It was recently my honor and privilege to recommend a very dear friend for the Massachusetts Department of Early Education and Care Exceptional Educator Award. While it appears as though the amazing Jenn Guptill didn’t win — travesty! highway robbery! –, she still deserves recognition. I hope you enjoy this portrait of an extraordinary educator whose innovativeness, strength, and compassion “does not conform to a pattern or norm”. Jenn Guptill, you are exceptional!
Back in 2003, I was a 22-year-old novice in every sense of the term when I first met Jenn, a lead teacher at Somerville’s Open Center for Children. Already a master of her craft, Jenn modeled her best practices, shared her expertise, and showed me how to be comfortable in my own skin. In addition to her peer, I also consider myself to be one of Jenn’s students; indeed, no one has shaped my professional or pedagogical life more profoundly. This is no small statement for, if you tally up all of my years of schooling, I am in the 22nd grade! I’ve also been blessed with quality educational experiences, from my affluent public schooling in the Chicago suburbs, to majoring in Education & Social Policy at Northwestern University, to studying abroad at Paris’s Sorbonne Nouvelle, to earning a Master’s degree in Child Development at Tufts University, to pursuing a doctorate in Communication at the University of Southern California. Yet no one has managed to hold a candle to Jenn. When it comes to passion for her profession, knowledge in both theoretical and practical terms, total presence in the classroom, and commitment of myriad out-of-work hours to curriculum creation and professional development, Jenn is unequaled.
Jenn’s love for early childhood education is both overt and palpable. She applies what she knows about child development and cultivates wonderfully substantive silliness—engaging in give-and-take rhyming with her students; trading giggle-inducing nicknames; singing and composing social songs (her famous “Boo Boo Song,” which has remained with me all of these years, has comforted hundreds of children and saved untold quantities of Band-Aids!); voicing various characters in read-alouds and personifying them in full-bodied dramatic play; and joining in the running, jumping, and climbing of gross motor play. This would be reason enough for her students and their families to adore her, as indeed they do. But Jenn doesn’t stop there.
Jenn’s knowledge of child development also guides her design of classroom space, acquisition of materials, invitations for children’s and families’ engagement, facilitation of emergent curriculum, documentation of community members’ process, and sensitive scaffolding and reflection. To offer just a few examples…
Jenn manages the art corner at Garden Nursery School, where she has been lead teacher/director since 2004, such that it’s stocked with materials to support students’ sensory integration, investigations of color mixing, explorations of mixed media, group collaborations, and personal expressions. The school’s manipulatives are well-designed and open-ended, facilitating students’ fine motor development and creative construction. The print-rich environment that Jan and her students have co-created, evidenced in their hand-written signs and self-published books about their classroom, nurture literacy skills and a sense of coziness and belonging. These values are further supported by parents’ audio-recordings of their children’s beloved books. Any and all students are welcome to visit the listening center, slip on a pair of headphones, and listen to their own or friends’ parents reading in English and/or foreign languages spoken at home.
Jenn’s commitment to her students’ social and emotional development is infinitely valuable. Through games, modeling, and discussion, Jenn’s students learn to identify and label facial expressions, body language, and their associated emotional underpinnings for themselves and for others. She offers observations, language, and encouragement for students to manage conflicts and solve problems themselves. Songs such as “We Don’t Leave Anyone Out” and books like Mean Soup normatize feelings, scaffold empathy, and articulate the values of a caring community; group projects and visual reminders (such as a poster with the tracing of each student’s hand) further undergird these messages. Through keen examination and rich positive reinforcement, Jenn helps her students to discover and appreciate their own and others’ strengths and challenges; it is not uncommon to hear her students shower their friends with both compliments and constructive criticism. Because Jenn is careful to praise process over product, students and their families learn to value intrinsic skills rather than external validation. In our world of constant change and competition, these relative priorities are essential. Additionally, since parents volunteer daily in Jenn’s classroom, their comprehension and delivery of best practices directly affects the group.
In terms of professional development, Jenn has shown remarkable perseverance and dedication. She overcame multiple obstacles in order to earn her bachelor’s degree, first studying Young Children with Special Needs for three years at Wheelock College and then returning years later to study Psychology at Cambridge College. She voluntarily attended scores of seminars, joined enrichment-oriented organizations like Cambridge’s Safe and Caring Classrooms Study Group, and taught workshops for fellow early childhood educators at the Teaching for Change conference and conference of the New England Association for the Education of Young Children. Jenn also has been a leader in advocating for her field, her colleagues, and young children and their families by acting as a community liaison and teacher assistant for classes related to the Massachusetts Leadership Empowerment Project (LEAP), in addition to petitioning at the State House on behalf of the Early Education for All campaign. She stays up-to-date with professional literature and research, and eagerly enlightens any and all conversational partners on the dynamics of childhood development and the lasting impacts of early experiences.
Thanks to Jenn, I learned how to stem my torrent of speech and carefully select vocabulary so that my discourse with young children was appropriate. She invited me to join her and the children in end-of-the-day dance parties to Stevie Wonder’s “Songs in the Key of Life,” and reassured me that my silly sandbox game of pretending to sicken from the children’s servings of “Poisiki” buckets was just what the doctor ordered. I grew confident in my ability to identify situations that merited intervention and mete out discipline with consistency and fairness. I learned how to pay attention to the children’s play and build off of it in order to advance their learning and growth. Under Jenn’s tutelage, I came into my own as a teacher.
Since our days as co-workers in Somerville, I have taught early childhood at Cambridge’s Harvard Yard Child Care Center and Medford’s Eliot-Pearson Children’s School. Additionally, I have taught: school-age children in Mumbai, India’s Expanding Minds Program; teens in Dakar, Senegal’s Sunukaddu Youth Communication Initiative and urban Los Angeles’s Explore Locally, Excel Digitally workshop; and undergraduates at Tufts University and the University of Southern California. Like Jenn, I also have endeavored to give back to my community and impact learners beyond my direct reach by offering professional development to educators in Boston, Dakar, and Los Angeles, and designing curriculum for Pearson, Houghton Mifflin, PBS, and Nickelodeon. I am currently working with USC’s Annenberg Innovation Lab, USC’s Impact Games Network, and cutting-edge non-profit GameDesk to develop and disseminate developmentally sound pedagogical tools and practices for 21st century learning.
Like so many of Jenn’s students, I owe a great measure of my interpersonal competence, capacity for play, and sense of self-efficacy to Jan Gilpin. I also attribute some of my own students’ strides to Jenn. I cannot imagine a more worthy recipient of the Massachusetts Department of Early Education and Care Exceptional Educator Award. She already is an exceptional educator – but it’d sure be nice for her to get the certificate that says so!
Jenn Guptill, you are a marvel. Thank you for all that you do, and all you have done. Thank you.