2.1 Chapter 2: Summary of Key Takeaways

114 | Quality Early Learning

emotional development, preliteracy and prenumeracy understandings and abilities, ways of understanding the world, and self- expression through the creative arts. It is vital that ECE educators work with parents to enhance the quality of the home experience and the smooth transition from home to preschool. When planning for implementation, a three-step process is advised, including a diagnosis to understand the current cultural and political context, planning for implementation, and ensuring a plan and process for continuous feedback and improvement.

See table 2.1 for a summary of the key takeaways in this chapter.

Table 2.1 Chapter 2: Summary of Key Takeaways

The nature and quality of adult-child relationships

• The role of the ECE educator is most effectively that of facilitator and guide rather than instructor. This has been referred to as a “relational” rather than an instructional pedagogy. • There are three key elements of quality ECE pedagogy: (1) supporting children’s spoken and communication skills, (2) supporting children’s ability to self-regulate their cognitive and emotional mental processes, and (3) creating opportunities for active learning through play.

Element 1: Communicating meaning

• Children need to be given opportunities to communicate meaning by representing their perceptions and understandings about the world through a range of linguistic, visual, and physical media, including activities. • Children’s ability to communicate meaning is influenced by their oral language, exploratory talk, and narrative skills. • Various specific activities and tools are available that teachers can use to cultivate these skills, including book reading and story-telling. Opportunities to engage in back-and-forth interactions with teachers and peers, as well as opportunities for children to explain themselves, can all build children’s ability to communicate meaning.

Element 2: Self-regulation

• Children’s self-regulation abilities are highly influenced by a range of social factors and so are teachable. • Classrooms supporting self-regulation are characterized by challenging and open-ended tasks, opportunities for children to control the level of challenge, and the encouragement of positive feelings toward challenge. • Children’s autonomy should be supported through the provision of choice and encouragement for children to develop their ideas and interests, and approaches that encourage children to talk about and reflect upon their learning.

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Table 2.1 (continued)

Element 3: Playful, active learning

• Playful, active learning affects children’s executive functioning, selfregulation, and language development. • Play is multifaceted and can be characterized into five types—physical play, play with objects, symbolic play, pretend play, and games with rules—each of which serves a different purpose.

Key curriculum elements

• Although curriculum is necessarily organized in subject areas, it is vital that a whole-child approach be considered. • A whole-child, evidence-based curriculum should include activities supporting children’s development in five areas: physical health and development, social and emotional development, emergent literacy and numeracy understandings and abilities, ways of understanding the world, and self-expression through the creative arts. • Documenting children’s activities, interests, and achievements through displays on the walls or in class books or albums, including records of discussions, photos of activities, and children’s creative products, can help assess children’s development and inform the educator’s future planning for the class. Open documentation should be complemented with the educator’s and child’s own records of individual children’s activities, enthusiasms, and achievements.

Diagnose

• When diagnosing conditions on the ground, key aspects to consider include understanding teacher knowledge, observing classroom instruction, knowing what materials are available, reviewing curriculum documents, understanding the level of classroom and school-level support available to teachers and parents, and community views of and support for pedagogy.

Plan for implementation

• When planning for implementation, key recommendations include understanding how to contextualize principles for pedagogy; prioritizing domains of knowledge, building from developmental progressions and based on country standards documents; prioritizing support for teachers that can be embedded in curriculum documents; co-developing scopes and sequences and curriculum documents, embedding principles for pedagogy; pilot testing and eliciting teacher input on pedagogical approaches and curriculum throughout process; and developing a plan for supporting the transition to primary school.

Continuous feedback and improvement

• Curriculum documents are continually evolving. It is important to have a system in place that allows for continual improvement of materials. • This system of improvement should include gathering data through routine observations and interviews with teachers and others in the education system.

Source: Original table for this publication. Note: ECE = early childhood education.