Pedagogical Leadership in Early Childhood Education

Conversations From Across the World

Mona Sakr, June O'Sullivan, Mona Sakr, June O'Sullivan

• Éditeur: Bloomsbury Academic
• Année: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781350250505
• Édition: 1
• Sujet: Education
• Sous-sujet: Early Childhood Education

Pedagogical leadership views leadership as something separate from formal authority or qualifications, seeing educators' understanding, interpretation and passion as the key lever for continuous improvement in early childhood education (ECE). This book shows how effective pedagogical leadership can create the right conditions for quality ECE provision, to increase motivation and engagement among staff, and impact positively on staff recruitment and retention. Written by a team of international experts based in Australia, Azerbaijan, Estonia, Greece, Finland, Norway, Sweden, the UK and the USA, this book explores pedagogical leadership in ECE in-depth and through an international lens. The chapters address questions including: what is pedagogic leadership?; what does it look like?; what impact can pedagogic leadership have on the everyday work of nurseries and other ECE providers? The contributors cover a range of topics including trauma-responsive pedagogy, child-initiated pedagogies, conflict management, change management theory and social leadership theory.

1
‘Intellectually Alive Early Childhood Education’
A Conversation about Pedagogical Leadership with Julian Grenier

Julian Grenier

What does pedagogical leadership mean to you?

When I first started working in early years, a huge amount of the focus on leadership in early years was really management. It was rotas, staff sickness and absences, budgets, just keeping everything on the road day in, day out, all of which of course remain really important. There was comparatively less focus on the idea that the head of an early years setting would be a pedagogical leader. I remember working with a brilliant head of centre who has shaped everything I’ve done since working with her, but if we had staff professional development about children’s learning, she wouldn’t attend that. She would use that as time to catch up on lots of the work that needed to be done. She saw it as valuable for the staff working in the rooms, but she didn’t really see her own role as a pedagogical leader.

With the Effective Pre-School, Primary and Secondary Education project (EPPSE) report (1997), we have realised more and more that while it’s essential to offer a well-run, caring, responsive, warm, lovely place for children to come to, those things are not enough. If we are going to make a difference for children, we’ve got to think about them as learners. That is quite a big paradigm shift for people in the early years, particularly when you’re thinking about babies and toddlers. We have to think about children as learners and understand our responsibilities towards them as active and curious intellectual minds, as well as bodies that need keeping dry and warm with nappies that need changing.

What does pedagogical leadership mean to me? It means that all of the time, if I’m thinking about running a child-centred organisation, I’m not just thinking about ratios and physical care and children being safe and well, important though all of those things are. I’m also considering whether this is an awe-inspiring, exciting, irresistible space for a baby or toddler or young child to come and learn and make friends and have new experiences. Is that happening as far as humanly possible every day here so that we are giving all of our children the best start to learning and life?

When I first went into the profession, children in East London were doing really badly in the school system in this country. The disadvantage they faced as a result of a poor experience of schooling was staggering. We recognised that unless we did more in the early years to support children as learners and communicators and creators, they were going to start compulsory schooling with very little chance of keeping up with children around the country. So investment in places like Newham and Tower Hamlets and Islington, where I’ve been working in the early years, had to be about children as learners and about their life chances, not just about childcare, otherwise we wouldn’t do enough for the children.

In any group of children there are always many children who are much cleverer than us. We have to be really humble about the fact that that’s the case, and do everything we can to recognise and celebrate all of the many intelligences and creativities that children have. When I first started working in inner London, the prevalent view was that the children already had a hard enough life, so our role was to keep them as happy as possible in their early years education and schooling. That was the extent of the ambition and it’s patronising. I think pedagogical leadership is about being much humbler than that and about respecting and valuing the children that we work with as intellectuals and thinkers who can do brilliantly in their lives, and not see them as children to feel a little bit sorry for, or to think that if we give them a few happy and warm hours in the day that’s enough. Because it certainly isn’t.

So is pedagogical leadership a hat that you wear as a leader, or is it something that is intertwined through everything you’re doing?

I think the New Zealand Te Whariki image of the interwoven mat in early years absolutely holds true. There isn’t a way of splitting up your leadership role and thinking ‘this is the pedagogical leadership bit’. It all comes together in our decisions. How we decide to spend our budget or work our ratios is pedagogical leadership. In my opinion it’s not good childcare unless learning is going on, and therefore you can’t split those things up either. So that weaving metaphor is really powerful.

What has inspired your thinking on pedagogical leadership?

In the 1990s I worked in a centre in north London that was part of the EPPSE project. One of the personal experiences I had there was one of the EPPSE researchers talking to me about my approach to what we were doing with the children. They asked me ‘why do you do it that way?’ and I have to admit I was completely floored by that question. I did it that way because that was the way it was being done there. I saw my role as keeping things as they had been and I was very influenced by history and tradition and what I’d seen and heard and very uninfluenced by the idea of critical reflection. Having those questions asked of me and my practice was a seminal moment for me.

