The role of staff in supporting active learning
To enable continuity, it is important for staff in the pre-school and primary settings to adopt a joint, collaborative approach to organising learning and to evaluation to ensure continuity and progression.
In primary schools with nursery classes this can be part of a regular routine of forward planning meetings, staff meetings and in-service days. For nursery schools, partner provider centres and other stand-alone settings, joint planning may present more of a challenge.
It will be important for staff in all early education centres and associated primary schools to find ways to work together. Close communication about children’s previous experiences and learning is crucial at the time of transition.
Children have a natural disposition to wonder, to be curious, to pose questions, to experiment, to suggest, to invent and to explain. Staff have an essential role in extending and developing this. Sometimes it is appropriate to allow the environment and resources alone to encourage and extend the learning activities of individuals and groups. However, it is often the skilled involvement of staff that ensures that learning is taken further. For all children, it is important to gauge intervention sensitively and flexibly.
When children are involved in self-directed play, staff have an opportunity to observe their learning and, if appropriate, take it forward through sensitive intervention or using a more direct teaching approach.
Reflective questions
Thinking of how staff interact with children to support and extend their learning:
- In what ways do you demonstrate and model activities?
- How do you listen, suggest, contribute and sometimes question?
- In what ways do you support children’s social development?
- How do you encourage children to talk with one another and to share their thinking?
- How do you actively involve children in planning their own learning?
- How do you ensure that learning extends children’s learning styles?
- In what ways do you support children to reflect on their own learning?
- How do you provide opportunities and time to engage children’s curiosity and prompt enquiry (children asking and answering their own questions)?
Related links
Professional development
At the heart of an active learning approach is the creative, adaptable professional who can develop the ideas that arise when children are immersed in their learning.