In this
entry I wanted to talk about Pinterest and why I’m simultaneously learning to
love and hate it. For those of you who don’t know, Pinterest is a site where
you can collect interesting links into albums, a lot of people use it for
recipes, wedding planning, fashion ideas, home design, preparing for babies,
etc. If you need to do it, Pinterest probably has plenty of links to make you
feel oddly inspired and inadequate at the same time. So it isn’t surprising
that Pinterest is full of activity and classroom setup ideas for teachers.
Awesome right? Maybe. The problem isn’t Pinterest itself, the problem is how I
see it being used.
Last
semester we had to do a group project in which we created sample lesson plans
around a common theme and present it to the class. How I feel about that
experience and everything that went wrong with my group could be a completely
different entry, but for now I will keep us on topic and discuss how Pinterest
factored into this. The philosophy at the college I study at, and therefore the
center I work at, is to use emergent curriculum. In short, this means we
observe the children’s interests and abilities and design curriculum for the
near future around that in conjunction with the Preschool Learning Foundations
(Which I will call PLF in the rest of this entry). We don’t have a year’s worth
of curriculum planned out before the school year starts or specific themes
planned for specific months. This
assignment was supposed to be a way
to get practice at creating this curriculum. We were supposed to choose a theme
(since we didn’t have actual children to observe for this specific class), do a
brainstorming web where we consider what subthemes we can get from the topic
and think about how these subthemes fit into the key areas of the PLF. Once we
did this we were then supposed to form our lesson plans.
I can’t
speak for every group but I know in my group I had a very difficult time
getting my group to work through the steps. As soon as we picked a theme they
were on Pinterest looking up activities and wanting to copy them for our lesson
plans. Now I do understand not everybody agrees with the philosophies of
emergent curriculum or Reggio inspired activities – to some people worksheets
and planned yearly curriculum is fine. But that wasn’t the assignment and it
bothered me that people were so unwilling to think about the lessons, they
found something that looked “cool” and just wanted to copy that. They didn’t
want to discuss if it was developmentally appropriate, they didn’t want to
discuss if it allowed exploration and authentic learning, and they didn’t even
consider what aspects of the PLF these activities encompassed. In the end I
ended up writing a new web for my group because I couldn’t get them to put the
effort in and I was the one who put the effort into going through the PLF and
tying that into our activities.
The easiest
explanations for this would be laziness or apathy, but I think there is more to
it. For the classroom I’m working in we’ve been given assignments in designing
certain aspects of the classroom and I took art and manipulatives/loose parts.
I’ll admit I started looking at Pinterest for some inspiration and started to
feel really intimidated. Seeing all the creative, amazing looking ideas on that
site just makes anything you come up with on your own feel second class, it’s
like comparing your average wedding to a celebrity wedding. I feel like all the
extravagance on Pinterest has raised people’s standards but most of us don’t
have the time, resources, or experience to do projects on the same level as the
ones most shared, and therefore seen the most, and since none of our own ideas
feel like they measure up we opt to copy the ones that seem better. And when we
do decide to take something from Pinterest we desperately want our finished
product to look like the finished product in those beautiful blog pictures. In
a preschool setting this becomes problematic because we become overly concerned
with the product and forget what is really important – the process. When you
are painting your house you do it to make your house look nice, the purpose is
to have a good finished product. But when preschoolers are painting this isn’t
necessarily the case, when they are painting they are practicing fine motor
skills, learning about colors, learning about the properties of paint or other
materials, learning to express themselves, learning to share materials and
space, and so much more. When we design activities for children this is what we
need to have in mind, not how the end product compares to that beautiful
Pinterest post.
I want to
make it clear that I’m not saying Pinterest is all bad – my own preschool album
has a couple hundred pins on it. I just think Pinterest isn’t being used
correctly, it should be inspiration but not a strict blueprint. And part of
that means letting go of our own pride a bit. I feel like especially for people
like me who are new at teaching there is a lot of pressure to prove ourselves
with these amazing, original activities. Confidence comes from experience and
when you don’t have a lot of experience it is hard to feel confident in your
own ideas especially if you’re comparing yourself to these Pinterest
activities. I’m guilty of this too, I’m having to stop myself from thinking
every art idea I come up with is too simple and remember what matters is how
the children benefit from it, not if I look amazingly creative to my fellow
teachers. That really ties into my first post, I have to remind myself I’m
still mastering the basics and I don’t need to be in expert mode yet.
It is nice
to know that there are teachers out there passionate about their jobs willing
to share their experiences and other teachers furiously pinning activities they
think will enrich their children’s experience. This exchange of ideas does have
teachers trying new projects, experimenting with new materials, and hopefully
getting away from doing the same activity over and over. Because of that I am
grateful Pinterest exists. I think used as a guide, a starting point, it is incredibly
valuable.
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