Laboratory Preschool offers students practical teaching experiences where the students get to determine the structure the classroom for the children, that is, they are the teachers, no teachers are employees. It is taught by a teaching team composed of the college instructor, advanced students in Early Childhood Education and Special Education associate degree programs, with the assistance of one class of beginning students.
Laboratory Preschool is equipped with two outdoor courts we have for large motor development for the children. The students set the ladders and planks in different formations every day. Since it is always different, the children are continually challenged to try new things.
For more information, write to us:
Attn: Sara Leder
Early Childhood Education Program
Child and Family Education Division
North Seattle Community College
9600 College Way North
Seattle, WA 98103
Tel: (206) 527-3783
Noris Daniel is the instructor in the campus Laboratory Preschool. That means she practically lives there. She finds the children, both "regular" and a few with special needs, organizes the supplies and resources, and serves as model teacher and gamemaster. That is, she lays out the playing board, assigns the roles and the chips, and lets the "game" of educating these children begin.
Before she came to North Seattle Community College Ms. Daniel was a teacher in child care, Head Start, and then the Education Coordinator for a Head Start grantee here in Seattle. She and Tom Drummond taught together in a Head Start kind of classroom in a housing project in central Seattle for a year, back in 1988. That was one hot classroom! Besides teach kids, she READS PEOPLE. She is a woman with high interpersonal intelligence. She is direct, open, honest and genuine--the perfect attributes for the Laboratory Preschool instructor. She builds a classroom in which everyone feels free to be who they are, at this moment, to risk, to try new behavior, and to feel accepted as a growing, exploring, learning person. People laugh a lot, too.
If you were to enroll in our program, we would put you into the CCE 12O Observation and Participation class in the lab school. Ms. Daniel would give lots of observations to do and watch your relationships with the children. She would listen to what you thought was happening, what you thought was important for them, give you feedback on what you did, and watch videotapes of your teaching with you. At first it can be scary, but there is probably nobody you would rather have on your side.
Office telephone: (206) 528-4624
In 1970 he became interested in severe behavior disordered preschool children. What started out as volunteering in a classroom at the Experimental Education Unit gradually became his profession. Now he teaches classes about curriculum, how to talk and behave in ways that give children freedom and responsibility, how to foster skill development and assess that in a child-responsive, project-oriented classroom, how to manage difficult behavior and set up a classroom so it positively teaches pro-social behavior, how to include parents and communicate with them, and, one of his favorites, ART.
If you were enrolling here, you would get a lot of him. His major life interest is in teaching--how to teach well, how to learn to teach and how to teach others to teach. It is quite complex to try to learn to understand, but he has had lots of help--mostly in collboration with my colleagues in the Laboratory School. The answers we find are in continuous open, collaborative, self-reflective development. He has been lucky to be here everyday in the process of learning to teach with a group of learning teachers.
Office phone: (206) 528-4626