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What would you do next?

Record what you might do next in response to the theories below the examples.

Respond to others.

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How have they documented children’s theories?

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How have they documented children’s theories?

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What do you notice?

How have children's conceptual understanding been documented?

How have children's theories been documented?

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What might be the intentionality of the educator?

How can these invitations provoke, build on and potentially support children's working theories and conceptual schema?

Record your ideas under the examples in our thinking space and respond to others.

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How do protocols (to unpack documentation) assist you in:

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How do protocols (to unpack documentation) assist you in:

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learning about how the child constructs meaning (their learning process)?

noticing underpinning interests, ideas and theories?

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How do these conceptual understandings open to many possibilities?

What possible research/theories may emerge?

How can these incorporate student thinking and curiosity?

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Record your ideas to the following questions

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Record your ideas to the following questions

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What are working theories?

Why are working theories important?

What do working theories mean for us as educators?

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How does teaching conceptually change our thinking?

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How does teaching conceptually change our thinking?

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How does focusing on concepts promote the building of working theories and conceptual schema?

What concepts could we focus on with children to promote working theories?

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tania@innovativeglobaled.org

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innovativeglobaled.org

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https://icsearlyyears.edublogs.org/2018/01/29/a-fairy-garden-surprise/

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Reflections Nursery UK

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Last time Fiona wrote
'Finding time to pull apart ideas with others is a critical part of our work, and can be a true joy when you find that colleague with whom you can really wrestle with ideas, explore sticky tensions and open opportunities for new meaning to emerge. '
Collaborative planning at my school continues to be a precious time where we listen to each other's perspectives, challenge our thinking and explore new possibilities and solutions. Every Wednesday, we have about two hours to reflect on last week's learning, plan in response to the children's thinking and consider other learning engagements such as circle time, number talks, small group explorations and PE.

To structure our meeting (and our thinking!), we use protocols to explore the conceptual layers in children's play and discuss our documentation.

Everyone first individually identifies prevalent play scenarios and writes these ideas on different sticky notes combined with the underpinning concepts that come to mind. When everyone is ready, we share our different notes, compare, contrast and consider each other's perspectives. This helps us with ensuring that our planned invitations and provocations are connected to the children's research.

The online tool Miro is great to create a 'web' of identified concepts and connections between these concepts and the enduring understandings of our units. We have started adding our responses in white so we can keep track of how investigations evolve. Perhaps we can change the size of the blue circles according to its importance at any given time.

We have started the year with the central idea: people learn about themselves through their interactions with other people, places and materials. Some of the emerging concepts connected to this unit are:

Memory - Influence Many children wanted to revisit previous experiences when they returned to school. They explored the materials, re-created certain play scenarios and spontaneously started singing familiar songs. Some children asked for materials and games they associated with a certain space, enjoying the possibility to make choices and influence their experiences.

Writing - Identity Several children expressed they want to learn to read and write. We feel this is closely linked to their sense of identity. They seem to think the ability to read and write makes you 'big' and become part of the world of older peers, siblings and adults. We see children making 'lists', printing letters, asking questions such as 'what does it say?'; actively making meaning of our sign system with profound dedication.

Family - Roles Family continues to be a thread in children's role play scenarios. The different roles and identities within families are explored and re-created. We have noticed that many stories evolve around responsibilities, age, rules and authority.

Relationships - Hierarchy - Influence - Inclusion - Exclusion The beginning of the year often evolves around relationships. We have observed many children exploring their identity within the learning group. With a different set of children, there seems to be the need to investigate how we learn and play together. We are actively supporting children with developing their social and communication skills so they can consider other points of view, respect each other, the spaces and the materials.

How do you identify 'threads' of research' in play?

How do you document this and capture evolving play scenarios over time?

What thinking routines and or protocols do you use to structure collaborative planning meetings?

Communities of practice are created through ongoing dialogue. Time, a listening stance and structures that enhance discussion support this discourse and help us to grow as professionals. Robert John Meehan formulates it beautifully " The most valuable resource that all teachers have is each other. Without collaboration, our growth is limited to our own perspectives. '

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Last time Fiona wrote 'Finding time to pull apart ideas with others is a critical part of our work, and can be a true joy when you find th...

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PEDAGOGICAL DOCUMENTATION: IMPOSSIBLE GOALPOSTS AND IMAGINARY ENEMIES

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Around the world early childhood and primary school educators are exploring the practices of pedagogical documentation as a strategy fo…

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THE CHALLENGE: MEETING REQUIREMENTS AND DOCUMENTING AS RESEARCHERS

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Last week Fiona wrote: I think that documentation is the strategy that will allow us to transform the way we spend our time with…

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This post offers ways to use one text to provoke and reveal children's inquiries - genuine curiosity, sincere questioning, authentic tension and heartfelt wonderings.

Just like Winsome, the children in my class have passed their fifth orbit around the sun. Who is Winsome? Let's find out how she connected Kindergarten to the concept of curiosity, the craft of bookmaking, the mindset of wondering and the magic of imagination - and unearthed the roots of their inquiries.

The Wonder of Winsome is a picture book recently published by Kath Murdoch, perhaps best known for being a true advocate of inquiry as pedagogy. Winsome, the main character in the text, arrived in book form in Paris recently, pretty much at the same time as I was inquiring into a specific workshop I wanted to attend (which itself led to inquiries about and connections to Paris and Rufus Wainwright!)

What follows is a series of learning opportunities over the course of a week, sparked by Winsome!

Concluding thoughts as a result of using an anchor text:

Know your curriculum - plan for big ideas to be explored intentionally (some planned and others more responsively)

Observe and listen to students - to deny their curiosities would be a crime!

