Child Development in Practice

Responsive Teaching and Learning from Birth to Five

Pamela May

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781136892882
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

How should children feel about themselves and their learning? How do I know what children have learnt and how can I move them on? How can I ensure that resources are available for children to use actively and independently?

In today's busy setting an understanding of child development sometimes gets overlooked, yet it lies at the heart of effective practice. Child Development in Practice provides an approachable, user-friendly base from which to plan ways of working with children that are developmentally appropriate and will enable them to learn enjoyably and effectively.

Drawing on recent research, the book thoughtfully discusses sound principles of child development alongside descriptions of every day practice. It then offers practical advice on how to fully utilise the key areas in an early years setting, including the creative area, books and stories and the outside, and shows how to plan and implement integrated topics where teaching is cross-curricular and holistic. Throughout, a series of key questions are presented to encourage practitioners to reflect on why they are teaching in certain ways and increase their understanding of children's developmental needs.

Directly linking theory and practice, this book aims to give students and practitioners the knowledge and confidence they need to help children become active, interactive and independent learners.

Section 1
The theory of child development

1
Children’s emotional and behavioural development

Ideas about children’s well-being, motivation and creativity are currently high on the national agenda with a range of debates such as ‘Lost Childhoods’ which began in the Daily Telegraph on 12 September 2006 and the discussion on ‘happiness’ by Nel Noddings, where she talks of happiness as being ‘an aim of life and education’.⁹

Government has mirrored the national debate by legislation and initiatives such as ‘All Our Futures, Creative and Cultural Education’¹⁰ and ‘Every Child Matters’.¹¹ ‘All Our Futures’, states that ‘When individuals find their creative strengths, it can have an enormous impact on overall achievement’¹² making clear the links between motivation, creativity and high achievement. This report also supports the idea that we need to build on children’s talents and interests by saying that ‘the key is to find what children are good at. Self-confidence and self-esteem then tend to rise and overall performance improves’.¹³ Clearly, government is recognising that if children feel good about themselves and what they are doing, their learning will be more successful.

In this chapter we will consider what theory and current research tell us about children’s emotions and how their views about themselves as people directly affect their success as learners. In major reports on early years education in England – from ‘Starting with Quality’ (The Rumbold Report) published in 1990, the Startright Report, published in 1994, through to the recently published Cambridge Review, published in 2009 – researchers have commented on the impact of children’s well-being, empowerment and self-esteem on their motivation to learn. Sir Christopher Ball states categorically that ‘The art of learning is not a mystery. No-one learns effectively without motivation, social skills and confidence – and very few fail to learn successfully if they have developed these enabling attitudes and ‘super skills’ of learning.¹⁴ No mention here, then, of needing a high IQ to be good at learning; but one must have self-confidence and be able to get along with others. Similarly, Robin Alexander in his address as part of the Cambridge Primary Review, ‘Emerging Perspectives on Childhood’¹⁵ explores the notion that adopting a policy of empowerment for children would help to rid us of a view of children that is negative and deficit: i.e. they are seen as passive, problematic and weak. The current EYFS document happily supports the alternative view: that children should be seen as competent and eager to engage with the world. This view presents the child as strong and with huge potential, always providing that there are trusted companions who will learn alongside the child and that the child is in a stimulating and rich environment. EYFS cards 2.1, 2.3 and 2.4 explicitly support this positive view of the young child. The current theories that underpin this positive and uplifting view of childhood come mainly from the English ‘Birth to Three Matters Framework’, Scandinavian countries and from New Zealand and Reggio Emilia in Northern Italy.

Self-esteem

Self-esteem is the picture you have of yourself, your abilities, your social competence and your looks. Children who feel that they can accomplish what they set out to do, who know that there are people who want to be with them are said to have high self-esteem. This self-picture has been put together since birth and is formed by how people who are important to the children, have responded to them.

Self-esteem will not remain static and young children, who, with their lack of experience, will need continuous encouragement to build up the confidence that will promote a good self-image. Children will feel differently about themselves in different situations: for example, in their family, in their early years setting or with their friends. Of course, these experiences are part and parcel of normal life and are counter-balanced by a secure family environment with the constancy it provides of love, acceptance and boundaries of behaviour. This consistency gives children an indicator of their value and worth and leads to a strong sense of identity. Children will come to our settings with a fairly clear sense of their identity and their strengths and weaknesses, even though, of course, they will not be able to articulate these. A practitioner will learn about a child’s self-belief through the ways in which the child behaves. One of the key ways that a child is helped to feel confident is to feel secure in his surroundings. Children, who have a stable family life have already been provided with a positive, continuing sense of their identity. The job of the practitioner is to provide ongoing continuity and stability so that all children feel that they belong to the setting too and that they are in a place where their self-image is reinforced and enhanced. Consequently, their self-confidence can grow. This requirement becomes much more challenging, of course, when there are children in the setting whose early experiences have been fractured or unstable, so that they come to the setting with no clear idea as to who they are, what they are good at or what might be expected of them. These are children who have low self-esteem, feel insecure and who probably have a low view of their abilities and will therefore not risk any activity in which they are likely to fail.

As emotional well-being is now recognised to be central to children’s success as learners, it is essential that planning for every area in the setting takes into account children’s emotional needs and each succeeding chapter in the book will reflect this by asking the related practitioner’s question, ‘How should children feel about themselves and their learning?’

