Creating a Culture of Reflective Practice

The Role of Pedagogical Leadership in Early Childhood Programs

Anne Marie Coughlin, Lorrie Baird

• Publisher: Redleaf Press
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781605547404
• eBook ISBN: 9781605547411
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Early Childhood Education

As the field of early learning continues to grow and evolve, we must consider the impact of our approaches to working with adults and children. Early childhood professionals and leaders need to reconcile their responsibilities in never-ending administrative tasks, ensuring program quality, and supporting the growth of others. Creating a Culture of Reflective Practice: The Role of Pedagogical Leadership in Early Child Programs is a comprehensive practical look at creating systems, structures, and protocols for supporting people in?large and small organizations, individuals working as mentors, coaches or pedagogical leaders to invite educators into a thinking and learning process about their work.

Readers will develop the skills and mindsets that can enhance their performance and effect organizational change. Creating a Culture of Reflective Practice offers stories and structures connected to four principles of pedagogical leadership with specific ideas to enhance the work of educational leaders.

Working from a place of values and vision

Building strong relationships

Seeing and supporting strengths and competencies

Supporting professional learning in multiple ways

CHAPTER ONE

Welcoming Complexity into Our Work

“The path isn’t a straight line—it is a spiral. You continually come back to things you thought you understood and see deeper truths.”

Barry H. Gillespie

Take a moment to consider…

What has been your journey in early learning?

What do you think it means to be a pedagogical leader?

What are you hoping for as you begin this book?

We are story sharers, which is slightly different than storytellers.

For years we have been gathering and sharing stories from the early learning classrooms we have had the good fortune to work in and visit. As pedagogical leaders, classroom stories have been one of the most powerful tools we have encountered to help us learn about ourselves, connect with other people, and reflect on practice. So for us it makes sense that we construct our book about pedagogical leadership around stories.

We are also drawn to thinking with structures. Not the kind of rigid structures that do the thinking for you but a variety of open structures that invite questions to help guide, challenge, and expand our thinking.

The stories and structures that we offer in this book are some of the ones we use in our work with the pedagogical leaders and educators in our own organizations and in our consulting work. We offer them to you as an invitation to explore, share, and learn from your own stories of practice.

While we had been toying around with writing together for years, it wasn’t until spring 2019 that the ideas for this particular book began to take root. With the encouragement and nudging of our good friend and mentor Deb Curtis, we felt it was time to share some of the thinking and practices that we have found to be so useful over the years. Little could we have known just how much the world was about to change.

Of all the challenges we could have imagined in writing a book, doing it in the middle of a global pandemic wasn’t one of them. Like so many others, we have had to learn to move and work differently. It has been a tremen-dously emotional time during which we have needed to develop new approaches, learn new terminology, rethink budgets, and find creative ways to connect with each other. Yet with all of the loss and challenge that COVID-19 has unleashed on the world, the virus has also offered an opportunity for us to slow down, deeply consider the purpose of our work, and strengthen our resolve to build the kind of world we want to live in. The pandemic has reminded us that we are all global citizens, and our actions have a profound impact on each other and the planet we live on. If there was ever a time for stories of hope and healing in the world, it is now.

In early childhood education, hopefulness has always been our call to action. We have an ethical responsibility to enter our work wearing an armor of optimism. We owe it to children to focus on a future that is worthy of them. To see our challenges as opportunities and leave the world in a better place than we found it. This is our work, and it’s why we have written this book.

PEDAGOGY AND PEDAGOGICAL LEADERSHIP

We are living in a rapidly changing world, and as people who live and work with the earth’s youngest humans, what we do matters greatly. How might we meet the challenge of our times and work in ways that can help heal the world? How might we reexamine the purpose of education and think more deeply about the kind of educators we want to be? How can we focus our teaching practices around compassion, curiosity, imagination, experimentation, collaboration, innovation, and kindness? We believe the pathway to a new kind of thinking in early childhood is to take a new approach to leadership, one that moves us beyond the administration of rules and regulations and takes a pedagogical approach.

The words pedagogy and pedagogical leader are relatively new terms for many early childhood educators. Depending on whom you talk to, you will find many different interpretations for each. In education, we think of peda-gogy as the study of the teaching and learning processes and the pedagogical leader as someone who supports that study. When we reflect back on our careers, we can see that we were pedagogical leaders long before we knew what the word pedagogy meant. As educators in the classroom, we were always curious and eager to understand more about children’s learning and thinking. We intuitively understood that it was our responsibility to create conditions for relationships to unfold. When we moved out of the classroom and into formal leadership roles, we brought that same curiosity and understanding to our work with adults. Over time, we have come to see the role of a pedagogical leader as someone who is curious about thinking and learning, sees the competencies of others, understands the importance of relationships, and develops structures to grow a culture of reflective practice and critical thinking. A pedagogical leader is someone who nurtures learning dispositions and is guided by strong values and a vision for themselves and others.

