Jacqui Ward [Early Learning Coordinator]

Welcome to today's session. Preschool, programming and planning. This is part one, the introduction to a five-part series. My name is Jacqui Ward and I'm the Early Learning Coordinator within the Early Learning Unit at the Department of Education, and I'm here with my colleague Kelly Birkett.

Kelly Birket [Early Learning Advisor]

Thanks Jacqui. Hi everybody, I'm one of the Early Learning Advisors working in Jacqui’s team. Before we begin our session today, I want to acknowledge the traditional custodians of the land that I’m on today. They are, pardon me. The Darramuragal people and this is Ku-ring-gai land. I recognise their continuing connection to land, water and community and I want to pay respect to the land that you're on today while you're accessing this recording.

Ok, this series of five recorded sessions as a whole suite addresses these two professional teaching standards. So, 6.2.2, Participate in learning to update knowledge and practice targeted to professional needs and school and, or system priorities and 6.4.2, Undertake professional learning programs designed to address identified student learning needs.

Again, as a suite, this professional learning has outcomes and it is intended that learners will understand and apply the legislative and quality standards of the National Quality Framework. It's intended that learners will apply knowledge of child development, early childhood pedagogy, and curriculum to plan teaching and learning experiences which enhance learning outcomes. Learners will develop skills to take a planned and reflective approach to curriculum decision making, synthesise the individual as well as the integrated aspects of the planning cycle, and finally, it's intended that learners will critique practices, systems and processes in relation to quality, teaching and outcomes for children.

Ok, so a folder has been set up in the Early Learning and Schools Microsoft Office Team. Within the communities of practice channel, that's the first image on the left there. If you go into files, you'll see a folder and within that folder are the materials that are referred to in this in this session. Also there's some tasks and reading tasks and some pre session tasks. You'll find all the materials in there. If you have any problems, perhaps you can't access the team, or when you are in there, you're not quite sure where the materials are, if you email Early Learning someone will be able to help you to find them.

Ok, so when you enrolled in this course, you would have got information about three pre-session tasks. The first one was about reflecting on your image of the child, the second was a reading and the third was a terminology task. If you haven't had a chance to complete these three tasks, we suggest that you pause this recording now and then go to the folder I just mentioned and you'll be able to find a document which has got the details of each task and then when you've completed those tasks, come back and push play and continue this recording.

Jacqui Ward

OK, we're going to have a little look now in this section about legislative and quality standards and also Department requirements for programming and planning in the preschool. So, first of all, we are going to take a little quick look at the legislative standards. Laws and regulations outline the legal obligations of approved providers, nominated supervisors and educators. So, basically they are the requirements of what we need to do in the space of programming and planning. The Education and Care Services National Regulations apply and the Education and Care Services National Law apply. So, what we're going to talk about on this slide is really, I guess knowing what you're required to do as a bare minimum as a starting point. There's a few that we've mentioned and highlighted in this presentation, but obviously you might want to have a little bit more of a look at that. We're going to start off with Section 168 in relation, that's from the National Law, and it talks about what the requirements are for the educational program in a preschool. So, the program must be delivered to all children in the preschool that's based on the Early Years Learning Framework and delivered in a manner that accords with the Early Years Learning Framework. So, in other words, applying the pedagogical principles and practices of the framework. It is based on the developmental needs, interests and experiences of each child. So, it definitely needs to be considering all of those sorts of things and is designed to take into account the individual differences of each child. So, again, a program should look different for each child at the preschool, because they've all got their own different interests, dispositions for learning and cultural backgrounds. If we move down into talking about what does Regulation 74 talk about, it's about documenting of child assessment or evaluations for the delivery of the educational program. So, in other words, it's saying, what are the sorts of things that you need to write down, so the first one is more talking about the delivery of the program and this one is talking about the things that should be recorded. And it talks about for the purposes of the educational program, the following information needs to be recorded. So, assessments of the children's developmental needs, interests and experiences and participation in the educational program. So, all of those things need to be captured when you're writing something down. Assessments of the child's progress against the outcomes of the educational program, and again remembering those outcomes relate to the outcomes of the Early Years Learning Framework, as we mentioned above. In preparing the documentation, educators should consider the period of time that the child is being educated and cared for, how the documentation will be used by educators at the service, and prepare the documentation in a way that's readily understandable by educators and parents. So, what I want you to have a little think about when we're looking at this page and also the next page is having a little think about where in these requirements does it say how much or what methods that you need to do? I think Kel this is probably an opportunity, you might want to have a little say in this because I know that that's often a question that people get asked, isn't it? How many observations do I need to do?

Kelly Birket

Yeah, absolutely Jacqui. When I was a P-2 initiatives officer that was generally a concern, not just for educators also for school management wanting, wanting a number where very much we can't give a number because the focus needs to be on the meaningfulness of the information and the quality. You know, one really meaningful quality piece of information that informs the program is going to be a lot better than half a dozen meaningless pieces of documentation.

Jacqui Ward

For sure, and I think you know really what we need to think about is probably not how many and how should I write them in terms of, should it be a learning story, a post it note or digital documentation or whatever, but really, our question should be, is it actually meeting the requirements of what we're talking about on this slide and the next one. So, it's yeah, it's really something to have a little think about there. It really talks about, these requirements talk about the content and the meaningfulness of the observations and the information in the planning and all those sorts of things rather than the numbers.

Kelly Birket

That's right, and before we go to the next slide, I just want to remind you in the Microsoft Team in that same folder you'll find a resource summary sheet and on that is the URL, the link to the online regulations. If you do want to go and you know, read a little bit more and also don't forget in the guide to the NQF, the operational requirements interpret the regulations and give examples of what they might look like in practice, so that's another great source of information if you want to dig a little bit deeper into what the regulations require of you. And don't forget also our team has also delivered an online self-paced module focused on quality area one and the link to enrol in that will be on that resource sheet as well, and that's another way to get some more information, if you do want to look a little bit deeper into the regulations.

Jacqui Ward

Yeah, and again I think this five part series, is hopefully when you finished all five of them, you know you won't be too worried about what's required because you will have a great understanding of the processes and practices and why you are doing all those things and that will be sort of, you know, the requirements will happen automatically because you'll understand the process a little bit better, but that’s a good way to start, just to preface that. The next slide we've got here is talking a little bit about the quality standard. So, the National Quality Standard has requirements that detail the information that we need to include in the assessment and planning cycles. So, standard 1.3 talks about the fact that assessment and planning is, you know, there's a very reflective, planned and reflective approach to implementing the program for each child and there is specific information then in there that's required in terms of that ongoing cycle of observation, analysing, documenting, planning and implementing and reflecting on learning. And there is also the link in quality area seven that the educational leader is supported and leads the development and implementation in the educational program and the assessment and planning cycle. So, there's lots of links in the National Quality Standard for that as well.

Kelly Birket

Yeah, thanks Jacqui and apologies, I have accidentally jumped the PowerPoint forward.

Jacqui Ward

I was expecting another slide there.

Kelly Birket

Yes, it was. We did have a little bit of an unpacking of regulations 75 and 76 which also relate to the educational program. And also I wanted to mention that we've got the legislative requirement, we've got the standard is here, but then there's also the departmental requirements. As teachers you all we all need to follow what is set out in the teachers handbook. So, in Chapter five the responsibilities in relation to programming and planning are noted. It states that in carrying out their duties and responsibilities, all teachers must meet the individual learning needs of students and assist each student to maximise his or her learning outcomes. And then there's also, as you are probably very aware, the School Excellence Framework. It provides a really clear description of the key elements of high quality practice. And if you haven't used this document previously, it's what schools use to document and to assess their practices to inform school planning and annual reports. I won't go into the detail, but I've uploaded a copy of the School Excellence Framework into the folder and you'll find there's some notes. in there about what curriculum looks like at the excelling level.

Jacqui Ward

Can I just jump in there Kel? Obviously we're not suggesting that you know you need to be too concerned about the school space, but I think you know we often talk about our department preschools and there being a whole school approach. So, it is good to be thinking about what does the teaching and learning cycle look like in the school and how are those similar standards and expectations carried across into the preschool. Have we got a next slide on that Kelly?

Kelly Birket

We have, Ok, it's not responding. There we go, pardon me. OK, so that is just the teachers handbook and the School Excellence Framework I just noted. Then also some schools then as well have specific school guidelines or policy and that that's when people sort of start asking about quality and quantity because they want to sort of include that information in a school guideline about programming.

Jacqui Ward

And I think that raises a good point too, to remind everyone that as part of these sessions we will also be encouraging people to at the end, it's an optional task. If you've got a procedure in place or a policy in place for this that you might want to, sorry for programming and planning in the preschool that you might want to review and update it, or actually think about writing one. It's an optional extra though, so again.

Kelly Birket

if you do decide to take that pathway, it is a big job and definitely get your P-2 initiatives officer involved as well as the rest of your team. It's not something you can do on your own because obviously practices need to be consistent across the whole preschool. But yeah, we'll talk about that towards the end of this recording.

So, which leads us to a task. You will be familiar with the Leading and Operating Department Preschool Guidelines, so if you could pause this recording and just go and pull up your copy of the document, you could go to the department's web page or I've also saved a copy in the team channel. These guidelines interpret the legislative and quality requirements in a department preschool, so the section on quality area one, pages 11 to 22 give you some detail on how you will apply their requirements in your preschool.

OK, so after you've done that reading, you can come back and continue the recording. Did you want to add anything there, Jacqui?

Jacqui Ward

No.

Kelly Birket

OK, alright so then will go on to the next section.

Jacqui Ward

So, we thought that it might be a good place to start to sort of unpack some of the theoretical perspectives and understanding that underpin programming and planning in the early childhood space. Also, I think that there's you know a need for us to think about how we view children in general, but particularly the way children in the early childhood setting, the way children learn and how that influences the decisions we make in programming and planning.

So, the EYLF and the educators guide talk to us about the idea that drawing on a range of perspectives and theories can challenge traditional ways of seeing children, and inform approaches to children's learning and development. It talks about that skilful educators are aware of their beliefs and knowledge, and the theoretical perspectives from which they come from. And I really love this quote in the Early Years Learning Framework as well, that the educators professional judgment are central to their active role in facilitating children's learning. So, when we're talking about that professional judgment, we need to think about what sort of things you know, how do you make those professional judgments, and where does that judgment come from? And as the EYLF quote goes on to say that in making those professional judgments, educators weave together their professional knowledge and skills, their knowledge of children, families, and communities. Their awareness of how their beliefs and values impact on children's learning, their personal styles and past experiences. Educators also draw on their creativity, intuition and imagination to help them improvise and adjust their practice to suit the time, place and context of learning. So, that's kind of the, I guess the foundational ideas and statements that underpin this course, that we're saying that you need all of those things to weave together to implement the programming and planning cycle well, and what we're going to touch on now is just, exploring a little bit about what theoretical perspectives mean and how they inform our professional judgments. We are going to explore some theorists in particular, and how and where you might refer to them.

So, we're going to just talk a little bit about, again, the Early Years Learning Framework asks us to think about theoretical perspectives when we're planning a curriculum for children, it talks about that there's a range of different theories that have informed the development of the framework Itself. But also the way we are encouraged to view children's learning and development instead of being influenced strongly, perhaps by one or another, it's about weaving all of those different theories together. So, we thought we would just do a little quick catch up and find out a little bit about those theorists to start with. They are sort of grouped into some main ideas in the Early Years Learning Framework. We talk about developmental theories, we talk about sociocultural theories, developmental theories are about those ideas where children, you know go through a series of developmental Stages, and they develop conceptual ideas as they progress, and they talk about children's learning being grouped in developmental domains such as the physical domain or the socio-emotional domain or language domains and cognitive domains. Sociocultural theory emphasise the central role that families and cultural groups play in children's learning, and the importance of relationships. There's also a whole lot of theories that focus in on the role of experiences in shaping children's behaviour or behavioural theorists. Bowlby's theory of attachment, is a good example of that one. There's critical theories that invite early childhood educators to challenge the assumptions about curriculum and consider how their decisions may affect children differently. Again, if we think about that, those critical theories you know involve us to critically reflect on our assumptions of different things and the idea that not everybody perceives a situation in the same way, and the final one is talking about, not the final one, but the list in the Early Years Learning Framework talks about post structuralist theories offering insights into issues of power, equity and social justice in early childhood settings, and I think that those are really great things to consider in our programming and planning as well, because we can really explore some of those deep issues with children, even very young children, and again we draw on those theories when we do that. Anything to add there, Kelly?

Kelly Birket

No, no thanks Jacqui, that sounds great. We will have a look at a bit more detail of those in a minute. Just before we go on to that, this is something to really keep in mind when you're thinking about your own theoretical perspectives and also working on developing your preschool philosophy, is that the principles and practices of the Early Years Learning Framework are founded on beliefs that children are capable and competent, that they actively construct their own learning, and that learning is dynamic, complex and holistic, and that children have agency.

Jacqui Ward

Yes, and it's worthwhile I guess having a think about that when we talked about the pre-task, being the thinking about your image of the child and whether or not your image of the child, how that is reflected in these concepts and ideas.

Kelly Birket

Yes. Ok.

Jacqui Ward

So, this table comes directly from the educators guide. So, again, if you'd like to read more about it, you can, but it's just giving you some examples of the theoretical perspective and some of the more famous theorists in that space, so Vygotsky and Bronfenbrenner are ones that definitely stand out for me in terms of this sociocultural theory perspective. And again, we talked about that being focused in on relationships and participation are essential to learning so you can see some strong connections there to the concepts of belonging. Children develop and learn in multiple ways that are socially and culturally approved and constructed. In other words, language I think is a really good example of that, you know, children obviously learn home languages, but if they are in a setting where English is spoken, they will automatically develop and flourish in both languages. Children are active agents and contributors in the different social groups in which they participate. Again, positioning children as a key player I guess in that family and social construct.

Kelly Birket

Yes, thanks Jacqui. An example of a sociocultural perspective in action is educators who feel or who take advantage of a learning experience or situation by engaging and interacting with the child, and so believing that the learning will take place through the interaction, discussion, the sustained shared thinking about what the child's doing. So, yes, there's a lot of different theorists who do advocate for sociocultural theory, but definitely the key one that everybody knows about is Vygotsky. And the example obviously there is trying to extend the children to work with you in their zone of proximal development. So, when they're working with you together, they're able to do more than what they would do independently.

Jacqui Ward

Definitely, and I think a nice one to point out there too is if you choose to write down a learning story that this is really representative this theoretical perspective. You know the idea that you're telling a story, I guess of children's learning journey and it's reflected in that sort of concept or idea and I guess one of the ones, the thing that I did want to sort of preface when we're talking about these theoretical perspectives. I often get asked the question about, do we need to specifically reference, you know, a theorist in our observations, and I know some people choose to do it that way, and again there isn't a requirement, if we come back to the requirements in the legislation, it didn't specifically say we needed to reference a theory. It doesn't say that in the in the quality standards either, and it certainly doesn't say it in our Early Years Learning Framework. It's just, I guess it's a personal choice, and for me I think it's more important that you know and understand the links to theory then necessarily you know specifically writing a reference to them in your programming and planning. If I think about that requirement that we talked about earlier on, that the information needs to be presented in a way that educators and families Understand, I'm not sure it's always appropriate to mention you know a complex explanation of a theorist in that kind of format, so again, the choice is yours. We just wanted to cover off on some of these concepts.

Kelly Birket

OK, thanks, Jacqui we will move on to the next one we've got here, again straight out of the educators guide to the Early Years Learning Framework.

Jacqui Ward

Yes, so those behaviourists theories that we talked about there. Pavlov I'm sure everyone recognises that name, Pavlov, Pavlov's dog with the conditioning and Skinner and Bandura, and I also mentioned Bowlby there as well and the main ideas here is that behaviour is learned, inappropriate behaviour can be replaced by appropriate behaviour, changes in children's behaviour occur because of the responses they get. Again, you might not always agree with all of these theories or ideas, but definitely I think there's definitely a degree of conditioning in our programs whether or not we like to admit it. Children do become sort of used to our routines and what not.

Kelly Birket

Yes, that's right, Jacqui. And I guess at the start of a preschool year or when a child commences, there's a lot of learning of routines, and reinforcing what the behaviour expectations are and obviously that's influenced by a behaviourist approach.

Jacqui Ward

We can see a little bit of crossover there too can’t we with that sociocultural theory too, because I think if children in that context won't necessarily be. included in the group if that behaviour isn't acceptable, so a bit of a crossover. We talked a little bit already about the developmental theorists, and probably I think one of the most famous ones is Piaget there, Steiner, Montessori and Gardner are some examples as well. That development is holistic, that they move through a series of developmental milestones, and they learn through exploration and playing with concrete materials, and I think that's a fundamental thing that we all agree on that children learn through that exploration and play.

Kelly Birket

Yeah, ok, and the last one we will look at closely is the critical theory.

Jacqui Ward

So, there is Haber-mas and Freire, again that children have agency, that they have the capacity to make decisions and choices about their learning. It really positions children as active agents. Children have the right to be consulted and heard on matters that affect them. Social transformation is supported through education for a more just and equal world. So, really I think an important component underpinning both the Early Years Learning Framework and also all aspects of the National Quality Standard.

Kelly Birket

Yes, that's good. Thanks Jacqui. And now we're just going to have a look at two sort of scenarios or situations in a preschool. So, again, this isn't intended to be an example of the fact that you need to annotate or document examples in your program. It is not a requirement, but this is really for the purposes of drawing it out as an example, so the first one there talks about content which acknowledges the influence of and reflects children's home culture is an example of Bronfenbrenner's ecological model. The idea that children fit within a family first in a neighbourhood or community and beyond. Again, that's based on the sociocultural theories we talked about the attention given to environmental provocations as an example of the Reggio Emilia approach, based on those sociocultural theories as well and down the bottom, if an adult joined in on children's play, intentionally engaging them in discussion to scaffold their learning and skills would be an example of Vygotsky's social theory, sociocultural theory in particular, that zone of proximal learning encouraging the child to the next step.

Kelly Birket

And this second example depicts a preschool in which the positive behaviour for learning program is being implemented. So, you can see at the bottom of the image there's the rule or expected appropriate behaviour, that bikes and cars will stay on the red track. When such appropriate behaviours are explicitly taught, reinforced, and rewarded, this approach is based on a behaviourists theory. Also just say, for instance, this child was taught to ride this three wheeler before being introduced to a two wheeler bike, that's a developmental approach, so Piaget saying the child goes through Stages of development.

Jacqui Ward

So, I guess there for me, a place where theoretical perspectives can be called out and identified is the preschool philosophy. The preschool philosophy really explains what you do and why, and so the idea to identify and articulate theoretical influences fits nicely in there. The preschool philosophy is informed by the theoretical perspectives that influence at the preschool community, so again, depending on all of the different ideas and understandings of each of the educators, and again what's happening in the school space will influence the philosophy. It guides all aspects of preschool operations. So, when we talk about something in our philosophy, we show how theory influences our day-to-day routines, our educational program, our learning experiences, our behaviour expectations, all of those things, the way we interact with families. It outlines the purposes and principles under which the preschool operates, so everyone has those agreed terms of reference, if you like and reflects the guiding principles in the National Quality Framework in the Early Years Learning Framework, again, everyday practices must align with the philosophy. If not, something needs to change either the philosophy or the practices. Sometimes I think it's a question of the fact that we don't always acknowledge that the philosophy should be such a everyday kind of document that we engage with. And we don't always connect with the fact that those theoretical perspectives are underpinning our philosophy.

Kelly Birket

Yes, yes, ok. So, just a little task now again, we will ask you to pause your recording. Skilful educators are aware of their beliefs and knowledge and the theoretical perspectives from which they come. So, what we want you to do is just recall one aspect of your practice, just one small part or a common scenario which occurs in your preschool and think about the theoretical perspectives that are influencing your actions, reactions in relation to it. Just to try to analyse where your beliefs are coming from and if you need to go back to the EYLF educators guide again, pages 54 to 57, because that's where those tables we looked at earlier are from. Ok, and after you complete that task then we will go on to the next section.

Ok, the assessment and planning cycle. Ok, so you'll be familiar with this cycle. This is the one published by ACECQA. The assessment and planning cycle is the ongoing process used by educators to design programs that enhance and extend each child's learning and development. We often talk about the first Stage, the second Stage, the third Stage, but in reality for some scenarios and situations, it's ongoing. Each cycle leads onto another, generally sometimes a cycle will be implemented, and it will end at the reflect Stage, but often the cycles are ongoing.

Jacqui Ward

And definitely Kelly if we can point out to our learners that sometimes the cycle will happen in an integrated way so you might write a sentence or two than it actually is sort of covering off on all of the things at the one time or sometimes you might break down the cycle when you're writing some things down, and you might go through it step by step. You might have an experience that you're writing about or a planning cycle that's actually done and implemented in a spontaneous way and all done within half an hour process so you might record it after the event, or you might actually have quite a long range project, so the cycle might go on for a really long time, so it's not as sort of a pre-set or predefined idea, it's a range of different ideas in one, the planning cycle.

Kelly Birket

Yes, yes, absolutely. The key thing is that all the Stages are there just over different periods of time that you know, if you're planning something, perhaps a learning experience, if some observation and analysis of learning hasn't gone before and if you’re planning randomly, that's not going to be as valuable as planning that's been informed by the prior Stages of the cycle, so it's really important that you are covering all the Stages of the cycle.

Jacqui Ward

You make a really good point there, Kelly. Every part of the planning cycle is underpinned and enriched by the part before. So, if you haven't got some rich and meaningful observations or analysis, you won't be able to plan for rich and meaningful learning, so it's all related.

Kelly Birket

Yes, absolutely. Ok, so now we will just have a little look at the different Stages. Ok, so first of all, we've got the observing and collecting information and this Stage of the cycle involves collecting meaningful information, as we mentioned before, about a child in relation to their current knowledge, strengths and interests, skills and abilities and culture. So, in part two of this series, we're going to unpack the importance of collecting meaningful information and talk about a little bit more about prioritising the quality over the quantity.

