This link takes us to the blog of a bloke called Don Ledingham, who states that

Recent research, and our intuitive understanding, into the link between the ability to read and the ability to access the curriculum would suggest that a child’s developmental level is a key factor in their success or failure. Yet we treat younger children, who might be 20 per cent behind in their development, in exactly the same way as their peers.

I’d echo his thoughts on this.

I’ve had the good luck over the last few weeks of visiting some really good young and trainee EY practitioners in schools, and am brought back time and again to my persistent worry that, even where Child Development is part of the training programme for EY teachers and other practitioners, we run the risk of having our work (and consequently their work with young chidlren) dominated by externally defined structure – by training them to be what, in a previous post I noted Frank Furedi calling HE lecturers “purveyors.” Outcome mongers, perhaps.

What I would, in a perfect world, be calling for is a training curriculum that trusts three key players in the training process much more deeply than at present: it would trust the trainee who, increasingly, is in the process not by default (if that were ever widely the case) but out of a genuine desire to understand and practise the skills of teaching; it would trust the schools as hosts and partners to have something to give other than classroom space for the inexperienced to gain experience; it would trust initial teacher training providers to be able to encourage trainees in their desire – to encourage scholarship, risk-taking and learning from their mistakes. But this Utopia would be undrpinned by my desire to see Child Devlopment at the heart of the understanding of trainee – and the lecturer, and the host teacher – and that’s maybe just me wanting to impose that agenda rather than the agenda of people who work best by structure.

Oxford Brookes describes itself as ” learner centred,” but what does that mean in the context of an afternoon (or a morning) with PGCE trainees? Frank Furedi has an interesting insight on this in his THES article from December 2007, in which he castigates newer HE instititions for embracing a student centred model:

The equation of the student experience with an act of consumption has serious implications for academic life. The most important casualty of the promotion of this consumer-dictated model is the fundamental relationship between academics and their students. The model implicitly demands the transformation of the relationship between scholar and student to that of a provider of knowledge and skills and customer.

However, Furedi is talking, I think, not so much about HE/ITT or other professional training in Universities as about the less vocational tasks of education and training at HE level, where “economic and political pressures… are likely to distract lecturers from working in accordance with their discipline-based ethos,” whereas ITT is already subject to these forces in a number of important ways, and has been for some time. Or is this too world-weary?

Not to beat ourselves up too much – or to expose tutors to unnecessary criticism – it must have some connection with the difficulties of constructing a programme with at least three differing end points, two of which are official and externally generated: TDA requirements and the measures such as National Curriculum testing and OfSTED that judge teachers to be effective. The third – tertium non datum? – is where I think we become (or can become) learner-centrered, the area of the greatest creativity, in which assessment for learning meets the enthusiasm and previous experiences of the trainee – or their cynicism, or tiredness – to try and make a realistic programme that will inspire for success as well as prepare for survival.

Maybe that last line is what I’d really like: something not only grounded in good classroom practice, but also inspirational, to carry the hesitant into better practice than predecessors in a post might have had – or to sustain that good practice, rather than be bowed down by current tensions. This means we are urging change, in Initial Teacher Training, at least insofar as we empower our trainees to look for alternative solutions, to think creatively and to get to grips with that fundamental question that (at interview) seems such a trite warm-up line: Why do you want to be a teacher?

In what ways can training to be a teacher be made to mirror the curriculum we offer to young children?

There is an interactive element that very closely mirrors this in the school experiences or teaching practices trainees undergo. Here the elements of first-hand experience and social learning that are obvious in documents such as EYFS Card 4.1 and card 4.2 are brought to bear on the trainee. In some courses this is almost in a apprenticeship model.

I suspect the dynamism is brought by the trainee, to some extent: “I could always teach” is an attitude as unwelcome today as ever. It is fostered, however, by the degree to which the trainers allow imagination, exploration and risk-taking to be part of the formation of the new teacher. Or at least, that’s the ideal world…

I’m hoping this link takes readers to the early, early years photos I took this evening of my first grandchild. She’s not called Nick.

Enough words, if so.

I’ve often said this to trainees when they find the pace and content of the PGCE tricky in some way, and seeing my sister going the GTP makes me wonder whether the present alternatives are actually any healthier. Study where a fast pace is set by external forces generates stress, just as any working to deadlines does. What then are the possible alternatives?

