In this episode, we talk with Dr. Mary Louise Hemmeter from Vanderbilt University about the Pyramid Model and how it works to support young children’s social and emotional development in a variety of early childhood settings.
More About Our Guest
Mary Louise Hemmeter, PhD, is a professor of Special Education at Vanderbilt University and holds the Nicholas Hobbs Chair in Education and Human development. Her research focuses on effective instruction; supporting social emotional development and addressing challenging behavior in young children; and coaching teachers. Through her work on the National Center on the Social Emotional Foundations for Early Learning, she was involved in the development of the Pyramid Model for Supporting Social Emotional Competence in Young Children and a model for coaching teachers to implement effective practices. She is on the leadership team of the National Center for Pyramid Model Innovations and leads multi-site research projects related to the Pyramid Model.
Podcast
Transcript
Intro: Thanks for joining us for a podcast from the Illinois Early Learning Project. Our project is part of the Department of Special Education at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and funded by the Illinois State Board of Education. On this podcast, we share information about how young children grow and learn as well as strategies adults can use to help them thrive. My name is Natalie Danner.
Natalie Danner: Welcome to the Illinois Early Learning Podcast. Today we are talking about the Pyramid Model. We are joined by Dr. M.L. Hemmeter, welcome.
Mary Louise Hemmeter: Thank you. I’m glad to be here.
Natalie Danner: Great. We are so happy to have you joining us today. Mary Louise Hemmeter, Ph.D., is a Professor of Special Education at Vanderbilt University and holds the Nicholas Hobbs Chair in Education and Human Development. Her research focuses on effective instruction supporting social and emotional development and addressing challenging behavior in young children and coaching teachers. Through her work with the National Center on the Social Emotional Foundations for Early Learning, she was involved in the development of the Pyramid Model for supporting social emotional competence in young children and a model for coaching teachers to implement effective practices. She is on the leadership team of the National Center for Pyramid Model Innovations and leads multi-site research projects related to the Pyramid Model. So we are excited, Dr. Hemmeter, to have you share about the Pyramid Model, especially for the early childhood educators who are listening today. So, we’re going to get started with a very broad question: what is the Pyramid Model?
Mary Louise Hemmeter: Well, that’s a big question. But we think about the Pyramid Model as a framework for organizing effective practices. And what that means is that the Pyramid Model is based on the assumption that when you’re working in a classroom with children with a range of abilities and a range of backgrounds, you need a range of practices to support all of those children. And so, the Pyramid Model is a way to think about what are the practices that all children need to thrive in their social emotional development. Those are things like relationship practices, creating predictable and consistent routines and activities promoting children’s engagement. That’s what all children need. Some children come to our classrooms, and they need more support around learning social skills and emotional competencies. So, they need more opportunities to practice, or they need more intentional teaching to learn things like how to interact with your peers, or how to communicate their emotions, or how to calm down when they’re feeling big emotions. And so, we think about that as kind of the second tier of the Pyramid, or things that we do for children who are at risk for some reason. Any good early childhood teacher knows that even when you do all those things well, you can have a child or two who needs something more intensive, either because of social emotional skill delays, because of behavior that’s challenging and that’s not responsive to all those good things that you’re already doing. And for those children, we want them to be successful in their everyday routines. But sometimes it takes a team of people to think about what are the interventions and supports that will help that child be successful. So, the Pyramid is a way to take all those practices and put them into a framework that guides teachers in how they can support each and every child that they work with.
Natalie Danner: That makes a lot of sense, and that gives us a good overview of the Pyramid Model. Thank you. I understand that Illinois is a Pyramid Model state. So, what does that mean for a state when they are a Pyramid Model state?
Mary Louise Hemmeter: Yeah. So, if you think about all those things I said about what goes into implementing the Pyramid, what we know about the Pyramid is that the practices I just talked about are the things that people who are working directly with children and families need to know how to do. Right? They’re what home visitors, childcare providers, teachers, all need to know how to do to work with children and families. But we also know that those practices are only effective when there are supports in place for people to learn how to do them. Right? And so when a state decides to be involved in Pyramid Model implementation. What they’re focused on is, how can we make it? How can we at the state level make available training and coaching and implementation supports? How can we make those things available so that programs at the local level are able to provide the kind of supports that teachers and other providers need to be able to do those practices as well. So, when a state says we’re going to be involved in Pyramid Model, that usually means that there’s a team of people at the state level who are saying, this is really important for us to do in Illinois, and we’re going to start to build systems that will support early childhood people to use these practices.
Natalie Danner: That’s great. It sounds like it is such a benefit for our state to be involved in the Pyramid Model, and there are different ways for teachers, educators, and home visitors to get that support in order to implement it in their own classrooms and their own practices. So that’s wonderful.