Jacqui Ward

And I think it's really important here to emphasise the sorts of things that you're looking for when you're observing and collecting information. It's all of those things that you mention there, Kelly, it's about current knowledge, so if you were to, as a result of you know, attending this session today, have a think about before you progress into the other parts of the series, do you regularly correct collect information on children's current knowledge? What does each child in your preschool know about a variety of different things? What are their strengths? What are their interests? What skills and abilities to they have? Where is their cultural identity represented? What sort of things do I already know about this child, as opposed to always having to write moments in time observations? So, thinking about that from that point of view that you are really collecting some really rich, meaningful information.

Kelly Birket

Yes, thanks Jacqui. And then the next stage as you know, is the analysis of the learning, and so this involves interpreting and assessing the information collected about a child to determine what they're learning and how they're learning. And, just like previously, in part two, we're going to focus a lot on the why, what, and how of analysis. \

Jacqui Ward

That is a really good point, and I forgot to mention that in the first part too with gathering information, also those observations and the information you gather, needs to actually, you need to be looking for specific information that relates to all of the five learning outcomes, otherwise you won't be able to analyse in this section where it says, how does this link to the approved learning frameworks? Well how will you be able to analyse that information if you haven't thought about gathering specific information in relation to the learning outcomes. I think this is really important because and again, this is where your programming will look different for individual children, even though you might have had an observation where you are observing all of the children in the one setting. They might have all been, you know, participating in the one experience, but the learning will be different for each child. So, really important to think about the analysis for learning in an individual way as well as in a group way.

Kelly Birket

Yes, absolutely, I’ve seen educators. They'll have some photos of the group and a little bit of a group synopsis, but then they'll go into an analysis for the individual children who were involved in that experience, because it is so different for everybody.

Jacqui Ward

And it definitely gives us the direction of where to next when you've done the analysis.

Kelly Birket

Absolutely, and then that leads into the planning. So, at this Stage of the cycle you're planning the pedagogical practices you'll use and the learning experiences that will extend learning. In part three of this series we will be discussing what needs to be planned for as well as the importance of planning, the learning environment and we will have a bit of a focus on the outdoor environment and keeping the intended learning at the forefront of the planning.

Jacqui Ward

I think this is a really important one, Kelly, because often we see, well I’ve seen plans for learning and they are really just a list of the types of resources that people are putting out there when in actual fact, your plans for learning need to be really meaningful again, as we keep saying they need to include so it's visible for everybody. What are the intentions for learning? What outcomes am I hoping to achieve? What goals do I have for children's learning and how will I do it? What are my teaching strategies for each child and how am I going to implement that across all of our learning environments and all of our learning experiences? So, all of those routines, group experiences, indoor, outdoor. So, the planning part of things is really important and it allows everybody I guess to take an active role in facilitating that learning.

Kelly Birket

Yes, absolutely, and I think that's what the Early Years Learning Framework is referring to when it talks about maximising learning opportunities, making all those different parts of the day and environments count by addressing them in your planning.

Ok, so the next Stage is of course implementation, so this refers to the educators or the adults actions throughout the day as they engage and interact with the children to support learning and wellbeing. So, when we do part four of this series, we're going to look a little bit at the place of intentional teaching in a play based learning pedagogy. There's a couple of really interesting readings about how you can address both simultaneously and we will also talk a little bit about the different roles an educator takes in children's play.

Jacqui Ward

I think this is a really important part of the planning cycle, Kelly in that we can have plans for learning, but if we are working from a play based pedagogical approach, you don't actually know how it will roll out until you're actually in those interactions and those experiences with children. So, the implementation allows us for that quote at the start there where we talked about, you know educators needing to use their creativity and intuition. So, this is where that comes into play when the learning is implemented. So, if you have got plans for learning and the focus of your planning is, you know your learning and teaching strategies you can actually implement them in a variety of different ways across the week, the day, the term, or wherever.

Kelly Birket

Yes, absolutely. I don't think anyone is as flexible as an early childhood educator in being able to seize a teachable moment or adapt what they're doing, modify and going with where the children's engagement is, but always, you know, within mine what their intended outcomes are. But just, you know, playing it by ear as the best way to achieve those outcomes.

Jacqui Ward

I think you're right there, Kelly. I think we are the Olympic gymnasts of the teaching profession.

Kelly Birket

Absolutely. Ok, and now we will go to reflecting, evaluating. So, this Stage there are two key components. Obviously your reflection and evaluation. When evaluating educators are asking themselves how meaningful particular Stages of the cycle have been that they're looking at the micro level. So, it might just be an evaluation of one single learning experience or one part of the day, and then the reflection is the big picture or the macro thing that involves critiquing or analysing one's own practices.

Jacqui Ward

Yes, definitely and I think again this is something that is a very misunderstood aspect of the planning cycle. I think people probably are actually, it's a thing that is probably done well but people aren't always identifying that part of what they're doing as you know, evaluating and reflecting and such an important part again if I think about you know, particularly critical theoretical perspective there, if we're not really reflecting on you know, those bigger picture ideas we are not necessarily going to be improving our teaching so reflective practice is crucial to improving teacher quality.

Kelly Birket

Absolutely and it doesn't have to be documenting every single thing, every thought because you're automatically critiquing your own practice throughout the day as you think, I should have done this or this would have gone better this way, or the way I did that was great. When we look at in part five, we will talk about making documentation of those reflections manageable because you know it very much is something which you are automatically doing all the time.

Jacqui Ward

You raise a really good point, there, Kelly that we're not talking about any one of these components of the planning cycle having to require a lot of writing. It's really just about capturing you know the important ideas, concepts, moments, whatever, so it doesn't matter if it's recorded information or as in an audio recording or some post it notes or learning story or whatever the method is that you might choose to you to use. It's not about an onerous amount of information. It's just about really focusing in on capturing the key ideas.

Kelly Birket

Yes, that's an important point and not to get caught up on the method at all. The key thing is that yes, you were able to capture the ideas and that the reflection is occurring.

OK, so that leads us into another task so just based on what you have just heard, we've just talked in detail about each of the five Stages of the cycle. We just ask you to pause the recording again and just think about what it is you actually do at each Stage of the cycle. What are your practices? How are you documenting what you know? What discussions are you having? How are you engaging with your colleagues? And then also generally, people are using a lot of a range of methods of documentation, but is the links between each of these Stages clear? So, what I mean by that is where are you documenting your forward planning. Is it clear how that links back to the two earlier Stages in the cycle? So, how would somebody, an outsider coming in know what something is linked to? I guess it's all about showing that you are implementing cycles and that you are not, things aren't randomly chosen, there's actually a purpose in in what you're doing.

Jacqui Ward

And then can I just add in a quick note there too Kelly? If we could think about, you know in that first point, what are you doing at your preschool at each Stage of the cycle? Can we also think about reflecting on what we're doing in terms of groups and what we're doing in terms of individuals? Because we need to have the planning cycle reflected in both.

Kelly Birket

Absolutely yes, actually I'm thinking I might adjust the task in the folder in the team, I'll add that into the detail to think about both and then the other and again for both are there gaps? Are you doing a great job with your reflection and evaluation but perhaps your collection of information is not quite as strong. It's a self assessment, so just have a little think about your cycle, you know are all the Stages there, are the links clear? And then don't forget to just double check that, so the section 168 of the law and then the regulations 73 to 76, are you covering off on those?

OK, and then after that this is what Jacqui mentioned earlier, an optional task, the programming and planning procedure. Again, as I said before, it's a big big job and if you're not in the right place to do it, it's ok not to take it on now. Definitely, you cannot do it on your own because all of our preschool educators are working in a team, so it needs to be something that everyone comes on board with. Some preschools have already got a programming and planning procedure, and if that's you, you might want to update it. So, just working on it gradually. At the end of each of this series, the end of part two, three, four, and five. There's a little scaffold, a little bit of information about what you might add to your procedure based on the content. And the entire scaffold is in the teams file. So, just the third point there just to reiterate, it does take a long time to develop an effective procedure that is actually implemented well. You can't just, you can't just pick something up from someone else's preschool. You really need to trial implementation. You need to know if what you're going to be doing is manageable time wise, and you will need to evaluate what you're doing and then go back and modify and as I said before, developing a procedure requires collaboration and consultation. You need to get agreement from your whole team that this is what you're going to be doing as a team. And finally, as mentioned, also before your P-2 initiatives officer is a great support, particularly for writing and developing procedures because they come with a background of knowledge themselves and experience, they provide that, but they are also providing an outsiders view so they're able to maybe mention you know, pick up some ideas, additional ideas you might want to add in.

Ok so thanks everyone for viewing this recording today. I hope you found it helpful. And as always, if you've got any queries, don't hesitate to email Early Learning and then somebody, hopefully myself will be able to respond to you and to give you some assistance.

Jacqui Ward

Great, thanks Kelly, that's great.

Kelly Birket

Thanks Jacqui and so keep an eye out for part two and we will see you again then.

[End of transcript]

Kelly Birket [Early Learning Advisor]

Hi and welcome to the second part of this series of preschool programming and planning in this part today we're going to be focusing on the observe and analyse stages of the cycle. My name's Kelly Birkett I'm one of the Early Learning advises and I'm here with my colleague Jacqui Ward.

Jacqui Ward [Early Learning Coordinator]

Hi everybody, my name is Jacqui Ward I'm the early learning coordinator and very excited to talk to you about part two of the planning cycle.

Kelly Birket

Great thanks Jacqui. Before we start I want to acknowledge that where I am today while we record is on the traditional lands of the Karringi and Darra people, I recognise their continuing connections to land, water and community and I want to pay respect to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander, Elders both past present and emerging. I'd also like to acknowledge the traditional custodians of the lands on which you are today as you access this recording.

OK, the teaching standards that this course addresses are. We looked at this in the last part are 6.2.2, 6.4.2. And again, as you would have seen in the first part, these are the course outcomes which will be addressed. Over all five parts of this course.

OK, just a few little reminders, so the materials that we refer to resource is the precession tasks are all in a folder within the communities of practice. Channel of Early Learning and schools. If you're not a member or you can't see them or there's a problem with accessing just send an email to Early Learning and we will help you out there. Also in the folder there's some examples and illustrations of practice that have generously been shared by preschool teachers. They're not vetted or quality assured but they are provided to give you insight into the wide range of approaches that teachers are using across the state in their documentation and also finally in the communities of practice. There's a post tab and the idea is to increase effectiveness of this PL you can engage with your colleagues by using the post tab. So if you select posts down the bottom, you'll see you can start a conversation. And we encourage you to do this to ask questions. A post questions maybe that should be answered questions share your reflections and your ideas with your colleagues to just have a little bit of a little bit of professional dialogue about the content of the course.

Jacqui Ward

Can I jump in there Kelly, just to say that part of the research and the evidence based around effective professional learning is that really that idea of supporting learners to apply learning back into their practice within the classroom. So that's a really important component of this course, and we encourage you to do so and will also be posting things in there as well that you can comment on some questions or ideas. But if you're brave enough, share some examples of your work and ask for some feedback from the colleagues in that group.

Kelly Birket

Yes, great, Thanks Jacqui. OK and you would have seen the precession task. There's two readings, the essence of what we're doing today is from the early years learning frame of the assessment for learning section. There's also some more information on this in the educators guide. And then also we ask you to consider why you gather information about children in your preschool. What why are you doing it? If you haven't completed these, this reading and reflection, just pause the recording now and do so and then come back to it.

Jacqui Ward

And I think that's a really important one as well that second point there, Kelly, just to make sure that you know in order to be doing the teaching and learning cycle well or the planning cycle, well, you really need to know why. What's the purpose behind that information that you're collecting and what you're doing with it? So it's a really important task that one and again. What a great one to share your insights in the communities of practice channel

Kelly Birket

Absolutely. OK and so will start with the first section.

Jacqui Ward

OK, first section of the planning cycle is observing and collecting information, so we're going to be focusing in on that. And as you can see, there's the whole planning cycle. That diagram comes from a ACECQA, the guide to the national quality framework and basically the essence of the planning cycle is to promote learning and development. Each Stage of the assessment and planning cycle relies on the other Stage being given equal consideration, so they're all important components and they definitely can be viewed together in this professional learning. We're breaking them down for the purposes of really honing in on what skills and knowledge are required for each Stage of the planning cycle. So this Stage involves collecting meaningful information about a child in relation to their current knowledge, strengths and interests, skills, abilities and culture. So the information that we gather really provides the foundation to the rest of the cycle. If you don't have good solid information at this first Stage of the planning cycle, you may not necessarily be able to plan rich and meaningful experiences. You may not necessarily be able to analyse the learning or reflect on the learning either, so it's a really crucial Stage, so we really encourage you to think about that what I just mentioned there about meaningful information and whether or not your practices at the moment are really hitting the mark on terms in terms of all of those things we just mentioned their current knowledge, their skills, their interests, their skills, abilities and culture, all of those things need to feature. And though it's described in Stages, and we're unpacking this in this professional learning in Stages the cycle is ongoing, is ongoing in a holistic process, and the entire cycle might be documented in one piece of documentation. A couple of sentences it doesn't have to be written separately in the way that we are presenting the information today. Sometimes you might spontaneously implement a planning cycle for in response to a teachable moment. Some things you might have planning cycles that are long ranging, and I think we mentioned that in the first part, but just again to reiterate. It's not necessarily about breaking them up in this sort of individualised way. When you recording your information, you can definitely collate and cross over the ideas and what not in each of the sections, but today we're focusing in on this one.

Kelly Birket

Great.

Jacqui Ward

So it's a little quote from the early years learning framework, because really, what we're doing in these two phases of observing and gathering information, analysing the learning is were actually assessing children's learning, so we're assessment for children's learning according to the EYLF, refers to the process of gathering and analysing information as evidence of what children know can do and understand again that little phrase there is really important one as well. Does the documentation that you currently have about children. Does it demonstrate? Does it make the learning visible of what children no can do and understand? Is that clear in individual records as well as across groups? It's part of an ongoing cycle that includes planning, documenting and evaluating children's learning so our own early years learning framework gives us some good guidance in that space as to what we're doing in this first part of observing and gathering information. And again, like all teachers across the education continuum, we need to think about assessment and I think for early childhood educators our views of assessment have been very much influenced by the theorists that we talked about in part one, and a lot of those theorists coming from more of a scientific background and really focusing in on observation. And that's one of the reasons why we talk about observations, but effectively what we are doing is assessing learning. NESA talks about assessment, for learning formative assessment, talks about assessment as learning as in children, being involved in their own learning and assessment of learning, which is more of a summative thing. And again, I think this is where our views of assessment can be a little clouded when we think we need to observe something directly or a moment in time. Whereas summative assessment gives us permission if you like or viewing it from that point of view to say that we can actually summarise children's learning overtime, we don't have to maintain that very objective perspective that you may have learned in your formal training, your preservice teaching or what not.

So I'm just going to read through a few of those points on the slide, so if we think about formative assessment or assessment for learning, it's in support of ongoing learning. It's an integral part of day-to-day practice, usually in observation of the child in everyday learning experiences, and usually acted on immediately by the teacher to support or extend learning. So, again, the other thing there is that formative assessment can also inform the effectiveness of our teaching as well. So when we present experiences or we engage with children in a certain way, those maybe more. Some of those intentional teaching strategies may be more effective for some children than others, so formative assessment is a way for us to gauge the effectiveness of our teaching as well assessment as learning again the early years learning framework positions, children as competent, capable learners, and having agencies, so it's really important to think of them as having a key part in the planning cycle. Children can self assess and reflect on their own learning and this will help give you more information that you need to know whether or not where a child is at in terms of their current knowledge, skills, abilities, and what they can do, and no one understand. An educator in child discussing what the child has learned, how they learned it, and what they would like to learn next is a crucial part of involving them in that planning cycle involving children in contributing are setting their own learning goals is really important. Again, how do we get motivation and buying from people? We involve them along the way, so that's really important. And as I said, assessment of learning or that Summative Assessment is a summing up or reviewing of what the child is learned, their progress or the distance travelled. Some of the obvious examples of that when we do some we might make some summative assessment comments towards the end of the term, or halfway through the year, or as part of the transition to schools statement. Again, you can use all of these different types of assessments at any point in time and use them to help you gather rich and meaningful information. As we said generally used for the summative of assessment generally used to assess learning against the ELYF one of outcomes. The learning outcomes for children and often used at defined endpoints, but again, can be used throughout, so that's just a little bit of a snapshot if you like about assessment.

So again, if we think about the question that was posed, why do you collect information about children well you've got a range of different reasons, and connecting with the purpose behind what you do tends to give you a lot more confidence in your own professional knowledge and your own professional decision making as well. Why do we document? In case you're still there thinking I'm not really sure, some of the points are on the slide there. So to develop a holistic understanding of each child, to better know how to extend their learning because every child's disposition is different. Each child's learning style is really different and they each have a role to play in how best to support and extend their learning. To monitor each child's learning progress towards the EYLF learning outcomes as we talked about in part one, that's a legislative requirement. We do need to make sure that we have information as to how children are progressing in relation to those learning outcomes. Again, not with an end point in mind, but just looking at how they're progressing and learning along those outcomes as a continuum. The reason why we collect and observe information is so that it can inform the planning of our educational program. It is supposed to be based on those observations of children it’s not meant to be a random collections of things. Again, if you think about the difference between a school curriculum and our early childhood curriculum, the difference is the centre of focus. So the centre of focus in our curriculum is children and what they're interests and needs are and how they're learning is progressing. Whereas in that school Stage it's more about a curriculum or a topic focus. So again, that needs to be clear as to why you're collecting that information. Again, that's also a legislative requirement. And of course we want to make learning visible and be able to share it with others that's one of the joys of our teaching profession that we get to share it with our colleagues. We get to share learning with children with families with other professionals that you may be working with. Also, those people that are coming in to check on what your program looks like in your observations. So your supervisor or your principal, also your authorised officers as well. So think about that when we're talking today. I want you to really have that in the focus of your mind. Is the learning visible in what we're doing here? What information we are observing and collecting? And of course, you know this gives us meaningful information. These observations in terms of evaluating the effectiveness of the learning experiences in the environments provided and as you know, that at the end of the cycle, that evaluation and reflection sort of leading to this part of the cycle as well. So there's a bit of a link and an overlap there as well.

So this is the million dollar question Kelly that everyone always asks what do I do and how much do I do? And all those sorts of things. So we're going to cover that a little bit. And what sort of things do you need write down and collect and what's the evidence that you're providing that you've got information that relates to what we're talking about? So it's important to plan which information you collect, allowing you to be strategic with your efforts and time, you might choose to make targeted observation or to summarise learning. You know the choice is yours at the focus is about making children's learning visible and recording that progress as we mentioned before. So one of the things that I think most, especially early childhood teachers really grapple with is how do I manage to document in the time the time allocated you know time is the most challenging aspect I guess of the planning cycle. So I really want you to think in today's session will, maybe there's some things that I can actually stop doing because they don't necessarily provide the rich, meaningful information that I need and that I want to collect. And maybe you think about doing things a little bit differently. So as we said before the information collected might be related to a child's progress towards a specific learning outcome, including discrete skills, making sure that's not the only thing you write about. I know that when I read a lot of observations, I come across a lot of people writing something about how a child might be learning to write their name, or that they're cutting scissors, or that they're holding their pencil in one hand or the other. Yes, maybe some relevant information, but there's nothing else there that necessarily tells me a lot about the other learning outcomes. As we said, distance travelled towards achieving an individual learning goal. So have we noticed that a child can you know, that they have different skills from you know the start to the end of term or a period of time that you can select. Have we got information about their interests, their strengths or their needs? This is what we're talking about in relation to children's current knowledge. There should be a rich portfolio in there information about this individual child and I'm not suggesting that means barrels and barrels of written information, but even in some point forms or some post it notes, just some information that tells that child, that family and other educators that you know that child that they're known, valued and cared for, and that they are challenged because you know all the things that they already can do and know and understand. We need to think about how the how we show the way that they were involved in a range of different experiences and this is one of the issues that I personally have when we do group observations because it doesn't necessarily give me information about individuals and what individuals were getting out of that learning. So how was that child involved in that group learning experience, nothing wrong to talk about the group experiences as a whole, but then you might talk about some individual ways and things that children were learning in that. And also there might be that development in an area of developmental domains so physical social all those sorts of things. There is a crossover with the outcomes in relation to developmental domains, but sometimes people might like to call those out separately. Physical obviously catered for in learning outcome number three social is covered off on one and two. You know there's lots of ways at the developmental domains are intersected in there, but a particular thing that I can think of, Kelly is that you know if we're calling out a developmental domain. It might be if we have some concerns over a child not progressing in the way a child. We might expect a child too, so that can give us some good information to flag that maybe they might need some further assessment. Is there anything else that you've got to add on that Kel?

Kelly Birket

No, no, not at all. Just like you talk to again, it's making sure it's not random what your I just want to confirm that it’s so important you need to actually set out knowing what information you're looking for, because otherwise we'll just end up with reams and reams of info that you can't necessarily use, so yes, that would be my point.

Jacqui Ward

Yes, I definitely think that such a such a good point Kelly. You can be very and you should be very targeted. You know sometimes you will be observing a moment that happened that told you a lot of information, but other times you'll be, well, you know what I don't really have a lot of information about this child and I know this is something where a lot of people talk about checklists and whether or not you should have a checklist. But I think they're probably for me about a tool that. Is for teachers really to say what parts do I not have very much information on this child, so they're good for that reason. I think yes.

Kelly Birket

Yes, I've seen some teachers have great spreadsheets with the five outcomes and they just kept a little bit of a tally to make sure that they are collecting information about the whole child and that identifies any areas that they don't have information about the child. OK, so on the next slide, if it's OK, I'll talk about this one.

