Month: August 2018

The fourth blog post in the Practices series looks at Intentional Teaching. Here are 5 tips to help with this practice …

1. Reconnect with your personal philosophy: For myself, the reason I got into early childhood as a career path was because I have always been passionate about how children explore and communicate in their own ways and I wanted to help support and challenge them, and be challenged by them. Hopefully you also have a personal philosophy and reason to be in early childhood that revolves around supporting and connecting with children. Sometimes we can slip away from this philosophy because of our personal experiences, the culture of our service, or a lack of professional development and mentoring opportunities to help us achieve this. Take some time to reconnect with what it was that started your early childhood journey to begin with and take stock as to whether your actions today reflect this, or whether you need to take steps to reconnect with this philosophy, in turn making you more deliberate in your interactions and programming.
2. Be present: There are a lot of layers to being an educator and sometimes some of them take priority, whether that be doing chores, documentation, chatting with families, making friends with staff members, resetting the environment, and then accidentally children have slipped down the list of priorities. Being present as an Intentional Teacher means that you are always connected to the children as your number one priority. Your decisions allow you to spend more time with the children, not less. You find ways to work with the children and collaborate on the program together instead of telling children to leave you alone because you are busy. You are constantly in tune with what is happening in the environment and use this as an opportunity to adapt, reflect and challenge your ideas, instead of just getting through the day in whatever route seems easiest.
3. Encourage your peers to be intentional: Part of being an Intentional Teacher is that you are aware of your role within your peers and your team. You are constantly striving to be a role model and a mentor to others in the way you are purposeful in your actions and thoughtful in your language. This includes holding other educators accountable in their intentions, and addressing issues in a professional and collaborative manner when shortcuts have been taken, or children have slipped down the priority list. This could be done in spontaneous discussions, through room meetings or staff meetings, reflective questions or professional development opportunities.
4. Consider the messages you send: If you are a ‘deliberate, purposeful and thoughtful‘ educator then you need to consider how this comes across in the way you communicate, both verbally and non-verbally. Having your hands in your pockets while supervising the outside area says ‘don’t talk to me’. Using sarcasm, bribes or threats to manipulate children is not professional behaviour. Removing children from an experience because they are not doing what you want, instead of adapting the experience so they can engage, is not child focused practice. Simple little interactions can communicate volumes of information to a child who is looking for someone to trust and connect with and a place they can feel secure.
5. Reflect on your practices: As with many aspects of the curriculum and our own behaviour it is important to reflect and take stock on how we are really performing, versus what we think is happening. Here are some questions to help with that.
   • How many times a day do you find your attention pulled away from the children?
   • Do you find yourself cutting corners a lot? (e.g. writing observations you didn’t actually observe, rushing through experiences, doing things without the children because it is quicker/neater/easier, avoiding discussions with certain families because you don’t feel like it).
   • How many of the events celebrated in your service are done in a way that is deliberate, purposeful and thoughtful?
   • Do you value the spontaneous learning that children demonstrate on a regular basis or are you more focused on the documentation?
   • When you get out of bed in the morning to go to work are you enthusiastic about what the day may bring? (and if not, when was the last time you were? What changed? How can you get that passion and enthusiasm back?).

 

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The third blog post in the Practices series looks at Learning Through Play. Here are 5 tips to help with this practice …

1. Provide play based experiences: Play based experiences are engaging, meaningful, child directed, open ended (in regards to outcomes &/or time), and inclusive. All children can engage in play based experiences at their own level and still have the opportunity to learn and develop. It is important to do an audit of your environment and your resources and check how play based learning is supported and whether it meets the criteria mentioned above. If children cannot explore and investigate, resourcing their own learning and challenging their own ideas then it is difficult to provide evidence of play based learning, and also compliance of most of Quality Area 1.
2. Value play based learning: Play is how children learn. There is vast amounts of research on the matter supporting how important it is to provide play based learning opportunities and how to support children through this. The basic premise is that the more children are in control of their own learning the more engaged and connected they are to it, which allows for more information to be retained. However play based learning still requires educator support and that brings us on to the next tip…
3. Be an active participant: The role of the educator in play based learning is to role model, support, resource, challenge, engage and invite children’s development. It is not passive supervision of the children, it is also not directed learning, it is a form of collaboration in the play. Educators need to demonstrate dispositions such as curiosity, resilience, exploration, planning, risk taking, social engagement, perseverance, problem solving, creativity and so on to support children to engage in play at a deeper level too. Through playing alongside children and being flexible in your approaches and engagement you support children to learn these dispositions and build their confidence to engage deeply in play.
4. Advocate for play based learning: One of the points of the ECA Code of Ethics is that “in relation to children, I will […] understand and be able to explain to others how play and leisure enhance children’s learning, development and wellbeing“. This means being able to demonstrate how learning occurs during play, how this is supported by research and theory and how this occurs in your service. This may be in newsletters, through your observations, in discussions with families, through your philosophy and so forth. There is a big misconception among non-early childhood qualified people that play is for leisure, not for learning, and the more you can demonstrate how it achieves both the more you advocate.
5. Use play as a foundation for learning opportunities: Observing how children play can be a great way to assess children’s learning, challenge children’s skills and knowledge, identify interests and more. The way children engage can also drive decisions around the environment, resources purchased, and projects implemented into the program. As such play based learning should be valued as a fantastic opportunity to develop educator’s knowledge and understanding of the needs of their children and the direction of their program, not a time to sit and catch up on documentation or other tasks while the children are off playing.

