Learning & Development: Practitioner Role: Part 1 - Time to talk

Photographs by Justin Thomas at Headington Quarry Foundation Stage School and The Slade Nursery School and Children's Centre, Oxford.

How do young children communicate? What are the barriers to communicating effectively with children? Where and with whom do children talk most freely? These are just some of the questions raised by 'Interacting or Interfering? - The Oxfordshire Adult-Child Interaction Project', which aims to give practitioners a better understanding of their role in supporting early learning.

The Project involves 14 practitioners, who work across a variety of schools and settings and educate children aged from six months to six years. Project participants agreed to be filmed once a term for two years. This filming has yielded an invaluable library of footage for analysis and reflection on the adult role in early learning (see box, page 20).

BORN COMMUNICATORS

From the moment a baby is born, they are reaching out to communicate with those around them. Research studies show us how a baby just a few hours old can imitate what a parent does or says, by sticking out their tongue or responding to sounds.

As children grow older, their desire to communicate with those to whom they are closest does not diminish. Their relentless desire to communicate is seen in the way in which children strive to be understood, to learn new words, to try out new phrases and sentences and, once they become more competent talkers, to ask countless questions.

Usually, the efforts that children make to communicate are rewarded. Adults and other children smile, or respond to or interpret or expand what the child has said and, in so doing, reaffirm the message that conversation is a reciprocal activity.

To be successful, conversation relies on both parties being engaged and both parties being willing to contribute. The child who receives little or no response ultimately loses the will to instigate a conversation, for the joy of communicating is that you have an audience and that your audience shows, in some way or other, that what you have to say matters to them.

To be an effective communicator, young children need to be surrounded by sensitive role models who support and scaffold their earliest attempts at conversation and who appreciate the vital role that adults play in informing, extending and challenging children's knowledge and understanding of language, speech and communication.

THE PROBLEM WITH 'EDUCATORS'

Some practitioners, like some parents, do not understand that the child, however young, is already a highly effective communicator and may feel that they cannot hold a conversation because the baby 'can't talk yet'. But communication and conversation take place in many more ways than through talk alone.

Babies and toddlers are skilled at using gestures, sounds and signals to make their voices heard, but are reliant on a responsive adult taking the time to work out what their signals mean and what they are trying to communicate. The EYFS guidance says that interaction is based on 'respectful acknowledgment' of children's feelings and needs, and this is achieved only when adults recognise children's attempts to be heard.

Communication in early childhood settings can also run into problems when adults try to marry the needs of the child with the demands of an external early years agenda. Often, when a child is engaged in an activity or has embarked on a conversation that matters to them, the adult sees a learning opportunity and, rather than responding to the child, hijacks the conversation in their enthusiasm - or anxiety - to cover some part of the curriculum that, as an educator, they deem to be more worthwhile.

But what is worthwhile to the child should be what is worthwhile to the adult. It is the child's interests, the child's questions, the child's insights that should lead the early childhood educator to a greater understanding of what each individual child is thinking and learning, thereby guiding the adult towards a more successful identification of the child's future needs.

ENABLING ENVIRONMENTS

Much has been written about the influence of the environment on early learning. Findings from the national Every Child a Talker (ECAT) Project show that there are what president of Early Education Helen Moylett describes as 'hot spots' where children talk more readily.

In our Oxfordshire settings we found that there was no particular place where children talked most readily, but rather that the places identified by our practitioners as places where children held valuable conversations were usually those where there was no adult agenda - at snack time; when doing up shoelaces; when making models; when playing with dough. In other words, children talk most when they are most relaxed.

The more adult-led the agenda, the less the talk came from the children and the more the talk came from the adults. In adult-led situations there was little conversation if, as a definition of conversation, we agree that it is a reciprocal activity where both parties are involved. In most adult-led situations the exchanges between adult and child (or children) were much more one-sided, with the adult doing a lot of talking - and asking a lot of questions - and the children giving oneor two-word answers and doing a lot of listening.

Later in the series we will unpick more carefully the difference in interaction and conversation in adult-led sessions, as opposed to those that are child-led. For the time being, the important issue is that if our aim is for children to talk, interact and hold meaningful conversations, then they are more likely to do so when they are relaxed and when they are not trying to meet an adult's aims or expectations.