Jacqui Ward

Sure

Kelly Birket

if you start up the top, right corner in the red and this is just a little bit of a flow chart to support you to critically reflect on. What you're collecting information on and a little bit to try to make your work targeted and manageable. So first thing you need to ask yourself is that that pinky box will the information add to your knowledge of the child. If no, just stop. Follow that arrow down you're wasting your time. If yes, think about will the information inform the teaching and learning cycle. We collect information about children to inform our planning so that we can extend their learning. If it's not going to help you with that, perhaps stop. You might be wasting your time. If yes, think about how you can relate the information to the early years learning framework. If it can't be, I mean you might. It might be related. It's a little bit hard if it's not because our curriculum needs to be based on the early years learning framework. If you can, just check that you not duplicating information that's already been documented, or that's written in another way somewhere else. If it's not, go for it, collect the information if that particular piece of information has already been collected, perhaps just stop you don't need to re-document it, so this flow chart is just to sort of make you stop before you collect some information and just consider how meaningful and significant and relevant the information is.

Jacqui Ward

Yes, and I think, can I just reiterate to on that, can you relate the information to the EYLF? Well, we did talk about children's, you know, skills, knowledge and all those sorts of things, but they sit within that, you know, that's really ultimately the purpose of the information, isn't it? So it's good to have a lot of information around that, but you know, to know you don't necessarily, I guess have to record every single thing that you know about that child, for example, they went on holidays, you know, to Hawaii last week, if it's not necessarily relevant to what they're interested in in your preschool or your program, so you've got to be a little bit discerning, I guess.

Kelly Birket

Yes, and I guess when you are collecting information about the child's interests or you know things like that. If it can be, if that interest or experience they've had can be used as a vehicle for future learning, then that's a really valuable piece of information to collect.

Jacqui Ward

I think yes, you do raise a really good point there. Kelly and I think we I'm not sure if we mentioned it last time, but I'm sure we probably will. That's how a play-based program works, or experiential learning works. You know you use the interest as a vehicle to. You know, facilitate learning. So it is important to know about that. Again, and it's important to know what is it about that interest that is intriguing for that child as well.

Kelly Birket

Yes, for sure. OK, well, we'll move on to the next section. This sections about gathering the information.

OK, so we'll start with how this is the tough question, because everybody does want a template that they can fill in the boxes for, but the early is learning framework acknowledges that documentation is important, but it's not prescriptive. This is because each educator is an individual. Each group of children is different. There's no one size fits all approach or template. You'll probably have found yourself that from year to year you actually evolve you modify, you change the way you do things. You might start the year with a particularly great template that's working well for you and as the year goes on, you change it because your needs are changing. Whatever message you do use to gather information, the key thing is that it's manageable as teachers were always sitting really high expectations for ourselves and we have great goals and plans of how we'll document and how many we'll do, and when we'll do them. But if that's not manageable, everyone will fall in a heap. That the prime time for the children's learning is when you're there with them face to face and you need to be your best person then and if you've been up till midnight, documenting or rewriting or annotating you not going to be at giving 100 percent with the children. that's my opinion. So you know the methods you use need to be manageable.

OK, the documentation methods you use also need to be understandable to the children and their families because you need to make the learning visible, so you need to keep it fairly simple. Also, it's not noted here, but the other educators, your colleagues that you're working with everyone needs to be able to access what's written an understand what it means and interpret it. Keep in mind also, children demonstrate their learning in different ways, so, a diverse range of methods to gather information will capture and validate the different pathways that they take towards achieving their outcomes. Again, just like teachers are all individuals and there's no one size fits all with your information gathering for different children, you might use different methods. It's hard to even predict what will go well with some children, but you know, keep in mind that it's not a one size fits all. And finally, just like Jacqui said earlier, the information gathered must make learning visible, so make sure any samples, photos, recordings, anything like that it can't stand on its own, it needs some sort of contextual information, an explanation or annotation because you know what the photo is showing and you know the context, and you know what learning was happening, but you know, four weeks down the track or to a parent looking at that photo or anybody else that information isn't there, so it's really important to annotate. So definitely less photos, but more photos with some sort of contextual information.

Jacqui Ward

Kel I've just got to add something in there because I know that I've always, you know, had the In flying the flag about the fact that I think photos of really undermined gathering information and making it rich and meaningful because I think there's a such a strong focus on gathering the photos and collecting the photos and print the photos and resizing the photos and sharing the photos. And it just becomes more about the photos than actually the learning and one of the things that I've always suggested whenever I've delivered PL is how about we put away the camera for a couple of weeks and just see. If we might write things down in a different way, or if we might try different methods of demonstrating children's learning.

Kelly Birket

So, I agree, and I think the saddest thing is to see in a preschool sort of the two to three PM last hour rush, the kids are tired. You know the educates are trying to finalise things. Some kids are being picked up early, and then there's one very stressed educator trying to make the printer work to print out x number of photos to have ready for when the families come in the afternoon and the stress that the educator's put on themselves or the team to do that is just really unfortunate because the afternoon you know the day doesn't come to a nice end. It's a very stressful time and then and then often the educator will get be heartbroken because the families will be in a rush and they won't necessarily take the time to look at the photos. So that's something else.

Jacqui Ward

That’s right, we really got to rationalise our time as you said and think about it. Is it manageable? And the other thing is to that the other thing that I think has been an undermining of the quality of rich and meaningful information provided is this idea that we need to present that end of day experience or label, or journal or whatever you want to call it every single day. Actually, there's no requirement for you to do that, and if that's not working for you, and if it is stressful and if it is taking up a lot of time, you could think about doing something different. So one of the things that is another, you know flag that I fly because I feel like it's also been undermining the quality of rich and meaningful information that we provide. Is the idea of presenting information in that daily kind of space at the end of the day that there's this pressure that we need to provide photos and evidence of our day families. There isn't actually any requirement for that and if you find that unmanageable or that you're not really presenting really good information, then maybe think about stop doing that or thinking about a different way to do it again. I personally as a parent four children never really read any of the day books. I know that's a bit of a bad thing to admit, but again, you know the things that were more meaningful and relevant to me were those you know, collections of information about my children's learning overtime, I found that to be a bit more valuable, so again a great way to involve your families to find out actually, do they. Do they want need that or and or would they like something else you know?

Kelly Birket

Definitely asking families is really, is really important because, yes, you don't want to be spending a lot of time on something that isn't accessed, or is it? Is it more people actually want? It's not the information they want, so yes, I definitely agree there.

OK, so the next slide, is purposely a little bit vague because we've said one size does not fit all so you know we're not going to be overly prescriptive about the different methods that you use to collect information. I mean, of course you document an observation. How you do that is what works for you. For some people it's in the post it and then at the end of the week it's put in the child's file or at the end of the day it's put in a particular area of the preschool. Some people make their observations on a little template, but again, whatever works for you is good and what's more important is not how or what it's written on it's what you do with it. Some people get more and more as well as taking photos. They're taking little video snaps or audio recordings that could be quite valuable. Recording of a child talking about what they're doing is they're doing it gives you some really good information. As we talked about before, collecting and then annotating a sample. Also, think about asking the child his or her view and their perspective on their learning. They'll give you some insights that you might not have thought of, don't forget, never dismiss the value of talking to a family and gathering information from them. Also, your team, particularly if you're working in a double preschool and as for educators. Everybody is in a different part of the preschool. Everybody seeing different things, getting a little bit of collaboration and just using the expertise within your team is really good idea. And also if you've got therapists working in your preschool, if you've got a OT or a speech therapist coming in, taking the time to ask them about their interpretation of the child's learning will add to your picture of the child. OK, so now will move on to the next section.

Jacqui Ward

This is a section on analysing the learning so hopefully you've gathered or gleaned some really good information as to what sort of type of information you need to gather what sort of observations, you need to gather how you're going to do that and the reason why it's important, now we're going to talk about the important part of it and again this is what might be the annotation to the sample or the photo or the recording because it's your version of the learning that you think is occurring so the analysis of learning, which is really important.

So back to our lovely planning cycle and again you can see this is the little pink section there that we're talking about. And again we talked about promoting learning and development at each Stage of the assessment and planning cycle relies on each of the other Stages to be given equal consideration, and I think this part of the cycle is really important in terms of that interpreting an assessing the information you collected about the child, because it will determine what and how they're learning, and it will determine where you go to next. So it's an absolutely crucial Stage for the future direction, so the next step of the planning cycle, if you've skipped this step and you don't necessarily have an analysis in there, you don't necessarily you might be just providing more of the same experience because you haven't drawn out any other things that are important to inform that planning. Again, we talked about the fact that it's the cycles ongoing, it's a holistic process, and that analysis might be blended up into the observation that you're doing, so you don't necessarily need to keep them separate. But if you think that's a great way for you to learn as to how to provide some rich and meaningful information, then feel free to separate them. There aren't any rules about this, and again, it's about developing your skills and developing your craft and developing your professional knowledge and skills to be able to implement the planning cycle. I will also point out at this point in time to that the analysis of learning is really underpinned by the things that we know so we talked in the first part about the theoretical knowledge and understandings, we talked about the knowledge and understanding of the earliest learning framework. These are all important things that you need to have a good firm understanding of before you dive into the analysis or it will give you the tools if you like to understand how to do the analysis of learning. And one of the things that is my pet peeve also is you know to see the links to. I think very sometimes extraneous links to theorists in this analysis part or the links, to Ello 4.1 or something, or the link to the whole outcome. Or, you know, an observation that's of a moment in time yet it links to, you know, five of the learning outcomes. You know all five of the learning outcomes, so that's something to have a think about when you analyse the learning, you'll be able to really draw out which bits of the framework are relevant in this situation.

Kelly Birket

I mean and there's no, you know, one piece of learning that would show one of the learning outcomes has been achieved because it's just not possible. You know that their lifelong outcomes, so you quoting the outcome in its entirety, is not generally that helpful. Using the little points of evidence in the tables which we'll look at in a minute in the document in the ELYF document is helpful, or it actually calling out a specific learning, not the overall outcome is more helpful for your planning and for the families as well.

Jacqui Ward

Yes, it's just about to say exactly that. Kelly, that I think this is where I you know I hear from a lot of different families who might have a range of different backgrounds and they I think that they can be a bit perplexed by the fact that we write some information up that sort of says it links to these things, but they can't see the link between my child climbing on that balance bean and how does it link to these things, because this is the bit that's important. The analysis of learning is missing. Yes, it's a crucial breach. I think to making that learning visible.

Kelly Birket

Yes, yes, and calling out skills like sharing the child you know, showing their able to share, or you're focusing on that as a learning goal is more helpful than giving an outcome. But I mean, as educators as professional as you know what skills fit into which, in which concepts fit into which outcomes. Just be very conscious that they're very big, broad outcomes.

OK, so I'll move on to the next slide.

Jacqui Ward

OK, we probably covered off on a little bit of that, haven't we? When we were talking about our little chat then so,

Kelly Birket

We did

Jacqui Ward

We analyse collected information to make that subjective judgment about what the information is telling us about the child and their learning, and I think the subjective word is really important there because I think you know, as I said before, we learn how to write some observations and some interpretations, and you know, from my professional training, I was taught to be quite objective and to be as objective as possible, whereas it's always going to be subjective and I guess this is about giving you permission to say. You know you put you put it out there because you are thinking that in this analysis that you're making the judgment about what you think that child is learning and if you've got some rich and meaningful information that tells you that, then that will help to support that judgment. For example, there's a few children might be playing in the sand pit and they're filling containers. One child might be learning how to self soothe and regulate their emotions, and they're doing it for more of a sensory experience. And they might be enjoying the, you know, the visual of the grains of sand, falling and all sorts of different things. Another child might be exploring some, you know, mass concepts of volume and capacity and estimating and hypothesising whether or not these it'll take two or three containers to fill this bucket or whatnot. So we don't necessarily know unless we've sort of thought about analysing the information. And again, the more information the rich and meaningful information we've got, that first Stage, the observing and gathering information. The more helpful it will be at this particular point in time. Analysis helps educators in partnership with families and children and other professionals to plan effectively. As I mentioned before, communicate about their progress, clarify what might be hindering progress. Again, you know you can make some comment in this analysis of whether or not you think this is typical behaviour for this child, or whether it's out of the ordinary, or whether or not there's been a great level of progress in a particular area or whether or not there's been some regression. All of those sorts of things. And as we said before, identifying children needing additional support. That's where we can say in the analysis you know that that this child isn't progressing typically if we think about developmental domains or all of those sorts of things.

Kelly Birket

Definitely and this next slide sort of. does show how intertwined these two Stages are. This critical reflection of the analysis of learning is similar to the flow chart we had in the first Stage. This action is focusing on just again, if not already asking yourself is the information meaningful or helpful and what it could be used for and if it should actually be written or recorded? Or do you stop? Do you just leave it as a conversation or in your memory? The reason I've just made this point is because often the more experience an educator is, the more blurred the line between these Stages becomes to the point that experienced educators are making the assessment, collecting the information and already at the same time there analysing it in their head or as they document the observation, they're adding the analysis at the same time, and then also moving already into thinking about the next step.

Jacqui Ward

For sure, and it's a really good. It's a good reason why we've grouped these two parts of the planning cycle in the one session today because they are so integrated. Yes, because you would automatically. I think, particularly if you're looking at, we're going to look at the EYLF examples of what might be observed. It's kind of automatically interpreting the learning that links to that sort of outcome at the same time, so.

Kelly Birket

Yes. I think educators need to know what is which part of the documentation is the observation and which is the analysis because that's really important to be able to differentiate between what was saying and what it actually means. But yes, doing them all in one is definitely the way most people end up working.

Jacqui Ward

And I think too one of the problems here is, this is why I think it's important to do this critical reflection is. If you can't analyse the learning and you can't show some links to a range of different outcomes. What? Why is that? As in, you know is the information that I collected in the first place the problem and I kind of think that's often the case. We haven't collected enough information to start with, so we're trying to build a 20 story building on some sand foundations and it keeps crumbling. We can't really analyse the learning and we can't plan for it because we didn't get enough good information to start with.

Kelly Birket

Yes, I absolutely agree with that Jacqui, it is all gets back to what you're actually collecting.

Jacqui Ward

OK, what in terms of analysing for learning? So the analysis of learning helps us make sense of what was seen or heard. Again, that interpretation of the learning was the child you know, engaging with an exploration of mass concepts, or were they doing it as a soothing experience? Or were they developing that connection with the land, or you know, with natural materials, all of those sorts of things, so it helps us to sort of point the compass in the right direction. It interprets or questions information collected in order to determine what it's telling us about the child in their learning. So coming back to what I said before about having you know some summative assessments or some collections of things. This helps us with our analysis of learning. If we've seen this child do the same thing in multiple different situations or indifferent learning experiences, or throughout different times of the day of the week. It helps us to interpret that information, and therefore that leads us to you know, perhaps ask a question. Why is this child repeating this particular experience? What are they trying to get out of it? It might be focused in on one piece of information. As we said, sometimes the particular moment in time can be that epiphany that can give you that information or a child can demonstrate a whole range of skills and understandings that you haven't seen them do before, so sometimes it will be one piece of information. Other times it'll be a collection of information. As I said, overtime or over, you know, a range of different experiences that the child will demonstrate what they're interested to learn more about and the direction of where they're taking their learning, what skills there practicing, what they're keen to find out more about. And as we said before, it makes the learning visible. When we unpack it, I think of an example years and years and years ago of, you know. A little 3-year-old in my class that started drawing some patterns on a picture that she been drawing. She was really interested in drawing pictures, but this is the first time I've ever seen any symbols. They look like dashes and triangles and I remember showing her mum and saying You know, how exciting is this? Look at this look at what you know the child has drawn and I didn't add in the analysis of learning for the parents so they kind of were like it's a nice picture. You know because I was obviously what I was. what I didn't say to her was this is your child, and she is learning about what patterns and symbols mean, and she's writing them on there and I wrote the little quote of what she'd said there, but that was her way of writing at that point in time. That was her early writing. So again, if we make the learning visible for families and show them what that means, it helps them to understand how learning happens in those early years and how learning happens through play. And again, makes a formative or summative assessment of children's learning and also of the effectiveness, I guess of our teaching, particularly if we think about the planning cycle could be repeated or an ongoing kind of spiral. The observation could be tied into the evaluation at the end, and so our analysis is there for a really ideal place to say whether or not what we provided before was being effective in terms of our teaching.

Kelly Birket

And what you said about the family. Also, providing the analysis is a way of advocating for the importance of early childhood education, because sometimes the significance of what the child has done is not apparent. So by calling it out it definitely, you know, helps the family to actually see that you know what the child is doing is really quite significant.

Jacqui Ward

Yes, and it kind of reiterates what I said in part one too, Kelly where I said I'm not a big fan of sort of linking to a theorist when we write this analysis again. Maybe you do. But is it in a way that presents the information that is making the learning visible? Or are we just doing it to prove that we're super clever? Or you know that we know the links ourselves? For me, the place for analysis of linking our work to theorists happens, probably in other spaces, but again, that's just my opinion. That's not a rule, I just think it's really important that we sort of. Again, I use the word interpret because I think of it being like an interpreter. You know, if you are interpreting something for a person who spoke another language while we are the early childhood experts in, it's our job to interpret what that learning means and how we can present the information. I guess in Layman's terms, that are meaningful, to families.

Kelly Birket

Yes, absolutely it is. It is all about that. Yes, presenting the information in a way that's understandable to everybody else. So we'll move on to the actual the How, pardon me wrong slide. A little bit more information about what the analysis is.

Jacqui Ward

So when the analysis of information is collected, the child's learning is being assessed. So that's what we're doing when we're analysing the learning, we're assessing the learning. The primary purpose, of that assessment is to support ongoing learning or future learning. Recognising that children learn at different rates and demonstrate their learning in different ways. As we've mentioned a few times, so assessment methods, strategies, and tools should enable children of all cultural and language backgrounds and a range of capabilities to demonstrate competence. I think this is a really, really important part where, you know we need to think about the planning cycle we focused in on lot on the early years learning framework outcomes, but there's actually lots and lots of opportunity to link in here and think about when you're analysing the learning as to whether or not you are living your EYLF principles and living the EYLF practices. For example, you know the high expectations and equity, the respect for diversity. The culturally competent practice all of those sorts of things are really important here. Recognising the cultural limitations, if we present information in a certain way that doesn't necessarily suit that particular child in their family and their identity, so I think it's really important that this is part of that analysis that you thinking about.

Kelly Birket

OK, and so here's the how, how you actually go about doing your analysis. But when you doing your analysis as an educator, your drawing on your professional knowledge and experience and you doing that subconsciously, you not actually even aware that that's what you're doing. You're using your professional judgment. You're also applying your understandings of learning an including the theoretical perspectives that explain how children learn. So Jacqui just touched on that a little bit. Now you refer to the ELYF learning outcomes. You refer to possibly information about developmental milestones. You might be using your knowledge of early childhood development as well. Holistically and also you refer to previously collected information about the child. So there's a lot of different things coming into play when you're analysing a piece of information. But essentially at the end of the day, you're using your professional judgment and what particular resource or perspective you draw on will depend on the situation. I mentioned this earlier about gathering information to gain different perspectives and insights. You talk to your colleagues. You talk to the child's family, other professionals, and you also ask the child themselves for their interpretation.

Jacqui Ward

Can I just say, then? I think that last point there about you know, different perspectives to is a really important part in the importance of critically reflecting or the way throughout the cycle as well. Which kind of reiterates what I said in the slide before you know, like are you being culturally inclusive? And are you thinking about children and including children with a range of abilities you know and disabilities and all those sorts of things?

Kelly Birket

So, this slide. Here you can say what? When you were analysing, you refer to the ELYF learning outcomes. So here you'll recognise this table from early years learning framework. So what you need to be doing is looking to the left column there to the points of evidence. So when we were saying before, you can't look at, you know, don't, you're not analysing in terms of an entire outcome. It's smaller discrete skills, such as what's in there left. Left column here the five learning outcomes are aspirational and their long term aims, so they're to broad to use when you analyse learning. It's these smaller skills in these tables in the document that will help you move the children forward. Did you want to make any comment on that Jacqui?

Jacqui Ward

Well, I just think this is a good one to sort of also reiterate that these outcomes have kind of got those developmental domains embedded within them. And that there's also links to other things, like munch and move and fundamental movement skills. If you notice that point there when you know this particular outcome is evident when children engage in increasingly complex sensory motor skills and movement patterns, and also that combined gross and fine motor movement and balance to achieve increasingly complex patterns of activity, including dance, creative movement, and drama so that's a really good example of when we're practising our fundamental movement skills that we are developing those skills and that's how we could interpret that. You know, like that child is progressing and then we can. Also, I think talk about how they are how that links into that sort of the analysis could include how that links into supporting future learning and growth as well. For example, if I know how to run well and I have developed the skill of the fundamental movement skill of running, then I'm now more capable to participate in a range of games, both organised and social games. When I go to primary school and beyond, because I know that you know, I have good fundamental techniques of running for example.

Kelly Birket

Yes, yes, definitely. And the other thing it's important that these points are that they themselves are not a checklist. You observe the child and you analyse, and then you come to this document and you look for the relevant point. You don't start at the top and work your way down. But that would be too stressful, and that's not how learning happens. And the other thing to keep in mind is you can actually the points of evidence like what you will see to know that the child is progressing towards his outcome you can actually add your own comments, your own indicators. You actually word it yourself. You worded in a way that is understandable to the family and your team is perfectly okay to add your own indicators that you know that they're addressing this outcome but you know. Say like the example Jacqui gave of the fundamental movement skills, you might add some more detail in there. You might add, you know that the child is learning is able to skip or that they can, you know, hop on both legs. Anything you can do that that's OK because that's relevant for your context.

