Thanks to Paul Wickens, I have been able to play with word clouds, using the Wordle software. Of course these kinds of results need interpreting – but note the “must” in the Wordle cloud word frequency for the first chapter of EYFS – and am I right the wordle for chapter I have laboured so hard at looks rather woolly?
Or is this just the font?
The new header image, btw, is a Wordle of the introduction to EYFS.
Lenore Skenazy in the Free Range Kids blog alerts us to the idea of fake logs for children to play on. She – and many of the people replying – are justifiably bemused, angered or just plain gobsmacked by this, although not everyone is as super-critical as I might have imagined. I am pondering my response – I may go and whittle a stick while I do.
Dear reader, what are your thoughts? Are plastic logs (the advert is linked here) a nifty gimmick to get children moving? Too sanitised to be of use? A depressing way of undermining natural education? Or what?
Well, the sun is shining, and I ended the teaching day sat under the trees in our Arboretum with the people who are going to be my personal tutees. It was easy to be upbeat, while remembering that this experience, the workload and learning challenges of the PGCE never make for an easy year. So much to learn, for some a lot to unlearn, and this year above all some key messages the Government want us to deliver.
This isn’t going to be a moan. I read, for example, the latest drafts, tweets and releases on redefining SEN and am determined to think “here is another challenge” and then worry how the trainees and the trainers – and most importantly the schools – will deal with this, but today of all days we need to look at all this with some hope. Here is a large and competent bunch of students all looking at us, keen to get going, nervous of the step they’re taking and I feel I need to say
“We are professionals with you. As I’ve said before, we have beliefs we profess – and we want to share our vision with you.“
So what are we asking the Early Years PGCE students to learn? What does an Early Years teacher need to know?
I could list phonics, transition, pedagogies, child development, curriculum documentation, leading the team, dealing with parents, answering critics – the list is very long. Maybe I want them to know one thing: how children learn best. All being well, the rest may fall into place when they have grasped the beginnings of that.
To start with a quotation:
“Psychologists and educators have found it difficult to come to a definition of what play is – partly, perhaps, because the phenomenon is more easily recognised than it is pinned down to a rigid classification. However, understanding some of the complexities of play needs some unpicking. We can identify play when we see it, but going beyond a mere description is a more complex business.”
So much from the Reflective Reader we wrote back in 2007.
Has the new framework for Early Years changed any of this? It has to be admitted that there are a number of other documents and web sites which augment the framework, not least Early Education’s key Development Matters material, which must not be overlooked. But a quick look through the framework makes for depressing reading in many ways.
If we look at para 1.9:
Each area of learning and development must be implemented through planned, purposeful play and through a mix of adult-led and child-initiated activity. Play is essential for children’s development, building their confidence as they learn to explore, to think about problems, and relate to others.
Children learn by leading their own play, and by taking part in play which is guided by adults. There is an ongoing judgement to be made by practitioners about the balance between activities led by children, and activities led or guided by adults. Practitioners must respond to each child’s emerging needs and interests, guiding their development through warm, positive interaction. As children grow older, and as their development allows, it is expected that the balance will gradually shift towards more activities led by adults, to help children prepare for more formal learning, ready for Year 1.
We are clearly here in the realm of an instrumental view of play, one in which practitioners view play not as having intrinsic value but as a means to an end.
The gloom that hangs over this for me is the increasing interference of adults in children’s activities “to help children prepare for more formal learning, ready for Year 1.” Not only school readiness, but ready for a top-down curriculum done to children… So the official/enacted curriculum is already strong on what we need children to be like and we are no further on than the Desirable Outcomes in the 90s.
Or am I being too gloomy?
At the heart of my disquiet, I think, is the lack of clarity I started this post with. Part of me sees this difficulty in coming to a shared understanding about what play is as liberating – an ambiguity that allows for creativity, for risk-taking, for making time to read a book or whittle a stick; part of me would like a definition, and if I’m honest I’d like it so that we could have a bulwark against the intrusion of issues such as “school readiness” and top-down pressure. But there is a third element here, and I’ll end with a question:
As tides turn and fashions change, to what extent can EY practitioners steel themselves to live with this ambiguity, since the lack of definition actually makes us easy prey to the notion that Early Years practice is in effect just preparation for real learning?
