How practitioners should get involved in children’s play has been a central theme of early years pedagogy. It’s the topic of a one-day seminar from Julie Fisher, Visiting Professor at Oxford Brookes University, and is based on a four-year research project looking at how early years practitioners interact with young children.
Ms Fisher says the course, ‘Interacting or Interfering? Improving Interactions in the EYFS’, challenges the assumption that interactions ‘come about readily and naturally’, adding, ‘Adults sometimes force their own agenda onto children at an age when children are often highly motivated and driven by an agenda of their own.’
Caroline Burt, early years teacher at Fishergate Primary School in York, went on the course, which is offered through Early Excellence, after returning to early years teaching full time last year.
She says, ‘The course really demonstrated how careful you need to be – how [direction] needs to be taken from children and not you pressing your particular objective.’
Clips of real interactions from the research project were shown to demonstrate the sorts of interventions which were effective. Ms Burt says one example was something as simple as sitting down with children playing and deciding whether or not to ask a question, with the more effective scenario being not to.
Ms Burt says that her approach, and that of a teaching assistant who also went on the course, has now changed. ‘I am less vocal. I might copy what the children are doing rather than steer it – roll play-dough alongside them, for example. It can be quite subtle. You can be saying quite similar things but the child starts that interaction first – that’s crucial,’ she says.
The course also spoke about how positive interactions can be good for language development. Ms Burt cites an example of a practitioner trying to follow a child’s thought process, and avoiding correcting the child when they made mistakes. ‘Even if there were mistakes, that wasn’t a problem – correcting would mean the language flow would be interrupted. In terms of building confidence in speaking, that is more important,’ she says.
- More information about the project, http://bit.ly/2cyYeDT