Jacqui Ward

Yes, definitely. And again, for me I think it's about sort of making that comment. There's nothing wrong with also then calling out that this contributes to children having that strong sense of well being so rather than writing it as an outcome, we can just write it as a sentence. You know that when we you know when you know how to look after your own health and physical well being, that's an important part of you being strong, healthy, capable person throughout life. So you know, thinking about, I guess making in this analysis part, just making it a little bit more meaningful and relevant I guess and really, as I said before, interpreting the learning

Kelly Birket

And there's some other documents as well. So obviously ELYF is. Your primary document you source document, but if you need a little bit more information, there is the developmental milestones there based on the elf and the national quality standard. So there's a copy of that document in the channel for this course. So that's in communities of practice. Yes, so again, not a not a prescriptive checklist, but particularly a child who you have concerns about the developmental milestones might give you a little bit of information about what's the next step, or maybe what you should be seeing in that child. Well, so for those children who need a little bit of extension, I will probably already have some of your pre-schoolers who are working at the level of the literacy and numeracy progressions there already working at an early Stage, one level in literacy and numeracy, so you might want to look to that document to see what the next step might be for them and what the progression of learning is. The third dot point, the Queensland Kindergarten Learning Guide. So it's based on the early years learning framework, but there's a lot of sort of Queensland specific information in there, but what I have found quite are useful is the continua of learning and development. I like it just because it shows that if this is what the child's doing now, this is what they're showing you. This is the next thing you know, this is the extension. This is where you can go to next for the child, but you would have to pick through that document to find which parts are helpful for you. The Northern Territory preschool curriculum again is based on ELYF , and it's got throughout it little tables called phases of learning and it actually it has. Again, it's exactly it's similar to the Queensland one in that it shows you well if this is what the child's doing. This is a step before, this is a step after so that if you need to push a child on when you were doing your analysis. If you're thinking about what's the next step, it gives you a little bit of information.

OK, so that's something that section the analysis of learning did you want to add anything there? Jacqui before we go on?

Jacqui Ward

No, I think that's great. We've done lot's chatting along the way.

Kelly Birket

So keep in mind those four documents, the resource documents, the early years learning framework, they're not the progressions. The other three are all based on the early years learning framework, so it's okay to use them but always start with the early years learning framework.

OK, so in this section we're going to sort of bring. The whole session together a little bit of a conclusion. Some educators also use the, so what question in this model here where to organise their information and analysis they use these titles. So what? What was the learning that they saw? And so what? Why is that meaningful or significant for this child? So, this this gets a little back to what we were talking about before about you know, is it meaningful and relevant? And then educators use the question of now what? To start thinking about the next step for this child. So we're moving a little bit into the planning Stage, just as you're analysing thinking OK, this is what it's showing me and what can we do next for this child? What's the little nudge? What do they need to know now? What skills are understandings? Do they need? And how will I teach these things? Just based on your own practice. Just think about what you do at these two Stages of the cycle. Is the learning visible in the information you collect? And we've talked a lot about meaningful meaningfulness of information. Are you collecting rich, meaningful and relevant information? So after you've completed your observations or gathered information, do you analyse it and so that means you know, do you interpret it? Do you ask yourself what it's telling you about the child? What they can do, and how they're learning? And when you collect the information is it? Is it a focus on quality or is it more on quantity and that that's the big danger in setting yourself? Or if a school sets a prescribed number of pieces of documentation that. they end up just being done to satisfy a quota and that it's not quality and finally ask yourself, do you have information about each child across all five of the learning outcomes?

Jacqui Ward

And I guess you could just add in there Kelly that we're not talking about. As you mentioned before, it's not about quantity, so you don't have to have a huge amount of information. It could be a couple of dot points, but you've got some evidence that you show you know something about that child in relation to all of the outcomes. And that those key points of evidence that we showed in the EYLF table.

Kelly Birket

Absolutely and it's also about this is going a little bit further on, but it's about when somebody is looking at your planning, being able to show that what you've planned for is not random or it's not based on what equipment you have available. There's actually these two prior stages [that] have already have gone into the planning. There is actually some sort of observation or analysis which has resulted in something being planned for. There’s a purpose. There's a why to the planning.

Jacqui Ward

And I think that draws us to a really good point there. Kelly, that it's, it's also about making sure the planning cycle is visible so you know this came from somewhere and this is the reason why we do this now. So again, you might not necessarily write that down on your forward planning, which we're going to cover in the next section, but you can certainly speak to, you know what has informed this particular plan or what we're doing next. You know that you have covered off on all of those Stages of the planning cycle and you can speak to them.

Kelly Birket

Yes, so important. OK so if you want to go a little bit, sort of review some of this content, there's two readings that are in the folder in teams they're not. They're not deep, deep readings. They summarise some of the points that we've made. Definitely both readings focus on what we just talked about. The quality over quantity, but they're quite good readings. So if you've got time, it'll be great to go and have a little look at them. And they're both very current as well.

OK and just like at the end of the previous session we did. If you could take some time now to reflect on the content of this recording and the implications for gathering information and analysing learning in your preschool. So you just had a little think before and there's a few questions you processes and practices. What do you need to maintain? And is there anything you need to change, now that you viewed this recording? Are there some changes you want to make? Or are there some of your practices that are actually hitting the spot an you really happy with how it's going and they're meaningful and effective? And then finally, if you have taken up the challenge to work on a programming in planning procedure, have a look at the next section a gathering information about learning and analysing learning sections. There's some prompts there, a little bit of a scaffold, some questions and it relates directly to the content in this this recording, and you will have the information now that you've completed this recording to have to know what to write in there or some ideas. That brings us to the end of this recording. Thanks for joining us and again thank you, yes for taking the time to be here. Keep an eye out the third part of this five-part series we'll focus on planning. As always, if you have any queries, don't hesitate to contact us. There's the early learning email address there. Someone will get back to you and thank you Jacqui for joining me today and for all your knowledge and experience and sharing it today.

Jacqui Ward

Thank you. Kelly was great to have a good chat.

Kelly Birket

Thank you. OK alright bye bye.

[End of transcript]

Jacqui Ward [Early Learning Coordinator]

Welcome to today's session Preschool Program and Planning. The focus of this part three is planning. I'm Jacqui Ward, the Early Learning Coordinator and I'm here today with my colleague Kelly.

Kelly Birket [Early Learning Advisor]

Hi everybody and welcome back.

Jacqui Ward

So, today's session as you might remember, we already in part one talked about the introduction to the planning cycle. We talked a little bit about observing and collecting data, we've talked about analysing the information and today the next step is really focused in on. OK. Well, what are you going do? What are your intentions moving forward? So, it's an exciting area and hopefully you'll enjoy the session today.

I'd like to begin with acknowledging the traditional custodians of the land on which we're all meeting today, so obviously all of us are in different lands in different places. I would like to pay respect to Elders both past and present and any Aboriginal people with us today and acknowledge the wonderful way that Aboriginal people for tens of thousands of years have taken great care of our land in our country. And I hope you join me in doing the same wherever you are listening to this recorded session at anytime.

The professional learning that we're working on today links to the two professional teaching standards 6.2.2 is we've mentioned before, and 6.4.2.

The course outcomes are across all of the parts of the series, so there's five parts altogether. Looking at learners, understanding and applying the quality standards of the national quality framework. That's relevant for our preschools. Applying knowledge of child development, early childhood pedagogy and curriculum to plan teaching and learning experiences which enhance learning outcomes. Develop skills to take a plan and reflective approach to curriculum decision making. Synthesise the individual as well as the integrated aspects of the planning cycle. Critique practices, systems, and processes in relation to quality teaching and outcomes for children. So, hopefully you've already been, experiencing some learning and growth in relation to those outcomes and today's session hopefully will be furthering those outcomes.

Just a reminder, I'm in terms of the materials and resources that they are within our channel, communities of practice within the early learning teams and there are some precession tasks as per the other parts of the modules of this course, sorry, and they are referred to in that folder, early learning in schools within the early learning in schools, Microsoft Teams. So, hopefully you've had a chance to have a look at those pre learning tasks and you also take the opportunity to ask some questions and whatnot in the in the channel. There's an opportunity I guess for you to engage with us as facilitators and with your colleagues to apply that learning. So, the precession tasks for part three is a couple of readings. So, looking at reading the text surrounding the early years planning cycle within the educators guide. So, the diagram that we've been working off throughout these online modules or online sessions is a simplified version of this diagram in the educators guide, so having a look at that and what it means for your work and your understanding of the content that we're covering, particularly obviously in relation to that planning section down there at the bottom right hand corner. We also want you to have a little think about the planning. It is not just about planning for resources and materials, but it's actually thinking about different platforms that learning might occur. So, we've encouraged you to have a read of the ACECQA information sheet quality area three, the environment is the third teacher, so the idea that the spaces, the environments that we set up the learning opportunities provide opportunities for learning and for children for that learning to be facilitated in a child lead way. We're going to cover off on some of those topics today, so if you haven't already, read those it is really important that you stop your presentation now and hop in and have a read of those. That would be great.

So, as I mentioned before, we've been looking at the planning cycle. We've been looking at the observing and collecting meaningful, relevant information as being the cornerstone or the foundation for the planning cycle. You can't plan meaningful and relevant, and for deep level learning and complex skills and knowledge building if you haven't collected meaningful information in the first place to know where children are at and what interests and skills and currently knowledge they have. Again, that analysis of learning is really important both for groups and individuals to know what, where is the sort of right level to aim your learning experiences or your plans at. If you think of those theoretical influences, that's really important in terms of Vygotsky Zone of proximal learning, the idea that we are in that right zone I guess of the learning that we're planning for children, so again, this is a rehash of what we've already talked about promoting learning and development at each Stage of the assessment and planning cycle relies on each of the other Stages being given equal consideration. And in these courses where fine tuning or putting a microscope on each section. But it's really important that I guess, that you thinking about them as a whole as well. This Stage of the cycle requires the planning of pedagogical practices and experiences. That will further learning and development, so a real emphasis here, and I'm hoping you are picking it up all the way through. It's about, the learning is the important bit of what we should be writing down and what we should be thinking about. And it's all about this is an opportunity I guess in the planning cycle to showcase what our intentions are and make that learning visible so we have a clear calling out to our families to our authorised officers, to our colleagues to say this is the learning intentions and the teaching intentions we have for our experiences within the preschool.

Kelly Birket

Great, thanks for that Jacqui, I'm going to talk about the first section and it's the why of planning. OK, and as always we return to our key document the early years learning framework and within the early years learning framework it's noted that the document guides educators to plan to promote children's learning by designing challenging learning experiences and interactions that foster high level thinking skills. It's also noted that through planning, educators are selecting to use the most effective teaching strategy for different children. The same strategies not necessarily going to be effective with everybody or at the same time necessarily to extend their thinking and learning. The EYLF (Early Years Learning Framework) also directs us to make decisions about how the role of the educator and how their move flexibly in and out of different roles to promote learning. And finally, identifying the most effective method of assessing learning as well as making learning visible.

Jacqui Ward

So, I think again, Kelly, as you mentioned, our guiding document is the earliest learning framework, and so it's really important that we think about, this is what the early is learning framework has set out these we've sort of paraphrased them here, but these four key ideas that need to be incorporated into your planning. So, it's really important we're going to step that out to say doing some critical reflection as you work through these sessions and think about does your current planning process capture all of these ideas. Are there opportunities for those interactions to foster those high level thinking skills? You know? Do you have some written down ideas about how you might work differently with different children and this is an opportunity I guess for our individual and group plans to sort of intersect there might be one experience, but it's going to be differentiated for different children.

Kelly Birket

Absolutely it depends also a lot on the time of year because preschool is such a year of growth. What one method or approach that works at the start of the year might not be as effective towards the end of the year.

Jacqui Ward

Sure

Kelly Birket

OK. So, this next slide really breaks it down to the basics. For effective planning, you need to know the children and how they learn, and that's what you've done through the first two Stages of the cycle you've collected your data. You've analysed that information. You've also got your theoretical background, and your experiences to know how children do learn. You also need to know what to teach, so that's your content knowledge. And then as we just mentioned, you need to know how to teach, what teaching strategies are going to be affective, which children and when. Knowing, children and how they learn is also one of the Australian professional standards for teachers, 1.1.2 notes that at a proficient level teachers will use teaching strategies based on knowledge of students physical, social and intellectual development and characteristics to improve learning. The standards also note that in relation to knowing what to teach, that educators at the proficient level can apply knowledge of the content and teaching strategies of the teaching area to develop engaging teaching activities and finally, in relation to knowing how to teach the professional standards note in 3.3.2 that proficient teachers select and use relevant teaching strategies to develop knowledge, skills, problem solving and critical and creative thinking.

Jacqui Ward

I think that one too there knowing how to teach Kelly. If we think about the EYLF definition of pedagogy. It's about thinking about, you're teaching, but also the importance we talked about the environment being the third teacher, but also in the early childhood context. The relationships are an important learning component and those incidental times throughout the day throughout transitions and routines and all those other things really all really important about thinking when you are planning. It's not just about those sort of traditional group experiences that you think those are the teaching times, but actually knowing that teaching is happening all throughout the day and that play based program.

Kelly Birket

Absolutely and later on in this recording we will touch on maximising the learning opportunities throughout the day as well.

OK, so we just mentioned for effective planning you need to know your students and how they learn. Know the content, how to teach it and plan for and implement effective teaching and learning. So, the standards also state that in the domain of professional knowledge teachers understand what constitutes effective developmentally appropriate strategies in their learning and teaching, and use this knowledge to make the content meaningful to students. It's very much a child centred approach. Without that knowledge of the individual children in your group you're planning isn't going to be effective.

Jacqui Ward

And I think this is an interesting one to where we often come up with in the early childhood space when people challenge by the idea of, well, how do I determine the content if I'm doing, waiting for the children's, interest to emerge the interest is just the vehicle, for the learning of the content. For example, an interest in superhero play could be an opportunity to build awareness of inter relatedness in relation to learning outcome number two. Or it could be an opportunity to develop some oral language skills in relation to learning outcome number five so it's interesting that we sort of still need to focus in on I guess the things that we want to teach, even in an interest based program as well.

Kelly Birket

Absolutely because as a professional you'll know there's things that the children need to learn. The families will have an opinion of what their child should learn at preschool, and so if these things don't arise out of interest, you're planning needs to address them.

Jacqui Ward

Of course, let's not forget there will be things that children are interested in learning as well and skills that they are practicing as well that I think we've already covered it in one of the other sessions to about that why children ask the question why a lot and repeatedly about the same thing and that's one of the ways that they tell you that they are interested to learn about that particular content.

Kelly Birket

Yes, a little bit later in this session will have a look at some examples of using children's interests to promote learning. OK, so maybe now just have a little pause, pause the recording if you want and just think about how you plan what your process is. Is it on your own? Are you doing it collaboratively? And then how is your planning promoting learning? So, just pause for a minute and just have a little bit of a reflection on your own planning.

OK, this section we're going to talk about the how of planning and will start with a nice quote again from the early years learning framework. Children's learning is ongoing and each child will progress towards the outcomes in different and equally meaningful ways. Learning is not always predictable and linear. Educators plan with each child and the outcomes in mind.

Jacqui Ward

And I think it really poignant quote there Kelly, that we need to make sure that our planning is focused in again on the learning and that it's focused in on the learning as we talked about the requirements for our planning is that we are planning to progress children along the continuum of the learning outcomes. So, that's really important. That's the focus of what you're writing down in your plans.

Kelly Birket

Taking them to the next step, giving them a little bit of a nudge along. But definitely always the learning is the focus for this Stage, the planning. OK, so this diagram gives you an indicator of the process for planning. The process you take it might look a little bit different to this sequence, but you might do things in a different order, or you might have different terminology, but these are the things that you need to consider as you plan. If you've got your own template you've created to document learning, you might have included some of these areas as headings. So, in the first box we've got setting learning goals. It's really important that your goals are explicit and challenging. You need to have high expectations for everybody. If you don't, they won't progress. You need to be guided by what children already know and can do and what interests they bring to their learning. It's also important at this Stage to consult with families and the community about their aspirations and priority for their children and incorporate these into your goals. We talk about that a little bit more later on. Also, when you're setting your learning goals, you need to know why. Why have you chosen this goal so it might be to address a individual child's learning goal. Sorry, it might be to address an individual child's need. It might be part of an ongoing project. You might be following up on input from a family, your goal might be in response to a local community event that you're expected to be part of, so you decide to use that set of goal in relation to that event. OK. Alright, it's also important when you're setting your goals to know how they link into your assessment and planning cycles. So, a lot of educators will have some sort of coding system to link their goals to other documentation they have to make the cycle explicit, so what I mean by that is, if you've devised a learning goal in relation to a piece of information and observation you analysed, you need to have some sort of system of knowing that this goal relates back to that observation. OK. In box two the next step, is closely linked to your goals, and often educators will already be thinking about the content as they devised their goals. In selecting the content you need to make reference to the learning outcomes and the principles and practices. You need to make a decision on what knowledge, skills and understandings you'll be teaching the children. The other thing you could do at this Stage and a lot of educators will refer to other programs, so you might be referring to the munch and move program. You might have a social skills program, an external program, or it might be a school developed one that you're following as well. OK, and then the third box we've got design your learning experiences and the learning environment. So, obviously you're learning experiences are what it is that the children are going to do that will promote their learning towards the identified Goal. You might desire, decide to set up and you experience, or maybe you'll modify an ongoing learning area. You need to make a decision about is an adult going to be stationed at that experience or will it be set up and maybe an adult comes and goes. Or maybe the children are left to engage in the experience on their own. And the fourth box refers to selecting appropriate, effective learning approaches and teaching strategies. So, part of this Stage includes knowing how you're going to differentiate the experience. How are you going to support those that need extra support to engage or to make the experience more challenging. So, in often in the preschool context differentiation occurs through the level of adult support provided. The prompting and questioning made by the adult. Also, at this Stage you need to be thinking about inclusion and participation. In the learning experience you've designed will you need to make any adjustments to ensure everybody is able to join the activity and participate. And finally, as you plan, decide how you're going to know if the child has achieved the learning goal. Will you observe them? What are you expecting to see? Will you discuss what they're learning with them? What kind of things would you expect them to? How would you expect them to respond? What will they be saying or doing as their engaging. And think about also, so with formative assessment as you're observing the child and making a judgment about their learning, you could actually be modifying the experience or using questioning to provide additional challenge or additional support if that's what's needed.

OK. So, we will move on to the next slide. OK, the focus here is on who leads the learning. This is quite an interesting thing and there's lots of discussion in the early childhood world about the balance, so your plans need to include a balance of child lead and initiated learning and educator led and initiated learning. And that's because we've talked about how it's important. You, as a professional, know what it's important for children to learn in preschool, but then also we need to have a child centred curriculum in which children have agency are able to make decisions about things that affect them and can actually pursue areas of interest to themselves. As Jacqui alluded to earlier important ideas and key concepts won't necessarily emerge out of children's interests, so these must be intentionally planned for and led by educators. The key thing is, though, that that's not 100 percent of your preschool day. That's a portion. A good way to balance who leads the learning is to ensure the learning environment includes a variety of ongoing learning areas and that children can choose which area they engage with which materials they use, what they're actually doing, and then simultaneously providing adult led experiences. So, you might have three quarters of the group engaged in something they've chosen themselves in a learning area that you've already set up for them, and then the other children might be with you engaging in an adult led experience. The key thing is that the children have got the option to choose where it is their learning and what they're doing. Another way to balance who leads the learning is for the adult to join a child or small group in their chosen activity with the intention of addressing a specific learning goal or promoting learning more generally. In the next little section of this recording will look at some examples of that.

Jacqui Ward

Can I just jump in there to Kelly just to say that this is I think if people would embrace this and really critically reflect on this particular topic, it's quite earth shattering to sort of let go of the control to think that actually learning happens, whether or not we are sort of the ones leading and driving it. So, I think it's about reconceptualising your role and that it's not all about you as the adult being this sort of driver in the driver's seat about learning, it's actually about the whole concept I guess of its intentional teaching to me is that you are going to use a variety of different ways to maximise learning, which could be environments it could be learning centres. It could be routines. There's an opportunity to revisit learning and connect learning for children. There's an opportunity for us to revisit a concept over and over in different ways throughout the day and that idea that learning happens from the minute. Well, even before, as we know, learning is happening at home, but the idea that learning is happening all the time and we don't need to think about. Sort of, that idea, and I think we talked about it last session forcing everyone to sit in a group time and thinking that's the most meaningful learning that's happening throughout the day and really, for my observations and my own experience, it feels to me that that really is probably the least amount of valuable learning that's happening. You know, there's more behaviour management going on than anything else to getting everyone to sit down, turn around, be quiet, listen to the story, that kind of thing, then there is that meaningful engagement, and I think if we empower children to take the lead a little bit particularly around project areas and investigations. We really do allow them to develop those future focus skills that we've talked about earlier as well. That idea that they can engage in a cycle of research and they can investigate and explore provocations and they can, you know, propose different ideas. They can build content knowledge when they do all of those things through things that are maybe still a formal structured learning experience, like we might think of a more traditional learning experience with children. But it's just about viewing it in a different way and viewing the role of children in a different way.

Kelly Birket

Absolutely, and I think it's also good to keep in mind, general internal motivation. If a child's chosen to engage with something, they are going to have a higher chance of learning and remain focused and concentrate and be an active learner than if they've been forced to join something that they've had no input into.

Jacqui Ward

Yes, and it's also about that idea of acting in this way also sort of is a big way into contributing to children's sense of identity and sense of confidence as learners. If you encourage children to see themselves as capable, competent learners that have agency in their own learning, then these are all positive things.

