Berkeley, CA
Griffin Nursery School

The tides of education have flowed for centuries between imposed structure and internal structure; teacher-directedness and child-directedness; Froebels Conservatism and Dewey Progressivism; Back-to-Basics and Open Classrooms; back and forth, mixing, creating derivatives.

Early childhood education is itself a progressive, interdisciplinary field, and all preschools, including Griffin Nursery School, have the same beliefs:

* that young children are purposeful individuals who learn by doing;
* that they learn through concrete experiences, through their senses;
* that they move through universal developmental stages that have been described by various models, but that they also have unique temperaments and learning styles;
*that play is the predominant mode in which children invent, practice, and extend who they are;
*that a good education tends to children in all emotional, social, physical, intellectual, and creative respects;
*and that children need to feel competent, useful, and appreciated in their families and in their communities of peers.

A distinct characteristic of Griffin Nursery School, though, is the strength of its commitment to John Dewey's progressive model of education as a student-driven affair, in which children learn most effectively through the demands of their social context.

Because of her conviction that three- and four-year-olds are especially suited to self-directed exploration and that they move through predictable stages of socialization,

Elinor Griffin always kept her classes markedly free of routine; and the results resembled and continue to resemble a Summerhill-style free school.

The one change that has emerged in recent years is the 'class meeting' model of Jane Nelsen (Positive Discipline for Preschoolers, 1984), which provides a structure for the community democracy that emerges from the children's social experiments.

We have found that getting the children together once a day to get acquainted, practice being members of a community, and hammer out class issues has been valuable for us all. But generally speaking, the teachers do not determine the children's agendas. The role of the staff is to give love, respect, and affection, to provide safe and secure boundaries, and to help children develop their relationships, their play, and their skills.
Extracted from Griffin Nursery School website.

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The mornings are different from the afternoon The bulk of day is free play. Lunch is a matter of choice. Last call for lunch before group time. Each session ends with group time.

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