 

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The second in the Practices series looks at responding to children. Here are 5 tips to help with this practice …

1. Allow the children to take the lead: In order to respond to children they must be allowed the opportunity to lead. Sometimes it can be easy to take over an experience if it isn’t going ‘the way we had planned’, or the finished product doesn’t ‘look like it should’ however both of those examples are evidence of Responsiveness to Children not being utilised. The learning is what is important not the finished outcome, so if children want to take an experience in a different direction ask yourself ‘are they still learning?’ and if the answer is yes, then let them lead.
2. Build relationships with the children: Relationships are key when it comes to this practice because if children do not have secure attachments they are unlikely to take the lead. If educators do not have quality relationships with children they are unlikely to trust children to take the lead because of assumptions that they may ‘do it wrong’, or ‘mess it up’. The more trusting and nurturing the relationships the more likely it is that educators will respond to children’s ideas and value them for what they can bring to the curriculum.
3. Ensure you are giving children equal opportunities: Some children are confident in seeking out an educator’s attention and make it easy for their voice to be heard while other are less obvious and direct in their approaches. Younger children also use more subtle gestures and non-verbal communication to express their wants and needs. It is our job to ensure that all children have a voice and get the same amount of responsiveness. Again, your relationships will help to ensure this by not only valuing every child but also by recognising how each child communicates. An infant who moves a resource in front of them is saying ‘I have not finished with this yet’, and a child who is sitting at the back door quietly, with their hat in their hand, is saying ‘I want to go outside’. Both of these children deserve as much of a response as those who actively seek out an educator or communicate their wants and needs loudly.
4. Reflect on your practices: It is important to use critical reflection to ensure that your practices in your service support responsiveness to children and allow work to be done with children, not to children. What percentage of your program allows children to take the lead? Why? How do you ensure each child is responded to appropriately and positively? Do you actively seek the voice of those children who are less vocal in their communication? Is responsiveness to children role modelled in all aspects of the curriculum?
5. Demonstrate this in your program: By stating how experiences are driven by children’s play/suggestions/ideas/requests in your documentation you can provide evidence of responsiveness to children. Allowing the children choice in setting up the environment and how resources are used provides evidence of a commitment to child directed learning. Documenting in observations how children’s approaches to an experience prompted different levels of response (e.g. role modelling, questioning, getting additional resources etc) shows how this practice is implemented in the service.

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The next few blog posts will be covering the Practices from the EYLF and looking deeper into how these can be reflected in your service. Today we are starting with Holistic Approaches …

1. Consider the whole child: Depending on how you document in your service it may be easy to focus on specific aspects of the child for observations, checklists etc. such as language, knowledge of a particular topic, pencil grip and so forth. The issue with this is that it allows us to miss the other important skills and abilities the child is demonstrating. By considering the whole child you not only get a more rounded image of the child, but it also helps to build relationships and get to know the child’s interests, strengths and abilities. This information makes planning a lot easier so it has benefits for both the child and the educator.
2. Build your knowledge of experiences: The more innovative and creative you are in providing experiences the more opportunity there is to allow children to engage in holistic learning. This requires trying new things, networking with other services, engaging in professional development and collaborating with others in your service to ensure you are providing a vast array of experiences that will challenge and support children’s holistic development. Becoming more familiar with the many ways to engage and support a variety of skills through experiences such as regular walks, loose parts, home corner, play dough, blocks etc. can help you feel more confident in this practice.
3. Engage with meaningful experiences: The more meaningful and real experiences you can provide for children the more opportunities they have to demonstrate their holistic development. For example an activity such as small group cooking provides children the ability to engage with literacy (recipe/packaging), numeracy (measuring/time), turn taking, healthy eating discussions, sustainability discussions (waste, grow food), language (vocabulary, discussions), risk taking (try new foods), emotional wellbeing (pride in finished product), physical movement (stirring, cutting, grating) and more. Other meaningful experiences that are holistic and child directed include project work, investigations, planning and contributing to the environment.
4. Notice the unplanned: Sometimes if too much of the curriculum is planned then we can miss out on noticing the unplanned moments that children are engaged with all the time. For example if a ‘gross motor’ activity is planned then we may only focus on the gross motor skills being demonstrated and may miss out on amazing problem solving skills, social interactions or creative thinking a child is demonstrating. Try to be open to the entire experience that is happening and not just the sections that have been planned.
5. Think outside the square: The more innovative your program and your environment are the more opportunities there are to support and document holistic learning. Taking a holistic approach requires educators to be creative in both how they plan for, and engage with, children’s learning. The types of interactions had with children can support assessment of different levels of skills and knowledge with individual children through the one experience. Also consider how routine aspects of the day provide opportunities to take holistic approaches to learning.

 

 

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