Kelly Birket

Yes, I definitely agree with that. OK, so in this next slide we will just have a little look at some examples. There's many, many examples out there. These are some of the things I could think of that I've seen recently or heard of. When educators promote child directed learning, their fostering agency, they're building on the concepts of belonging, being and becoming and supporting children develop to a strong sense of identity. So, just as Jacqui just said, when you promoting agency, you recognising that children have a right to make choices and decisions and are capable of initiating their own learning. So, what this might look likes so example one, growing interest amongst the children to collect the cicada shells which you're appearing in the outdoor area. So, the children are motivated they are keen, they are seeing their friends collect the cicada shells. They're coming and asking you for containers to put the shells in. So, an educator could take advantage of this interest to develop an inquiry projects. So, the educator might start by asking the children what they already know about cicadas, and then what they'd like to find out. Then the educator could plan to select appropriate learning goals and plan experiences related to what the children want to find out about cicadas. So, it's very much been child initiated and it would be the type of project that would evolve, and it would change from day to day depending on how the children are responding, what they're finding out, what questions they're asking.

Jacqui Ward

A great opportunity in that example Kelly to explore that idea of environmental responsibility and life cycles, some stem work, there's lots and lots of learning in relation to the learning outcomes there with that project.

Kelly Birket

Absolutely, it is the kind of project that you would document, perhaps in a mind map or you don't want to large sheet of paper with the children. In having input into what are we going to do next? Yes it could go in so many different directions. Another example might be a child who is just singing a rhyming song, and you might ask them about it, and they might say, well my older sister taught me she's learned in year one, so that's an opportunity to use the interest to introduce a focus on rhyming words. So, then the educator might select a relevant learning goal and then plan activities to extend the children's rhyming skills. So, in doing that, the educator is addressing literacy skill, but it's off the basis of an interest brought into the preschool by a child. OK, and example three superheroes again. A child has shown an interest in superheroes. The educators supports this interest by adding large squares of fabric to the dress up area. He or she demonstrates to the child how the fabric can be tied to create a cape and then the child and their friend put on the capes and engage in superhero make believe play and then I haven't gone into what potential learning outcomes are, but there's many that could be social and emotional. As Jacqui mentioned earlier, they could be communication skills, but the key thing is that the learning can be addressed through the interest that the child has shown in the superheroes.

Jacqui Ward

And that last one, Kelly is a really good example of how one addition to the environment in the form of these material squares could be related to learning for individuals as well as learning across the group and different children might have different learning intentions for those squares of fabric because this child using it for superhero play might be different to the way you've got the intentions you've got planned for another child.

Kelly Birket

Yes, absolutely. What I do love is where some sort of added interest appears in a learning area. All of a sudden the children will swarm there because everyone wants to have a little look and a little play with this new piece of equipment so that one little fellow who initiated the interest would actually be probably responsible for a large number of children pursuing, you know that imaginative play.

OK, so the examples of what child directed learning might look like and this is an example of what adult led learning might look like. So, just say, for instance, there's a learning goal devised related to learning outcome two ,children become aware of fairness, so an educator might plan a directed learning experience. So, while the children are engaging in play in the ongoing learning areas, they might set up a small group activity following a recipe to make play dough. The children take turns to add the ingredients fairly. Say for instance a cup of flour, each going around the circle with lots of language, about this is fair, we take turns, everybody has ago, and then when the play dough is made, the educator might ask the group to suggest how the play dough will be divided and shared fairly. So, the focus here isn't on making play dough. The focus is on addressing the goal of children become aware of fairness. For the same goal another way that the teacher could lead the learning is to respond to the teachable moment. So, across say for instance, the week or the fortnight that they are focusing on this goal during group games, they might explain why it is important that anyone who wants to join is included. They might take the opportunity to positively reinforce children showing kindness. As well as intervening play to prompt children to share resources fairly. So, both are adult led or educator led learning, one a very directed learning experience and the other taking advantage of the teachable moments that crop up throughout the day. But the key thing is that the educators got in their head that this is their intention, that the children will become aware of fairness.

OK, so the documentation of your intended learning plans, so on this slide what we're talking about is the future learning plans. So, generally there's no hard and fast rules for this. The written format that planning takes is absolutely a local decision. Often preschools use a variety of formats depending on what the planning is for, whether it's a whole group an individual, an ongoing project, short or long term planning. So, generally people will have a plan for intentional daily planning, so this ensures that all of the adults, the educators working in the room know what the intentions are for that day and it links the planned experiences to other documentation in the planning and assessment cycles. That's what I've mentioned before that it's clear that these aren't just random experiences, they're actually part of cycles assessment and planning cycles. And as I mentioned it, the format might be a template, it might be a daily diary or journal, could be a concept or mind map. It's very much a local decision depending on the needs of the educator. Often also preschools still have a general weekly overview. Perhaps it might be a one page summary of significant planned learning and events. Usually this is to give the weaker direction, but to also share with families. It's very much a local decision you don't have to do it this. Some people might have a fortnightly overview. And then usually educators have a termly overview. It's more of a long term plan, making reference to the learning opportunities the ongoing learning areas. So, what will be provided and what learning will be promoted for instance in the craft area, what's going to be in the block area and what's the intended learning during that term in the block area, for instance. Often the term the overview makes reference to the overall themes of the early years learning framework, concepts key focus areas or components. This documentation might be divided into learning outcomes or key learning areas. Whatever is going to support the educator, but it definitely gives a direction for the term.

Jacqui Ward

And I just wanted to chip in there Kelly, just to say I know you've mentioned it many many times that it's a local decisions. So, it's really about making using your professional judgment to say what's manageable and what really achieves that goal that we are looking and to say is the learning visible and is it clear what intentions that I'm doing and have I covered off on all the things? Whether I'm doing this daily, weekly, termly, whatever the timeframe is that you sort of thinking about long range, short term, everyone's clear, I guess, about the intentions for learning.

Kelly Birket

Yes, I've noticed often term one, they determine the overview and will very much have a focus on developing a sense of belonging in the preschool, and definitely be addressing identity as well as learning outcome to helping the children develop connections with the other children and learning the routines and social and emotional development which really sets the scene for the rest of the year in the preschool and that, I think, is a really good use of the termly overview.

OK, so this slide is a little bit, it might not fit in here, but I just thought it's the best spot to put it to remind you that we are regulated to provide families with information about the program. The regulation doesn't use the word meaningful, but I think that is actually the key. It has to be meaningful information, again with a focus on what the learning will be, not what the equipment or the material is. So, the families need to have information about the general program in a place accessible in the preschool so generally that would be on display or it might be published in a in a newsletter or music through an app. Again, a local decision. And then the second point there, this is regulation 76. Families also need to be provided with information about the content and operation of the educational program in relation to their child and their child's participation, so I'm just bringing this up now because we've just talked about you planning, your documentation of your plans. You don't want to double up, so if you can, the best way is to not have separate information to address these regulations, but write your documentation in a way that it's accessible for families and addressed the learning, and it is easily understandable.

Jacqui Ward

And I guess it raises the point there too that we are planning for individual children within our program, and when that slide earlier where you mentioned where does this come from you can sort of show the evidence of the planning cycle in your program for individuals as well as groups.

Kelly Birket

Yes, absolutely. Sometimes preschool educators are concerned about confidentiality if they're providing information about the whole program, and so using some sort of system where you don't write children's entire names, or you might provide your daily plan but not at the exact. You might have a particular individual goal you're addressing, and you've got that documented, but you know who that's for, but you don't necessarily mean to add the child's name there for display. At the end of the day when that's no longer displayed, you could add the child's name in. There's different methods to do that, but yes, you do need to be conscious of children's confidentiality, but you should also be providing the information that families need to know about the program.

OK, that brings us onto the daily timetable which is also needs to be displayed for the information of children, families and staff. It's really important to make sure your timetable is going to support your learning intentions and the best way to do this is to make sure that you've got large blocks of time when children can immerse themselves in unhurried play and you can engage with them in sustained, shared thinking. To have a long periods of uninterrupted play, you've got to minimise the amount of time where their children are expected to do the same thing at the same time or be changing to a new activity or moving to a new area or packing up, setting up, packing up. Try to keep those very minimal. You need to make sure that your timetable is flexible where needed, that it can be varied for individuals who need it, but daily timetable also supports children's agency through opportunities to make decisions, so they'll be large periods whether children can choose what it is they engage with. Also, make sure your timetable includes opportunities for the children to take responsibility for keeping the environment safe, clean and well organised.

OK, so I'll get you to pause the recording now I will just get to bring up your own preschool daily type timetables. Have a little look and reflect on it in relation to these questions. So, these questions are related to the points I just discussed. Do a little bit of assessment of your timetable and just think about how your timetable is promoting learning in your preschool. Is it supporting learning or is it hindering?

OK, so now we'll move onto the what of planning. OK, will start again. You remember the process we looked at earlier the image, the first box related to selecting learning goals. So, these can be short term achieved in a single experience or there might be long term and ongoing over a period of time they move from the micro to the macro. Your effective planning will support the achievement of both individual and group goals. Educators devised learning goals with reference to the early years learning framework and other support documents and programs. Group goals are often identified in collaboration with the families and the school communities to make decisions about what children should learn at preschool. There's no document that tells you, that needs to be decided locally in the preschool context. There's materials you can refer to for advice and information, but it's something that your preschool team needs to sit down and talk about. Individual goals are often identified in collaboration with the child's family and or other professionals working with the child, such as a speech therapist. If a child has a disability, often the goal will be related to an area of concern or the development of a strength. This collaboration to develop individual learning goals helps to definitely support the continuity of learning between home and the preschool. The child's more likely to achieve the goal if their families being part of the identifying the goal because they will be reinforcing at home.

Jacqui Ward

Also to Kelly, I think it's important to mention that children can be involved in their own goal setting. They’re actually quite capable of, you know, identifying areas that they would like to work on in terms of their own learning and their own skills and knowledge and understandings. And I also think just you've mentioned there that the early years learning framework, but just sort of, refining that a little bit more to say that in each one of the learning outcomes there's a section on, examples of how children demonstrate that learning in those tables, and how educators can promote that. So, there's an opportunity to use that information as well to set goals for children.

Kelly Birket

Absolutely, yes, definitely. I did forget about the children's input. Often they are the best people to actually know where there at and what they want to do next? OK, so I guess also what I haven't made explicit on that slide is that you do need to plan for both group goals and individual learning goals. As far as how many, I can't answer that that's not prescribed, but you definitely do need to look at each individual child as an individual and then you've got your whole group goals.

Jacqui Ward

And I think that that sort of makes sense anyway, doesn't it because there will be some common areas that you're focusing in on across all children and then there will be some individualised goals that are more contextually relevant for that child's culture identity, all sorts of different things, abilities, strengths, all sorts of things.

Kelly Birket

Absolutely. I've noticed also often when educators do speak with each family, say when they're doing parent teacher interviews. The goals that the families have for their child are often quite similar, and so then those goals can actually be addressed as group goals and that that makes it a little bit less onerous. Yes, sort of grouping the goals together and addressing it. Maybe half your families might have a particular goal so setting up group activities to address them or make it a little more manageable.

OK so on this slide we talk about integrating the individual and group learning. So, the first two examples goals. Individual goals which are a modification of a group goal so that individual goal will be where there's a little bit of differentiation and so the support and expectations of that child would be different from the whole group. So, example one they are goals addressing early years learning outcome framework learning outcome five. So, you might have a group goal that the children will use greetings and farewells appropriately. As well as polite language, but then for a child who needs additional support, you would have a modified goal and so provide differentiation. Their goal might be that when they arrive at preschool and they greeted by an educator, they respond by looking at the educator and for that child being able to do that will be progress. So, that's an example of a modified, having a group goal and then modifying it for an individual and providing that individual with some differentiation. Example two addresses outcomes two and three. So, a group goal might be to participate in cooperative active group games following simple rules. Child B, who needs additional support, perhaps their goal is just to even join the group to participate in the game, but they would have with adult support and reminders of the game rules. So, it's another example of providing differentiation and how an individual group goal can be addressed through a group activity. OK, and then we've got some standalone individual goals, so these might not be related to whole group goals. You might have a child who for them in term one the key thing is to be able to separate happily from mum when they arrive at preschool. Another child who's going really well in their social emotional development might be needing extension perhaps developing leadership skills and you could ask them to perhaps developing leadership skills and you could ask them to teach another child how to complete a task, perhaps. Referring another child. He's got a particular interest, perhaps their goal could be to refer to simple books to locate and sketch different types of spiders. I guess that's a little bit of the learning experience as well. The goal itself would just simply be, to find information in books. For another child, their goal might be just to rote count from one to five. So, in that fourth point, for example if the child had selected to go and play in a particular area, the educator might at the right time when everyone else is engaged, they might go over and join that child in their play and take that as an opportunity to focus on counting with them using just rote counting, and maybe even then using the materials around them to focus on one to one correspondence.

OK, so here is an example of an outdoor program plan. You can see that the focus is very much on the equipment.

Jacqui Ward

Can I just draw out too just so everyone super clear, this is probably what we don't want to see in terms of plans. Example of what not to do and again, it's not necessarily that you don't. You might need this information out for educators to know what to put out, but it's definitely not an example of the planning for learning because there's no reference to learning here, there's just a reference to these are the resources that need to go out into the environment. And again, if we were to focus in on writing the learning down, we could then focus in on maybe the children selecting pieces of equipment so giving children a bit more agency and then being able to facilitate the learning that we're focusing in on through whatever. Maybe they want to do sticks and leaves on Monday instead of Wednesday. That sort of thing. And again, it's as I said, there's nothing wrong with having some provisioning and some communicating about provisioning, but not necessarily the core part of the plan.

Kelly Birket

Absolutely, I do know when I first started working at my preschool, I would spend maybe 20 minutes before the children arrived pulling out equipment from the shed, and then they would come and that's not what they wanted that day and so I decided to readjust and yes to use a system where they would arrive and suggest what it was they wanted to play with and then I joined them in their play to address the intended learning that I had.

OK, so yes very much the equipment materials or resource is the vehicle for the learning. It's not the focus or the priority. So, here's another example. So, in this example, the second column actually addresses why. The third column has a goal and then the final column has what the role of the educator would be or what the equipment will be. So, if you look on Monday, set up the perspex easel and paints outside. So, yes, that's the information everyone needs to know that the easel and paints are outside but the second and third column actually tell you why, what is the reason it's not just random because every Monday we do that, it's because there's been an interest in mixing colours. There was an observation made on the 23rd of the second and so our goal has been identified that today we will experiment with trial and error and cause and effect.

Jacqui Ward

You might want to pause and have a little look through that and again by no stretch of the imagination is this meant to be formulaic and say this is what you have to do its just about saying that this is some opportunities for you to do some critical reflecting and some thinking about what you're writing down and how you record that.

Kelly Birket

Absolutely and so yes, an equipment roster, particularly for outside isn't letting anybody know what the intended learning is or how it's come about and equipment roster is not linked at all to assessment and planning cycle, whereas something like this is, the brackets in the second and third column let you know what the links are.

OK. So, I mentioned earlier that we'd addressed maximising learning, so this is I can see a typo there. Sorry about that. This is making sure that all parts of your day, the teachable moments are taken advantage of. You do need to try if possible to minimise the number of transitions, so by transitions I mean pack away, go outside, pack away, go inside pack away, go outside, their types of transitions that you need to reduce so that the children can immerse themselves in play, and that there are opportunities for educators to engage with the children. But the transitions that you have to have the necessary, such as packing up, washing your hands before you eat lunch can be used to embed learning opportunities. So, have a read. These are some of the routines that you could introduce and opportunities to teach children particular things. This is just an example. You'll have your own priorities of what's important.

Jacqui Ward

I do think that routines and transitions are really good opportunity for educators to support children to transfer and adapt learning and connect learning. So, if for example, you goal is around investigating concepts of engineering and balance and stability of a structure. For example, then there could be an opportunity to explore ideas around that at the lunch time where you might have a conversation about different structures and how they are stable and all those sorts of things. So, there's real opportunity, I think to be thinking about planning for those times very purposefully and intentionally in order to make sure that that learning is happening, sort of all throughout the day.

Kelly Birket

Absolutely. OK, so you would have read the environment as the third teacher in the reading it discusses the Reggio Emilio approach which values the environment as a communicator, an integral part of the curriculum and as the third teacher, if you plan for your environment and you set it up well, that will allow you to work with a small group or an individual child while everybody else is engaged in meaningful experiences, everybody will be learning, but definitely that the more time and planning that goes into your environment, the greater the reward with more engagement from the children. The reading talks about preparing the indoor and outdoor environment, so they're attractive, engaging and encourage children's learning and development. Children will be able to lead their own learning whether there's an adult right there in the close vicinity or not. So, just before I read these dot points, under the image there of the reading, there's a preschool learning environment self assessment task. It's just a little inventory checklist. The types of things that you need to think about in your outdoor area. So, some of those are on the slide here. You need to think about providing a wide range of open ended experiences that are available in the ongoing learning areas. In your planning, you might talk about provocations or adding items of interest to those areas to stimulate interest, engagement and learning. Your environment needs to promote children's agency so that they can decide where they want to play, what materials with, with whom. You want to try to have your storage set up in a way that it's labelled so that the children don't need an adult to help them access something and that they can resource their own learning, as well as being able to pack away. And that's mentioned in this next dot point. Materials are displayed in inviting and accessible ways for children to choose from. An absolute basic, you've got adequate resources and play spaces for the children. So, what that's talking about also is not at two o'clock in the afternoon shutting off half your room and saying that's packed up now and only having two options. That's not fair on the children, they need to still have options to use a wide range of materials and the whole space. In your environment, you need to make sure that the children's and families cultures are acknowledged and visible. And that is also a balance between active and quiet experiences. Did you want to add anything there Jacqui?

Jacqui Ward

I'm just mindful of the time. and thinking we probably need to keep moving along.

Kelly Birket

Excellent, OK, alrighty, so here we've listed some of the teaching strategies that are known to be effective for young children's learning. I might leave that there and move on to the next section which is bringing it all together, so a little bit of a summary now.

In the resource folder in the communities of practice channel in our team, you'll find the file that is this video, so it's been made by Annandale Public School, which is in the inner west of Sydney, so it shows a group interest which initiated indoor area in the home corner and interest in role playing at a cafe. So, an educator observe the children's interest and thought about the community and that it is a cafe sort of community, and that the children enjoy having experience with their families out of preschool visiting cafes and decided to build upon that interest and that home experience to promote learning. So, what she did is she modified the learning area, she thought carefully about her role in the play and in the video you'll notice there are times where the adults are very engaged and at other times you'll notice they've added a provocation, or an item to the learning area and then they withdraw to observe the learning. As you watch the video if you could look at these four questions and jot down your responses. It's not explicitly stated by the educator what her learning goals would be, but you will be able to pick up what they are and then also think about the experiences that she uses to address those learning goals. So, pause now and open up the video and then think about how you respond to those questions.

Finally, as you've done for the earlier two parts of this series of five recordings. Reflect on the content of this recording today, and the implications for your planning. Think about your current processes and practices. Which do you need to maintain? Which do you need to change? And then, if desired, edit and or add additional information to your programming and planning procedure in the planning section.

OK, thanks for joining us today to talk about planning. I hope you found it interesting and it's got you thinking about some different things. And if you've got any queries, as Jacqui mentioned earlier, you could post them in our communities of practice and she or I will respond, or you could also email us at early learning.

Jacqui Ward

It was a great session. Thanks Kelly for chatting about planning today and we look forward to working on our next topic.

Kelly Birket

Great thanks Jacqui

Jacqui Ward

Thanks.

[End of transcript]

Jacqui Ward [Early Learning Coordinator]

Welcome to the preschool programming and planning series and this section is part four, which is all about the implementation. Implementing your plans for learning throughout the planning cycle. My name is Jacqui Ward and I'm the Early Learning Coordinator and I'm here with my colleague Kelly.

Kelly Birket [Early Learning Advisor]

Hi everybody and welcome back.

Jacqui

I'd like to take this opportunity to acknowledge the traditional custodians of the land on which we all meet today, different places, different lands, and pay respects to elders both past present and any Aboriginal people here with us today.

Just very quickly, this is the same, so you will have heard this many times in the first three parts that these links to the Australian professional teaching standards throughout this series.

And again, just a quick recap, these are the learning outcomes. I'm not going to read through them all, but I do really encourage learners to sit through and take a minute to critically reflect on, you're in part four now and have a think about whether or not you feel that you have a good understanding of these outcomes and whether or not you're learning is achieving those particular outcomes.

And just a reminder of where the learning materials are within our teams folder, in the communities of practice and there will be a folder labelled programming and planning so any resources that we talk about today you can access in that folder.

We have some pre reading tasks as per the other modules. This session is all about implementing the learning so it has a very strong focus on pedagogy and knowing what to say and how to really facilitate that deep level complex learning, so we've given you some pre reading that talks about perspectives on pedagogy and also an article that talks about sustained shared thinking. So, if you haven't had a chance already to read these readings then please do read them now. Pause the session and have a read. If not you can always catch them up on them on the end of the session.

So, as we know, we've seen this slide before as well to promote learning and development each Stage of the assessment and planning cycle relies on each of the other Stages being given equal consideration. We focused in on observing and collecting information. We talked about analysing the learning from that information that's collected. We've already talked about planning and this section is about putting it all into action, so it refers to educators actions throughout the day as they encourage any interact. Sorry as they engage and interact with children to support learning and well being. So, that's the real focus and as we've said all along, there's overlaps all the time between this section and the other parts of the planning cycle, and you may actually implement all at the same time in the one piece of documentation, you don't necessarily have to see them separately, but for the purposes of learning, we are taking out micro lens on the implementation site, part of the planning cycle today.

Kelly

Great thanks Jacqui. So, the first section we will look at it will just set the scene for the rest of the recording.

Ok, with regards to implementation. All end educators are involved and engaged in the implementation of learning plans. So, it's really important that all educators are familiar with the plans. Part of this also might involve revisiting plans. This might be daily, it might be termly. It depends on what type of plan was made and how long term the learning goals are. You need to make sure that you're learning plans are still relevant. There might be a particular interest has emerged from the group, and so you might want to revise your plans for the day or for the week. So, that involves reviewing, discussing, critically reflecting on your learning intentions before the implementation of learning experiences, and it's really good if everybody who will be on the floor in the preschool is part of that, because everyone needs to know the intentions are for the day. In implementing plans educators must understand and be able to transfer the learning intentions so that they can respond to children and act with intentionality to promote and extend learning.

