involve themselves in play? If your team members have read the resource sheet prior to your meeting they will have been introduced to the idea that educators should be involved in children’s play and learning. You might want to start your discussion by talking about this expectation - what does it mean to be involved in children’s play? - or by asking how team members responded to the thinking points at the end of the resource sheet. Some further discussion questions that be helpful: What strategies do you find most useful for extending children’s play? How do you decide when to intervene and when not to? When does involvement become “taking over”. How can we involve ourselves in play still allowing children time to play by themselves without direct adult intervention? How does our program encourage problem solving and provide opportunities for “sustained shared thinking”? How as educators are we able to get deeply involved in “shared thinking” with a child or group of children? How can we balance the need to maintain adequate supervision still being involved in play? For educators who may be unsure how to involve themselves in children’s play the following group exercise may be helpful. The list of questions and comments you develop will make a useful resource to help educators expand the strategies they use to extend children’s thinking and learning. Group exercise Ask each educator to think of an experience where their involvement made a difference to children’s learning. Explain to someone else what you did, why you did it and how it helped. As a group make a list of questions and comments that each of you have successfully used to expand and enrich children’s thinking. If it would be helpful you could also make a list of those questions and comments that haven’t worked - that have tended to close down discussion and conversation rather than opening it up. Decide on an action To wrap up the meeting think about what you, as a team, can do to make your involvement with children’s learning more effective. You might think about: how can we make more time to get deeply involved with children in what they are doing?; or what can we do to help build everybody’s confidence in their ability to support children’s learning and play? Remember to document your actions in your Team Meeting Minutes. This will contribute to your self assessment and in planning for your Quality Improvement Plan. End of Session 3.
Thinking Points What do you about the EYLF’s definition of curriculum? How does it fit with your own ideas? How does your curriculum currently include “everything that happens”? What potential for learning is there in the routines, transitions and day to day interactions at your service? Team meeting notes The EYLF’s definition of curriculum is a broad one. It makes us think about how everything we do and every part of our day supports children’s learning. If we are used to thinking about our curriculum as the planned experiences we write on our program this involves a big change. It doesn’t mean that we don’t have to plan anymore, but it might mean that we need to think about our planning differently. If you are to use this resource sheet as the basis for a team meeting you should consider: How you currently think about curriculum - what aspects of the day do you already include and plan for? Whether the EYLF’s definition of curriculum will be a big change for your team or not? What is it about the way you currently approach curriculum and learning that you want to change? The resource sheet will have introduced some of the key ideas about curriculum to your team members. You might want to start your discussion by asking for people’s responses - What did they think of it? Did it make sense? Was it new information? What jumped out as being most relevant? Some specific discussion questions that might be helpful: What does learning look like in our service and
Thinking points How would you describe your relationships with children? Think about how you go about building a genuine relationship with a child and their family - what do you do? Are there specific strategies that you use or does it “just happen”? How do you make sure that child gets to experience a positive relationship with their educators? Team meeting notes Secure, respectful and reciprocal relationships should underpin everything that we do. Because relationships are so much a part of our everyday practice we sometimes take them for granted. It can be a worthwhile exercise to actually discuss, the kind of relationships that you want to have in your service. Everyone’s idea of a “good” relationship will differ. It is only through talking those differences that we can reach agreement about how we want to work with the children in our care. The value of words like “secure, respectful and reciprocal” is that they help to give some definition to the kind of relationships that are most effective in supporting children’s learning. Related to our tendency to take relationships for granted is the assumption that relationships will simply happen naturally. In some cases this is true, but in others we need to put in a lot of work to make relationships happen. Without careful thought and planning it is unlikely that every child will experience the kind of relationships that we would want for them. This highlights the importance of thinking about how we actively plan for relationships to occur.