ExchangeEveryDay Past Issues

The appearance of this article was very timely. In my kinder class we have a young learner who will be bright and cheerful, fully involved in the group and avidly involved. Then, for "no apparent reason" she will remove herself from the group, become quiet, appear "depressed" - sometimes for a couple of days at a time. My coworkers have flagged this child. I have seen this child before - my son was this child, I was this child. When you observe this child you will quickly notice that, while she is visually withdrawn from the class, she is still attending to the activity. She has no trouble making friends but chooses one or two of the quieter friends. In fact, she works really well when paired with our "highest flyer" and that happens frequently because she is such "a good influence" on him. As I write this I find myself using many quote marks because the words echo my team mates' words referring to our learners. While I see a young child who is confident enough and mindful enough of her needs to move away from large group learning. At five years old that is incredible. While I have been able to open the discussion of introvert vs extrovert I have been less successful getting the team to consider the environment as a contributing factor to these "antisocial" behaviors that will be "detrimental to classroom learning in older grades". With such large classes and so many behaviors in our classrooms it seems to me that providing learning environments that cater to both introverts and extroverts is a "no brainer"! Pairing a quiet child with a more intense child can be good but do you consider the cost to the quiet child or do you merely see the benefits to the more intense child? A child is more than a behavior and we must look beyond the behavior to meet each child's needs and not the needs of the classroom first. Ask why we would change these habits that benefit an individual. We would not dream of denying a physical child a body break from class. Why then would we want to redirect the "quiet child" from a "book or crowd" break?

I agree about making them easy to share..... I often find them very interesting....but then get frustrated trying to figure out how to send from the site....so I head to the FB page and hope it is posted there as if not I just end up giving up! Many great articles though....often your page is my GO TO when looking for items to share with our members.

Interesting article, I shared it with my oldest son who is 29 and an introvert. I think the bias pointed out in this article is just one of many that we find in classrooms due to a lack of understanding of child development, specifically surrounding social emotional development.

I would love it if Exchange could make it easy to share these articles on social media since not all articles make the Facebook page. Currently the options only allow for printing the article or sharing via e-mail.