So, what that means is that if you've got a particular learning goal in mind and the child is playing in a particular area and then they move to another area, you can still implement your intentions, your planning goal, but you play with different equipment, a different learning experience. So, knowing learning intentions ensures that upper child's interest or the equipment changes the focus is still on the intended learning, and it requires educators to be really flexible, think on their feet and really keep a good eye on what's going on and making a lot of decisions as to where the best way to implement the learning. I guess, sorry Jacqui were going to say something.

Jacqui

I was just going to say that just sharing a story from my own experience that quite often when I'd come back when I'm thinking about the planning cycle, I'd come back to do an evaluation I've realised that when I didn't revisit that, what my plans were for learning prior to the experience again, I might have misinterpreted or miss remembered what I thought I was intending to do, so I couldn't necessarily evaluate the learning because I hadn't implemented in the way I'd intended. So, it's just about sort of. I guess seeing all the different parts in the planning cycle coming to fruition, I guess at this implementation phase.

Kelly

Absolutely, and making sure you’re taking advantage of the teachable moment when it crops up, your plans aren't going to go as you intended because you've got the children, they are very variable and it's hard to know what's going to capture their interest on a particular day. So, the role of the educator here is to be really, really flexible and take the learning to the child.

Ok, so in the early years learning framework, it's noted that educators draw on their creativity, intuition, and imagination to help them improvise and adjust their practice to suit the time, place, and context of learning. The framework lists eight practices which research has shown promote learning for young children. These are the practices, holistic approaches, responsiveness to children, learning through play, intentional teaching, and we will look a little more closely at those second, third, and fourth dot points in this session, but also on the practices of learning environments, cultural competence, continuity of learning and transitions, and assessment for learning.

Jacqui

And I guess as you say, Kelly we will be focusing in on those three, but in general educators knowledge and understanding of the pedagogical practices is really crucial to being able to implement your plans for learning well, I think they are the fundamental skills in order to be able to implement learning in a way that's relevant for each child, you need to have a good understanding of cultural competence. We talked a little bit about learning environments in the last session, so I won't talk too much about that. But it's an important thing about making some adjustments as time goes on, and as we know there's time where weather has an influence on the way that we might learn inside or outside or in different spaces, so learning environments are important as well, but also, opportunities exist really strongly in terms of that practice of continuity of learning and transitions.

I think we mentioned that last session as well that you can implement a lot of the learning throughout those particular times, and while we're actually going through implementing the learning will also be gathering information to assess learning as we go along the way so. Again, it shows the overlap of all of the different parts of the planning cycle happening at the same time, but really important also I guess to consider holistic approaches. The idea that we think about learning for the whole child when we're implementing learning as well.

Kelly

Yes, we have touched on assessment for learning in parts one and two, and we will again address this in the next part as well, because it's a really key critical practice.

Ok, so we use the word pedagogy a lot. The early years learning framework uses the term pedagogy to refer to the holistic nature of early childhood educators professional practice, particularly aspects that involve building nurturing relationships, curriculum, decision making, teaching and learning. Your pedagogical practices or what you do throughout the day to implement the curriculum, your actions to promote learning and I guess when I say, implement the curriculum, it's I'm referring to implementing your learning plans.

Research tells us that an educator's pedagogy, it was one of the most important aspects when assessing the quality of children's learning, so that's what you're doing right there and then in the moment with the child. The great teaching inspired learning blueprint for action notes that many factors come together to make inspired learning, factors both inside and outside the school gate. Once students are in our schools, however, their performance is most closely influenced by teacher quality.

Jacqui

It is a nice little summary there that the idea that what we do in this part of the planning cycle really makes the difference as to whether or not the plan learning is going to happen.

Kelly

Yes, absolutely you can have amazing detail, extensive plans for learning, but it's actually the way you're implementing them that will make the difference if the learning is realised or not. So, some of the actions that educators have, do to promote learning or are contained in the early years learning framework. So, if you look at the right-hand column of these tables, you'll be familiar with these tables in each of the outcome area descriptions.

So, the right hand column provides guidance for what you is the educator do to implement your learning plans. So, this is just a random example I took from the early years learning framework. But on the right there I was able to pull out phrases such as talk explicitly about, engage children in play with, join in children's play and engage children in conversations about, support children to analyse. So, these are the actions. This is your pedagogy. These are things you are doing to implement your learning plans.

Jacqui

And I guess that one of the things that I really encourage everybody to do in the on this picture here down the bottom that is not shown, that there's an opportunity for educators to write their own examples. So, really good thing for you to think about, and a little critical reflection activity for you to go to in there and write your own examples of how you promote this particular learning and those will be things that you can then draw on yourself in your own words to write in your plans as well.

Kelly

Yes, definitely, and then any other outcome areas, so the other parts of outcome five. These are some of the verbs that are used in in those tables to describe the actions of educators. Again, you'll have your own verbs to add to this collection, but it really does give you an indicator of how much guidance is given in the early years learning framework. As to your actions during the day and what it is you're actually doing to promote learning and to implement your plans.

Jacqui

Again, a good opportunity to do a little bit of critical reflection, or even a little bit of a tally for yourself to think about during your implementation. How often do I demonstrate? How often do I talk explicitly? How often do I acknowledge or promote learning? All of those sorts of things.

Kelly

Absolutely, and it's hard to say. I tried to categorise these, but it's really difficult because it depends so much on the context and the situation. But definitely when you're doing your planning, you can start thinking about some of the actions, things that you would expect to be doing. But obviously keep in mind also that you need to be flexible and go with the flow a little bit.

Jacqui

So, we're now going to talk a little bit about intentional teaching. As we mentioned, a key factor in Oreki Pedagogical practice that's really important in this implementation phase because you'll be using a wide variety of teaching strategies, I guess to implement your plans for learning.

Again, if we come back to the earliest learning framework and what it says about intentional teaching, it talks about it being used as a term to describe, not particularly a specific approach, so formal or structured or wrote teaching or a specific teaching technique. Rather, it's talking about the fact that you're teaching is purposeful, thoughtful, and deliberate. So, it's really about thinking about gain, what it is your intentions are in this particular learning experience. Thinking about how you might do that, what's the best way to implement that learning at this given time with this particular group of children, suiting the context and that you are quite deliberate and purposeful in those actions, even though it might not seem that way to other people, it's the way you set up your environments. It's all sorts of different things.

What determines whether an educator is engaged in intentional teaching is not necessarily what they're doing, but they're thinking and intention that sits behind it, so those things aren't always noticeable. What you're thinking when you're in an environment, but to a trained observer that's going to be quite obvious. Your actions and the decisions that you make. Educators who engage in intentional teaching recognise that learning occurs in social contexts, and then it interactions and conversations are vitally important for learning. This is why this implementation phase is so important and quite unique I guess from the other phases. The phases we've talked about so far might be done, sort of observing and gathering information and analysing might be done in the past. The evaluation might be done in the past. The planning part is done in the future. Where is this one is really about the being in the moment with children and really taking opportunities to maximise learning in those social situations. Intentional teaching it utilises strategies such as modelling and demonstrating open questioning, scaffolding and using sustained shared thinking and problem solving to extend children's thinking and learning.

So, have a think about when you're thinking about planning and also documenting after the event. How did you demonstrate? How did your model? What was some of the open ended questions you used and how did the children respond to that? How did you scaffold the learning? What things did you do as an educator in this situation to move children from one place to the next, I don't mean physically, I mean in terms of their learning, and where are the opportunities for that sustained shared thinking and are we making all of those things visible? Do we talk about and we unpack how children problem solved? And how did the learning move forward? How do we build on their conceptual knowledge and understanding of things? And did we record those sorts of things, when we write things down. So, that's a little bit about intentional teaching and why it's so important in this phase.

Kelly

And it also Jacqui relates a bit back to, we talked about your daily timetable and the importance of having large blocks of unhurried play because you need those blocks of times to engage in the sustained shared thinking. If the kids are continually chopping and changing between activities moving inside outside inside, you don't have those periods of time to really get into some deep thinking and collaborative problem solving.

Jacqui

You are right and children need that opportunity of a flexible routine to be able to progress through to extend an idea or concept to be able to revisit their learning and all sorts of things. So, lots of opportunities for thinking about what you do and whether or not you facilitating opportunities for that type of learning.

So, again, if we think about some of the research effective early education experiences from the E4Kids study talks about intentional teaching in the broadest sense, including things like promoting an understanding of everyday concepts through analysing, creating and integrating previous knowledge connected to the child's real world, we talked about conceptual knowledge building in the planning section. Children need us to facilitate that type of learning and to bring those conceptual understandings to the table, and when we do that in this implementation phase, we allow them an opportunity to analyse that information integrated think about what they previously learned. An educator will be facilitating that all the way.

Having back and forth exchanges with children that feature scaffolding, giving encouragement and affirmation. Children need that reinforcement to say that I'm on the right track and then I'm getting this understanding, that I am putting the right pieces of the puzzle together. Also, that idea of probing children's thinking and providing information all the way along we've talked about the idea that as educators we are interpreting what we think children are learning and understanding. So, if we probe their thinking and ask them to give us some more information, we get a better picture of what they're interested in learning what they are learning, and how they are learning it. They give us the answers when we do that. It's not always in a verbal answer either. It's about picking up lots of nonverbal cues and being responsive to children.

It's about modelling language through frequent conversations, open ended questions, the use of advanced vocabulary and language repetition and extensions and self and parallel talk. So, the fact that we are modelling all of those things helps children to learn and understand that type of information and again, that idea that we can give direct instructions sometimes, and that explicit teaching is really important as part of our intentional teaching. Sometimes that's the right method or the right technique for that particular time or piece of learning.

Quick reflection now. So, we'd love you to pause the presentation and have a little think, have these explanations of intentional teaching challenged or confirmed. What you understand about the term? Have a little note there, have a conversation with colleagues and with your leaders within your school. How would you describe the notion of intentional teaching to someone who's unfamiliar with the concept? Again, being able to process that information until someone else is a really good way of learning and understanding that concept. And how do you draw on the notions of intentional teachings to implement your plans for learning? So, what are your particular preferred strategies? Or, what are your things that you do in each situation to further that learning?

Kelly

Ok, and the next section we're going to talk about is the role of the educator in children's play.

Ok, so play based learning is a dance. A thoughtful, meaningful intellectual activity that is shared between children and between children and adults. The trick is knowing when to join the dance and how to follow the child's lead. So, that quote is from Kennedy and Barblett. I really like it because definitely your thinking on your feet, you're anticipating and you're moving in and out of situations as you implement your plans. Adopting a play based approach does not mean that children are left on their own with adults acting only as supervisors. Instead, it means educators observe children in play, interact sensitively with them, and use their professional knowledge to promote and extend every child's well being and learning.

And finally, as I mentioned before, educators move flexibly in and out of different roles and draw on different strategies as the context changes. I have bolded flexibly, because I think that's really, really important. If you can't be flexible with the way you implement your plans, it's going to be very hard, because the children do unexpected things. And unexpected things happen, and so you do need to keep your focus on the learning, but be flexible with how that is realised.

Jacqui

I think you make a really good point there to Kelly. Is that the flexibility is important too. If we're looking at child initiated learning or child led learning, you can't be so rigid about things because you don't know what direction that they're going to take things, and that flexibility will be important to make sure the learning still happens. If you're still stuck in it's probably not going to happen. It's not going to go anywhere

Kelly

Absolutely. I agree, Ok, so as you know the early years learning framework is based on learning through play. The framework notes that play provides opportunities for children to learn as they discover, create, improvise and imagine. When children play with other children they create social groups, test out ideas, challenge each other's thinking and build new understandings, play provides a supportive environment where children can ask questions, solve problems, and engage in critical thinking. Play can expand children's thinking and enhance their desire to know and to learn.

So, us as educators, we've got this I guess it's a quandary. Or we've got to manage the balance that you have learning intentions, but we also know that learning is most effective through play. So, in the next little section we'll just talk about how you can balance. You know, the different types of play, but while ensuring that your intentions are met. A balanced play curriculum incorporates some teacher planned experiences, daily life experiences, such as tidying up, setting the table, planting the garden, and also different types of play.

Ok, so the early years learning framework also from that similar same section as that previous quote talks about learning through play is a balance between child led, child initiated and educators supported learning. So, Susan Edwards from the Australian Catholic University talks about player carrying along a continuum, and I've tried to represent her writing here in this image with the left, you've got the child directed play and learning. So, this is what some people might refer to as open ended or spontaneous play. And this is the kind of type of play which is completely initiated by the child and research is actually shown that it's most effective and beneficial for social and emotional development. Though while the play is completely initiated by the child, the educator has a really important role in designing the learning environment.

Selecting the materials, arranging the materials, ensuring that their timetable has adequate amount of time for the children to engage in play in that area. In the middle of the image there you'll see guided play, so that's play that might be initiated by the child, but is supported by the adult. This is often a lot of the small group learning experiences very much play based, but there's an adult there prompting questioning, bringing in new resources and co playing, collaborating with the children. And on the right end of the continuum we've got adult led or teacher directed play. So, this is initiated by the educator, though it is shaped by the child because it's planned intentional learning, though they educator uses the knowledge of the child to determine what the experience looks like. The knowledge of the child's interests, their strengths. So, this type of play is seen to show the most benefit in the area of academic development. So, an effective integrated approach will incorporate all three types of play into the day.

Ok, so another academic has actually used different terms to refer to each of these types of play. He has said that the child directed player learning could also be referred to as trust in play, so this refers to it knowing that you set up the environment well, you've put provocations appropriate provocations based on your knowledge of the child in the ongoing learning areas, and you need to trust as an educator that the children will go to that learning space and that they will learn there even though you're not there physically as an educator. So, it's trusting that their learning is happening in those areas. The same academic has called the guided play he, refers to that as facilitative play. And the adult led play as enhancing learning outcomes through play. Just another take a different use of language, but explaining the same concept but also important to know. I like that there he's used the word trust and it's showing that the learning is equally valued and is happening in all the three different types of play.

Ok, so one approach to balancing open ended play with intentional teaching is using the pedagogical play framework. So, again down the middle there you can see three types of play, so at the top is the child initiated play like on the previous slide. This, Edwards Cutter McKenzie, Morin Boyd refer to this as open ended play, then in the middle on the previous slide that was referred to as guided play. Here it's referred to as modelled play. Some people also call it structured play.

So, features of this type of player include educator illustration, explanation, and demonstration, and then in the bottom rectangle in the middle we've got purposefully framed play, so that's the play that is completely adult lead, so that involves adult directed activities, a feature of that type of player might be educators leading discussions or teaching a group game and then leading the game. It's important as educators take advantage of each type of play and seek out the value in them. There's multiple endless ways that the different types of play will be combined throughout the day by the children, but the key messages to know that the children are learning in all the three different types of play.

Jacqui

And I think this is really important too Kelly when we think about when we've started off by looking at what our learning intentions are for individual children and groups throughout that day, week, or term, or whatever we're talking about. That we think about those ideas of using those play, types of play, I guess in those multiple combinations, so within the one experience you might be doing all three of those things. Or you might say that this particular learning intention would best suit that open ended play situations. So, the idea that you've got a little bit of thinking about in your planning how this learning might be implemented.

Kelly

Yes, absolutely, and in the definition of intentional teaching notes that intentionality can occur in each of these three different types of play. The difference is the adult, the level of adult support during the actual experience.

Ok, so this next slide shows some of the roles that the educator assumes to implement learning. Ok, early childhood educators take on many roles in play with children and use a range of strategies to support learning. So, there's more you will know of more then the ones that are noted here on the screen. These are just some of them that educators move in and out of in children's play.

Jacqui

I really like that one, the Stage manager, Kelly because it sounds sort of quite bizarre, but in reality in order for a play situation to keep going and to move forward, sometimes the educated does need to be the one to get more chairs for a table or to get additional props or to get things to keep the play moving and to allow the concepts or the thinking to be sort of further explored. I like the matchmaker role in the fact that, if you're learning intentions for a particular child out to support that confidences learner, you might take on the role of facilitating that child or supporting that child to take a leadership role in different types of play, or even the idea that you are an assessor or communicator, if we think about doing some stem learning with children when you're taking children through a research cycle, you might be doing that sort of assessing of where have we got and what information and communicating the steps so far.

You might take on the role of a scribe, for example, in writing down some of the information that children are learning. So, lots of different implications and a little bit like the one we said before this similar slide earlier on. You might want to sit down and have a think about a critical reflection on when you take all these different roles, and if you tend to take one more so than the other.

Kelly

Yes, and what the priority is at a different time, there might have been a group of children playing really happily together on their own game that they've initiated. But maybe 15 minutes in. You might need to intervene as a mediator to help solve some sort of conflict, and then when that solved you can step out again and the game will continue happily and you can move on to another priority or some other children and focus in on a different role.

Jacqui

Yes, definitely.

Kelly

Ok, so there's quite a lot of research about the benefits of effective implementation. Research says that when adults are involved in children's play, this is the opposite to merely supervising when there's actually involvement in one of those roles, the play lasts longer and is more detailed and elaborate. Social interactions between children increase, there are higher levels of cognitive activities as teachers scaffold children's learning by asking questions and posing problems, and there is increased literacy activities such as writing and drawing. When an adult is present in a play scenario and richer oral language can be heard. So, that's obviously the educator prompting modelling doing some of those actions. Those verbs that are noted in the earliest learning framework.

Another piece of research says that the quality of interactions between educators and children is most closely associated with cognitive and academic growth. So, what that are saying to me is it's not enough to be there in the physical space. Your interactions with the children have to be really high quality and intentional, and really thoughtful. And another piece of research has shown that there is a need to strengthen intentional teaching practices to better support children's learning in early childhood services and early years of school. So, that's saying that it's not actually an area that generally is being done particularly well, that as a profession educators need to really give close attention to their intentional teaching practices.

Jacqui

So, in particular there that idea of explicit teaching and instructional support to is really important. And again, that idea that I mentioned earlier that you might actually need to specifically unpack how to develop this skill or you know I can think of an example with fundamental movement skills, for example, and to get the fine grain detail of those skills you would have to do quite explicit teaching of exactly what that movement looks like in some correction for children if you notice that there's one of the steps that they're doing that isn't quite right, because it will impact the effectiveness of the whole movement, so it's something that we don't always think, I think if we're thinking about this play based learning that we don't necessarily think that we need to be that explicit or instructional but it's a really important part.

Kelly

Absolutely, and then. obviously, after such explicit instruction you then provide an opportunity for the children to practice the skill, and that might be more child led but it's not going to be successful if they haven't had that sort of intervention prior.

Alright, so there's a little reflection task here for you. Again, to pause the recording and just think about yourself and even think of a day as a whole or even just an hour or two session and the roles that you assume in children's play to implement the planned learning. How does the time of day, the timetable or the type of play influence the roles you assume? And what strategies do you use to implement your planned learning?

Jacqui

Next section we’re going to cover is being responsive to children so it's one of the pedagogical practices. As we mentioned earlier on and it's a really important practice to consider in this implementation phase as well.

The early years learning framework talks about responsiveness to children being about educators being responsive to children's ideas and play which form an important basis of curriculum decision making. So, when you're actually in the moment implementing the plan, learning the planned learning and experiences or the curriculum decisions might change as you go along. In response to children's evolving ideas and interests, educators assess, anticipate, and extend children's learning via open ended questioning providing feedback, challenging their thinking, and guiding their learning. So, these are the things that we need to be thinking about when we are planning for the implementation phase and actually doing the implementation phase. Are we getting skilled at assessing and anticipating and extending children's learning? And do we have the right bank if you like or repertoire or toolkit of open ended questions and phrases that we use in providing feedback or challenging thinking. Important things for us to have in preparation for this phase.

Responsive learning relationships are strengthened as educators and children learn together and shared decisions, respect and trust. I think this is such an important part of this practice, but also of this implementation phase that you really see this learning is happening as a co learning or co-construction. So, you're on the journey together of what you're doing with children. Responsiveness enables educators to respectfully enter the children's enter children's play and ongoing project, stimulate their thinking, and enrich their learning. So, you have quite a role as we set in children's play, but also the concept of ongoing projects is really important as well, because, again, it's a nice balance of having all of those sort of play roles of the educator in play or the pedagogical play framework that we referred to earlier. Children can lead a particular investigation or project based on their interest and the educated plays a really pivotal role in facilitating that learning through projects and it does allow children to engage in more complex learning.

If you're not sure what I'm talking about by a project, I'm talking about that idea that you investigate or research a particular idea or concept and you record the information that children are interested to find out about you do the research with children. You engage with technologies, you do the research, you conduct some experiments, or whatever it might be. You test out ideas and hypothesise. You might use imagination all sorts of different things. And that's how we stimulate children's learning in this particular phase.

We've talked about this in the planning phase, the importance of teachable moments, but again, it's really important. It comes to light, and most strongly I guess that in this particular part of the planning cycle, because we need to use those teachable moments if we're going to be responding to children. If we're going to be flexible if we're going to be allowing children to lead the play we need to be able to say this is a good moment. To facilitate this type of learning at the implementation Stage of the assessment and planning cycle, the guide to the national quality framework notes that educators implement planned experiences and at the same time identifying each utilised teachable moment. Moments to respond to and support children's newly emerging strengths, abilities and interest.

Teachable moments are the spontaneous moments and incidental opportunities to enhance children's play and scaffold their learning that comes from the early years learning framework as well. So, have a think about how you use your teachable moments and whether or not these are opportunities for you to further develop your skills in this area.

Kelly

And I think also Jacqui part of that is also knowing if the teachable moment is it going to be valuable to intervene and take advantage? And you might observe some teachable moments, you don't want to leave what you're doing, so you can make a decision to let that go. It's very much again a juggle of knowing what the priority is for you as the educator. Do you continue with what you're doing, or you've seen the teachable moment opportunity, and so do you take that opportunity.

