

"My dolly is your dolly's best friend."

Or the line I use to this day when role modeling how to enter into play, the straight-forward assertion of fact, "I'm playing too." 

Yesterday, I gave examples of how I role modeled inclusive behavior, ways to both enter into play and accept those seeking to enter into play. Now, I don't expect every game to be open to all comers, sometimes you have something going with your buddy and there isn't room for one more, but we strive, as a general rule, to create a culture of inclusion in our classroom. It starts with the adults, of course, and since in our cooperative classrooms somewhere between one-third to one-quarter of the bodies in the room belong to grown-ups, that gives us a running start. As adults, we almost always respond positively to attempts to enter into play with us. After all, that's why we're there, and when we can't, we explain why (e.g., "I'm helping Billy with this puzzle right now"), then let them know when we will be able to accept the invitation (e.g., "I'll play with you as soon as I'm done"), then we follow through.

I tell the adults that it's their job to role model inclusive behavior, to always seek to find a way to add one more child to whatever it is they're doing. If it's a puzzle, invite a second or third child to help. If it's a board game, go ahead and stretch and bend the rules to accommodate one more. If it's playing princesses in a castle, find another throne, make another crown, or suggest another gown.

When a child complains to me, "They're not letting me play," my stock response is to reply, "I'll play with you, come on." We then head right over to the kids who have somehow given the impression they don't want to play, sit down beside them, and say, "We're playing too." I don't want to boss or guilt anyone into playing with anyone else, but if I'm going to understand the dynamic of this particular exclusion, I figure I need to get right in the middle of the play, rather than the middle of a fight about play. Most of the time, this is all it takes, the exclusion was accidental or the result of a misunderstanding, and once I've helped break the ice, the game is on, everyone finds a role, and I can begin extricating myself.

Sometimes, however, by putting myself in the middle of things, I learn a little more about why things aren't working out. Sometimes I discover that the child is being excluded for a valid reason. For instance, "She keeps knocking down our buildings." I then turn to the child and restate their objection, "They don't want you to knock down their buildings. If you want to play with them, you can't knock down the buildings. If you want to knock down buildings, we can play that game over there," setting up a couple of concrete options, giving the child a chance to weigh out what is most important to her.

Sometimes I'll find that there is already an intense game in process, one that doesn't currently have room, for whatever reason, for another participant. I'll say something like, "We want to play with you," and give them an opportunity to explain why their game is a two person operation, to which I'll reply, "Oh, then we'll play with you later. Come on, let's do something else." We then set up shop nearby, often playing the very same game they're playing. Not always, but often then, the two games easily merge into one.

Of course, often I'll see that it is a clear case of exclusion, something done simply as a way to exert power at the expense of another child. This is usually the domain of a group of three or more kids. In this case I might invoke our rule, You Can't Say You Can't Play, reminding the children that this is something to which they've all agreed. If nothing else, it's a way to start a conversation.

There are times when I find myself coaching children the way I did Josephine, but at least as often, it's about the role modeling, inserting myself into the play again and again, not commanding the other children but just dropping to my knees and getting busy. 

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