Recently, one of my Head Start friends attended a CLASS training in Dallas. I first heard about this observation tool a couple of years ago. CLASS was developed by Robert Pianta, who is a developmental and clinical child psychologist at the University of Virginia. The purpose of this observation instrument is to assess early childhood to grade three classrooms’ quality. The tool’s focus is based solely on teacher and child interaction in the classroom, not the physical environment. I applaud the notion of measuring teacher’s receptiveness, conversations centered around good questioning techniques, problem solving, prediction, and brainstorming with real-world applications. The language modeling section is very impressive.

The part I wonder about is the appearance that phonological awareness, writing, alphabet knowledge and mathematics do not have a section of their own as language does. We learned from the National Early Literacy Panel these are key skills that must be addressed during early childhood. Are we hopeful that in the CLASS Instructional Learning Format section, teachers will automatically include those literacy and mathematic concepts? Those are major child/teacher interactions that need to be happening so children will be ready for kindergarten.