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| | Beyond data Julian Grenier |
Introduction
Twenty years ago, I moved from my role as a primary school Early Years co-ordinator to a new position as the Deputy Headteacher of a London nursery school. It was a pioneering integrated centre with babies and toddlers on roll as well as three- and four-year olds, and there were programmes of family support and close, positive links with social workers. My daughter was about a year old and the whole place just felt like it was the ‘right place’ for children and their families. But I had also unwittingly become a participant in the large-scale Effective Provision of Pre-school Education (EPPE) project (Sylva et al., 2010) and soon found myself being interviewed by one of the researchers. As the questions flowed about children’s early learning, assessment, and leading the team, I could hear that much of what I was saying was quite simply nonsense. I have never forgotten that feeling: it dawned on me that I had been busy teaching young children, caring for them, leading a team of practitioners and so on, yet I had never really examined my own theories and ideas.
That is why I now believe strongly that practitioners working in the early years need encouragement and opportunities for reflection and thinking. Early education is not just a programme that anyone can simply be trained to deliver. If we want children to be thinkers, problem-solvers and creators, then we need to prioritise the same attributes in ourselves as practitioners: as Robin Alexander has argued, with reference to primary education, “pupils will not learn to think for themselves if their teachers are expected to do as they are told” (Alexander, 2010, p. 308).
Yet all too often, the actions and decisions taken by early years practitioners are shaped by the tyranny of ‘data’. There is little time for practitioners to meet and reflect with senior leaders in schools, or managers in other settings. The precious time that is available ends up being dominated, all too often, by discussions about who is ‘below expected’, where ‘the gaps’ are, or what proportion of children are going to achieve a ‘good level of development’. Parents find themselves receiving baffling tables of data, describing their three-year-olds’ development as ‘16–26 secure’ – leaving them wondering what on earth that might mean. Holmes (2015, p. 20) has described this ugly state of affairs as the “ ‘datafication’ of early years teachers and children.”
In this chapter, I am going to discuss one of the main findings of the Celebrating Children’s Learning project – that we need to go beyond these obscure and dry discussions about ‘data’. I will be arguing that good early education can enable children to develop a wider network of relationships, to play, to practise skills, to find multiple ways of communicating and sharing ideas, make new connections and gain new knowledge.
I will be arguing that practitioners need to get to know each child, using ‘keen observation’ (Dalli et al., 2011), and that in order to notice what is important about children’s development and learning, we need to offer a broad, rich and varied curriculum. After all, where there is little for children to do, there will be little for us to notice.
I will be arguing that where there is a rich learning environment and a rich curriculum, practitioners will have more opportunities to find out what children know and can do, how they think and develop their ideas, and what sorts of misconceptions and barriers to learning they might have. This relationship between noticing important things about children and developing effective early education is explored in the next section.
Children as active constructors of their learning
Jan Dubiel (2016, p. 10) makes the important point that “assessment is never an objective activity, nor can it ever be value free.” We could not possibly attempt to notice everything about each child in a group: we have to be selective, and one of the ways we are selective is that we draw on our theories about how children learn. We select things that seem to be significant because they tell us about the child’s learning and we ignore things that seem to be irrelevant. We should be open about this. As Margaret Carr et al. (2010, p. 20) argue, “early childhood practitioners … have to make some assumptions about learning, assessment and evaluation … that are informed and reflective.”
As Carr’s statement implies, learning, assessment and evaluation are all bundled together. You cannot carry out assessments if you are not thinking about learning, and you cannot be an educator and help a child to learn if you are not thinking all of the time about assessment. Learning is not a ‘natural’ process of development from one stage to another, like a caterpillar morphing into a cocoon and then into a butterfly. Nor is it the case that children have to be taught everything through repetition, reinforcement and practice. The research and evidence is in almost complete agreement: children are active learners and creators of meaning (Evangelou et al., 2009; Dalli et al., 2011; Pascal and Bertram, 2014). Smith (1999, p. 86) puts it neatly when she states that “models of development which emphasise the child’s natural and spontaneous development from within or of development as being shaped entirely through learning processes have been strongly criticised.” For this reason, commonly used terms like ‘tracking children’ in early years education are problematic. We could only ‘track’ children if, as practitioners, we played no role in their learning and development, just as a hunter tracks an animal by following it discreetly rather than helping to guide its journey. Early years practitioners are not just spectators, ‘tracking’ the child’s unfolding development.
The great Russian psychologist Lev Vygotsky (1978) argued that rather than thinking about children in isolation, and merely trying to assess their level of development, we should instead think of children as social learners with a level of development that depends on who they are with. Vygotsky called this the ‘zone of proximal development’ (or ZPD) and defined it as “the distance between the actual developmental level as determined by independent problem solving and the level of potential development as determined through problem solving under adult guidance, or in collaboration with more capable peers” (Vygotsky, 1978, p. 86). The researchers Wood, Bruner and Ross (1976) famously developed the term ‘scaffolding’ to describe a pedagogical technique that follows on from Vygotsky’s theory. They describe ‘scaffolding’ as “ ‘controlling’ those elements of the task that are initially beyond the learner’s capacity” (Wood, Bruner and Ross, 1976, p. 90).
In other words, we might notice that Ryan has taken his coat off his peg and is then standing slightly frozen, unsure of what to do next, and jot down the observation that “Ryan can’t put his coat on.” Or we might notice Ryan is stuck, and use the pedagogical technique of ‘scaffolding’. We could say something like, “If I hold your coat, can you put your arm in?” or “If I start off the zip, can you pull it up to the top?” This encourages Ryan to do things that he is able to do, whilst we do the things he cannot – we manage those elements of the task of putting on a coat that are currently beyond his ability.
