characteristics of effective learning.
In planning and guiding children's activities, practitioners must reflect on the different ways that children learn and reflect the characteristics of effective learning in their practice. Three characteristics of effective teaching and learning are:
- playing and exploring - children investigate and experience things, and 'have a go'
- active learning - children concentrate and keep on trying if they encounter difficulties, and enjoy achievements, and
- creating and thinking critically - children have and develop their own ideas, make links between ideas, and develop strategies for doing things.
The characteristics of effective learning are important because they:
- help develop positive attitudes and dispositions;
- enable children to show us their needs, interests and preferences, feelings and ideas;
- enable children to transfer adult-led learning and make it their own;
- encourage children to stretch themselves and meet their own learning needs.
PLAYING AND EXPLORING
Play is a particularly important vehicle for learning for young children. This wonderful quotation, found on the website http://quixoteconsulting.com/Blog/2013/09/20/ play-and-learning-quotes-part-5/ (along with many others), sums up why it is so crucial in helping children to become lifelong learners: 'It's not so much what children learn through play, but what they won't learn if we don't give them the chance to play.
'Many functional skills like literacy and arithmetic can be learned either through play or through instruction - the issue is the amount of stress on the child. However, many coping skills like compassion, self-regulation, self-confidence, the habit of active engagement, and the motivation to learn and be literate cannot be instructed. They can only be learned through self-directed experience (ie, play).' (Susan J Oliver of the organisation Playing for Keeps.)
It is important to note that, in their play, children often demonstrate all the other characteristics. Lilian Katz (in Too Much Too Soon? Early Learning and the Erosion of Childhood, 2011) identified four types of learning goal: knowledge/understanding; skills; dispositions, which she defines as 'habits of mind with intentions and motives (not attitudes)'; and feelings. She suggests that it is not possible to instruct children to develop dispositions and feelings - children learn them from experience and from the people around them. It is, however, possible to damage children's dispositions by inappropriate instruction.
Katz's work reminds us that:
- children can know how to read and write and have the skill to do both, but may not feel good about themselves as readers and writers and may not have the disposition to be a reader and writer
- practitioners need to pay attention to all four learning goals if children are to make lasting progress
- we need to observe to ensure we notice children who are losing confidence and becoming unmotivated.
The National Strategies in Learning, Playing and Interacting (2009) provided a useful definition of play: 'Play is freely chosen by the child, and is under the control of the child. The child decides how to play, how long to sustain the play, what the play is about, and who to play with. There are many forms of play, but it is usually highly creative, open-ended and imaginative. It requires active engagement of the players, and can be deeply satisfying.'
When children are playing, they explore:
- feelings
- materials
- ideas
- relationships and roles (including language of roles)
- connections between one experience and another
- signs and symbols.
In their play, children represent ideas, objects, people and environments. Play can be solitary or include others, and play can help children to develop these positive dispositions for learning:
- finding an interest
- being willing to explore, experiment and try things out
- knowing how and where to seek help
- being inventive - creating problems and finding solutions
- being flexible - testing and refining solutions
- being engaged and involved
- making choices and decisions
- making plans and knowing how to carry them out
- playing and working collaboratively
- managing self, managing others
- developing 'can-do' orientations to learning
- being resilient - finding alternative strategies if things don't go as planned
- understanding the perspectives and emotions of others (from Learning, Playing and Interacting, 2009).
Vivian Gussin Paley, in The Boy Who Would be a Helicopter, writes: 'We were taught to say that play is the work of children. But watching and listening to them, I saw that play was nothing less than Truth and Life.'
Exploring involves having the confidence to:
- use all senses
- watch what others do and how they behave and then imitate
- interact with materials, objects and people
- take risks and accept a challenge
- raise questions and seek out answers
- engage and communicate with others verbally and non-verbally.
Some children arrive at settings lacking the confidence to explore (especially if they risk getting dirty) and take risks. Some may have been inhibited by adults around them and some may have cautious personalities. It is the role of the practitioner to support children to try new things and to move beyond their comfort zone.
ACTIVE LEARNING
Active learning is not just about physical activity. It involves:
- physical engagement - sensory exploration, hands-on experience, movement, transference of materials and ideas from one context to another
- emotional engagement - curiosity, motivation, confidence, self-belief, empathy, resilience, pride
- intellectual engagement - concentration, thinking, encountering contradictions and problems and persisting to address these
- social engagement - children learning alongside and from others (both other children and adults), within and outside of the setting. This social engagement, which requires sharing, turn-taking, collaborating, resolving conflict, etc, is particularly challenging for young children.
Often, children demonstrate a number of types of engagement within one experience.
CREATING AND THINKING CRITICALLY
Dictionary definitions of creativity include:
- 'having the ability to create'
- 'originality of thought'
- 'having or showing imagination'
- 'sophisticated bending of the rules or conventions'.
Tina Bruce reminds us that young children's creations are mostly 'of the everyday kind' (see Cultivating Creativity in Babies, Toddlers and Young Children, 2004) and that creativity is part of virtually every subject discipline, not just the arts.
We need to recognise that you need to be creative to be:
- a mathematician
- a scientist
- a writer
- an artist
- an ICT specialist
- a gymnast or dancer
- a musician
- a gardener
- a chef
- a doctor
- an actor
- a hairdresser
- a mechanic
- a teacher/practitioner
- a plumber or carpenter
- and lots of other things.
The idea that we need to support and extend children's thinking came from the Researching Effective Pedagogy in the Early Years (REPEY) project, which concluded: 'Adult-child interactions that involve some element of "sustained shared thinking" or what Bruner has termed "joint involvement episodes" may be especially valuable in terms of children's learning.'
Young children show their thinking through their:
- interactions with objects and materials
- behaviours or preoccupations within self-chosen activity
- questions (non-verbal or verbal)
- verbal interactions
- mark making.
We see they are powerful thinkers if we are willing to try to understand them. 'In his mental model of the world, there are a great many gaps that he might sense, but he is not able to put these into words. A child just feels a gap in his mind, like a missing piece in a jigsaw puzzle. But when, through his experiences, one way or another, along comes the piece of information that fits the gap, it's pulled in there as if by a magnet. I think we've all experienced this.' (Learning all the Time, John Holt 1989, Education Now Publishing Co-operative.)
The characteristics of effective learning are most likely to be demonstrated:
- when children are initiating their own learning
- when children have adults or more experienced peers to act as role models and to provide challenge - both by adding resources and by interacting
- within meaningful, real-life experiences that motivate and inspire children and that are challenging but achievable for them
- when children receive personal encouragement and positive feedback from others - for example, telling a child 'you worked really hard to solve that problem'.
Avoid:
- over-planning and over-directing
- telling or showing children what to do with open-ended materials and experiences - children need to be free to develop their own ideas
- providing models for children to copy or fill in - handwriting practice sheets, colouring in, filling in adult drawn shapes or making adult-designed models
- a daily routine that is fragmented with little time to work in depth. Children cannot develop their ideas fully if they are constantly interrupted.
This is an edited extract from 'Recognising the Characteristics of Effective Learning' in Developing High Quality Observation, Assessment and Planning in the Early Years - Made to Measure by Lisa Sancisi and Margaret Edgington
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