Tina Daigre, AA, is the director of Celebration Christian Preschool in Brentwood, California. She is currently completing her work toward a bachelor’s degree.
Do Your Classrooms Reflect Your Philosophy?
Two years ago a verse in Hebrews caught my attention, and I was unable to forget it. “See to it that no one misses the grace of God…” (12:15, NIV). These words kept playing over in my mind as I thought of their implications. As a director I thought about what they meant in terms of our staff, families, children, and community. What an incredible responsibility! Fortunately, I work in a place that seeks to do just what this verse says.
A quality Christian school is more than a place for a good education; it is also a bridge to struggling, hurting families who need God.
Our school began years before there was even a building. It started with several visionaries who had a heart for God and for young families. These visionaries understood that a quality Christian school is more than a place for a good education; it is also a bridge to struggling, hurting families who need God. As Christian educators, we have a unique opportunity to spread God’s love through the relationships we share with the children. Because their parents often look to us for support and encouragement, we have a perfect opportunity to “live Christ in front of them.” To make sure we stay on course, we measure every decision we make as a school against our philosophy.
Every program has a philosophy, and we believe that it is important to be purposeful about articulating and reviewing our philosophy often to ensure that all the staff members understand it clearly. At Celebration Christian Preschool, our philosophy says that the school will “cooperate and assist parents in fulfilling their God-given responsibility” for bringing their children up in “the training and instruction of the Lord” (Ephesians 6:4, NIV).
Be Ready
One way to implement the above is to ask teachers to be ready to pray with parents when necessary. Sometimes as I walk through the halls of our school, I see a teacher with her arms around a parent, praying. The message is extremely powerful! It’s one thing to tell parents you’ll be praying for them, but it’s something else entirely to say “Let’s pray” and then do so. Last year, a child in our school lost his grandmother to cancer. In the weeks prior to her death, the teachers prayed with the mother and the child at different times, and they offered additional support in the final weeks. On the day of the grandmother’s death, the little boy jumped up on her bed and said, “It’s OK, Grandma, you can go be with Jesus now!” A few hours later she died. How powerful it was for the school and the family to share in those moments!
Our faith as a staff has grown tremendously as we have watched God work in our lives and in the lives of those we've prayed for.
Also, in our lobby next to the coffee bar, we have a prayer box where parents can leave written prayer requests. Each morning we take the requests to our staff devotions and pray about them. We tell new families about the prayer box and encourage them to give us their requests. This year, a new family was enrolling. Before their little boy started school, we found out that his mom, who was seven months pregnant, had gone into preterm labor. Her baby was born early and weighed only a pound. Our staff had begun praying for the infant before he was born, and although we had not even met his mother, we sent her word that we were praying for the family. After the new baby had spent two months in the hospital, he was allowed to go home, where he is doing very well! That shared experience created a bond between home and school, and it gave everyone involved the blessing of watching God work. Our faith as a staff has grown tremendously as we have watched God work in our lives and in the lives of those we’ve prayed for!
Our teachers are also ready to offer other kinds of assistance in addition to prayer. Jesus shows us by example that it is best to make a quick or immediate response to a person or family in need (Matthew 8:5–13). Here are some of the many ways we stay ready:
- We keep grocery store gift cards on hand for parents experiencing financial emergencies, and we also make available free Christian financial counseling if it is needed.
- Our teachers often refer parents to our lending library for resources on such topics as discipline, marriage, and finances, and we hold monthly seminars on these topics as well.
- We have available outside resources and specialists ranging from mental health experts to speech pathologists to occupational therapists.
- We use the resources of our school parents to help other parents in need. This past year, a mother of two of our children underwent major back surgery and was unable to leave the hospital for six weeks. Once she could return to her home, staff members and other school parents made meals for the family for over a month! Another family said goodbye to their father, who was stationed in Iraq and would not return for more than a year. Other dads in the school signed up to offer help with mowing the lawn and meeting the occasional home maintenance need.
If our philosophy is more than just words on a sheet of paper, people will notice a difference.
In our school there is now a strong sense of community, which has been created as teachers and other staff members have found opportunities to share and live out Christ’s love! In order for staff members to “stand ready,” they must be built up. They must be growing spiritually and be armed for the spiritual battle. In our school we require that our teachers be regular attendees of a local church. We also encourage their spiritual growth by providing a lending library of Scripture studies, including tapes, DVDs, videos, and books that specifically teach the Bible. We offer incentives to encourage completion of these studies. For every study completed, we “reward” the teachers with a gift certificate to a restaurant or store of their choice. It’s important to note that the reward is not the point; rather, the point is the spiritual training and the knowledge that come from studying the Bible. We see these outcomes as important enough that we are constantly evaluating how to encourage teachers in their spiritual growth.
Commitment to Excellence
Our philosophy also says that we are committed to excellence in character development, academic achievement, and quality instruction, so it is imperative that our classroom instruction be of very high quality. Maintaining classrooms that reflect our philosophy is one of our biggest priorities. We do this in several ways:
- We start with teacher training. We begin each school year with teacher orientation and training. This kind of beginning serves to remind us of why we are here and what we are striving for—children and families who know God and are growing in knowledge of Him. In our day-to-day stress and busyness, it’s easy to forget how important it is to stay on course.
- We have developed a system whereby fellow teachers and staff members can walk into a classroom at any time and do a two-to-five minute evaluation to ensure that the classroom is functioning at a quality level. We call these “Quality Assurance Evaluations.” They are short and direct, and anyone can administer them. They are tools for the teachers to use as benchmarks throughout the year.
- Teachers are required to write a monthly curriculum, basing it on the age-specific objectives of their classroom. On their lesson plans, teachers list the objective for each activity, ensuring that even the children’s play is purposeful. For example, if a teacher lists easel painting as a daily activity, she must also list the reason doing it: for example, eye-hand coordination or crossing midline. This practice keeps the teachers in tune with the importance of their work and reminds them that there is tremendous value in what they do!
- As a school, we recognize the God-given uniqueness of each child, so it is important that teachers observe children and develop curricula to fit the children’s individual needs. Teachers wear aprons that hold adhesive labels. As they interact with children or even just watch them play, they can pull out an observation sticker and jot down a few notes. At the end of the day, the stickers go into each teacher’s “Observation Binder,” where each child has his own page. Every month these observations are analyzed to help the teacher develop specific activities that meet the needs of the children and enhance their growth.
The atmosphere of any Christian school should be different from that of a public school. And if our philosophy is more than just words on a sheet of paper, people will notice a difference. At the end of the day—and the school year—we hope that we as a school will be able to say that we did our best to “see to it that no one misses the grace of God.”
More Than Just Words 7.2