The most radical would be to say that graduates should be able to teach without further qualificatory training; that they are intelligent enough to read and to pick up what they need form in-service training. The old charge at the Oxford degree ceremony Do vobis potestatem legendi “I confer on you the power to lecture” holds true, if this is the case. Instinctively I want to say it can’t mean “teach” in the sense we use it today. The transferable skills of “graduateness” may well equip people to tackle the demands of a new profession or to evaluate their professional practice differently, but do not, of themselves, constitute a sufficient understanding of child development, pedagogy, &c &c.

At the other extreme, I think, is the idea that only a rigorously regulated, top-down training prepares the untested for the requirements of being a government agent in education. Danger of death by a thousand folders and government initiatives follows, or at least might follow,with the trainee being seen as a recipient or information, being prepared to become a deliverer of policy.

And this is where the “If I were you” really starts to bite. A recent(ish) speech (cited in this article on outdoors education) suggsts that we need a pedagogy that is “interactive, dynamic, ethical, educational, and caring:” a tall order!

Key to the process has got be an understanding of notion of curriculum, including how we view that nebulous concept “the needs of the child,” and a definition of the role of the teacher, although the findings from recent research in New Jersey suggest that significant differences in content in training exist in US (as, perhaps, here in UK), and that issues of equity need to be addressed.

This song by MC Lars. Nothing to do with EY but it cheers me up. And any rapper who can mention Robert Venturi in a song like Spacegame gets my vote, too.

The bald answer has to be yes, of course. Not everything in a good quality Early Years centre is going to be sustained shared thinking; even the logistics of space and ratio would tend to prevent it.

Similarly – and crucially, in the context of this argument – Siraj-Blatchford et al make a telling point about staff expertise in this paragraph:

While ‘sustained shared thinking’ may be considered a necessary pre-requisite for excellent pedagogy in the early years; our analysis also shows that on its own it may be insufficient. We found examples of practitioners whose knowledge and understanding of the particular curriculum area being addressed was inadequate and this led to missed opportunities or uncertain outcomes, and this was particularly the case for the direct teaching of phonics. (p66).

Where does this insufficiency stem from? Perhaps – I almost hesitate to say – from the reverential approach to childhood that is more protective than challenging. There is a real need for practitioners and people who train them to sort out a coherent model, an ethic, perhaps, of Early Childhood Education, coupled with a need, as the report states, “to identify the pedagogic models being applied by the most effective settings and to find out how these are realised in practice.” (p40) The REPEY project report is quite clear, for example, that, while formal programmes of instruction can be “counterproductive” (p30), “participation in excellent, cognitively oriented pre-school programmes was associated with later school competence”, (p30) . If programmes are not the way – and perhaps my disquiet is around whether sustained shared thinking might not become a programme – then how do we distinguish quality practice from poor?

Time to revisit Barbara Jordan’s chapter on co-construction in Anning et al (2004) Early Childhood Education: Society and Culture and ask What are the implications (of time and space) for this approach, not so that children are followed round by quizzical “metacognitive practitioners” (a bizarre notion of the teacher/EY practitioner) but so that a balance of time and effort is given to effective instructive activity in which the child is listened to, as well as time set aside for activities in which the adult, as a competent partner, shares their enthusiasm and experetise…

 

 

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.

Or maybe just a moan and some links.

I can’t help feeling that the EYFS cards that deal with play – for example, 4.1 , or card 4.3 which specifically is on critical thinking are a bit lightweight. This, for example, is what card 4.3 has to say about SST:

The most effective settings practitioners support and challenge children’s thinking by getting involved in the thinking process with them.

Sustained shared thinking involves the adult being aware of the children’s interests and understandings and the adult and children working together to develop an idea or skill.

Sustained shared thinking can only happen when there are responsive trusting relationships between adults and children.

The adult shows genuine interest, offers encouragement, clarifies ideas and asks open questions. This supports and extends the children’s thinking and helps children to make connections in learning.

Yes, there is a link in the electronic version of the card to the REPEY project and I do understand that the cards are meant for all practitioners, not just those who have FDs or BAs but I’m not sure what being aware of the children’s interests and understanding and genuine interest are beyond good, but standard, everyday practice.

It’s interesting to note that the UNICEF research paper (it seems odd to call something 52 pages long a “report card”) lacks a clear Early Years focus. While it talks in Dimension 3 about Beyond Basic Skills and Transition to Employment it also admits, a little further down that, while “childcare must be regarded as a major factor in children’s educational well-being,” it goes on to say that “adequate and comparable data are not available to permit the quality and availability of child care in different countries to be included in this overview.”

I wonder why they overlooked reports such as the Early Years and Childcare International Evidence Project (a series of reports of which this link is just to one and this link is to the summary)?