Mary Louise Hemmeter: Absolutely.
Natalie Danner: Many of the teachers that we’ve worked with at conferences and different professional development have asked us, is the Pyramid Model a curriculum?
Mary Louise Hemmeter: Yeah. And we get that question in our work a lot, too. And the easy answer is that no, the Pyramid Model is not a curriculum. So, we think about the Pyramid Model as being a framework for organizing effective practices. Once you learn the Pyramid, you learn that things that are part of the Pyramid, like establishing consistent and predictable routines and building relationships with children are really just foundational practices that you need, no matter what you’re teaching. So, they’re foundational to teaching literacy. They’re foundational to teaching math anything that educators are teaching. That’s kind of the foundation of it. And there’s not one right or wrong way to do it. And I think that’s what makes it different from a curriculum. So yeah, we would say that part of the Pyramid Model is being intentional about teaching social skills. But we’re not saying this is the only way to teach social skills. We’re saying that we want children to learn peer interaction skills. And we want them to learn emotional literacy skills. And we want them to learn how to handle big emotions and how to problem solve. But there’s lots of ways you can teach it. And you might actually use a social, emotional curriculum in the context of doing the Pyramid Model, because the Pyramid Model is just what wraps around that right? So, it says, in addition to teaching, you’ve got to have good relationships and well-designed environments, and you have to be ready for those children who don’t respond to your social, emotional curriculum. And that’s what the Pyramid Model does. It kind of wraps all of that up.
Natalie Danner: I think that explains it perfectly and just thinking about the differences between a curriculum and a structure that maybe supports a curriculum and thinks about the children who may not be responding as much to a curriculum as other children. So that leads us to the next question, who might use the Pyramid Model, and why would they select to use this?
Mary Louise Hemmeter: Well, so lots of people might use the Pyramid Model. So, as we’ve conceptualized the Pyramid Model, we have thought about how this might be used in classroom-based settings for preschoolers. We’ve thought about how it might be used in classrooms for infants and toddlers. We’ve thought about how it might be used in kindergarten even. But we’ve also thought about how could it be used in home visiting? So how could it be used in the delivery of Part C services, for example, to families. How could it be used as part of parent-child playgroups? What we find is that almost anyone working in a group care setting with young children needs support around children’s behavior. And so, we find that people report that the Pyramid Model is really effective for addressing children’s behavior, supporting their social emotional development in a whole range of group care settings. And I think our work more recently on thinking about what Pyramid Model looks like in the delivery of services during home visits and parent infant playgroups is pretty exciting too.
Natalie Danner: Wonderful. It sounds like it can really benefit a variety of people who work with the early childhood age group. That’s great. As we know. Many early childhood teachers work really hard to support children who may have social emotional struggles and might engage in some challenging behavior in the classroom. How might the Pyramid Model help them?
Mary Louise Hemmeter: That’s such a good question, and not an easy one to answer, because, as it turns out, the most effective strategies we have are for preventing challenging behavior and promoting social emotional skills. And most challenging behavior, especially in really young children, is about them not having skills. Right? So, children, you know, they take a toy away from a friend when they don’t know how to wait their turn, or when they don’t know how to ask for a turn, or when they don’t know how to manage their emotions. And so, addressing the challenging behavior in that situation is really about what are the skills they’re missing? And what do we need to teach instead? And so, when we talk to educators about the Pyramid Model, we talk about the importance of understanding what the behavior is communicating, what the child needs, the child needs help, or the child needs a skill, or the child needs a break, or the child’s trying to communicate an emotion, and they need help responding to that emotion. And when we, when we think about it that way, then it really empowers teachers to do what they already know how to do, right? Which is good teaching and good relationship building. But, as I said earlier, we recognize that in spite of our good prevention and promotion efforts, we sometimes have children whose behavior needs, who needs something more supportive. But what’s important about those children is, we still expect and know that they can be successful in our settings. But what we also know is that for children whose behavior is perhaps more challenging, and we can’t figure it out, that that really shouldn’t fall on teachers to do alone. And that’s when we think about, how do programs create teams that can support teachers in kind of a problem-solving process to figure out what the child’s behavior is about and to develop a plan and to support the educator, to be able to do all that and implement that plan, even when they have a whole bunch of other children running around the classroom.
Natalie Danner: I think that’s wonderful to think about those preventative strategies. And then also to think about that aspect of teaming that’s so important too when it comes to early childhood. And so, when we start to look at different age groups, because you mentioned before, Part C, and then talking about infants and toddlers. For me as a former preschool teacher, I always think of preschool first, and that age group three through five year olds, and what the Pyramid Model might look like with them. But when it comes to infants and toddlers, what does the Pyramid Model look like with a younger age group? And how is it different than perhaps your typical Pre-K or preschool classroom. How is it similar and different across those age groups?
