Our journey to help deepen children’s thinking and learning led us first to make significant changes to our planning and environment. In developing our practice further, we revisited and reviewed current theories from the field of developmental psychology on how children learn. We also worked with early years consultant Di Chilvers, who took us back to basics; using observation as a tool for really beginning to understand children’s thinking, their ideas and their fascinations.
Each child is unique and understanding their uniqueness helps us connect their interests to their learning by co-creating a curriculum and developing it further by following possible lines of enquiry. All this takes place in a supportive environment that is child-led and stimulates, inspires and promotes sustained shared thinking and talk.
OUR STARTING POINTS
Characteristics of Effective Learning
Statutory Framework for the Early Years Foundation Stage makes clear the requirement for practitioners to plan opportunities and experiences that nurture children’s dispositions to learn. It states, ‘In planning and guiding children’s activities, practitioners must reflect on the different ways that children learn and reflect these in their practice. Three characteristics of effective teaching and learning are:
- playing and exploring – children investigate and experience things, and ‘have a go’
- active learning – children concentrate and keep on trying if they encounter difficulties, and enjoy achievements
- creating and thinking critically – children have and develop their own ideas, make links between ideas, and develop strategies for doing things’
(Department for Education 2017).
Sustained shared thinking
Through our training and reflections as a team, we learnt how children’s sustained shared thinking develops through the Characteristics of Effective Learning (CoEL) and underpins their cognitive self-regulation. The phrase ‘sustained shared thinking’ was coined by Professor Iram Siraj, who described it as ‘an episode in which two or more individuals “work together” in an intellectual way to solve a problem, clarify a concept, evaluate activities, extend a narrative, etc. Both parties must contribute to the thinking and it must develop and extend the understanding’ (Researching Effective Practice in the Early Years – REPEY 2002). Sustained shared thinking can take place between children, as well as between adults and children.
Thinking about thinking
As we began to practise and support sustained shared thinking, our observations of children developed. We understood how to recognise and nurture children’s CoEL; in other words, how they learn. Our documentation of children’s learning in their Learning Stories has been a key element of our work, improving our skills of observation, as well as supporting the deepening of the learning experiences that we co-construct with children (see far right).
We share the learning stories with the children, so enabling them to reflect on their learning and strengthening their metacognitive skills – that is, their ability to ‘think about their thinking’, to assess their understanding, and to reflect on themselves as thinkers and learners.
IN RESPONSE
The setting started without a plan in order to foster a ‘bottom up’ learning process about their practice
We have made several changes to our practice in order to strengthen children’s thinking and promote the development of the CoEL.
The best way to enable sustained shared thinking to occur is by allowing children to follow their own interests, ideas and fascinations through play and by the practitioner being playful, co-constructing learning and working with the child or children to develop ideas and theories.
This requires a balance between child-led and adult-led play, and to achieve this we moved away from having structured adult-led activities and adopted a more flexible approach.
The child-initiated learning through play continuum (below) is a helpful visual guide for rethinking the balance in adult-child interactions within a setting (The National Strategies 2009). It reminds us that most learning takes place when it is child-initiated and supported or guided by an adult through sensitive interactions and experiential learning (see shaded area of diagram, below).
We came to understand that much of our teaching and guiding is actually spontaneous and very ‘in the moment’ (Ephgrave 2018). We have created an atmosphere with an emphasis on interaction, where adults support the learning process through modelling play and talk, asking questions and making their own thinking more explicit.
We support children to make connections with previous learning by using past experiences as a springboard or trigger for imagining or recreating new ideas, – for example when problem-solving (see Karamveer and Aaron’s learning story of a snail race, far right).
This ‘thinking about thinking’ conversation is guided and supported by the learning that we observe and document in children’s learning stories, which are printed and made into books or displayed in the nursery rooms.
Another change we needed to make was to have adults placed in designated areas for sustained periods. Adults can now begin to see what ideas are developing in children’s preferred learning environment, and develop these into projects.
