DEVELOPING YOUR PRACTICE - MAKING A DIFFERENCE

• Developing your practice
• Reflective prompts and
  reading support
• Exploratory Play
• A Conversational Approach
• Emergence

Record a short session of classroom talk. Use a chart to help you think about roles in your classroom. How do the children support each other? What is your role as the adult? How might you develop the children’s engagement and ideas?
A useful chart can be found in Smith, H. and Higgins, S. (2006) Opening Classroom Interaction: the Importance of Feedback, Cambridge Journal of Education, Volume 36, Number 4, pp.485-502.

Consider communication in your own setting. Compare your reflections with those of Nind, M. (2003) Enhancing the Communication Learning Environment of an Early Years Unit through Action Research, Educational Action Research, Volume 11, No.3, pp.347-364.

You will have seen that children often seem to “know” something one day and not another. Wells, p9, claims “knowledge is only truly known when it is being used by particular individuals in the course of solving specific problems.” How can you use his three implications (pp.9-10) in planning to help you overcome this issue? Wells, G. (no date) Action, talk, and text: the case for dialogic inquiry at people.ucsc.edu/~gwells/Files/Papers_Folder/ATT.theory.pdf
This article is based on the introduction and conclusion of Wells, G. (2001).