As an early years educator, the ideas you have formed about cognitive development will have been influenced by your study and also by your life and work experience. These will influence your pedagogical approach to supporting children’s thinking and learning:
- If you see children’s learning being a natural process that will unfold according to biological imperatives, you may hold the view that adults should not participate in children’s play and learning activities, so as to avoid damaging their natural development. You may then focus your engagement mostly towards providing resources in the environment.
- If you see children as moulded by their environment, you may also see them as empty vessels to be filled from a body of existing knowledge and an adult-determined set of skills. You may then see adults as the providers of all that knowledge and the source of wisdom about how to do things. Your learning environment would then most likely be centred around the adult and focused on teaching skills and knowledge out of context.
- On the other hand, if you believe that the world needs people who are self-directed, creative thinkers who are able to adapt to change, you are more likely to see children as active learners who are motivated by an innate desire to learn and who learn both autonomously and in collaboration with other people. You would then create an environment rich in resources to encourage exploration and discovery that helps children to use their initiative and allows them to make choices and solve problems. You would also see yourself as part of the learning environment, a learning resource and also a partner in learning.
In reality, effective educators combine these approaches according to the context and the needs of the child at the time. There are times when you are very involved in children’s play and learning. At other times, you will be actively noticing and thinking about what a child is doing, storing this information in your mind for later discussion and planning.
Mostly, effective educators provide a sensitive balance by maintaining an attentive presence; not interfering in children’s play and explorations but being available should they be invited or the child need their support; sensitive to moments when they might extend a child’s thinking through suggesting ideas, materials or actions without disrupting the child’s flow of thinking or autonomous action (Fisher 2016).
Julia Manning Morton is an independent early years consultant. From Birth to Three: An Early Years Educator’s Handbook, Routledge, won Nursery World’s Professional Book of the Year 2024.
CASE STUDY: being an effective educator
Time for babies
What is good about our team is that we agree that it is important to sit nearby to babies who are exploring to help them stay focused. So, if the phone rings, instead of jumping up and disturbing the babies’ concentration, we can ask each other to respond without worrying that they will think we are lazy.
Following the child’s lead
Hayley had planned to take Nathan (18 months) and Georgia (22 months) to the library that morning. However, Georgia arrived with a snail she had found on the way. Her mum said there were lots by the wall at the back of the flats. Hayley decided to abandon the trip to the library and go on a snail hunt instead. Each toddler chose a bucket and set off to discover snails.
Sharing thinking at a city farm
We were at the city farm, looking at the white horse when Louis (two years) kept saying, ‘It Father Christmas.’ At first, I was baffled and was about to suggest that Father Christmas has reindeer with antlers, not horses, when I remembered that we had been reading Harvey Slumfenburger’s Christmas Present, in which Father Christmas rides on a white horse at one point. We were then able to have a conversation about other aspects of the story and, when a motorbike went whizzing past, recall that Father Christmas also rides one of those. Louis then said, ‘Uncle Nigel mo’bike’, taking our conversation in a different direction. Not knowing what this referred to, I asked, ‘Does Uncle Nigel have a motorbike?’ Louis just nodded, and I realised that I needed to ask his mum about this, only to discover that they had been looking at video clips of his uncle motorbike racing – information that led to developing play activities that Louis got very involved in.
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