Responsiveness to children also involves that scaffolding and if we come back to our theoretical influences discussion that we had in our first part, we talked about and we've talked about it a few times actually Vygotsky Zone of proximal development and that idea that we sort of are going to where the child is at, and we're making sure the learning is within the right stretch of optimal kind of zone where it's challenging but not too challenging. The early years learning framework to find scaffolding as the educator’s decisions and actions that build on children's existing knowledge and skills to enhance their learning. We talked about that in the first phase.

The first part as well, about you know, observing and gathering information. Some of the information or a big part of the information that we have to build on, to build our planning and implementation on is children's existing knowledge So, that's where we know, that's how we know where children currently are at in the planning phase sort of setting targets or objectives or goals for learning. That's where we want children to be at and the middle zone there that with help is the implementation phase where we're putting all of those things into action to help make sure that learning is realised. And again that idea that there's other theoretical perspectives at play here that a child requires progressively more complex joint activity with one or more adults. The idea that we've talked about already that children learn in that social context, and again the with help section might not always be an educator or an adult it actually might be another child.

This is also the idea where we can work with families to know where children are currently at, where families would like their child to go in terms of their learning, and how do we both work together to help children get there. That idea of continuity of learning in the home and the early childhood setting is really important.

We've mentioned this idea already, but sort of unpacking this understanding sustained shared thinking is really, really important in this implementation phase if we are to make that learning complex and deep level meaningful learning, then we need to understand what does this concept mean, because that's when that deep level learning is happening. Siraj Blatchford talks about sustained shared thinking as an episode in which two or more individuals work together in an intellectual way to solve a problem, clarified concept or evaluate activities. So, this is an opportunity for us to do all of those things in this implementation phase. In practice, what does it look like? It may involve educators and children working together on an idea or a problem.

Again, that idea of it could be a small moment in time, or it could be a long ranging project. It could involve an individual child. It could involve a small group of children. It could involve you know, different children on different days investigating different ideas within the one sort of topic or theme. It involves engaging in the thinking process with children, so taking on that role of provocateur or that idea of what if we did this or would it be different if we tried to mix different ingredients or all those sorts of things. Scaffolding children to help find solutions to their problems and that again is not about bringing all the information, say to the table, but actually scaffolding them to think about ways that they could investigate and find that information themselves, so whether it be researching, you know through the library or you know researching online. Or as I said, conducting experiments, there's a range of different ways that we could scaffold children to help find the solutions to problems or to projects that they're interested in investigating. Helping clarify ideas, and again building that conceptual understanding of different things.

Again, scientific concepts are a good one that comes to my mind about that. Often children are experimenting with some different sort of physics concepts, and we can help clarify that and explain and help put the pieces together. Helping children make connections between their actions and their learning. Again, that idea that we are helping them to interpret and recognise and acknowledge that learning is a really important way to help the learning be solidified and help them to be able to use that for future learning which is really important as well.

Again, the idea of using open ended questioning is really important to having your tool belt, so there's a little list here of all sorts of different ways that you could use these open ended questions. This list is not meant to be exhaustive, but it's meant to encourage you to have a think about making sure you're confident in your repertoire of open ended questions so that you can use them at anytime so that you can do the things that we've got on the slide here, that developing of higher order thinking skills and cognition. That you can help support children by giving them insights into their own ideas, thoughts and feelings.

Facilitating that formative assessment of children's learning. So, you can really sort of target what it is that they're investigating hypothesising or exploring. But it promotes that active learning and also that engagement in the learning with the educator and the child. Enables differentiation, so it enables you to do different things for different children for different groups of children. And it helps children relate new information to past experiences. As I mentioned before.

I have got a couple of myths here too about the idea that implementing learning, I guess needs to be the main learning or the most important learning is happening at those group experiences that we quite often do throughout the day this is encouraging you when we're doing this little mythbusting section to really think about implementing learning through small group and individual experiences. The whole group experiences as we have mentioned before different parts often it's more of an activity that is about, you know, managing the group behaviour and trying to get everyone's attention on a particular thing that might not necessarily be relevant. Again, there might be times where you do come together as a group and there might be quite intentional reasons for you doing that, but it's not the only way learning happens, and it's probably not the most effective way that learning happens. So, is there a requirement for children to join in whole group experiences to learn is that the only way learning happens, not necessarily.

As we've said, learning can happen all throughout the day from start to finish. If we think about you know the definition of our curriculum in early childhood, it's everything that we learned. It's not just about those structured group experiences, it's the routines. It's the coming and going. It's the free play. It's all sorts of different learning, so hopefully you'll have it opportunity to think about what that means for the way you structure your day in your learning experiences. The second one is talking about teaching occurs primarily during those whole group activities. I think we've busted that many times over to say that you're teaching is happening all the time. You're teaching is happening from word going in this planning cycle. It's happening when you're observing the learning. It's happening when you're planning the learning. It's happening when you're analysing the learning. It's happening when you're implementing the learning throughout the whole day throughout the whole week, throughout the whole year.

Children must join in on whole group experiences to be ready for school, now that's a goodie, a classic, definitely not. There are lots of opportunities to be ready to be accustomed I guess to the to the experiences that are happening at school. That's not necessarily the way that you can do that. Again, have a think about what you, believe to be important aspects of readiness. For me, the most Important aspects of being ready for school are things like being aware of your own learning styles and learning preferences, and having that confidence as learners. So, have a think about what does that mean and it doesn't necessarily have to happen in that way.

Kelly

Thanks Jacqui for talking us through that section. The next section is a short one and it focuses on making the learning visible.

So, this slide talks about recording the incidental learning that happens during the implementation Stage. This is a spontaneous learning. These are the things that you might not necessarily have thought might happen, so as well as planning for future learning when you do your planning in the previous Stage, the spontaneous or incidental learning should be documented and this happens retrospectively. For this to be manageable, educators must reflect on what has been the most significant learning and events and document these only. You are not ever going to capture everything and there's just so much happening through the day. So, you really need to reflect and think about what it is you are going to document by significant learning. It might be, a child's learning. They're showing evidence now of, they've met a learning goal or a child is now doing something they haven't been able to do, or there's just something that really catches your interest. And it's something that you want to make sure you've got recorded.

As for all documentation making the learning visible from the incidental learning can be in any format that suits you. It's a local decision. Whatever is going to work for you and your team is the best way to do it. There's absolutely no requirement to record daily, and there's definitely no requirement to have a daily diary completed during the day with photos in the preschool entrance for the families to look at when they pick their child up. You've got to think about what's the best use of your time during the day when the children are present and focus on the implementation of your plans, and that's your focus. Not providing a summary of the day for the families necessarily, so this retrospective planning might not happen daily, it might happen at the end of the week for each of the groups you've got, definitely don't fall into the trap of producing a souvenir with your documentation.

The focus of the documentation is the evidence of children's learning and development. You're not making a memoir for the families. They might love it. You're an educator, and you'll focus is the child's learning and development. And finally, retrospective documentation is a really good opportunity to give the children a voice to ask them what they learned. How did they do this? What did they find out? What was the process? And then also, what do you want to do next? It's a really good time to try to work into your timetable, a bit of an opportunity for discussing the children's learning with them.

Ok, another reflection on making the learning visible. So, just think about reflect on a retrospective documentation you can play and what information is it that you're generally capturing? Are you relating it to individuals as well as groups? It should be a combination of those. What format are you using to document the information? Is it effective for you? Is it working for you? There's no prescribed template or quantity it's got to be quality information that's going to inform your planning. So, do you focus on quality information which is meaningful, worthwhile and can be used to inform future plans for learning. So, if you could just pause the recording and just consider those questions and reflect on your own documentation.

Ok, so we're towards the end of our recording now, but just bringing everything we've spoken about today together there's two tasks viewing two very short only two and half minute each videos. So, both of them show great examples of educators implementing the preschool curriculum on their examples of high quality interactions as you watch, notice how the educators interact, and particularly with reference to the strategies we've talked about today.

So, look for examples of open ended questioning. How they are responding to the children's ideas and actions? How do they engage the children in sustained, shared thinking? How do they keep that problem solving and that conversation going? How do they use questioning and prompts to differentiate the learning experience for individuals? In both of the vignettes, each educator has children very different ability levels, but is able to keep them engaged in the task or in the experience through their support and the question and you'll notice the questions are very different for each child, and that's based on the educators knowledge of each of the children and also look for examples of how learning is scaffolded.

Ok, so these videos and the links are here, but the links are also in our research folder. This is the first one and this is the second one. There's also a PDF copy of this presentation in the folder, so you might want to go to it to have reference back to those reflection questions. The reason we have included these videos is just to try to show examples of what it is we've been talking about in real life practice.

And finally, for the previous parts of this course, after you've looked at the videos, reflect on the content of the recording as a whole, and the implications for you for implementing curriculum in your preschool. Think about your current pedagogical practices, which are effective. Are there any new practices that we've talked about today or we've emphasised that you want to trial using, maybe modify how you have been doing things and then if you want to continue working on your preschools programming and planning procedure, focus now on the implementation section.

Ok, so that concludes this session. Thanks for joining us again. We've got one more, part five, which focuses in on the final Stage of the assessment and planning cycles. As always, if you've got a question, you could post it in the communities of practice channel in our team. Or you could email us at early learning.

Jacqui

Thanks Kelly, great session.

Kelly

Ok, thanks Jacqui.

[End of transcript]

Jacqui Ward [Early Learning Coordinator]

Welcome to the preschool and planning cycle, part five, which is all about reflection. My name is Jacqui Ward and I'm the Early Learning Coordinator. I'm here with my colleague Kelly.

Kelly Birket [Early Learning Advisor]

Hi everyone, welcome back to this. The last session in our 5-part series. Hope you get a lot out of this today.

Jacqui Ward

I'd like to begin. With an acknowledgement of country. In doing so, paying respect to Elders both past and present, and any Aboriginal people with us today. And to remind everybody that this is a registered course and maps to the Australian professional teaching standards as per the screen. And then, as we mentioned all along the course has some learning outcomes across all five parts, and these are written on the screen here. So, please do take some time and review them and see whether or not you feel that you have achieved some learning in those in regards to those points.

Kelly Birket

Yes, thanks Jacqui and when you complete your evaluation at the end of this session, you'll be able to let us know how you feel you've gone in relation to each of those outcomes.

Jacqui Ward

And reminder that all materials that we talk about today kept in the folder in our Microsoft Teams drive within the communities of practice channel and please feel free if you wanted to start a conversation in their share a story, ask some questions, whatever you feel like. Some pre session tasks as per our other sessions, the first one is. A critical reflection reading from Gowrie and the other one is developing a culture of learning through reflective practice from ACECQA. So, if you haven't already read those, take some time now to review them. They'll be really important in helping you move through the course content today.

We just wanted to quickly sort of call out that within the national quality standard. There is a specific reference to reflection and evaluation within the planning cycle itself, but in addition to that, critical reflection is a standout element as well, so it's really important this final stage of the assessment and planning cycle that it's that we really unpack that notion of what critical reflection is and how does it inform your work and your professional practice.

So, just to recap, as you know, we've covered off on observing and collecting meaningful, relevant, rich information about children, analysing that for, finding out what children are learning and what we can do with that information in order to inform our planning. Looking at implementing, learning and using a range of strategies there in the final section is reflecting and evaluating. And this Stage of the cycle involves educators reflecting to evaluate how effective and meaningful the other Stage of assessment and planning a cycle work, as well as considering questions of equity, inclusion, bias and discrimination. Going to be talking a lot about that today, that critical element of your work.

So, just going to set the scene a little bit in terms of what does our guiding framework tell us. So, the early years learning framework talks about groups reflective practice together with ongoing learning because that's really the point about reflecting on anything. If you don't really learn anything from that reflection, then there's kind of no point in doing it. And it really speaks of it as more of an action or a verb than something that is just a word that we refer to, I guess reflective practice is a form of ongoing learning that involves engaging with questions of philosophy, ethics in practice. Its intention is to gather information and gain insights that support inform and enrich decision making about children's learning, as professionals early childhood educators examine what happens in their setting and reflecting and reflect on what they might change. So, there's really quite. It's quite meady part of the cycle and really important for us to know exactly what we're doing. And what we are reflecting on what is our philosophy and what does it look like in practice. What are the ethics that drive our practice and how else, what are other professional standards that guide our practice? Early years learning framework goes on to say that a lively culture of professional enquiries established when early childhood educators and those with whom they work are all involved in that ongoing cycle of review. Through which current practices are examined, outcomes are reviewed and new ideas are generated. So, that idea that it's not just about a single educator doing this on their own, they're doing it within their team, within their community, within their school, within the parents, the families, the children themselves. And obviously, the benefit of such things is that in such a climate, issues relating to curriculum, quality, equity, and children's well being can be raised and debated. So, we can really talk about the effectiveness of our work in terms of outcomes for children.

So, being at these cycles talking about reflection and evaluation, I think it's really important that we sort of draw out a few points of where they differ. They're not interchangeable. I don't believe, and again, I think it's important. for our purposes, we've delineated them in this way in order for you to sort of, I guess, check off to see that you're doing both. We speak of evaluation in terms of being that micro level. It could occur while you're doing something after the event or experience, and it predominantly ask what questions. So, what worked well, what didn't? What things could I change in terms of the time of day I implemented that, or in terms of what strategies you could use? Focuses in on those daily experiences, and aims to find answers from existing knowledge. May make an observation or judgment without detailing the reason for the judgments. So, important things, because if you don't have that map micro level focus on things we don't always pick up issues at the macro level, so critical reflection is that sort of bigger picture view or the macro level view occurs after an event or an experience. And quite often after multiples, or when a few issues are raised collectively ask what occurred as well as how and why so that real analysis of the situation focuses in on your professional practices, so not just that one event, but as a series of experiences or series of strategies or series of approaches, a series of interactions, all of those sorts of things. And involves a close examination of all aspects of events and experiences from different perspectives. So, the idea that we're not just thinking about our individual learning experiences with the children were actually seeing it as part of a bigger picture of all of our interactions aims to finances relating to practice to literature and to theory. So, we're thinking about all of those things influencing our critical reflections. An as we've mentioned a few times that it's considering those issues of social justice, equity, inclusion bias and discrimination it allows us to think critically about our work and it also allows us then to be able to facilitate those sorts of skills and promote that learning within children. And that's really strongly featured in areas learning outcome one and two. So, in order for us to do that is promote that learning, we need to be able to be practiced as at that as educators.

So, again, if we think of ourselves in doing this, we are really thinking of reflective practice or reflection as just one of the tools in our tool kit. So, characteristics of a reflective educator are that they're willing to stand outside and observe their practice to better understand their actions. So, you get a level of objectivity when you're doing that, you creating that sort of looking in on your own practice, you are comfortable with examining and analysing your experiences rather than just leave them. You know these are the things that encourages to go a little bit deeper. Have the courage to question truths in inverted commas, as things that we've always believed and why things that are done in that particular way. Often we inherit a lot of practices when we start somewhere new or that we've just sort of collected along the way without questioning those. We can never truly improve our practice. It's about really respecting different viewpoints, and recognising that there's no one right approach or answer that everyone brings that. Diversity of experience and understanding to the table that they are constantly looking for ways to improve their practice in order to deliver a high quality program in. In fact, those two things being a reflective educator in a high quality program in my opinion are intrinsically linked. They're able to be critical without being negative. That's important. This isn't about bringing anyone else down. This is about actually critiquing your practice. Focusing on the professional, not the personal tapping into perspectives, experience, and beliefs of their colleagues and seeking out professional collaborations and networking opportunities when we see what other people are doing and we see some of that theory, an ideology in practice, we learn so much and we prioritise improving outcomes for children because if we don't change our practices or differentiate our practices, we're not necessarily achieving the best outcomes for all children.

So, we're going to actually ask you right now if you can pause your session and have a little watch of the ACECQA video here, it's about critical reflection in practice, it goes for four minutes, and it really is focusing in on some educators talking about what critical reflection is and really focusing in on what things they've changed based on that critical reflection. So, take some time, and if you are happening to do this series with a group of people. Take some time to discuss it. If not, take it to your next team meeting and have a chat about what does this mean for you guys as a team.

Kelly Birket

OK, so next section about recording we're going to have a look at it evaluation and will start by asking why, why we do evaluate? So, there's two you could look at evaluation in two ways, and the evaluation that's actually in the moment, as you're implementing your plans and then there's also the evaluation after an event or the experience, quality experiences are not going to automatically happen there has to be some sort of evaluation and critical or and or critical reflection for things to happen and for things to go well. So, we'll start by looking at evaluation in the moment it enables an educator to make decisions about what to do in, say, during a learning experience to promote learning. This is a type of evaluation that's just happening in the moment on the go. You are probably not even conscious that you've actually evaluated. It's not necessarily something that you would record, but it's an action you would take in response to something you've seen or heard to further promote learning. Similar to that, an educator in the moment might make changes to the environment to extend learning. Again, depending on what the hearing and seeing for an example might be, adding or removing a resource. Knowing what adjustments to make so all children are able to access and participate in an experience. So, this is about noticing that a child is interested in something, but for whatever reason isn't able to engage or participate. So, it's the things that you would do to make that inclusion possible. Very similar to that knowing where and when support and intervention are necessary. It's a really finely tuned skill to know when to stand back or when to intervene, but as you gain experience, you'll know exactly what the right moment is, but those actions are based on an evaluation and of course as we talked about last session taking advantage of the teachable moment. OK, so evaluation that happens after an event or experience, so this might be at the end of the day. When you sitting down and you just jotting down how things went, what went well, you know what didn't go so well, things like that. This will help educators know if they're gathering and analysis of information planning and implementation were and it looks like the word effective got knocked off there, but this is what Jacqui was talking about earlier about evaluation of all the other Stages of the assessment and planning cycle. After an event enables an educator to judge if the information they collected was relevant and meaningful. Did it actually give you the information to make a relevant or meaningful plan that actually resulted in learning? Determine if their teaching strategies were effective and judge if the learning experiences were meaningful and if the experiences help to achieve the intended learning. So, educators evaluate all aspects of the assessment and planning cycle to make continual improvements which result in better outcomes for children.

OK, we'll have a little look now at how. Most educators spontaneously engage in reflective practice as they make decisions in response to what happens throughout the day or session. They build on children's discoveries by adding materials and extend children, thinking by posing questions, or suggesting another way to tackle a problem. This type of reflection in action also occurs when new situations present themselves or established strategies did not seem to work, and the and the educator experiments with alternatives. Evaluation may be likened to commentary or anecdotal comments on programs or an experience. It is simply descriptive in nature and does not assist in any deeper thinking or analysis. Often the commentary stops there without any further or actions being considered. That might be the case. Often though, are there will be a modification made to if it's evaluation after an event. There might be a modification to the planning. There might be a modification to the environmental setup. An educator might think well if this happens tomorrow this is how I will respond. Yes, decisions like that. It made OK. How does it happen? Before I read this I just want to say because it is an area of concern on how you record your evaluation, just like we've talked about evaluating the document. The documentation of the other Stages of the cycle. It's definitely a local decision, but whichever way you decide to do it, it has to be manageable for you. I just mentioned before you can't document all your evaluations because you were just constantly evaluating throughout the day, so you need to just select identify the most significant. Some people use dot points or make notes on their daily plan at the end of the day. Other people during the day might make jottings on post-its or I've also seen educators actually record themselves speaking into their phone and then sending that to an email to their own email address so then they've got that documentation there.

Educators evaluated by seeking the opinion of families through informal conversations, surveys, or formal interviews. Engaging and collegial discussions with colleagues spontaneously or more formally, such as at staff meetings that spontaneous conversation that generally is what happens at the end of the day when you're cleaning up, you know when somebody's washing the paint, somebody else is wiping down the tables, and you have a discussion about did you see what happened here? You know this didn't go so well. What can we do about this? That's the sort of informal discussion, asking children to talk about what they learned and what they think helped them. And developing and using a set of guiding or prompting questions, so those four dot points all relate to how educators evaluate.

OK, what does it look like? OK, so these are the types of questions an educator asks themselves during the day in the moment as experiences are happening. This type of evaluation helps the educator know what to do that. So, what actions to take to support and extend the learning in the moment. So, the educator might have set up this learning experience with a particular intention and might have been related to a social skill for the little, you know, the kids involved. It might have been related to make believe play could have, I've got no idea. With those resource there it could have been an extension of another activity, but the types of things that an educator would ask themselves is what extra resources could I add? How's the child going? Are they engaging? What are they saying, is what I'm seeing consistent with other information I've collected about this child? Are the children interested and engaged, and then of course, if they're not, what could I do to support engagement? Is their experience actually promoting learning? Is it doing what it was intended to do? What about tomorrow in this area? What questions can I ask to support the children's learning? And again, how is this experience going? Other children having fun, are they staying there for a while? I guess also you could ask questions related to learning outcome for about, you know, maintaining concentration and focus.

OK, so these are some examples of the types of questions that and educator might ask after a learning experience, perhaps at the end of the day or the end of the week. Maybe at the end of a particular project or an enquiry. Generally, this information would be recorded along side the planning for those experiences in the same document, but you don't have to do that, but often educators will have the plan. This is what was planned for, these were the experiences and the strategies used, and then this is the evaluation of how it went. So, you'll notice the text on the slide is arranged around the cycle because, as I said before, evaluation should be very much about the other Stages of the cycle. So, with in the observer the collecting gathering information Stage questions might be was the information collected meaningful? What additional information needs to be collected was the analysis of information accurate? Was it relevant? And then down asking about the planning Stage, did the intended learning occur? Were the learning intentions appropriate and relevant? Were the teaching strategies affective, what should be included in future plans or modifications made to current plans, were the principles and practices of the ELYF reflected in the planning. And then at the implementation Stage what adjustments were made for individuals. Were these effective? Were children involved and engaged equally? What's the next step after this? What did educators do to respond to the children? Did the learning environments promote learning or just simply what happened?

