Throughout my adult life, I have observed and taken part in many thousands of interactions between adults and children. These experiences helped me understand that the most powerful and appropriate adult responses to babies and children extend far beyond the list provided in Ofsted’s definition of teaching for early years (which includes ‘showing, exploring ideas, encouraging, recalling, setting challenges’). Many of these responses fall into the category of non-verbal communication.
Plenty of people working in early years are already using non-verbal communication to great effect. Unfortunately, these types of responses often go unrecognised as learned skills.
WHAT IS NON-VERBAL COMMUNICATION?
There are estimates that up to 90 per cent of communication between people is passed on non-verbally. There are many aspects to it, including eye contact, facial expressions, posture, gesture, haptics (touch as communication), proxemics (distance between those communicating) and paralanguage (the non-word aspect of speech, including pitch, volume, hesitation noises and intonation).
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