I worry that what we could end up doing – what I think the new EYFS does – is looking at it as a bit of an add-on. With the Rose Review, the new phonics material and the “simple view of reading,” we could very easily forget about it, more or less, and simply stress that children have to be respected and that practitioners should be genuinely interested.
Yet it would seem to me to be a crucial issue in EY pedagogy. SST (which reminds me of STD too much) is to do with effective interaction between adults and children; it comes very close to the “co-construction” that Angela Anning et al champion so effectively in Early Childhood Education: society and culture, in particular in Barbara Jordan’s chapter, where she declares that there is a
“qualitative difference between the minimal levels of shared understanding developed during either teacher-directed teaching or unassisted, child-directed play, and the much greater levels that develop when all parties are contributing to interactions though the sharing of power.” (Anning 2004, p36)
There is an interesting extract from Marion Dowling’s Nursery World article from May 2006 on the Literacy Trust website.
But the question remains: how do we train practitioners in Sustained Shared Thinking?
There is, of course, the training material from Early Education, and the daunting (perhaps too daunting?) question that the EYFS card ends with: Have you ever taped your interactions with children to see how you support the development of creativity and critical thinking?
Perahps the diffculty lies not so much in the subject as the fact that this is a skill, largely intuitive, that we are looking for. There are books like Dunkin and Hanna’s Thinking Together, which form a sort of programme of in-service work and reflection designed to improve practice, and an Early Childhood Centre in Nebraska has compiled a bibliography on the subect, but perhaps what is called for is observation of good and bad practice, and time to relfect in grouops and alone on what sustained shared thinking feels like, and how, within our own ways of communicating, each of us can develop the skills.
To this end, the Communicating Matters pack comes close to a programme designed to improve communication between EY practitioners and their children, but begs the question as to whether we are, at heart, asking for a specific technique we can name Sustained Shared Thinking, or whether the term covers a broad spectrum of high-quality practices in relating to and listening to young children.
nicktomjoe 