…to the history of outdoor playground design, and a great blog from Playground Design.
When I link to RSA, I usually have something to link that’s a talk, or one of the entertaining RSA animations, like this more recent Divided Brain one. Today, it’s merely this: the connection between art and wellbeing, explored here, and the point made at the end of the blog entry about measurability. While Marlow’s article in the Guardian suggests all sorts of projects that try or have tried to quantify happiness and to promote wellbeing, with this one to my mind being the most straightforward (and the questionnaire rather revealing, in the way of such things) , I can still hear Kathryn Ecclestone echoing John Stuart Mill, on whether asking the question “Are you happy?” adds much to an understanding of ourselves. Of course this links to the post below on Flow and the TED talk from Mihaly Csikszentmihaly. So, to end, a final link: If you’re happy and you know it is an interesting overview of the notion of the pursuit of happiness.
Some very interesting links here for the New Year, for example this one on play in the Early Years or the more general link to a map (which perhaps could do with a bit of elaboration – I note some gaps round Oxford for example!!).
The Play In Schools position paper is also well worth a read, despite being 6 years from its publication. Despite? Perhaps because. How much movement has there been? Are we now seeing a return to formalisation in schooling which will cost play dear? Or will it simply mean a clearer line between the two – “Work hard, play hard” as my head teacher used to say – except he was thinking of rugby, which I found more of a trial than Greek.
The ever-thoughtful Julian Grenier brings to our attention – well, to mine anyway – the new physical activity guidelines in his blog and in the factsheet 2 It deserves some consideration, although I feel uneasy as I read it. . Part of me has to recognise where my opposition comes from: the tone, which is less factsheet than Diktat, and (deeper in my history) from the dire footie sessions in Junior and Secondary schooling where I was taught nothing and stood around, bored and cold and sidelined (and I now shamefacedly wonder about all those other classes where I lapped up attention at the cost of bored and sidelined classmates). However, three hours a day seems an awful lot to get in – until we turn from the terse and instructional language of the factsheet to the longer report itself, Start Active, Stay Active and in particular Ch 3 on Early Years.
Full marks to the repeated admissions of the paucity of research evidence on EY activity. But I find the argument interesting, and I worry about this reported connection:
Importantly, patterns of sedentary behaviour, particularly TV viewing, are relatively stable over time.
The brief, sketchy but important section p24 tells us soething about what the report sees as important about play, abd while I could argue about this rather instrumental view of such a core way of interacting, it is nonetheless worth quoting in extenso:
Active play opportunities should encourage young
children to:
•use their large muscle groups
• practise a wide range of different movements
• experience a variety of play spaces and
equipment
• set up their own play areas
• make up their own active play
• have fun and feel good about themselves and what they can do.
But does it have to seem as if we are required to do it? Oppositional me feels like catching the bus instead of cycling to work in the morning….
Perhaps I have been too allusive in recent posts on EYFS, and perhaps this is a symptom of being away from the classroom too long – too far away from the stories shared with chidlren, the time we found a mouse’s nest, the cafe where the food was made of sand from the sand pit. When I included here a quotation from Evangelou et al to the effect that “the art of early years practice is getting the balance right between guided and self initiated learning, either in homes or in settings” I ought to have gone further, and maybe nailed my colours to the mast. Here, then are some more quotations to think about.
In Sue Rogers’ chapter on “Powerful Pedagogies” (in Liz Brooker and Sue Edwards’ Engaging Play) she suggests, for example that
The coupling of play with pedagogy is in many ways a deeply problematic enterprise for at least three reasons [I’m quoting just the first two here]: first, because traditionally, the concept of play has been positioned in marked opposition to its apparently more worthwhile counterpart, work. This divuision is marked not simply by the ways in which play is often relegated to specific times and places but also in the ways inn which it is regarded in practice as a marginal and recreational activity removed from the real business of the early childhood classroom. Second the pedagogization of play (pedagogy of play) has meant that play has increasingly become an instrument for learning adult competencies.