A similar approach can be taken to developing a conversation with a child. If we spend time getting to know children, then we can help them with those parts of the conversation that might otherwise end in a roadblock. When Fatima comes up to her key person and says “noo-noo gone way,” her key person knows that ‘noo-noo’ is her pet name for her auntie and is able to keep the conversation going by saying, “Oh, where has aunty Tasmin gone?” This is what the researchers in the Oxford Pre-School Project, a study of early education in Oxfordshire in the 1970s, call a ‘contingent’ response to a child.
Wood, McMahon and Cranstoun (1980) make the distinction between the ‘contingent’ and the ‘programmatic’ responses adults make to children. A ‘contingent’ response depends on the adult knowing the child: “the adult takes the child’s interests and ideas as a focus and maintains the interaction contingently rather than programmatically” (Wood, McMahon and Cranstoun, 1980, p. 205). So Fatima’s key person works hard, drawing on her knowledge, to develop a conversation about auntie Tasmin and does not simply say, “Lovely, Fatima, now it’s circle time, be a good girl and sit down.” A very shocking example of a ‘programmatic’ response to a child, from the Oxford Pre-School Project, is described by Garland and White (1980, p. 53): “a child bursts out with the comment that ‘my Daddy’s dead, but I’ve got a grandfather and he’s going to take me to school’, only for the practitioner to reply ‘is he?’ ” and then continue “asking the children to recite in turn ‘it-is-Wednesday-the-thirtieth-of-June-hot-and-sunny’.”
During the EPPE project, the researchers built on this concept of the ‘contingent response’ and described a new pedagogical technique that they dubbed ‘sustained shared thinking’ (SST). In Researching Pedagogy in the Early Years (Siraj-Blatchford et al., 2002), sustained shared thinking is described as “an episode in which two or more individuals ‘work together’ in an intellectual way to solve a problem, clarify a concept, evaluate activities, extend a narrative etc. Both parties must contribute to the thinking and it must develop and extend.” More recently, Siraj, Kingston and Melhuish (2015) have added the clarifications that SST does not have to involve an adult-child dialogue, but might happen when children are talking with each other, and that it “may include ‘standing back’ and allowing the child to explore, familiarize, solve problems, and think by themselves or in pairs as well as intervening and supporting the child.” The EPPE researchers also use the term ‘reflexive co-construction’ (Siraj-Blatchford et al., 2002) to describe the type of effective early years pedagogy that is characterised by taking children’s ideas as the starting point for extended and mutual investigation.
In this section, I have argued that children are active constructors of their learning. Effective practitioners develop conversations and shared activities with children by using the pedagogical techniques of scaffolding, responding contingently to what children say, and developing sustained shared thinking. These ideas should directly inform how we think about assessment in the early years. If practitioners always stand back, or if they are constantly trying to note down a child’s ‘significant learning’, then it is unlikely that they are engaging in extended discussion, shared thinking, or scaffolding. In fact, the pressure to ‘gather evidence’ and to assess will directly interfere with their capacity to support the children’s learning. It is little wonder that Osgood (2012, p. 127) found that ‘doing observations’ is experienced as a laborious chore by many staff working with young children.
Mountains of evidence
As previously outlined, the best practice in early years assessment is in line with what we know about how young children learn, and how adults can best teach them. When practitioners practise ‘keen observation’, they can quickly adapt their approach to scaffold the child’s learning and help the child practise a skill, learn something new, develop an idea or overcome a difficulty.
When a four-year-old girl at Sheringham Nursery School was recently experimenting with different materials in our WaterPlay Zone, she saw a small stone sink rapidly to the bottom of the tray and told the practitioner that “heavy things go to the bottom.” Seeing an opportunity to develop her scientific thinking, the practitioner asked, “I wonder what will happen if we put the stone on the boat?” The stone was placed on a plastic boat and, to the child’s surprise, the boat with the stone on it floated. The practitioner then pushed down on the boat and encouraged the child to do the same: she commented, “It feels like the water’s pushing my hand.” They continued to discuss what they observed and felt, and the practitioner resisted the temptation to rush the child towards any conclusions. It was a very skilfully supported episode of joint investigation and sustained shared thinking. By way of contrast, I can remember how in my own reception class, some years ago, I wrote a label on a display that said “we investigated floating and sinking and we found that heavy things sink.” When the Local Authority Science Advisory Teacher visited, she ruefully commented, “Better not get on that ferry to France this year, then.”
Effective early years teaching, which rests on keen observation and quick responses to what children are doing and saying, dissolves the perceived boundary between ‘adult-directed teaching’ and ‘child-initiated learning’. As Bruner (1995, p. 6) argues, this type of teaching involves “adults treating the child as an agent and bent on ‘teaching’ him to be more so.” The more children develop their thinking, skills and understanding, the more they can be agents in early years settings and reception classes. They become more able to make their own choices and follow through their decisions. Just as effective teaching promotes more autonomy in early learning, Kochanska et al. (2001, cited in Evangelou et al., 2009, p. 19) have also argued that close and emotionally attuned caregiving helps children to become more autonomous: “the child embraces the caregiver’s agenda, and thus experiences compliance as self-generated and not interfering with striving for autonomy” leading to “voluntary, thoughtful adaptive and effective self- regulation.” The evidence suggests that effective practice in both teaching and caring for young children makes them more autonomous, stronger and better able to self-regulate.
However, if practitioners are under pressure to collect and collate huge amounts of evidence, then their ability to work in these ways is severely constrained. Writing a post-it note that “Jason likes playing with the blocks” or snapping a photo of a smiling Jason next to a tower of unit blocks he has built might capture his enjoyment. But it will make no contribution to his early education. And constantly jo...
