Morning conference for Sheffield Branch of Early Education 30.6.18

1. Dr Julian Grenier
grenier@outlook.com
@juliangrenier
Noticing and
celebrating children’s
learning
why it’s essential to early years
practice from birth to five

2. Noticing children
• Noticing and valuing
young children as thinkers
perhaps begins in England
with romanticism
• Wordsworth coined the
term “early childhood” and
calls the young child the
“best philosopher”

3. Robert Owen – New Lanarkshire in the early 19th century – note the animal display as
well as the dancing

4. Margaret
McMillian:
“The Nuisance
Who Worked
Miracles.”
J.B Priestley

5. Remembering our history
is important

6. Susan Isaacs

7. But let’s also remember…

8. And let’s also remember…

9. Respectful educators
• The importance of getting to
know and value each young
child
• Compassion, love and
understanding
• A community development
model
• Building on family strengths

10. How do we see young children now?
•Dalli et al (2011, p.18): “to see the infant and
toddler as a learner still constitutes a
challenging paradigmatic shift for many
teachers”.
•Gopnik et al, 1999, p.1: “the most powerful
learning machine in the universe”

11. Acting on what we notice
• “a close and nurturing adult-child relationship
… is necessary for intersubjectivity, which
allows the caregiver to judge how much the
child already knows and understands, so that
she can provide appropriate scaffolding to
extend development.”
• Smith (1999, p.86)

12. Readiness/it will happen in time?

13. Natural development?
• Smith (1999, p.86): “models of development
which emphasise the child’s natural and
spontaneous development from within or of
development as being shaped entirely through
learning processes have been strongly
criticised.”

14. Tracking

15. Measurement, evidence, data

16. How much assessment?
• There are about 570 bullet-point
statements in Development Matters

17. • With the common practice of breaking
down each band into beginning,
developing, secure, stages:
• In a nursery class where children’s levels
of development range from 16-26, 22-36,
30-50 months - there are 9 levels across
17 aspects = 153 levels to assess.
• And some schools still require “evidence”
for each assessment….

18. • There are 141
children aged 3
and 4 years old on
roll at Sheringham
Nursery School.
• There are 18
aspects in
Development
Matters
• That adds up to 18
x 141 = 2538 cells
of data and a bit of
that looks like…

20. Chores
• “Doing
observations”
can be
experienced as
a time-
consuming
demand by
many staff
working with
young children.

21. • Jayne Osgood quotes Delia, one of the
practitioners in her study, discussing the
“stress of report writing, record keeping and
all those other chores”. Osgood comments
that “Delia’s reference to “other chores” is
indicative of the perceived laboriousness of
current expectations in nursery practice.”
Osgood, Negotiating Professionalism (2012,
p.127)

22. Reframing
children?
How might this be
changing the way
adults relate with
children?

23. Teaching ≠ passive children
“reciprocal
interaction with …
more competent
members of the
culture, adults
treating the child as
an agent and bent on
‘teaching’ him to be
more so”
Bruner, 1995, p.6

25. Celebrating children’s learning: a
joint project by a group of London
nursery schools
Our aim was to avoid the
discourse of ‘tracking’,
and develop instead a
discourse around
celebrating learning,
learning about learning,
and thinking about
teaching.

26. Features of best practices
• you can hear the child’s
voice
• there is keen observation of
the child’s exploration, play
and thinking
• the practitioner has noticed
that the child is learning a
new skill, or is making new
links between aspects of
knowledge
• there are examples of
sustained conversation and
thinking, sometimes with
feelings of awe

27. Access all the materials here
https://www.eleysp.co.uk/celebrating-childrens-learning/

28. Our working approach
Every note about a child’s learning must:
• Be significant, so it was worth the
interruption;
• Be assessed, so we think about what it
tells us about the child;
• Be acted on through planning/provision,
so we help the child to make more
progress.

29. Writing to celebrate progress

30. Making learning visible in the early
years
• In diverse communities, it’s important to
articulate and share what we are doing, and
why, and how it helps children’s learning
• From Celebrating Children’s Learning: “Lipa
grew up in a small neighbourhood in Comila,
Bangladesh. She lived in Italy for some time
with her husband and son before giving birth
to her daughter in her early 40s…”

31. A second challenge
• Is the emphasis
we are putting
on assessment
stopping us
from thinking
about the
curriculum?

32. The case of the vanishing
curriculum?
• 2000 Curriculum
Guidance for the
Foundation Stage
• 2002 Birth to Three
Matters
• 2008 Practice Guide
for the Foundation
Stage
• 2012 EYFS Statutory
Framework

33. Have Development Matters and
the ELGs become the curriculum?

34. • “Around two thirds of
the staff inspectors
spoke to confused
what they were
teaching (the
curriculum) with how
they thought they
were supposed to
teach it….

35. Bold Beginnings
• “….This seemed to stem from misinterpreting
what the characteristics of effective learning
in the early years foundation stage (EYFS)2 –
‘playing and exploring, active learning, and
creating and thinking critically’ – required in
terms of the curriculum they provided.”

36. Bold Beginnings
• “There is no clear curriculum in Reception.
Most leaders and staff in the schools visited
acknowledged that there was little guidance
about what four- and five-year-olds should be
taught, beyond the content of the ELGs.”

37. Bold Beginnings
• “Play was an important part of the
curriculum in all of the schools visited. The
headteachers knew which aspects of learning
needed to be taught directly and which could
be learned through play. However, except for
literacy and mathematics, the schools were
not clear about the time they devoted in a
typical week to the different areas of
learning.”

39. Some of what’s missing
• Shape, Space and Measure – now absent from
Maths
• The Natural World is the only aspect of
science
• Self-regulation largely seen as being about
children’s regulation of their emotions

40. “Executive function skills help us plan, focus
attention, switch gears, and juggle multiple
tasks—much like an air traffic control system at
a busy airport. Acquiring the early building
blocks of these skills is one of the most
important and challenging tasks of the early
childhood years.”

42. Case study
from Impact
– metacognition
and executive
function in the
early years
https://chartered.college
/journal

43. Case study from Impact

45. Tales Toolkit
http://talestoolkit.com/
Helping children to develop their self-regulation
and executive function through a scaffolded
learning approach

46. What are the opportunities?
• Collaboration – to develop
early years curricula for our
schools and settings
• For example – what sort of
curriculum will build on young
children’s curiosity; what sort
of early scientific skills and
knowledge do we want
children to learn in the EYFS?

47. Children learning
• Without ongoing, formative
assessment – we can’t know
what children are learning
and whether our curriculum
is succeeding
• Early learning is not a process
of “unfolding” or “natural
development”
• Even the most comprehensive
summative assessment is only
a crude “dip check” of what
children are learning.
• It’s not as simple as checking
the oil in a car…

48. A first concluding thought
• “Knowledge about children that comes from outside
one’s own experience seems to make little headway
against received wisdom and ‘commonsense’
practice. It is only when the research helps one to
see with one’s own eyes that it gets beneath the
skin”.
Jerome Bruner (1980, p.211)

49. Whatever happened to the children
in Margaret Donaldson’s “utopia”?