And Deborah Albon’s chapter on Playing for Real (in Janet Moyles’ Thinking about Play) starts to draw to a conclusion with these remarks:
…I do not believe there are easy answers; indeed I am suspicious of ‘easy answers’ to complex areas of practice. But I do believe the questions are important to reflect on and constantly revisit as team. This points to a need for reflective classroom discussions about play in early childhood settings that go way beyond planning meetings merely listing the resources that might be added to an area in order to organize and encourage children’s play or that discuss observations of children’s play without reflecting on the role practitioners could play in extending or, indeed, inhibiting that play.
So here’s me not being allusive:
The richest times I have seen children have in school have rarely been in the gift of the adult, except indirectly. That’s not to say that there wasn’t learning there – my observations at the time suggested the opposite – or that learning didn’t take place in opportunities I created, but simply that those times which I remember best from working with young children are those in which children seem motivated and involved in a project that has only incidentally been about their learning something I have chosen. They have been afternoons with time machines, days with dens, improvised pulleys and rope swings, funerals for dolls, and the time that mouse came out from under a paving slab.
Another student comes today to talk about the job she’s got in Foundation Stage, despite her training being in the Primary phase. Why am I rattled by this? Is it the misunderstanding of the students that they will be OK, or the heads’ misunderstanding of what might be needed – or my fundamental misunderstanding of how un-precious EY pedagogy really is?
There is, of course, the embattled group syndrome, real Sherif intergroup stuff (this link is to a quick and easy overview) ,where EY people would somehow like to believe their work –our work, my work – is so specialised that no-ne dare set foot in the door without highly detailed understandings of child development and effective pedagogy . It’s true in one way. We do need –the research is at least clear on this – well-qualified people. I take this to mean people with graduate attributes ( for one table of attributes linked to employability see this fascinating article fromn BeJLT) who understand their job, who understand children; despite admiring his on-the-hoof work towards child-centred learning, we don’t want to replicate the experiences of Wilderspin.
EPPE is after all very clear:
High quality pre-schooling is related to better intellectual and social/behavioural development for
children.
Settings that have staff with higher qualifications have higher quality scores and their children make more progress.
Quality indicators include warm interactive relationships with children, having a trained teacher as manager and a goodproportion of trained teachers on the staff.
Where settings view educational and social development as complementary and equal in importance, children make better all round progress.
Effective pedagogy includes interaction traditionally associated with the term “teaching”, the provision of instructive
learning environments and ‘sustained shared thinking’ to extend children’s learning.
But there is another side to this: the idea of some school leaders and parents that “anyone” can teach in Early Years, the feeling that it is not a job that requires immense amounts of trust or expertise. It is bound to rankle.
The third point however, has to be where I point the finger at myself.
At what level does the teacher, or the teacher-trainer or (in my case the learning and development leader for a team of teacher-trainers [as in this epigram from A B Ramsay] need to recognise that the fine-tuning between the Foundation Stage and Key Stage 1 is just that? That’s not to say that there isn’t some poor practice “out there,” and Julie Fisher’s excellent new book, Moving on to Key Stage 1 (yes I did write an endorsement) is certainly written with a need in mind here, but when faced with the need to give guidance to teachers – or students – themselves faced with impossible demands, should we – I – be so quick to draw lines? Where do principles need to come in to play?
Perahps the answer lies not so much in the Pauline notion of “integrity, gravity and sound speech” as the idea of St Benedict; the teacher trainer may have principles but should also be aptus… ad lucrandas animas, skilled at winning souls, “qualified to win souls,” as this translation has it.
Qualified. I’m back to where I started.
nicktomjoe 