children is important, but one course helped give practitioner Jill
Smart a musical revelation.
St Paul's Nursery School & Children's Centre in Bristol decided it wanted to deepen reflective practice, to provide more stimulating practice, avoid repetition, and go beyond seeing children's interests as primarily important for planning which resources to buy. Following a two-year research project with Bath Spa University, the teaching school came up with a programme on 'reflective noticing', which involved using up-to-date research on connecting schemas with emotional patterns and emotional intelligence, and recognising the innate prejudices and assumptions of practitioners. As a result, the setting now uses a 'reflective wheel' to model responsive planning and is offering this training to other settings.
Jill Smart, Early Years Teacher, from Mama Bears, Thickett Avenue, says doing the St Paul's afternoon course helped her focus in on the point of observations in a new way.
She explains, 'When you write up observations you can ramble on about a lot of things, but this really helped me focus.
'Practitioners were shown the reflective wheel and photographs of children playing and asked to discuss what they thought was happening. The leader really made us reflect on the photographs. You should be thinking about what the child is doing and why.
'A couple of days after doing this course, I saw a boy using chalk on the blackboard. It looked like marks, dots and zigzags. When I got closer I realised he was humming as he went along, and the marks and sounds corresponded - I realised he was writing music. And then he went off singing his tune around the nursery. Having done the course I was much more in tune with what the marks actually meant.'
Another useful thing was thinking about use of language. 'Instead of asking the children "What did you do today?", they suggested we ask "What did you learn?" The language you use can get so much more out of the children.' She adds, 'Reflective noticing is so important because you can find out if there's something they are particularly interested in, or if they are doing something for comfort reasons.'