Alongside what children are learning, consider how they are learning - specifically (in this case study) the communication, thinking, research and social skills

Use literature to invite and provoke students' thinking and don't be afraid to ask challenging questions to scaffold and elicit students' theories and conceptual thinking

Offer concrete opportunities for students to grapple with and deepen their understanding of abstract concepts and processes.

So what?

After reading this blog post, what approaches and practices have been validated for you? What are you inspired to try next week?

What are the roots of your students' inquiries? Which concepts are they wanting to figure out?

Through Winsome, it is evident that so many of my class are curious about the book-making process. I need to offer the children different ways and materials to make books of different sizes and types. I need to find some visuals that will provoke and inspire children's thinking.

I see opportunities to build on the children's interests in numbers and fascination with worms, snails and spiders to invite children to create non-fiction books. Their attention to question marks could lead to interesting inquiries about other punctuation marks.

Play is an integral part of the children's day and their wonderings about how things work can form the basis for theory building around function. The classroom is full of open-ended materials and loose parts to explore this further.

The author, Kath Murdoch, has invited other classes around the world through social media to post photographs of her book in their local environments. Winsome has been found here . My class has been very curious about the map on the classroom wall, so I plan to explore the Padlet with the children.

An important step in this process is to ask the children themselves - directly - what they think could come next based on this approach to learning. In the spirit of inquiry, I would not be looking for one "best" answer, but instead a menu of possibilities that children could choose from based on their tastes.

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Winsome unearths the roots of Kindergarten's inquiries

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This post offers ways to use one text to provoke and reveal children's inquiries - genuine curiosity, sincere questioning, authentic tension...

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"Working theories are present from childhood to adulthood. They represent the tentative, evolving ideas and understandings formulated by children (and adults) as they participate in the life of their families, communities and cultures and engage with others to think, ponder, wonder and make sense of the world in order to participate more effectively within it. Working theories are the result of cognitive inquiry, developed as children theorise about the world and their experiences. They are also the ongoing means of further cognitive development, because children are able to use their existing (albeit limited) understandings to create a framework for making sense of new experiences and ideas." (Hedges & Jones, quoted here)

These are not once-for-all understandings that are achieved and then we move on, but ones that grow and grow through students' time at school. That enclosing is a schema, ie a repeated behaviour, seems to indicate that the understanding that is built up doing it is something that needs to grow incrementally and be connected with lots of other thoughts and experiences.

The more experienced children in the class seem to have this understanding much more firmly, and to build and create together with so much more ease.

But, like so much of children's play, it doesn't seem to be directly pursuing a question (like 'Where do birds sleep?). Outwardly, it's more directed towards making , production than it is to finding out . They are, ultimately, finding out, but the immediate impulse is one of creation . In this way the play seems to have more in common with the arts than with the sciences.

This is a thought that I'm still mulling over.

And now this sketchy diagram that I've drawn is making me think. The impulse to create, to make, to perform, to challenge oneself allows a feedback loop. It puts the results of our action (beige in the diagram) into the world as something that we can observe. A kind of design cycle. We are building up theories about the kinds of achievements we can have in the world.

Helen Hedges writes 'Learning may appear somewhat disorganized, perhaps appear to move around and then return later to topics, questions and ideas, may call on invention and imagination to connect ideas...'

To me, most learning is disorganised, full of imagination and invention. So much of learning, of building theories, is devoted not to how the physical world works or even to social and cultural learning considered as learning what's already there. A huge amount of learning seems devoted to managing possibility. I have these materials - what could I do with them? How might I deploy them, arrange them? I have this time with my friend? How might I fill it? I'll learn to wildly invent, to put some unheard-of combination boldly into place - and I'll see what happens then.

New Zealand's Te Whāriki Early Childhood Curriculum has a section called Learning Dispositions and Working Theories. "Dispositions that can be useful for learning include playfulness, whakatoi (daring), persistence, resilience and imagination. Children also develop dispositions towards domain knowledge..."

What I'm trying to get a grip on doesn't seem to simply reduce to dispositions though. It is a more disorganised-seeming, less direct way of obtaining knowledge about what daring and playfulness can achieve, what can be done with freedom and within necessity, how the social and physical environment can be remixed. It centres around agency, and uses whatever is at hand to achieve its undefined aims. It achieves its goal of developing capable and skillful being and making in the physical and social world, but its means are more indirect than what comes to mind when we think of theory-building: curiosity -> question -> search -> answers.

This simple house the children make seems to bring so many aspects of learning together. Mathematics is in there too. The straight line of the bricks, the way they are placed in the same orientation, and on top of each other to create layers. The way the lines of bricks are parallel to create the rectangular floor plan, and how the cars are arranged, spaced out evenly.

That word arrange. It means both to place things by some kind of design, and also, metaphorically I suppose, though we're no longer conscious of any metaphor, to organise anything in life.

Maybe the play follows a similar path to the way the word has travelled? We play at organising loose parts, we learn, ultimately, to organise our lives, whatever the variables it gives us.

And now I'm curious what the roots of that word arrange are:

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Three of my new students (aged 3 and 4) have been settling in this half term. They have been doing lots of playing alongside each other, but...

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thelearningsquare.nl

annevandam@thelearningsquare/nl

FaceBook: The Learning Square

Instagram: anneslearningsquare

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I see , I think, I wonder as a thinking routine for discussing documentation

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I see , I think, I wonder as a thinking routine for discussing documentation

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HV0JIjxisUc

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How is this connected to children's learning? What does this mean for us as educators? 

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How is this connected to children's learning? What does this mean for us as educators? 

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Kate Adaci The KAUST School

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Record any theories you have noticed in your students here. Respond to others.

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Record any theories you have noticed in your students here. Respond to others.