What Is Pyramid?

Welcome to a typical preschool classroom implementing The Pyramid Approach to Learning. Here's what you'll find...

Relational Nearness

The Pyramid environment creates a sense of warmth, security and familiarity. Children's spaces are personalized with names and photos. Pictures of each child's family are posted at eye level and evidence of the cultural diversity among the children can be found throughout the room. Teachers greet children warmly and treat them respectfully with calm voices and kind interactions. Small cozy places and social areas allow for time to be alone and time to join in with others. Natural, sensory elements provide a soothing calmness.  The daily schedule provides a balance of quiet and active periods. Teachers work hard to ensure that every child feels safe and secure every minute of every day. Children are held close so they can develop the confidence to move away towards increasing self-regulation.

Relational Distance

The Pyramid environment promotes children's ability to be autonomous by ensuring that adults don't have to do anything for children that children can do for themselves. Materials are organized into interest centers and accessible to children for making choices and acting independently.

Simple coding strategies help children return materials to their proper places. Teachers encourage children to take responsibility and to try new things with appropriate support.

Opportunities are in place for children to become increasingly self-reliant in all areas of personal care. Children provide input into which examples of their work are displayed. The daily schedule encourages small group and whole group interactions that develop social skills. Teachers believe in the competence of children and continually challenge them to stretch and grow.

Educational Nearness

Learning is cohesively wrapped in meaning and context through month-long projects. Projects integrate all learning domains and also focus on one specific domain. The skills and concepts in this domain grow in complexity and abstraction across the four weeks of the project.

During the first week of the project learning starts with what is already familiar to provide a sense of safety and confidence. A sense of excitement is created by seeding the environment with props and materials that evoke anticipation for the project.

In the second week new learning is introduced through concrete experiences involving the five senses so children get a perceptive grip on skills and concepts in the here and now. Children play to learn and all teaching is done playfully to take advantage of the fact that the brain learns best during play and social interactions.

Educational Distance

In the third week of the project the teacher intentionally links new learning to children's previous experiences. Activities are planned using strategies such as classifying, comparing, contrasting and verbal sequencing of past experiences. During these activities children begin to take distance from the here and now as they re-present their experiences in more abstract ways.

Strong clusters form in the brain as teachers challenge children to use language to represent thought. Thinking leaves the safety of the perceptive senses to go into the mind for answers. Children must separate from current space and time as they answer questions requiring them to recall events that have happened in the past and predict ones that might happen in the future.

The fourth week moves children's learning even more distant as learning expands in more complex, abstract ways. Children solve problems independently and collaboratively, apply experiences from the previous weeks to new situations and more difficult examples, and re-present what they know in a variety of modalities.

Questions are asked that require children to reflect on what they have learned and draw conclusions from the experiences they have acquired. Children's metacognitive skills grow as they reflect on their classroom activities over the four weeks of the project.

Initiative of the Learner

Pyramid teachers support and optimize children's capacity to take initiative, recognizing that it is both the beginning and end goal of the educational journey.

Children take initiative during center time through free play and Initiative Learning activities. Learning activities have specific learning goals and are designed to entice children's natural curiosity about how things work. Puzzles, matching games, sorting boxes, and pattern cards are examples of Initiative Learning activities children enjoy and readily select to challenge themselves.

All learning domains are integrated in center-based activities that offer children opportunities to learn through a range of modalities, intelligences and media.

Teachers change props, materials and activities in learning centers weekly to reflect the growing complexity of the project and to honor the fact that the brain seeks novelty and excitement. New activities grow out of children's emerging interests in aspects of the current project and children's learning is strengthened as they process and re-present new skills and concepts in a variety of ways. The power of children's choice and the teacher's intention offer a balanced approach to learning.

Initiative of the Teacher

Pyramid teachers use a four-week project format to intentionally teach new skills and concepts that grow in increasing complexity and abstraction. They understand that skills and concepts occur in a hierarchy across all learning domains and that learning also occurs in a series of short and long-term cycles.

Teachers embed the short-term cycles of learning into the projects and recognize that the long-term cycles of learning take place over a three-year period that connects learning from one age group to the next. This provides cohesion and collaboration among classroom teachers while promoting professional growth.

Each project includes a Learning Framework to guide the scope of teaching. Teachers employ a wide range of strategies to playfully engage children in exploring new skills and concepts in a whole group setting. Children needing extra support are engaged in a special process that ensures readiness to learn in the whole group setting.

Whole group is followed by center time where children can choose to join the teacher and process their new learning in a small group setting. In these small group settings the teacher can individualize learning and authentically assess each child's level of skill and understanding.
Learning is made "attractive" so children are drawn to small group activities rather than coerced.

Teachers and children engage in a dynamic dance of transformation as they interact through dialogue. Each exchange from child to teacher and back again transforms the other's understanding and informs the response that follows. The thinking of Pyramid teachers grows continuously as they use the process of inquiry to question the decisions they make about classroom practice.

Documentation of children's learning is used to inform teacher planning and advance children's metacognitive reflection. Parents are encouraged to be actively involved with each project and expand classroom learning at home.

Pyramid goes beyond the theories of Piaget (the child has considerable cognitive power and can guide his own development) and Vygotsky (the child grows cognitively by not only acting upon objects, but also by interacting with adults and more knowledgeable peers), and takes into account the findings of Fischer & Bidell, 1998, that demonstrate that when children are well supported by adults, they are able to function at higher levels.  When children play alone they continue at the same level for a long time. 

However, when an adult provides stimulation through discussion, demonstration, illustration and questioning children learn at a higher level.  The key to effective adult support is that it must provide adequate stimulus for the child to progress and still allow the child to maintain his own initiative.  Children who have effective adult support not only learn more, they demonstrate more motivation and perseverance in seeking solutions - two critical attributes of autonomous learners.