Jacqui Ward

You make a really good point there. Kelly there's actually sort of, I think, three time frames when we talk about evaluation. You kind of doing it where you're looking at, as you've mentioned in the moment, you're looking back, but you're also looking forward, as in, well, what am I going to the answers to all these questions will inform the next cycle of planning wont they in terms of that information you use, in terms of the analysis, in terms of the planning.

Kelly Birket

Absolutely, definitely yes, that's a very good point. So, it is a great resource we've just very recently come across. And throughout it it's been made by the Victorian government and throughout it features different learning experiences for different age groups and for each of the learning experiences that has a little synopsis of what of each of the Stages, what not actual documentation, but just an explanation as to what the educators did at that point. And then what's really interesting about it and relevant to this recording, is for each of the learning experience there's a list of the types of evaluation questions you would ask. So, if you're wondering about how other people evaluate or looking to get some more ideas, just have a little look in there. You'll find that resource in our channel in the folder that says materials and resources.

OK, so the last slide for this section on evaluation is a reflection task. Just think about the last week you've had with the children. Identify three occasions when you evaluated so either in the moment or after the event. It might have been a formal evaluation we actually sat down, intending to evaluate, or it might have been one of those evaluations with your colleague as you're doing things and it's more of a conversation more spontaneous as well. For each occasion, what was the focus of your evaluation and what action did you take as a consequence of your evaluation?

Jacqui Ward

We'll now move into the section focusing in on critical reflection and starting off with why, why do we do it? The great quote in the guide to the national quality standards. So, critical reflection involves closely examining all aspects of events and experiences from different perspectives, with a focus on implications for equity inclusion and diversity. It takes reflective practice to a deeper level and includes educators analysing or don't diagnosing what happened and asking why. So, definitely looking at not so much as the individual practices as we mentioned with the evaluation of that moment in time, but more thinking about bigger issues and the way we work having some potentially unintended consequences. So, it takes it takes ourselves to look at our practice an critically evaluate whether or not we're doing what we should be doing in terms of achieving outcomes for children.

So, moving on the attention of critical reflection is to gather information and insights that support, inform and enrich decision making about children's well being in development. And of course their learning. Critical reflection is an ongoing process that facilitates continuous improvement, so by no means can you say at any point in time I have finished reflecting.

It's just a process, cyclical process, like the planning cycle itself. It enables educators to analyse or diagnose what happened and why, supports educators to make changes and improvements to their practice, knowledge, interactions, actions, and learning environments. Helps identify areas educators might want to learn more about, understand better, or to find different ways to approach their practice. Encourages educators to think about questions of equity, cultural competence, social justice, democracy, and fairness. As I mentioned before, they're all elements that are covered off or concepts or ideas that are covered off in the early years learning framework learning outcomes. So, in order for us to be supporting development in those areas for children, we need to be thinking and critically reflecting on how we do that as adults.

In terms of critical reflection in terms of how, so there's some strong foundations for critical reflection that we need to think about first and foremost. So, in order to be able to do critical reflection well, because I think this is an area that often comes up as a question for educators. Well, what am I reflecting on or what questions do I need, or what template do I need? Because there's that uncertainty, I guess of knowing what they should really be critically reflecting on so first of all, building your professional knowledge of all of the things that you need to be knowing about in order to critically reflect so things like professional standards. So, the national quality standard, the code of ethics, you know, knowing the EYLF really well, knowing your own service philosophy well, all of the things that you need to know in terms of your professional knowledge. That's just to name a few, but those are sorts of things that you need to have in your toolkit or as a foundation. I guess for success. You need to be thinking about embedding critical reflection as a regular process, so again, not just something you're doing to say I can tick a box that I'm critically reflecting, it's just becomes a natural part of what you do every day in every way. You allow time for it. You prioritise it and it becomes part and parcel of your everyday actions. And that also that you know. Again, as I mentioned before, but I wanted to emphasise that again and again and again. Making a change as a result of your reflection. So, what am I doing differently now that I'm aware that this is an issue or a challenge for me, or that I've realised that this particular practice isn't really achieving the best outcomes for some of their children in my group. What can I do differently and actually implementing that in your planning cycle?

As we mentioned there that you drawing on your professional standards, so within the national quality standard element 4.2.2 talks about professional standards and how they guide our practice our interactions in our relationships. So, educators use professional standards, an ethical principles to guide professional conduct in decision making in practice. Guide professional conduct in relation to decision making requires on educators reflecting on these professional standards. It's important that educators are aware of their attitudes, values, and beliefs, how they impact their work. So, again, it's one thing to know what those standards are, but where do you fit in that in understanding and application of those particular professional standards. Educators benefit from working with each other, the educational leader and the supervisor to identify where biases may have informed their values and minimise the impact of those biases in their practice and relationships with children, families, colleagues and local community. And this is really important this point, because, again, we're not being critical reflective educators if we don't acknowledge that every single one of us has some biases. It's inevitable in the way that we experience the world we were raised in a particular way. We have certain world views because of our culture and our family background, so inheriting that is a way of seeing the world that has some biases in it. So, it's important to acknowledge those when all educators understand what's guiding their practice and why educators can make improvements to their practice and enhance outcomes for children. And that comes from the guide to the National Quality Framework, Section three.

As I mentioned before, the code of ethics is a really important component of our professional standards as well. We're very, very fortunate and privileged. Not all teachers have a code of ethics to guide their practice in early childhood we do and they are a set of ethics or standards that guide what we do. They can be used as a tool to support our critical reflection or create that rotor of are we on the right track and are we living up to the ideals that we hope and that we all agree on are important in early childhood profession. The ethics note that being ethical involves thinking about everyday actions and decision making, either individually or collectively and responding with respect to all concerned. Again, you can't do that unless you've got a component of critical reflection in there and the code of ethics also guides our decision making into in relation to our ethical responsibilities.

Kelly Birket

I've also uploaded a copy of the code of ethics into the folder with the material, so if you're not familiar with the code of ethics, definitely worth all having a look at what the principles and values are.

Jacqui Ward

And you've also captured one on the slide there to Kelly in relation to colleagues. I will participate in a lively culture of professional inquiry to support continuous improvement, so the code of ethics is very much written like that a set of statements that we all agree to.

And of course, a really another really important thing that we need to consider in terms of what are we critically reflecting on or what is guiding us through those critical reflections is our service philosophy, because it contextualises your reflections. It encourages you to think about what does, what have we all agreed is important in our context in our particular community, and again, a nice little quote from the guide to the in NQF there drawing on your philosophy will help to ensure that your making the right decision based on your agreed norms and values. The statement of philosophy serves three purposes that it underpins the decisions policies and daily practices of the service reflects that shared understanding of the role of the service among children, families, children, sorry, staff, children, families in the community, and it guides educators, pedagogy, planning and practice when delivering the educational program. So, it's one of the things that we need to think about when we're doing that critical reflection is what we're doing in our program when we think about the assessment and planning cycle. Is what we're planning for? Is it in line with whatever philosophy says? You know, if our philosophy says that we believe in that children are competent and capable learners and they learn best through experiential play based learning. Are our learning experiences then mapping to that? Or are they actually, you know, very much based on rote learning or very structured teacher led experiences. Therein lies an opportunity for critically reflecting on whether or not we're realising the best outcomes for children through our service throughout planning.

And this is, I believe a little graphic, which is a beauty from the pre task reading that we mentioned. And it talks about.

Kelly Birket

So, I just said, yes, that's right.

Jacqui Ward

It talks about the layers of reflection and it talks about the fact that we all have our own experiences and knowledge base. As we mentioned before and then when we think about reflecting, we add in these layers so we add in the experience and knowledge of others. We don't have to be the holders of all knowledge ourselves. We can draw on the expertise of others we look at, you know, doing some reading we look at theorists and theories relevant to our work, and in particular the subject or the idea that we're reflecting on, and we think about those broader social and political circumstances. At the moment, we've got quite a few things going on where we are experiencing some social and political climates. I think we always do that we need to think about and what we could do to make a difference for those things and contribute to the betterment of our community as well as our individual children.

And this is a little bit of an example. Again, if you'd like to, you can read that full article the sources on the page there it talks about. You know, having a bit of a cyclical process again, or a process to critically reflect. So, if we're thinking about how do we do this? This is a little sort of stepped out action. If you like to do this. If you thinking well, I'm not sure where to start in terms of critical reflection. This is some of the prompts that you could use to start that process. First of all, reflecting identifying the issue or topic and gathering up evidence to say why is it a problem and why talking to children and families and other professionals? How are they experiencing this particular problem? You could look at reframing that to say when we do it in this way, who benefits who is disadvantaged? Is there another way to do it? What could be improved? How does it meet the big ideas of the earliest learning framework and all your service philosophy and all the code of ethics and all the national quality standard? All of those sorts of things, decide and plan to make any changes necessary and change or modifying your practice and thinking about too how do you need to embed those changes as well? You know does it require you to update your procedure or your policy or whatever on those things. Looking at the final Stage of reviewing by reflecting on the changes made, rethinking and review as required, so that idea of where these change successful in actually achieving what we wanted to do in that re framing section and the planning section, you know, did it actually work or do we need to make some changes?

And just a reminder that again, if you're still stumped as to how do I go about that element of critical reflection, we're talking about critical reflection really in relation to the planning cycle here, but in actual fact, critical reflection is an important practice for all of our work across all of the seven quality areas across everything that we do so there is embedded within each standard at the start of each standard there are prompt questions for you, so you don't need to reinvent them. You can actually use some of those questions, so there's an example on the screen there of some of those things, so this might be the starting point for your critical reflection and to build your muscles and your strength if you like in being a critically reflective educator.

Some tips. Again, if you think about if you new to the journey or if you'd like to get better skills, thinking about reflecting individually, it's good to practice on your own and think about what you might say, but also it's good to practice as a group. You're more likely to do that if the reflection occurs leading up to or is taken by the group of educators. So, when we do it together makes a difference. Go deeper than a simple description of an experience or an event. Remember, critical reflection of what you decide to actually write down is really more about the decision making. You don't really need to describe all of the events that happened, you just need to capture about you know what did you think about. And why did you think those things were, you know, not on the right track or not in line with the professional standards and what changes did you make? Don't take things at face value look beneath the surface and see what might be influencing a situation again. And try and think about it from the multiple perspectives you know, different family backgrounds, different cultural expectations there's lots of things where you can try and take that child's perspective in your reflection. And again, actually asking them how they're experiencing the program and those bigger picture questions are actually quite insightful and knowledgeable about those things. Drawing an experience and knowledge of other educators as we mentioned considering theories, research and literature and how they inform practice. If you're not currently reading some research or some literature on that particular topic, that could be an opportunity to broaden your perspective as well. And as we said, considering those broader societal issues that may impact on practice, such as your stereo types, any culture, any racism, sexism, all of those sorts of things, maybe even the way that we view our typical family structures or gender issues. There's lots of things that we have in place that need to be thought about when we're thinking about critical reflection.

Another opportunity to pause and watch another video. This one is written by a service director. In it she talks about her experiences as part of a professional learning community committed to critical reflection. There is there is a series of them and that's really useful, so pause the video, pause the session right now, and have a listen. Otherwise you can come back to it later.

Again, if we talk about the what of critical reflection, so what are the things that were actually sort of ending up with?

We've got a similar graphic here where we're talking about some example of critical reflection questions, so this is particularly based on learning experience, but this also could be equally relevant these types of stem questions for reflecting critically reflecting on a particular issue, or a challenge that you might be having. I won't read through all of them, but I'll have a little look at some of those things there, a little question there is to say is this a good cultural experience? Or is it tokenistic And how will I know? Again, these are the sorts of things that are really important to reflect on. If we thinking about because we can see there that this experience is quite obviously an experience focusing in on learning more about Aboriginal culture. And so again, how is this experience supporting Aboriginal children within this? And what are preschool families want to learn, want children to learn about Aboriginal culture and why is it important? Why have I included this experience with an Aboriginal focus? Why is that relevant? How do other preschools imbed, Aboriginal perspectives. Again, how does this experience support the department's Aboriginal education policy? That's a really good one as another piece of professional standard or something that guides our critical reflection. So, have a little think about how all of those sorts of things are happening in your preschool.

So, we've developed a little bit of a resource as part of these professional learning to provide you with some prompt questions to support reflective practice. Again, you might not find that you actually need them, but you may find them useful to keep them handy just to keep them in the forefront of your mind when you're doing you're working with your practice. And again, it's about critical reflection it's about drawing on the information from the early years learning framework in particular, page 13 those overarching questions that really help us go a little bit deeper. Who is disadvantage when I work in this way, and who is advantaged sometimes, you'll notice that you know you have that certain way of working with some children. That sort of things just seem to fit together it’s quite natural. Again, that's probably got a lot to do with the fact that your experiences potentially might be quite similar to that group of children or that individual child and therefore they are advantage because they have a similar life experience or worldview to you. Maybe some children whose world views and experiences and cultural identity is quite different might be disadvantaged when you work in that way. Again, this there's no judgment about these particular reflections. They're actually just saying, well, what could I do? Or how could I change things to make my practice more inclusive? What are my understandings of each child? Sometimes we can make some decisions early on about all people in our lives, and sometimes it's important to revisit what am I actually, what am I of my basing these understandings on in these ideas. What theories, philosophies and understand understanding, shaping assist my work. How they outgrowing some of the things that I learned in my pre service training or my initial qualifications? Or you know the more recent or some of the professional learning that I went to a while ago that I'm still using to guide my decision making in my everyday. What aspects of my work are not helped by theories and guidance that I usually drawn to make sense of what I do. Again, these are some examples where sometimes, for example, if we think about those developmental Stages and thinking that children have to progress through those in a linear way, well sometimes some children don't actually do that. Sometimes they jump ahead a couple and sometimes that they may be quite progressed in some aspects of the cognitive domain, but others you know further back, so it's about acknowledging that sometimes theories we might need to draw on different theories at different times to support our work. What questions do I have about my work? I quite, really like that one as well. You know, it helps us to make sure that we are on track in making sure that our work is meaningful and relevant and engaging for us as professionals. That's the way that we keep making sure I guess that we're bringing the best of ourselves to our work. What are my challenge by what am I curious about? What am I confronted by? All great questions to keep us on our toes to think about the fact that you know, maybe there's room for us to be. You know, following a particular curiosity or an interest area. What am I confronted by? Sometimes I do that for myself when I think I'm swimming along you know really well and an my practice is on track with its alignment you know, to the code of ethics. And then every now and again I've confronted by a bias that I didn't realise that I had. And I'm realising that yes, I need to always be open to different perspectives and seeing things from looking from a different window I guess if you like or taking a little bit of a further step back and looking in. Are there other theories or knowledge that could help me understand better what I've observed or experienced? Again, a really good one to think about in terms of, well, maybe I've been always guided by, you know, a range of theorists that I've sort of kept to be quite consistent. Well, maybe there's knew theories about the way the mind works, or the way interactions support learning, or the way you know people and children are using technologies that could benefit our work, so those questions are in in the file if you would like to use them to take with you, I guess and take into your daily practice to get you thinking about things.

So, another reflection task. So, this is really getting you about getting you to think about applying what we've covered so far into your practice. So, thinking about your week with children so it can be any week you can be thinking about something that happened in the past, particularly if there's something that you. That stands out for you. You know, based on the content, that we've just covered, you know, think about a time where you thought, wow, that did really unsettled me that particular week or something happened in that particular time. Again, identifying three occasions when you critically reflected, and for each occasion thinking about the following questions was the issue. What was the issue or focus of reflection? So, what were you thinking about and why was it an issue? What perspective all sources information other than your own knowledge and experience, did you consider? So, again, that could be, how do we include? You know, different families. Did we talk about it with other educators? Did we draw on some theoretical knowledge? Did we go to the code of ethics all those sorts of things? Have a think about that. So, writing answering all these three questions for each of those three occasions, and the final one. Again, re emphasising that there's no point in critical reflection if we didn't actually take some action. So, what actions did you take as a consequence of your reflection on each of those three occasions?

Kelly Birket

OK, so this is the last section of our presentation. Thanks for talking us through critical reflection Jacqui.

Here's another video task. This is an optional one. It’s very interesting though Katherine Lee, the director of the point preschool talks, takes us through the ongoing process of evaluation and the way her team has overcome some of the challenges that they've come across, you might recognise some of the challenges in your own service. Again, it's a short video, and if you pause, you can follow the link at the bottom of the screen there.

Jacqui Ward

and I do apologise. I was referring to this video when I talked to earlier on in my section about the reading task that was actually a reading that you needed to read in this one is the video

Kelly Birket

That's OK, both a service director and both talking about reflective practice in their own service. So, what do you do with all the information after you've completed an evaluation or you've critically reflected so your fact finding, your discussions, you might find that you actually are on track and that you know that things are OK in that might confirm that you are doing things in an effective manner or it's probably more likely that you want to tweak things you want to take action to make improvements, which will in turn lead to improved outcomes for children. Also, it's really important that after with everything you do, you actually know why you're doing it. So, for instance, you need to be able to say you know we're doing this because of this, or we change this because we talked about this and realise this, so that nothing is random. None of the practices in your service I just happening because that's why they happen. They're happening because as a team you've observed. you've gathered, information you've talked to each other, you've talked to other preschools, you've read information, you've attended professional learning and then made a considered decision about how to do things. so that they were effective. So, some of the changes that teams have made, you might recognise some of these. So, after as a result of evaluation, the types of things people have changed plans modified to include experiences to assist children to know how to be a kind friend. So, imagine you can, in your mind think about what was happening in the preschool that this staff came to this decision that they had to have this as a priority. Another team talked about their routine and then changed it to reduce the number of pack ups. You change could be as simple as outdoor storage areas being reorganised, but that might have an impact on the children's learning. Different methods of recording observations trial. New resource purchased to support the teaching of dramatic arts, staff engaged in professional learning and discussion around scaffolding so you can imagine in your mind why and the types of issues that might have come up and that as a result of the evaluation these are some of the actions of the teams took. As a result of critical reflection additional cultural celebrations incorporated adjustments made to preschool furniture, organisation of parent teacher interviews changed, information booklet translated and photos included sustainability prioritised in the selection of art and craft materials, and a review and update of the QIP, the philosophy or particular procedures. I wonder if any of those resonate with you. If you've made similar changes in your press school, or if you've actually got an issue at the moment that perhaps one of these changes will be the result of your reflection.

OK, so this slide sort of wraps up this recording, and this focus on the evaluation. And critical reflection. So, what do you do now? You finished the cycle and we've had our five sessions. At this point you might decide to wrap up your planning cycle or you might use it as a springboard into a news cycle. You might continue, but go a little bit different. Or you might just end things now. Remember, some cycles are implemented in a short space of time, or others a longer term and just continue on and on some cycles that you implement for individuals while others are for groups. Just a review you remember, in session part one we had a look at this image, so I just want to recap. We started by talking about gathering information, making sure it's significant and it's meaningful and asking yourself what you know about the child, their current knowledge, strengths and interests, skills and abilities and culture. That in part two pardon, I’m sorry that was part two part one before we even started with our cycle. We looked at the our image of the child. We considered theorists that have influenced contemporary early childhood practice. And we reflected on which ones our practice are aligned to, and in part two, as I just said, we looked at observing collecting information and then we spoke about analysing the learning. What does the information tell me about what and how the child is learning. And in part three, we focused on planning. That's where you're selecting, identifying what it is the child is ready to learn next, and how you going to support them to get there. Then we focused in the last part four on implementation. What it is you do as an educator, your actions while the children are with you engaging in their learning experiences. How you respond to them and how you promote learning. And finally, we've wrapped up here looking at reflecting and evaluating.

OK, in part one we asked you to reflect on your assessment and planning cycle. We asked what do you do in your preschool at each Stage of the cycle, are the links between each Stage of the cycle clear? Are there any gaps? Are the legislative requirements being covered? So, if you still got those notes it would be great to have another look at it but have another go at this task because you've learned a lot since you completed that reflection. You might have some additional information now that you're aware of what you're able to actually label what it is you're doing. You might be aware of gaps now that you weren't aware that it actually was a gap before. Also, if you've been working on reviewing or developing a programming and planning procedure, complete the last section related to evaluation and critical reflection, and then have a look at the document as an entire piece of work. Make sure there's no overlap. Make sure it reads through well and that it would be something that you could take to your team and try to get some. I guess buy in from your colleagues, you probably want to speak to your supervisor about it, get some feedback. Also, contact your P-2 initiatives officer or next time they visit us them if they would mind having a look and offering feedback and then I suggest you trial using the procedure and then make any modifications needed. You procedure might be two different from what your current practices and in that case you might want to choose a small part of it. You might just want to focus initially, perhaps on the way you analyse information, or you might want to focus just on what it is in your procedure you've got about critical reflection, and that's OK because it's a continual journey of improvement and whatever you do needs to be manageable. You can't take everything on at once.

Jacqui Ward

And an important part there, Kelly is that we have I guess a concept or an idea and we can articulate the planning cycle and how we do it, and that's one of the great things about having a procedure is that you can actually document and record how you do all those things and if someone new in your team starts or someone's filling in for someone when they're away, it's really easy to convey that message to other people as to how you work in relation to the planning cycle.

Kelly Birket

Yes, definitely

Jacqui Ward

and it is how we embed our practice

Kelly Birket

for sure. OK, and so finally I would really appreciate it if you could take five minutes to complete this anonymous survey So, as I mentioned earlier, it asks you to judge how you're learning towards the learning outcomes of this course, and that will give us information to inform the development of future professional learning and it also, asks some questions about the actual delivery of this professional learning. Yes it is anonymous and it won't take long at all, so thanks a lot for joining us on this journey. I've enjoyed it and thank you Jacqui for being my co deliverer.

Jacqui Ward

Thanks Kelly, it's been great. I hope everyone's got a lot out of it.

Kelly Birket

Great thank you. Bye bye.

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