What We Build With Blocks
Each year, we open the beloved Block Building evening for parents and guardians by pulling language out of our mission statement – Westland’s lodestar – to contextualize the learning ahead. Block building with children embodies Westland’s mission: hands-on, an exciting and rewarding process, child-centered, committee, group-based, experiential, and developing problem solving, and creative and critical thinking skills.
This past block building evening for parents and guardians invited me to reflect on the fact that blocks are the most important material at Westland. I found myself honoring the important citizenship blocks have in progressive education tradition, as evidenced in the The Block Book, the guiding text by Elisabeth S. Hirsch, from which so much of my learning and language derives. Block building embodies Westland’s pedagogy, learning by doing and asking learners to construct their own knowledge at the onset of an experience and at multiple points throughout a study, including the culmination of a study. Blocks enable children to construct knowledge, literally and figuratively. The evening event enables parents and guardians to do so too. Adults – viscerally – get to immerse themselves in block building, which develops and deepens their understanding of this essential pedagogy that their children experience. The evening develops and deepens community too. Blocks are sacred at Westland.
Westland regularly checks the rearview mirror as we journey forward together each school year, now in our 73rd. As we consider our block building pedagogy, Caroline Pratt is the first and most prominent image in our rearview mirror. Pratt was the founder of City and Country School in New York City my predecessor, Scott Moran, is currently head of school. As a young teacher and throughout her significant career, Pratt was a rebel. As noted in The Block Book, Pratt critiqued traditional methods in education, sensing that while traditional methods in education kept a teacher happy, they are hardly of service to a young child’s needs or abilities. Pratt didn’t stop with critique or dissatisfaction. She critiqued then created.
In Teaching Community: A Pedagogy of Hope, bell hooks writes, “When we only name the problem, when we state complaint without a constructive focus or resolution, we take hope away. In this way critique can become merely an expression of profound cynicism...” Pratt’s critique coupled with her research and invention of the unit block back in 1913, indeed created profound hope and constructive focus.
Before inventing unit blocks, Pratt – a woodworker herself – studied children at play. In this iterative process, Pratt observed a boy playing with the newly invented wooden blocks. Pratt shared in her educational autobiography, I Learn From Children, “With blocks to help him, he was using all his mental powers, reasoning out relationships… and drawing conclusions. He was learning to think.” Through blocks, Caroline Pratt was creating an environment where children could explore then replicate the world around them – a learning experience we strive for at Westland, where children learn to think and be in community in hands-on and connected ways. With blocks, children can create worlds and also make sense of their world.
Block building also embodies John Dewey’s notion that work is play and play is work. At the recent parent block building evening, we dove into the teaching-and-learning element of block building, sharing the powerful rundown of academic and social emotional skills children develop through block building. Presenting to parents, Assistant Head of School for Teaching, Learning, and Development Jennine Rodriguez shared: “For young children who are balancing reality and fantasy, who are just starting to learn about the world outside of their homes and schools, block buildings enable them to recreate and live in those worlds. They can safely experiment, try on different realistic and even fantastical roles, and develop essential skills.” Jennine shared, too, the copious curricular connections both from her own experience as an early childhood teacher and educator as well as pulling from The Block Book:
● Social Studies: Mapping, patterns, symbolic representation, interdependence of people.
● Spatial, fine, and gross motor skills: Visual perception, hand manipulation, eye-hand coordination.
● Problem solving: Planning, following directions, understanding interdependence.
● Representational and mathematical thinking: Shape, symmetry, mapping, measurement, depth, width, height, length, fractions.
● Expressive language: Naming, labeling, telling stories, reflecting, exchanging ideas.
● Pro-social skills: Flexibility, advocacy, resilience, expressing gratitude, follow-through, cleaning up.
● Scientific reasoning: Trial and error, discovery, understanding properties of matter, interaction of forces, inclined plane ramps, systems, balance, stability, gravity.
When an observer walks into a room where children are block building, there is often an immediate sense of flow. Children are intensely in the present moment and they are pursuing any number of questions and pursuits. Children ask these questions sometimes alone, sometimes in committee, sometimes consciously, sometimes not. Questions include: How do I convey people and their work? How do I get the blocks from the shelf to this other space safely? How do I handle, and manipulate the block to be in just the right spot? How can we build higher? How can we add a door or a window in a realistic way? How can I express my idea, listen to others, and what happens when I don’t get exactly what I planned? How do I need to be flexible? What do I do when everything collapses? How do I get my idea across to others? How do I take turns? What materials do I need to share? How do I express my disappointment? How do I express my pride at a job well done? How do I express my appreciation? How can we get this structure to look just like the one we visited on our field trip? How do I make this structure more stable? Can this balance? How do we test our hypotheses? When do I know when I’m finished?