“If I compare a pedagogical leader with a manager, the latter is someone who hovers around and micro-manages to check offa to-do list while the former is a person who shows the direction and vision to follow and also inspires others to research and learn for the sake of personal and professional growth.”

Sonyaa educator

We know that for many people, the idea of being a pedagogical leader themselves might be new. Historically, leadership in early childhood has leaned more toward the administrative side. Let’s face it, for some folks even pronouncing the word pedagogy is a difficult task. Whether your tongue trips over the word or not, if you are interested in growing a culture of reflective thinking in yourself and others, this book is for you. This book is for educators and leaders who are interested in the relationships that unfold through the teaching and learning opportunities that take place every day and how they can become more intentional in their practice. It is for those who want to explore principles that can act as a foundation for their work and who are eager to collaborate and think with others. If this is you, then perhaps you will begin to see yourself as a pedagogical leader as well. While we see that educators in the classroom can take up the role of pedagogical leader alongside children, we have written this book for those leaders who support the work of adults on behalf of their work with young children. We believe all pedagogical leaders deserve a pedagogical leader and an organization that systemically supports this approach.

“My pedagogical leader has definitely shifted my practices as an educator and person. She has helped me build and grow frameworks that challenge my thinking and perspectives.”

Carrie, educator

We have experienced firsthand the transformation that takes place when early learning professionals are supported by organizations and leaders who take up a pedagogical approach to their work together. When guided by clear pedagogical principles and intentional practices, educators and pedagogical leaders begin to learn more about themselves and the impact of their work.

THINKING ABOUT QUALITY IN EARLY EDUCATION

It is without question that ensuring quality is one of the greatest responsibilities pedagogical leaders take on. The word quality has been part of early childhood rhetoric for as long as we can remember, and for many the pressure to achieve this thing called quality is enormous. For years we have been involved in discussions at various tables where dedicated people have searched for the best way to create quality environments. We have been witness to (and, yes, even tried using) a wide variety of checklists, standards, and programs that have been imposed on the early childhood community with the promise of obtaining some kind of “high-quality” experience for children. It seems that every year we are bombarded with some new approach designed to offer a foolproof path to quality. Out of a deep desire to be perceived as a strong and competent educator or leader, we can end up imposing ideas on ourselves and others that have been curated around someone else’s perception of quality. All too often these ideas have been narrowly focused around one particular worldview and leave little room for thinking about the role of education and teaching in today’s changing world.

With everything leaders are responsible for, it is easy to see how these predesigned approaches can be alluring. And yet, in our combined seventy years of working in this field, we have yet to stumble on any one foolproof standard, checklist, or program that can ensure quality. In fact, we question whether ensuring quality is even possible or ethical. Perhaps it is because there is no one way to think about quality. Quality is complex and personal. It seems to us that asking, “How do we ensure quality?” is not nearly as useful as asking other questions, like “What does quality mean? Who gets to decide? What does quality look, feel, smell, or taste like? Who benefits and who is excluded?” What systems can we design to make sure we include these kinds of questions about quality in all aspects of our organization? Digging into these kinds of questions can help us to see that there are many ideas, many paths, and many stories about quality. The process invites complex thinking and helps us resist the temptation of defining it from a single narrative—one that may benefit only a small portion of the population.

The more we listen to each other, question our certainties, and consider multiple perspectives, the more we come to realize that there is far more about our work (and this world) that we don’t know than we do. Being open to each other and different ideas can help us resist leaning toward one uni-versal truth and aid us in realizing that we are continuously learning as we shift and expand our understanding. It can liberate us from thinking that we need to have the one right answer and inspire us to consider other stories. It can shift us from saying ‘Now we know this” (a declaration of certainty) to “This is what we know now (an admission that we are continuously shifting and growing and there is no end to our knowing).

When we are willing to embrace the complexity of our work, we become open to...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Chapter One: Welcoming Complexity into Our Work
• Chapter Two: Pedagogical Leaders Work from a Place of Values and Vision
• Chapter Three: Pedagogical Leaders Focus on Building Meaningful Relationships
• Chapter Four: Pedagogical Leaders See and Support Competence in Children and Adults
• Chapter Five: Pedagogical Leaders Support Learning in Multiple Ways by Design
• Moving an Elephant: Some Final Thoughts
• References
• Index