Lev Vygotsky's work has made us aware of the importance of thinking and learning taking place in a social context. Children learn from one another, and practitioners play a key role in respecting, supporting and extending thinking. Effective interactions are based on conversations that you would have with a friend. The following approaches all play a part.
* Tuning in Skilled practitioners intuitively have all their antennae open to evidence of children thinking, listening carefully to what is being said, observing body language and what a child is doing.
* Showing genuine interest Young children know immediately when adults are merely pretending to be interested. Conversely, they blossom when given undivided attention and affirmation. Clear signals of real interest are also shown through eye contact, smiles and nods.
* Respecting children's own decisions and choices It is tempting to influence children to change their ideas because we know better, and we can see short cuts and other ways of achieving success. But growth in thinking can only occur through the children seeing things through, recognising cause and effect and learning from their errors.
* Inviting children to elaborate Children find it hard to resist when an adult demonstrates that they really want to know more about what they are doing. An enthusiastic request for more detail will usually receive a response.
* Supporting sequencing of ideas Children need to learn to organise their experience and can be encouraged to think along the lines of what happened first... and then what happened...?
* Recapping In the ferment of mental activity, children can find it difficult to express and hold on to ideas. It is helpful sometimes to rerun the thinking with them: 'So Amil, you think that...'
* Clarifying idea Similarly, an interaction may help to make the child's meaning clear while respecting his idea. 'Right, Darren, now are you telling us that this stone will melt if I boil it in water?'
* Reminding The child may need help to hold on to his thought: 'Don't forget, Darren, that you said that this stone will melt if I boil it.'
* Offering your own experience Children will be more inclined to offer their thoughts and feelings if you offer yours: 'I really like to listen to music when I cook supper at home. It makes me feel happy.'
* Suggesting Offer suggestions in the spirit of helpfulness, not prescription: 'You might like to try doing it this way.'
* Using encouragement to further thinking Encouragement can be more effective than praise, particularly if it is specific: 'You have really thought hard about where to put this door in the palace, but where will you put the windows?'
* Offering an alternative viewpoint As children become used to sharing their views, the adult can gently challenge thinking. For example, they may say: 'Maybe Goldilocks wasn't naughty when she ate the porridge. After all, since the porridge was left on the table, perhaps she thought it had been left for her.'
* Speculating By encouraging children to speculate, the practitioner is helping them to open their minds to other possibilities: 'Do you think the three bears might have forgiven Goldilocks and asked her to come to live with them in their house?'
* Reciprocating This involves a two-way interaction where both adult and child are on the same wavelength: Child: 'I want do some gardening.'
Practitioner: 'What a great idea. I would like to do some as well. But what sort of gardening shall we do?'
* Asking open questions If we are to have good conversations with children, questions both open and closed should be used sparingly to avoid a child feeling under pressure. One or two open questions can be used effectively in the spirit of enquiry, for example, 'How did you manage to make this balance so well?' Occasionally a closed question is useful when you actually need to know a fact What is his name? Where does he live?
* Modelling thinking Young children need to understand how adults use their thinking: 'After work I need to take my dog to the vet's, take my books back to the library and buy some food for supper. So, I wonder what I should do first?'
Helping children become good story-makers
Before children can write a story they need to be able to think about, play a story and then tell a story. One of our priorities in the Foundation Stage must be to ensure that our children become good story-makers.
We ensure this happens by creating a story culture and respecting all the stories that children bring to us. These stories, initially drawn from children's own experiences, become embellished by bits of stories they have heard, television programmes they have seen and experiences they have encountered. They put these ideas into their creative play, experimenting with characters, settings and events. Their feet are not chained to the ground by common sense and their imaginations roam into far-flung places.
In fantasy play, children think their own thoughts, create their own scripts and are always in charge.
In one nursery I visited, the role-play area had been transformed into a scenario for 'Sing a Song of Sixpence'. Two girls were pegging out clothes and attaching pieces of card to each item of clothing. When I expressed interest in this they told me that they were the maids: 'We're pegging out the clothes, but this is the fabric conditioner to make the clothes smell nice and feel smooth. The King says that he likes his socks to smell nice.'
Encouraging children to think about their thinking
If thinking is made a prominent feature in the setting, young children can be encouraged to be aware of their thinking processes or develop metacognition. They can start to understand that we all have thoughts and we can create our own stories.
Some thinking is easy (remembering what we know already), and some is more difficult (and requires some hard work). We should share the language of thinking with children and introduce terms such as puzzle, wonder and discover. We should encourage them to think about how they think - for example: 'Think about that picture in your head'
'Think about what you already know'
'Think what you would like'
'Think about what you need'
Above all, practitioners should emphasise that thinking is something important that we all need to do and that every child is a good thinker.
Helping children to progress in their thinking
Where the Foundation Stage offers children good scope, encouragement and the necessary scaffolding to think, this provides a platform for children to expand and develop their thinking powers. Practitioners will be aware of when it is timely for this to happen and how best to support children further.
* More in-depth conversations and discussions are possible as children become more fluent in spoken language and able to absorb in more detail images in books and photographs.
* Children will also progress in planning skills. Initially young children's plans are often a matter of impulsively choosing an activity from a range of alternatives. With experience of making choices, plans become more considered. Older children are able to plan with a purpose in mind and think through how this is to be achieved, for example the resources they will need, who they will work with and the sequence of steps in the process.
* Memory or recall skills are practised regularly in the Foundation Stage: What did we do, what did we see, who can remember the story of...? This leads to children thinking in the past, reporting and describing their memories. With encouragement they shift their thinking into a higher gear as they start to reflect on what they have learned, how they felt about their experiences and actions and what they might do differently.
There is then a substantial amount of work involved in supporting, sustaining and extending young children's thinking.