Challenging Early Learning

Helping Young Children Learn How to Learn

James Nottingham, Jill Nottingham

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429674563
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

What are the goals of Early Years education? A lot of people ask this question and receive answers ranging from keeping children safe; introducing them to the values of society; encouraging a love of language; giving them experience of socialising, harmonising and behaving appropriately. This book shares the best strategies to help children grow into even more curious, resilient, happy, articulate and thoughtful learners.

Challenging Early Learning takes James Nottingham's tried and tested and acclaimed 'learning to learn' methodology and applies it to teaching three- to seven-year-olds. Each chapter includes:

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• Colourful and stimulating learning activities that will help children learn how to learn.

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• Practical 'Now Try This' sections that encourage readers to think about current practice and explore new ideas.

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• A Review section that focuses on building a broad tool kit of teaching strategies.

Covering a range of key topics such as feedback, dialogue, growth mindset and the Learning Pit, this book is aimed at all pedagogues, teachers, parents and leaders wanting to challenge the way in which we learn and make learning more challenging.

1.
Creating the Conditions for Early Learning

CHILDREN LEARN AS THEY PLAY. MOST IMPORTANTLY, IN PLAY CHILDREN LEARN HOW TO LEARN.

(O. Fred Donaldson, 1993)

1.0 Challenging Early Learning

The youngest of our three children recently celebrated her fourth birthday. Living in England as we do, this means she has just a few months left before she starts school. So now seems a good time to reflect on her nursery experiences.

For the last two years, Phoebe has attended two Early Years settings: an outdoor nursery and a playgroup. We wish she could attend the outdoor nursery every morning, but unfortunately it is only open twice a week. So she heads off to the local playgroup for the other three weekday mornings.

When it is a Little Acorns day, she springs out of bed and is the first one ready, waiting expectantly by the door with her rucksack on her back. (See Figure 1.) When it is a playgroup day, she gets herself ready without any fuss but without much excitement either. On arrival, she bounces off to Little Acorns without so much as a glance back or a kiss on the cheek. At the beginning of the three playgroup mornings per week, she generally holds hands with one of us until the last moment and gives us a tight hug before she enters the room. At the end of the day, she is full of chatter about the Little Acorns activities she’s been engaged in, whereas we rarely get an insight into her playgroup day.

Our daughter is the same child every day. She comes from the same home with the same parents and same brother and sister. Yet she is also so very different depending on which Early Years setting she attends that day. It was the same for her older siblings. That is how significant educational settings are. Get it right, and children will flourish; just do OK, and children will just do OK.

The culture you set makes an enormous difference in the attitudes and experiences of your young learners.

The aim of this book, therefore, is to share what Little Acorns (and many other nurseries and schools just like it) are getting right in the hope that more of our young children might thrive more of the time. There is no recipe for success, of course. So much depends on context. But in our experience, there are very definitely aspects of learning in the Early Years that seem to work much better than others to encourage, nurture and excite young children, and so it is these that we will share with you here.

1.1 Encouraging Growth in a Nursery

The names for Early Years settings vary so much around the world, from daycare to preschool, crèche to nursery, kindergarten to playgroup. Of these, we would like to draw attention to the term ‘nursery’ because of the comparison with horticultural nurseries in which young plants are nourished and grown. This might seem a strange thing to do, but bear with us, please: there is a good reason to do so.

Some people we work with, particularly in Scandinavia, view with suspicion any attempt to ‘teach’ or ‘challenge’ young children. Their belief is that youngsters should be allowed to play, investigate and try without the direction of ‘pushy’ adults. They believe in a form of child-centred learning in which children should go in any (safe) direction their curiosity and interest take them. Adults should not lead.

Figure 1: Phoebe Nottingham at Little Acorns

What is the optimum balance between free play and structured learning for young children?

Though we have sympathy with this ideal in that we are certainly not advocating pushiness, it is also true to say we are promoting the idea of adults designing specific learning opportunities for children to engage in. Not hothousing or controlling but engaging and extending children’s learning. So we would like to take this opportunity to explain our point of view before we proceed with this book, and to do so, we’d like to draw a comparison with horticulture.

If we were to consider plants, it would be true to say that many species are remarkably hardy. Lay down some new concrete, and still some plant life will find a way through. Gardens that are tended lovingly still have weeds growing in unwanted places. Even with the most unforgiving of elements, vegetation finds a way to grow. Hot deserts and freezing tundra show sign of life. The hardiest always seems to find a way to survive. Naturally.

Using the analogy of young plants, it is clear that many seedlings will grow with or without support. Yet it is also true that given the right environment and nurture, the chances of all plants blooming are significantly increased.

Horticulturalists know this, of course, and yet they don’t just leave it to nature. They want other plants to survive too. Indeed, not just survive but thrive. So they cultivate, tend, provide for and protect their young crops to enable more of them to flourish and grow. They alter the conditions and the provisions so that even weaker saplings have a chance to bloom. They know that many plants will survive without their help, but they also know if they get the conditions just right, then many more will not just survive but also thrive.

So it is with education: children tend to learn. Naturally. Children develop socially, physically, emotionally and intellectually even when the situation is ‘just OK’. Think back to the story of our youngest in the previous section: she is learning all the time, even at her uninspiring playgroup. The playgroup supervisors rarely provide super engaging activities, but Phoebe and her pals still learn. They play, they investigate; they think.

Yet at Little Acorns (the Early Years setting that excites our youngest child the most), there is a mix of free play and purposeful play. Free play is encouraged, of course, but there is also time to engage in activities, designed by the adults, that engage, extend, excite and puzzle the children. The activities are still ‘child centred’ in that they start from where the children are in terms of developmental levels and interest levels. But, rather like the horticulturalists, the adults are also looking at ways to support each sapling’s growth so that each and every one of them flourish and thrive.

Unfortunately, this analogy leads very quickly to the idea of hothousing and/or pruning to create the ‘ideal’ form. Of course, we are not advocating either of these approaches. There are already far too many people (parents and educators) falling into the trap of hothousing or ‘pruning’ children’s interests and activities in the pursuit of ‘ideal’ scores in narrowly conceived, standardised tests.

Instead of hothousing or standardising, we are advocating a ‘nursery’ approach to learning: one in which conditions are adjusted to promote the growth and development of every single ‘plant’. This might include a frame to support and extend, words of encouragement (you talk to your plants, don’t you?) to nurture and show care, help for roots as well as leaf tips, moving the pots into the light or the shade, depending on the need, and so on. In other words, we are advocating small but definite adjustments to encourage growth of all young ‘saplings’. In our minds, that is what will help children in in Early Years and school settings to flourish.

We are advocating a ‘nursery’ approach to learning: one in which conditions are adjusted to help all ‘seedlings’ to flourish and bloom.

But then that leads to the question: learning what?

1.2 Learning how to Learn

What are the goals of education for young children? A lot of people ask this question and receive many more answers than they bargained for. Answers range from helping children to learn, to keeping them safe; introducing them to the values of society; encouraging a love of language; giving them the experience of socialising, harmonising and behaving appropriately; and so the list goes on.

(Jame...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• CONTENTS
• Acknowledgements
• List of figures
• The Challenging Learning story
• The language of learning
• Chapter 1: Creating the conditions for early learning
• Chapter 2: Children’s response to challenge
• Chapter 3: Developing dialogue with young children
• Chapter 4: Engaging children’s thinking skills
• Chapter 5: Listening, thinking and questioning
• Chapter 6: Making progress
• Chapter 7: Feedback and Learning Intentions
• Chapter 8: Early learning activities
• Appendix: Coded transcript relating to Section 3.6