In one of our settings, for example, the practitioners noticed that children were more relaxed outside than in - and then realised that was because most of the child-initiated learning took place outside, while more adult-led activities were planned for inside.

ADULT 'HOT SPOTS'

More unexpectedly, the Oxfordshire practitioners found that there were adult 'hot spots' in their settings - places where adults were more relaxed than others and, consequently, where they were more ready and willing to respond to a child's conversation rather than impose their own. These adult hot spots revealed that for all of us, there are areas of the nursery or classroom where we are more confident about the learning taking place and areas where we are not.

In one setting, for example, the adults all skirted round the block play area because despite paying lots of money to have high-quality blocks in the nursery, the adults were not confident about the learning that comes from block play and about how to support it. So, if a child who loves block play is in a setting where adults do not go to that area, then their chances of holding meaningful, sustained conversations are instantly diminished.

KNOWING THE CHILD WELL

It is perhaps unsurprising that the DVD footage of Oxfordshire practitioners interacting with children shows that the adults who have the most relaxed and extended conversations are almost always those who know their children well. In other words, they are frequently the child's key person.

This may have been expected, but we were surprised at how often this point was brought home to us, as practitioners used what they knew about a child - reference to family members, the name of a pet, the area in which they lived, the activities they experienced at a weekend or on holiday - to act as a starting point for a conversation or to keep a current conversation going.

Adults who know their children well do not need to have somewhat superficial exchanges in order to find a more meaningful starting point for a conversation. A key person knows the child well enough to recall something that happened yesterday or that morning and to build on that shared experience; they can make links with experiences that the child had some months ago to help the child make connections in their learning; they know about and can point out that what a child likes or dislikes is the same as or different from their brother or sister, thus making the child feel known and understood. All this makes for a more natural and meaningful conversation where children feel secure in the strong relationship that they have with their key adult.

Interestingly, some of the Oxfordshire practitioners did not have a key person role (because they have management responsibilities) and found the 'upside' to this was that they felt able to follow children's interests, once they had tuned in to what they were, because they didn't feel responsible for changing a nappy, filling in a record sheet and so on. This view brings us back to the importance of adults feeling relaxed and not worrying that another agenda is forcing them to get children to talk about things that are worthwhile to the adult rather than the child.

The effective practitioner is focused on the child the whole time and 'in the moment' - not looking around at what else there might be to do, not being distracted by other adults or other children or other responsibilities, but letting the child know that, for that moment, they and their ideas and their feelings and their needs are paramount.

PERSONAL BELIEFS

Underpinning all that we do in our work with young children lie our beliefs about children, childhood and how young children learn. While we may be able to say what we think others want to hear at an interview or a staff meeting, it is in our daily interactions with children that we reveal the depth of our understanding of child development and the level of our commitment to children and their learning.

Everything we discussed in our Oxfordshire project came back to our belief systems. Did those in Key Stage 1 classrooms believe enough in child-initiated learning to fight for it alongside the adult-led agenda? Did those working in baby rooms enjoy having conversations and working out what the baby's gestures, sounds and signals might mean? Did those who thought their role was to lead learning now understand that there are times when the child needs to lead and the adult follow?

The Oxfordshire practitioners believe that more than anything, we need to be fascinated by children - what they say, what they do, what they are thinking. If not, then we will not take the time it takes to get to know children and to tune in to their learning and development needs. It seems to us now that if early childhood practitioners are not fascinated by children, then perhaps they are in the wrong job.

ABOUT THIS SERIES

This four-part series of articles explores the issues that have arisen for practitioners involved in 'Interacting or Interfering? The Oxfordshire Adult-Child Interaction Project'. The Project, which is ongoing, aims to give practitioners a better understanding of their role in supporting early learning and what helps or hinders adult interactions with young children. The four parts are:

Part 1: 'Effective communication' (Nursery World, 23 January 2012)

Part 2: 'Tuning in to children's thinking' (Nursery World, 20 February 2012)

Part 3: 'The adult role in child-led learning' (Nursery World, 19 March 2012)

Part 4: 'How to have conversations with children' (Nursery World, 16 April 2012)

See also: www.nurseryworld.co.uk/go/learninganddevelopment

MORE INFORMATION

Helen Moylett's six-part series on communication in the early years is at: www.nurseryworld.co.uk/go/communication/.

Julie Fisher is an independent early years adviser and visiting professor of Early Childhood Education at Oxford Brookes University