Learning and Development: Physical Development - Skills active

When I talk to practitioners about 'active learning', responses range from 'it's all about letting them run round' to 'children need to be active, don't they?'

Well, yes, but active learning is about far more than the purely physical. It embraces all aspects of a child's cognitive and social development, and in so doing, often challenges practitioners to reassess their role in children's learning.

For 'active learning' to take place, practitioners need to become co-partners in children's learning story, a role that is rewarding for the adult and intellectually stimulating for the child.

Getting Engaged

When children are engaged physically and cognitively in an activity, adults engage better too. Likewise, when adults are truly engaging with them, the children display higher levels of concentration, motivation and perseverance in the learning process - as Laevers states, 'deep-level learning is taking place'.

However, a growing problem is that too many practitioners are devoting too much time to observing children, so failing to interact with the children and take their learning forward - and often failing to even use these observations as starting points for planning!

To embrace active learning, practitioners need to re-evaluate their philosophy on early learning, their purpose as practitioners and their interactions with the children in their settings. What is important is that they reflect on not what they can 'provide' for the children, but rather what they can achieve together.

Surely, the purpose of early education is to help develop in young children open, independent, autonomous minds, capable of assimilating skills and knowledge and adapting them to tackle new problems.

If practitioners' current role is only to instruct, then they are simply imposing on children their ways of doing things and so preventing the children from fulfilling their potential.

Active learning builds upon children's inherent drive to explore relationships and meaning, to take risks, to discover, and it builds within them the capacity to make sense of their world, to solve problems and advance their learning.

To achieve this, the practitioner must be the pro-active co-researcher - a role that may conflict with some of practitioners' notions about being an 'educator'.

Starting Points

To embrace active learning, start by re-evaluating your belief systems.

- Plan a series of staff and parent meetings (it is imperative to have parents on board, so you can explain what you do in the setting and why).

- Agree a joint vision for the children. What do you want for them? How do you want them to develop? Draw up a list of adjectives for discussion - for example: independent, curious, rebellious, adventurous, talkative, obedient, co-operative, solitary, creative, loud, quiet, compliant, questioning, competitive, risk-taking, sociable, imaginative, domineering. Such an exercise can engender discussions between staff and parents about what the adjectives mean, what they look like in practice, and which ones should be promoted or discarded from the list.

- Debate current practice with staff before drawing up an action plan to monitor developments: what needs to stay the same? What needs to change? What continuing professional development is available to your team? What resources do you have?

Observation

- Set up a system of observations so that all the children are observed regularly at both child- and adult-initiated activities.

- Assess the quality of observations. What are they telling you about a particular child, the context, the cross-referencing of learning areas? Talk to key people at the end of a session about what the children have been doing and, most importantly, how learning will be extended and reinforced. It's vital to act upon observations immediately, to ensure they aren't stuck in the 'observation box' and then ignored. 'Little and often' should be the approach when it comes to observations.

Personalised Learning

Essential, too, is that you make learning personal, meaningful and developmentally appropriate for each child - remember, each child is unique. Regular dialogue with parents will help you achieve this.

Take account of each child's interests, skills, knowledge and experience. Remember, too, that children will often learn the same things in different ways and at different times in their development. Some children prefer to tackle problems independently; others might need greater encouragement from a sensitive adult.

Personalised learning depends on how activities are presented. As with adults, children will engage in an activity only if they see the point to it, or if it appeals to their interests and learning styles. They will consequently feel confident that they can carry it out.

Decision Making

Ask yourself: 'How often do I sit and talk with the children about their interests and what they want to do?'

Make it your job to watch children's TV. You must have knowledge of children's culture if you are going to respect and value their decisions and actively engage in their play.

Children need to be able to make decisions about their learning and environment, for only then will the learning opportunities match what both you and the children want to achieve.

Some practitioners feel uncomfortable about handing control to the children. But this approach allows practitioners to share, accept and validate the children's thoughts and feelings. It helps children respect their environment more, and so their learning becomes inspired by them rather than imposed on them by adults.

Without the opportunity to choose and make decisions, children become bored and disengage from their learning. Likewise, if their wishes are ignored, they lack enthusiasm for adult-directed tasks and comply only to please adults.

This is not to say that children are left to their own devices. A structure needs to be in place, ground rules and expectations shared and understood.

Practitioners must take on board the children's suggestions and knowledge garnered from their observations and involve the children in constructing the environment. The challenge, however, needs to be meaningful and pitched at the correct level, or else children become bored, frustrated and insecure.

The whole staff team should also be involved in decision-making. Inviting them to make suggestions about what works best will help them feel more valued and, consequently, more engaged with the children's learning and development.

Practitioners also need to address children's basic and emotional needs, for only when they are cognitively and physically comfortable can children feel able to learn.

With this kind of encouragement, support and control over their learning, children will gain greater confidence, a positive disposition and an increased drive to take control of their world.

Planning

Planning should be short-term and evaluated regularly, as every cohort of children will have different needs and interests. Every day, ask yourself:

- What went well today?

- What can we provide tomorrow?

Talk daily with key people about key observations.

Many settings use three types of planning: daily, weekly and medium. Medium-term planning, usually covering two to three weeks, is flexible, adaptable and responsive. What is important is that all participants are involved in the planning process, and practitioners never stick to the plan if it is not working.

From their observations, practitioners will see how even the youngest children are responding to the provision and making sense of their environment.

As a child's language develops, so practitioners can engage children in a dialogue about their interests, or sometimes about adult-initiated ideas. For example, I recently supported a nursery class of children fascinated by bugs and beetles - an excellent starting point for discovery, as follows:

Key questions and children's responses

- What do you know about bugs?

They fly; they have loads of legs; they eat dirt; they can't talk; they are all different colours; they are on the telly; some are big and some are really small.

- What would you like to find out about bugs?

Can they fly backwards? Are bees the same as wasps? How many bits does a caterpillar have? Where do they live? Is Spiderman a bug - because sometimes he is and then he is not?

- How shall we find out?

Look in books; use the computer; read stories; ask grown-ups; find some bugs and put them in a jar

This simple exercise provides a basis for planning and something for the children to monitor their learning against. As the children become more confident with this way of working, they will start to plan their own learning.

Practitioners can begin a session by asking the children to share their ideas about what they are going to learn today, and end the session with a discussion about the day's learning. This routine benefits children's speaking and listening skills and the personal, social and emotional aspects of learning. The practitioner's role is to note children's responses and learning and monitor and record their development.

As the children develop, a useful strategy to employ is the 'could, should and must' technique, in which you provide the children with graded challenges: some the children could do, some they should attempt, and perhaps one that they must do. Such an approach leads to the children learning independence, responsibility and greater autonomy.

- Neil Farmer is a Foundation Stage consultant. E-mail: thefarmer.66@hotmail.co.uk