Following on from that research, I was invited to join a group that Iram Siraj was running at that time at the Institute of Education. There, I met Bernadette Duffy among other people and that was so important for me because I’d never been part of those sorts of discussions before where we really thought about why we were doing things and what the evidence might suggest was effective and not effective. They were constantly modelling curiosity and questioning and asking ‘what is it that you’re noticing that makes you so confident to say that?’ or ‘why do you think that?’ or ‘what have you seen elsewhere?’

I was extremely fortunate to develop links with Pen Green and Margy Whalley there. Margy created a climate where people were fearlessly asking questions about what we were doing and whether it was right for the children and for the communities we were working with. The whole idea of asset-based community development as I would think about it now was also really powerful for my development. I think she disrupted a certain view of professionalism which I might have had, which was that your job as an early years teacher or leader was to read up on the best evidence and do the best you could. I still strongly believe this is essential, but Margy would say, ‘remember that it’s not your community and they’re not your children; what does the community want for these children, how can you mobilise the community?’

Is pedagogical leadership something you can see and feel when you walk into an ECE setting?

I think the honest answer to that is ‘yes’ but I would also say that it’s vital to be sceptical about those gut feelings. Sometimes we go into a setting and we have certain things we’re looking for and of course that really structures what we see and hear and we don’t necessarily realise the full approach that that setting is taking.

Research for my doctorate in education involved meeting regularly with groups of early years educators from a range of settings in disadvantaged areas and having semi-structured conversations about the children they work with. It was incredibly illuminating how thoughtful and creative a lot of those practitioners were. I realised that it’s very easy to underestimate the work people are doing with children and jump to conclusions. We have to work very hard to guard against that. We often have to work really hard to understand the qualities of the setting we go into.

At the same time though, I do listen out for those conversations between educators and parents at the end of the day. Are there only details about the physical life of the child (how they ate, slept and used the potty) or is there a conversation about the intellectual life of the child? That is something I look out for. And sometimes you’ll see settings putting a strong emphasis on developmental journals that are essentially an assembly of photographs with happy looking children, rather like a gorgeous family scrapbook, often lovely and very valued by the children and families, but nothing about learning. Or nothing about the struggles children have when they learn or how they persevered and overcame things. That would worry me too.

So I guess I have a mental checklist of signs of what seems to be an intellectually alive early years setting, but I’m also really aware that I have to try and control for the bias that I might bring to that.

How do you think about pedagogical leadership in the English ECE sector as a whole? What do you think about where we’re at currently and where we need to go?

If you go back to the term ‘climate’, let’s think about the climate from the point of view of being an early years educator in a setting where (a) maybe your pay is little more, or no more, than someone who does something like replenishing the shelves in a supermarket, (b) probably the support and level of dialogue and critical thinking that you had in your initial training was quite limited, (c) probably you’re not accessing much professional development because your setting is living somewhat hand to mouth and (d) probably you’re working really long hours and you go home at the end of your shift exhausted and there is little or no time to have that kind of reflective dialogue with your colleagues about what the children are doing and what it means for their learning.

So how would it be that a climate like this would foster something that was full of creativity and learning potential for the children attending? It just seems really unlikely to me that it would. Unless we have the structures to train staff really well and to support reflective dialogue among colleagues, and unless we have more graduate-level practitioners, I can’t see that we’re going to make the shift that we need to make.

What really worried me about graduate-level practitioners is the number we have interviewed here who despite having a degree in Early Childhood Studies still find it really difficult to talk about how children learn and what their role is in promoting that. We need to build reflection into all levels of our early childhood education (ECE) training and we haven’t got there yet.

Lindsay Foster, here at Sheringham Nursery School, leads a programme called Outstanding Early Years Teaching. What’s really great about this programme is that it’s actually about creating a community of learners who work together for a year looking at practice in a range of different settings in East London, critically interrogating it. They have lots of online engagement between the sessions, using WhatsApp and Twitter, and share a lot of resources and insights. There’s a coaching element to it around helping participants to focus on what it is they think they’re seeing and what they want for the children they’re working with. It’s about peer learning and every year that group reminds us that there are so many practitioners out there who are brilliantly reflective and thoughtful and have great ideas. It’s really magical to see them flourish but they do need that coaching support, that learning community, that opportunity to view settings outside of their own immediate circle, to actualise all of that potential that they’ve got.

Is it about policy then? Is it about the policy shifts and signals that enable a climate where there is the time and space for reflective practice?

Yes, but what I would say is that my experience of working in the early years suggests to me that looking for policy signals of that kind is naïve. I think the best change happens because people on the ground act with determination to do something different and better and they show that it works and percolates up until eventually the world of policy notices it.

Those effective settings that the EPPSE project identified didn’t happen because of policy, it happened because those leaders on the ground – people like Bernadette Duffy, Carol Walden and Margy Whalley – made it happen and then via EPPSE it came to the attention of policy that there was a better way of doing things.

We do need policy, most definitely, and the right structures, but I just can’t believe that hanging around and waiting for that to happen is the best thing, and often there’s much more potential to do things than people imagine.

