Finding Time: The Rhythm of our Routines

 

Earlier this year I was offered a generous invitation to join Susan McKay, from the Studio for Playful Inquiry team, in an hour of dialogue on the concept of Rhythm. Our conversation was adventurous and free flowing, laced with stories to share with colleagues who were able to tune-in in real time, and recorded for colleagues in other timezones to view later. As a long-time fan of the work of Susan, and her colleague Matt Karlsen, I naturally jumped at the opportunity to share some thinking with them again. 

Over the past few years, we have been fortunate to share some conversations - discussions that attempt to nudge boundaries of what is possible in young children's educational programs. Despite the time that had passed since our last connection and the great geographical distance between us, this conversation felt as if no time had passed - we were together again, effortlessly in our own rhythm, thinking and chatting together in pedagogical companionship. Having ‘pedagogical companions’, as our wonderful colleague Ann Pelo would suggest, is critical for our personal and collective teacher wellbeing. When we find these connections with colleagues we are feeding our shared professional growth, creating time and space for the brave conversations to take place and for the questions to come flowing out, new ideas and opportunities rising to the surface as the space of collaboration opens up.

The topic of rhythms offers a generous and fertile space for our consideration - it nudges our thinking away from ‘the problem of time’ and asks us to think about our relationship with the clock, what we do and what we value, how we get into flow, and what might be possible if we focus on the experiences in front of us rather than the schedule on the wall. Some of these essential questions support us to find a new ways to shape our work with children, a new tempo for our practice, one that offers it own cadence and flow. Far from the didactic and scripted lessons that some current models of education claim to subscribe us to, this way of considering time opens up our work: as dynamic acts of education that are focused on meaning making, skill building and the co-construction of knowledge. 

Time is a universal subject, a challenge that transcends the ages. I remember asking a group of 9 and 10 year olds a few years ago about how they experienced time in their day-to-day schooling. A brave question indeed! Their responses were enlightening, offering very powerful insights about children’s everyday experiences of time:

Teacher:	Yesterday after lunch, Max said something interesting that I thought we might come back to… he said “time is a big problem” What do you think he meant? What problem is he trying to solve?
Imara:	Well he was actually talking about the problem in the playground… the bell goes when you are right in the middle of the game… the time goes up before the game is finished and that’s the problem. It’s our playtime and it isn’t long enough.
Timmy:	The problem isn’t the bell Imara, it’s that we spend too much time talking about the rules of the game and then we have no time to play… then the time disappears and you don’t get time back! Once it’s gone it is GONE! Game over!
Jana:	If you are quick with ‘eating time’ then you get ‘play time’… it’s simple! You have to eat fast to make time go faster.
Leo:	My Dad says that it’s not how much time you have - it’s what you do with the time you have that is important… but when he wants me to do something now he says ‘no time like the present’...

Our rhythm in the classroom shapes everything that we do. By observing how we attribute time and carve up the learning day we can see traces of our deeper values at play, such as: the time we give for relationships and connections, the time we afford for listening and documentation, the time we allow for consideration of children’s theories and ideas, and the time we gift ourselves for dialogue and interpretation of documentation and other important data with colleagues. All of these are shaped by our deeply held values and beliefs. At times I think we fall into the trap of ‘unthinking’ our way through time; where the way the day rolls forward and our approach to time can generate habitual patterns which are easy to fall into, hard to notice and even harder to shift. This, in turn, can lead to routines that are time-bound before they are child-focused or experience-centred; our gaze can all too easily become output-focused where children run the risk of becoming subjects of education and/or recipients of routines. 

How can things change when we refocus our gaze on time?

Instead of a focus on implementing routines in early childhood, where the teacher is busy doing, telling, cleaning, organising, ensuring compliance, keeping checklists and implementing programs with efficiency and productivity, we might do well to consider our ‘routines’ as expressions of our own pedagogical rhythm. This intention shifts our attention towards listening, feeling, responding, relating, thinking together, adapting pace and flow responsively attuned to the children in front of us. Here, the work we do centres on the ideas of agency and participatory engagement, as a dynamic of the democratic classroom - a self-propelling force. If time truly is a universal challenge for educators, we wonder what might become possible if we shift our focus to that which sustains our pedagogical rhythm.

How are structures and routines shaping your time with children?

How does your daily rhythm declare your deeply held values and beliefs?

How can we support each other to find and maintain nourishing rhythms in our work together?