Community Feeling in the Preschool Classroom
How Teachers of Young Children Can Foster Social Interest
May 31, 2009
Creating a sense or feeling of community in a preschool classroom can benefit both children and teachers. Psychologist and founder of individual psychology, Alfred Adler, believed that humans, including children want to be useful in a group to achieve a high level of “social interest” or “community feeling”. Adler defined social interest as the innate drive to cooperate and work with other people for the common good.
How a Positive Community Feeling Affects the Preschool Classroom
According to Adler, when children feel useful to a group, they have fewer reasons to misbehave in the group setting. Social interest improves behavior and teaches children how to work with others. On the other hand, pampering children creates more reasons for children to misbehave. When adults pamper children, adults create an environment where children learn mostly how to receive and not how to give to others.
Building strong feelings of community isn’t something teachers can tell children. Instead children best learn about social interest through experiences that allow children to contribute to others in the classroom. When children are allowed to contribute to others in a classroom, then children will have more opportunities to experience and learn the skills of helping, sharing, cooperation, compromise, and encouragement.
Meaningful Classroom Jobs Foster Social Interest
Some teachers do assign classroom jobs to young children, but not jobs that are meaningful. In order for classroom jobs to teach social interest to children, jobs must actually contribute to the life of the classroom community. Preschool teachers often keep busy with work that young children can be doing instead.
Every day holds opportunities for children to contribute to their preschool classroom by completing classroom jobs. “With patient teaching and supervision, children can help prepare snacks and meals, clean up, organize shelves, pull weeds on the playground –the possibilities are endless,” write Nelsen and Erwin in Positive Discipline for Childcare Providers [Three Rivers Press, 2002].
Making Class Books Encourages Social Interest
Creating books about the social life of a preschool classroom helps children visually see snapshots of social interest. Preschool teachers can take photographs of young children working at classroom jobs, making sure that every child in the classroom is photographed while contributing to the classroom community. To create a class book, teachers can mount the photographs on cardstock paper and ask class members to use words to describe the actions in the picture. Teachers can write the words next to the photographs to create text for the book.
After the book has text for each page, teachers can bind the pages together. Then teachers can read the book to the class as well as store the book in a place where children will be able to look through it. Because children create the text for the class book, they are contributing to a group project that the entire class can enjoy. Making a book about classroom jobs is a project that documents social interest and creates social interest for young children at the same time.
Cooperative Games Nurture Feelings of Community
Teachers often bring competition into the preschool classroom by playing competitive games with young children. Instead of fostering competition, preschool teachers can promote social interest by teaching cooperative games so that children can practice the skills of group problem solving. Parachute games and cooperative musical chairs are just a few examples of games for preschoolers that involve the concepts of sharing, problem solving and teambuilding.
To create a better sense of community in the classroom, teachers must intentionally give young children opportunities to experience social interest. Assigning classroom jobs, creating books about community life in the classroom and playing cooperative games help children practice cooperation, problem solving and caring skills that are associated with high levels of social interest.
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