If I look at the context in Newham, the funding arrangement for private voluntary initiatives (PVIs) includes the requirement that there should be a certain number – I think it’s three – of whole day professional development trainings for PVI staff and so that’s built into the funding structure. So what we did in Manor Park is we said to our PVIs, ‘well look, we can all try and do our own thing with the funding we’ve got but it’s probably really hard for all of us, but if between 10 and 20 of us collaborated on a single project, we’d get massive economy of scale and we’d learn more from each other and we’d get more impact’. And that was really the inspiration behind the project we did in Manor Park, which was called Manor Park Talks. At that scale, you can bring in really experienced trainers, you can train in big rather than small groups and you can pay for monthly coaching for everyone. We could get the Institute of Education to work with us around the evidence base and create the iterative relationship between evidence and practice on the ground. So what’s needed is that sort of collaborative work at community level to improve practice, not waiting for someone else to show us the way.

It sounds like community partnerships are absolutely central to this. Is an element of pedagogical leadership about community leadership?

Yes – and that also involves other aspects of community, so yes, other settings and childminders, but also your community more widely, and how you are working in that community development way. We are at a very early stage of doing that despite thinking that it is important.

It can be difficult to achieve. For example, one of the common challenges faced in Newham is that a lot of children will appear in a nursery setting either at three or even appear at reception class at four with really quite complicated special needs, and no one will know about the children. And then there’s this enormous effort to try and understand what their needs are and to meet them and to provide as far as possible for them. This has been understood in terms of parents being ‘hard to reach’, with the idea that they are hiding their children away and not coming into contact with services earlier because perhaps there are feelings of shame and embarrassment or whatever. But we worked with a really gifted children’s centre lead from Tower Hamlets, Sue Cox, and she turned it on its head: Is it the family that’s hard to reach or the service?

If you’re a family in this part of Newham, maybe your English isn’t great, maybe you don’t understand the English early years system, maybe you’ve tried to go to a stay and play session at your children’s centre and you’ve been humiliated about your child’s reaction to it. In this situation, who is hard to reach: the parent or the service? Sue argued that the service was very hard for the parents to reach, not that the parents were hard for us to reach. She did some work with parents of children of special needs about what sort of service they would find accessible and she created a service based on those findings and actually we haven’t had any difficulty engaging at all with parents who have a young child with Special Educational Needs and Disability (SEND) in that service. Now, we very rarely come across two-, three- and four-year olds with complex needs who the children’s centres know nothing about. So the narrative of ‘hard to reach’ is a narrative we need to shift.

I would add to that a couple of other narratives that we, as pedagogical leaders, need to shift. One is that children speaking English as an additional language (EAL) are somehow a vulnerable group of children rather than a magnificent cohort of cognitively brilliant children who are going to really flourish. At the same time, we also need to get rid of the flipside myth that they’ll come into our setting and learn English easily because young children are just so brilliant. The truth like in all of these things is that it’s somewhere in the middle, which is that they are brilliant but that it is also hard work to come into a setting at the age of three and not know the words that everyone else knows. Practitioners have to work hard to help you to learn English in that situation. It will come more naturally to some children than others, but it’s not going to be easy.

A lot of our thinking on that was informed by one of our teachers, Tania Chowdhury, w...

Table des matières

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• List of Contributors
• Introduction
• 1 ‘Intellectually Alive Early Childhood Education’: A Conversation about Pedagogical Leadership with Julian Grenier
• 2 Pedagogic Cultures in Early Childhood: Framing Children’s Experiences
• 3 The Pedagogical Leader at London Early Years Foundation: Defining and Developing the Role
• 4 Trauma-responsive Pedagogical Leadership in ECE: What It Is and Why It Matters
• 5 Pedagogical Leadership in Practice with Babies
• 6 Plan-Do-Review: What Can We Learn from Change Management Theories about Pedagogical Leadership?
• 7 Pedagogical Leadership: Comparing Approaches and Practices in England, Greece and Sweden
• 8 Pedagogical Leadership among Directors and Deputies in Early Childhood Settings in Australia, Finland and Norway: A Summary of a Small-scale Study
• 9 An Organisational Approach to Supporting Pedagogical Leadership: Reporting on a Case Study with London Early Years Foundation
• 10 ‘If You’re Going to Build a House Where Everyone Develops and Learns, You Can’t Have Hoarders’: A Conversation about Pedagogical Leadership with Nichole Leigh Mosty
• 11 Fostering Pedagogical Leadership through Action Research: A Practical Perspective
• 12 Interpretations of Pedagogical Leadership among Community-based Early Childhood Education Leaders in Azerbaijan
• 13 Pedagogical Leadership in Italian Early Childhood Education Settings: Managing Conflicts While Facilitating Participative Decision-making
• 14 Advancing Pedagogical Leadership at National Level: Looking for a Policy Window
• Conclusion: Sustaining the Vision of Pedagogical Leadership
• Index
• Copyright