Dr Julian Greniergrenier@outlook.com@juliangrenier

Assessing and celebrating young children’s learningWhat can we learn from the past and how might we shape a future beyond levels?

Early years practitioners in 2016?

Measurement, evidence, data

How much assessment?• There are about 570 bullet-point

statements in Development Matters

• With the common practice of breaking down each band into beginning, developing, secure, stages:

• In a nursery class where children’s levels of development range from 16-26, 22-36, 30-50 months - there are 9 levels across 17 aspects = 153 levels to assess.

• And some schools still require “evidence” for each assessment….

• There are 141 children aged 3 and 4 years old on roll at Sheringham Nursery School.

• There are 18 aspects in Development Matters

• That adds up to 18 x 141 = 2538 cells of data and a bit of that looks like…

Chores• “Doing

observations” can be experienced as a time-consuming demand by many staff working with young children.

• Jayne Osgood quotes Delia, one of the practitioners in her study, discussing the “stress of report writing, record keeping and all those other chores”. Osgood comments that “Delia’s reference to “other chores” is indicative of the perceived laboriousness of current expectations in nursery practice.”

Osgood, Negotiating Professionalism (2012, p.127)

Reframing children?How might this be changing the way adults relate with children?

And what about levels?• Do we really want to find ourselves

talking to parents about children’s learning in terms of ages?

• How might it feel as a parent of a four-year-old to be told that your child’s development is like a two-year-old’s (e.g. “in the 22-36 month band”)?

“I am concerned that the tool intended to support practitioners to understand and foster children’s development is too often misused. When used as a tick list of descriptors of what children must achieve, it can sadly limit both children’s development and the professional awareness and skills of practitioners.”

Nancy Stewart (2016)

“Assessment, as Development Matters points out, means ‘analysing observations and deciding what they tell us about children’.”

Nancy Stewart (2016)

Dorothy Canfield Fisher

Susan Isaacs

Margaret Donaldson’s “paradise”

What style of pedagogy?

• “a close and nurturing adult-child relationship … is necessary for intersubjectivity, which allows the caregiver to judge how much the child already knows and understands, so that she can provide appropriate scaffolding to extend development.”

• Smith (1999, p.86)

IntersubjectivityIntersubjective relationships depend on the child having agency, and the adult’s commitment to giving more agency to the child over time – as opposed to models which only position the child as the recipient of care.

• Smith (1999, p.87): “children’s ability to handle intersubjective encounters depends on: “reciprocal interaction with … more competent members of the culture, adults treating the child as an agent and bent on ‘teaching’ him to be more so” (Bruner, 1995, p.6)”.

Lilian Katz

Jerome Bruner• “Knowledge about children

that comes from outside one’s own experience seems to make little headway against received wisdom and ‘commonsense’ practice. It is only when the research helps one to see with one’s own eyes that it gets beneath the skin”.

Celebrating children’s learning: a joint project by a group of London nursery schools

Our aim was to avoid the discourse of ‘tracking’, and develop instead a discourse around celebrating learning, learning about learning, and thinking about teaching.

A jump in the puddle

The stopwatches

The bridge in the garden

Counting with string

Keen observation

Features of best practices

• you can hear the child’s voice• there is keen observation of

the child’s exploration, play and thinking

• the practitioner has noticed that the child is learning a new skill, or is making new links between aspects of knowledge

• there are examples of sustained conversation and thinking, sometimes with feelings of awe

The Red Queen