Mary Louise Hemmeter: Yes. So, the basic framework doesn’t change. Right? The idea that we have to have consistent routines and predictable routines and nurturing relationships and intentional support for social emotional learning. None of that changes. But how we do it changes, right? So, you know, I can take a really concrete thing and say that a consistent and predictable schedule in a classroom for three- to five-year-olds is what the group does, right? We develop a schedule, and the children move through the day. In an infant classroom, a consistent and predictable schedule is about each individual infant, right? And is about that individual child having their own schedule that’s based on their needs, right? That looks really different for an infant than it does for even a two-year-old who can begin to follow more of a group schedule. So the idea that we’re doing this range of practices doesn’t change. But what it looks like changes. We’re not going to expect teachers of 18-month-old children to teach them how to say “I’m mad” when they’re mad, right? They’re still learning language, right? They may not even have those words in their vocabulary, but we can label their emotions, right? We can say, “you seem to be really mad that Mickey took the toy away from you, I can tell you’re really mad. Come, let me give you a hug,” or “let me help you get the toy,” right? So, we’re still doing that part of teaching emotions. But the way we teach emotions to really little ones might just be that we’re commenting on emotions, that we’re building their emotional vocabulary, that they’re hearing a lot about emotions. So, what we’re doing doesn’t really change that much. It’s how we do it that changes if we’re in classrooms serving really young kids versus preschool classrooms.
Natalie Danner: It sounds like meeting the children really where they are developmentally. Thinking about their language abilities, and their physical abilities, and all of those kinds of things when implementing the Pyramid Model across age groups.
Mary Louise Hemmeter: Yeah, no, I do want to say that, you know, even though it made it sound like I was talking about individualizing with older kids, we still think it’s important to individualize with older kids, right? So, we might expect that in a group of, you know, four and five year old children, that we have a consistent and predictable routine. But if we have a child who can’t sit for long periods of time developmentally, or who needs a break more frequently because of where that child is in their emotional regulation, we allow them to do that. That’s part of the Pyramid Model, right? Which is saying, what will help this child be successful in this group care setting? And that might not look the same for every child in the classroom. And that’s a really important part of the Pyramid. When we begin to think that all children in the classroom can learn in the same way, that’s when we start to see, I think, behaviors that are challenging because children really do need different levels of support.
Natalie Danner: I appreciate that point about individualization, and I think that’s important in infant, toddler, preschool, classrooms in a variety of settings.
Mary Louise Hemmeter: Yeah.
Natalie Danner: And thinking about the individual needs of individual children.
Mary Louise Hemmeter: Exactly.
Natalie Danner: Makes a lot of sense. So, as we close this episode, are there any resources on the Pyramid Model that you think might be important to share with early childhood educators?
Mary Louise Hemmeter: Yeah. So, I was thinking about this, and I think you have a link on your website to the National Center for Pyramid Model Innovations, or what we refer to as NCPMI, and I think one of the best resources is the actual resource search bar on the NCPMI website. And you can go to that, and you can type in just about anything. Like a “schedule for a toddler classroom,” and it will pull up some tool that you can use around schedules for toddler classrooms. Or you can, you know, type in “social story to teach anger management,” and it will pull up a sample social story. So, I think that is just a wealth of information that can apply to everybody. You can type in an age group, any kind of thing. The other, and all of that’s free. You can just go to our website and download that. A lot of those materials can be edited to fit your population or to individualize, that kind of thing. And the other thing I would say, that is a really good tool is the Unpacking the Pyramid book which is available, currently available. It’s Unpacking the Pyramid Model for Preschool Classrooms, but there’s an Unpacking the Pyramid Model for Infant/Toddler Classrooms, that will be available right after the first of the year, as well.
Natalie Danner: Wonderful. Well, we’re excited to read that one when it comes out as well, and we will list all of those resources on our web page for educators to explore. So many helpful tips have been shared about the Pyramid Model in this episode. I want to thank you, Dr. Hemmeter, for being our guest on the Illinois Early Learning Podcast.
Mary Louise Hemmeter: Well, thank you so much for having me, and I hope people will go check out those resources and good luck to all of you and your very important work with young children.
Natalie Danner: And until next time keep early learning at the forefront.
You have just heard a podcast by the Illinois Early Learning Project. For more information, please visit us at illinoisearlylearning.org where you can find evidence-based, reliable information on early care and education for parents, caregivers, and teachers of young children. Thanks for listening and for helping the children in your home, classroom, and community have a strong start in their early learning.
IEL Resources
Resource List: Getting Started with the Pyramid Model