PLAYING THEIR PART
Regular supervisions have supported practitioners through the changes, giving them the opportunity to discuss any concerns in a place of safety and in confidence. During the second year of changes, team members were encouraged to keep their own learning journeys and record their concerns, questions and misunderstandings. These were later discussed with their supervisor or raised in team meetings. Regular training sessions have always been a place for the team to discuss the changes and plan our next steps under the themes of: ‘what’s working well’, ‘what are the challenges’ and ‘what needs to happen next’.
THE CHALLENGES
We started our journey without a plan. This is because as a team we were, and still are, engaging in our own collaborative research to find out what we need to do to reach our ultimate aim of deepening children’s thinking and learning and how we need to do it. This has been a ‘bottom up’ learning process. As a staff team, we have had to free ourselves from our old ideas and challenge our ways of thinking. Creativity is a messy process and we have seen that and been part of the mess.
Because we are unique individuals, the challenges have been different for each and every one of us, on both practical and personal levels. Practitioners have had different views on how many resources need to be provided for a learning space to be interesting and challenging. Finding enough time at the end of the day to share learning with team members and restock areas of provision also seems to be a constant struggle.
Another challenge has been how far we are prepared to let children explore and take risks. For example, one recurring conversation was about how much tape you allow children to unravel in one go.
There was usually more than one view on this, so we discussed what underlying ideas and thinking might be motivating the play, and whether it was a purely sensory experience or something else. We concluded the learning potential was different for different children.
At the time, a group of children was fascinated with traps and webs, so we allowed them to make their own using their preferred medium of masking tape. In addition, we offered other resources with similar properties (such as wool, string and crêpe strips).
Challenges on a personal level have been different for each of us. They are commonly based on our own views and typically stem from our childhood experiences.
As a team, we have always worked hard to keep communication going, addressing concerns and challenges openly and honestly as they present themselves. Working in this way is healthy and allows the team to travel through the ‘fog’ of uncertainty together, emerging with a shared understanding and a strong sense of belief in the team.
BENEFITS TO CHILDREN’S LEARNING
When children have a degree of control over their choices, they are motivated to learn, their levels of involvement increase and their ability to self-regulate is heightened. Self-regulation is about:
- being independent
- knowing what you want to do
- following your own ideas and interests
- making your own decisions and choices
- being intrinsically motivated
- using all your strategies
- connecting and transferring your learning
- deepening your thinking: metacognition.
(See More information and David Whitehead’s work on self-regulation.)
Supporting these key skills has made a huge difference to the children’s levels of involvement and the development of their creative and critical thinking skills at Grove House. This has been the catalyst for other school teams, who have visited our setting to see for themselves the quality of the interactions and learning.
Feedback from a Foundation Stage lead teacher in a local primary school who visited Grove House with her team included the following: ‘The children who I have had this year from Grove really do have such a different level of critical and creative thinking and that is also why we were so keen to visit! My team and I were so inspired after viewing your provision, staff interactions and the wonderful things the children were doing with such high, deep levels of engagement and taking risks!’
At Grove House, we have worked hard as a team to make the changes so far and we continue to learn and to work together to apply our knowledge and skills in order to do the very best we can for the children and families in the community we serve.
NURSERY WORLD SHOW
Jo Dabir-Alai and colleague Ranbir Jaswal will be among the speakers at the Nursery World Show in London on 7-8 February. Visit: www.nurseryworld show.com
MORE INFORMATION
Ofsted (2015) Teaching and play in the early years – a balancing act?
The National Strategies (2009) Learning, Playing and Interacting
Ephgrave A (2018) Planning in the Moment with Young Children
Chilvers D (2013) Creating and Thinking Critically
Whitehead D (2013) ‘The importance of self-regulation for learning from birth’ in H Moylett (ed) Characteristics of Effective Early Learning