There’s also an inherent purpose for writing and reading, as many children have an urgency to explain something in print, for example signs (Enter/Exit Signs) and labels for play and for real (Please walk slowly!). At the recent Group Two Farmers Market block build, a child shared with a colleague, “If someone doesn’t have money, they can get the produce for free.” My colleague wondered aloud, “How will those people know they can get the produce for free?” And the child, an emerging writer, came up with the idea to make a sign. Motivated with important purpose, the sign was made, the important message conveyed: You can get produce for free.
Children aren’t “pretending” when they create with blocks. They are making sense of the world through their “play as work, work as play.” Blocks are the medium for this interplay. Through recreating a field trip, for example, the social studies, and subsequent academic and social-emotional skills, get internalized. Recently I was talking to a Group Sixer, who was reflecting on building the Capitol as part of Group Six’s U.S. Government Study, both from a historical lens and a current event lens. The child admitted that they could never really visualize the January 6 insurrection until that block build. Through block building, the learning becomes sticky. It lasts. The curiosity not only remains intact and protected. The curiosity grows.
For Westland, the social studies connection is the essential conduit to our integrated curriculum. As the Block Book plainly lays out, it is through block building that children simultaneously reflect on their learning as they extend their understanding of people, places, and the world of work. While all of these academic skills are growing, children are tending to materials, sharing responsibilities through committee work, practicing consensus building which leads to habits of active citizenry in a democracy. Children are developing friendships, making new connections, and fortifying existing connections with one another. Children are increasing their attention spans, learning how to be fluent and facile collaborators, embodying cooperation, and getting comfortable with conflict and the repair that occurs throughout intense collaboration. Children develop a sense of satisfaction in their work – both the process and their final product – that leads to a desire to keep learning. This process embodies bell hooks' notion of a “constructive focus.”
Expertise, scholarship, and intentional pedagogy goes into facilitating block building. As we consider best practice at Westland, teachers are asked to make available a wide variety of materials for student research, help students find and organize appropriate materials to express their learning, and organize the room and materials in a way that is easily accessible to students. These attributes are all present when teachers are facilitating block building.
Once visiting a classroom in my first year at Westland, I had an “aha” I shared with the teacher – that through blocks and through being on a committee, the children were able to access their strengths and demonstrate their understanding of the study in a powerful way. This past fall I told a student ahead of one morning before school, “I want to know more about what you’re studying,” and the child immediately led me to the block building area of their classroom. In the Reggio Emilia sense, block building is a language for children to demonstrate their understanding of the social studies. Last year, for example, Group Oners realized that one of their block builds was geographically inaccurate. What did they do? They unbuilt and rebuilt what they had been working on to incorporate a hill that made their build more geographically accurate. The children did so capably and calmly. When given time and space, children are thorough, thoughtful, and motivated to do topnotch work. Perhaps here, children learn that not much good comes from rushing or being rushed.
Block building is a vital component of Westland’s program, “a no fail medium” as described in The Block Book. Perhaps blocks are considered a no fail medium, because blocks teach children how to fail, setting children up to analyze their work, their relationships, and how they communicate about their work and relationships.
Recently I, along with six other Westland Board members and colleagues, saw AI specialist Dr. Vivienne Ming speak at the California Association of Independent Schools Heads-Trustees Conference. Dr. Ming spoke on the idea that in this current, modern (science-fictiony?) world our children are inheriting, young people don’t need tests and tasks with one right answer. Children need “ill-posed” problems that invite them into “uncertainty, social skills, meta cognition, and purpose.” Dr. Ming added, “Children need to be given experiences where they’re taking the unknown and transforming it.” Dr. Ming didn't know at the time, but she was talking about block building. Dr. Ming closed by declaring, “What children don’t need is tools. They need to be master craftsmen and artists.” Yes. They need to be block builders, literally and figuratively.
I was reminded that children are builders – of blocks and community. This reminder sustains my hope. We build and unbuild. Our process can look different every time depending on the diversity of the group. People get stronger when they work together. The children come to know this. As one child reflected when they were in Group Three four years ago: “Learning is like block building. You build your structure, but as you learn, you add onto the structure. Learning is constructing yourself. As I’m gathering information, I’m building myself as a human.”
This child’s words point to Caroline Pratt’s earlier promise over 100 years ago – that blocks help children learn to think. Perhaps this child reveals a bigger pedagogical promise too. Blocks not only help children think, blocks help build children as good humans.