The requirement of the EYFS to allocate a key person to each child also reflects the crucial importance that is attached to helping children feel secure, safe and confident in their surroundings. Marion Dowling, in her book entitled Young Children’s Personal, Social and Emotional Development states that ‘One of the most important gifts we can offer young children is a positive view of themselves. Without this they will flounder through life and be constantly seeking reassurance from others as they cannot seek it from within’.¹⁶

Well-being

The EYFS supports the notion of security and love by requiring that each child in the EYFS is linked to a loving and dependable adult by stating that ‘Babies and children become independent by being able to rely upon adults for reassurance and comfort’.¹⁷ It is within these close, loving relationships that reassurance and comfort are fostered and it is these feelings that give children the security, safety and confidence that they need to begin their journey towards well-being and independence. A secure attachment to a caregiver (or a key person) provides children with a sense of well-being which is thought to provide a buffer to the effects of stress. Children with a poor or disorganised attachment show raised levels of the cortisol hormone that tend to limit their ability to function effectively both emotionally and cognitively. It is worth, at this point, making the distinction between a key worker and a key person. Elfer et al.¹⁸ argue that ‘key worker’ and a ‘key person’ are not interchangeable terms although they are often used as such. A key worker describes a liaising role which concentrates on enabling a range of professionals to work in a coordinated way. The key person, on the other hand, is primarily an emotional relationship whose focus is the well-being and security of the child.

Well-being, then, is not about things in life going well; most of us are able to cope reasonably well when life is progressing smoothly. Children with high levels of well-being are able to ‘stay on top of things’ when the going gets tough and things are going badly. They show more resilience to the effects of events that most people experience at various points in their lives, such as ill-health, the loss of a loved one or other significant changes. Resilience has been defined as ‘normal development under difficult circumstances’.¹⁹

Agency

Well-being is usually felt when children have some ‘agency’ or freedom of choice about what they are doing in the setting. This idea of autonomy and freedom of choice resonates with the characteristics upon which a democratic society largely depends, characteristics such as independence, cooperation and freedom of thought.

Bronwyn Davies (1990), refers to agency as ‘a sense of oneself as one who can go beyond the given meanings in any one discourse and forge something new’.²⁰ Children with a lack of agency tend to believe that their talents and abilities are set in stone and invariable, whereas those with a sense of agency believe that their talents and abilities can develop over time and will respond positively to new and interesting experiences they encounter and to the effort that they expend.

Belonging and boundaries

These can also be thought of as part of well-being. Children who feel that they belong to their setting have a good sense of well-being. Children can often be heard saying ‘At my nursery…’, and this phrase is an indicator that they feel they belong to the setting and are at home there. This feeling is essentially associated to the loving relationship that the key person offers and is evidence of the secure relationships and friendships that the child has formed there. Boundaries are the expectations, rules and responsibilities that come with belonging to a group, be it family, nursery, faith or cultural. Every organisation has its expectations and knowing what these are help a child to feel ‘contained’ and safe. The most important aspect of expectations, rules and responsibilities is that they are consistent, so that the young child can begin to understand what is acceptable behaviour and follow the code that is in place. It is when children feel secure and have a good level of well-being that their behaviour is most likely to be positive. Behaviour, then, is always linked directly to how the child is feeling. Challenging behaviour is never random but stems from an emotional cause which staff need to try to understand before efforts are made to manage it. Managing a child’s difficult behaviour without having some understanding of a possible cause may well lead to a situation where an undesirable action is temporarily controlled but the child’s emotional need has not been addressed. As Rosie Roberts states in Self-Esteem and Early learning; ‘unreasonable behaviour is almost always reasonable from the point of view of the person doing it’.²¹ This phrase is really helpful as it suggests that practitioners consider and attempt to understand the situation from the child’s point of view as a starting point to the management of it.

Communication

Children who are secure because they feel that they belong to their setting are likely to talk freely and confidently to adults and to their friends about what interests them. The aspect of agency that is a part of well-being gives children the confidence to explore new ideas and to share them with all who show an interest! It is these twin strands of security and confidence that give children the motivation to communicate experiences that are meaningful. They will do this in a range of ways such as role play, small-world play, painting, singing and mark-making. Tina Bruce calls this process ‘representation’²² as children re-present their important ideas and experiences. Children are unlikely to feel able to do this unless they are emotionally secure.

Positive dispositions

A high self-esteem will give children the confidence that they will need to succeed in learning something new. Learning a new skill or attempting to understand some new knowledge requires all of us to take a ‘leap of faith’. The leap is from something that is known and familiar, and therefore comfortable, to something that is unknown and possibly challenging and scary. To embark on this journey sometimes requires nerves of steel; just think about the adult learning to drive or trying to master a new language! The inner voice that tells us ‘Yes, I can do this’ is called a positive disposition and is the driving force that helps us to get started and to persevere when the going gets tough. Lilian Katz calls a positive disposition a ‘pattern of behaviour’ or a habit of mind.²³ She suggests that children may have inherent aptitudes and talents but may not necessarily use them. The disposition is the motivation to apply their talent so that they habitually feel positive about their abilities. For a child to feel positive about learning something new there needs to be both a cognitive challenge – i.e. something that awakens the child’s curiosity – and the desire to learn. An example of this might be as complex as learning to read or as simple as balancing on a log in the setting’s outside area...

Table of contents

• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Section 1 The theory of child development
• Section 2 Areas of learning in the setting
• Section 3 Projects and cross-curricular learning
• Endpiece
• References
• Author Index
• Subject Index