Debi Keyte-Hartland

“Thinking is where intelligent action begins”

Margaret Wheatley

In any kind of professional learning and development, the birth of new ideas and thinking that comes from the participants themselves, rather than being instructed and handed down by an expert trainer is powerful, motivating and energising.  Nancy Kline (1999) considers how in being enabled the time to think, we can all be ignited to think about and share our own ideas and solutions to issues we face in our work. In this blog, I will describe a recent ‘professional thinking day’ I facilitated with Ashmore Park Nursery School and Phoenix Nursery School in Wolverhampton that enabled Klines ideas of a time to think. Thank you to all the teams at both schools for giving their permission and enabling me to share your feedback and experience.

The trouble with not having the time to think

The trouble is as Kline (1999) says, we are all too often so busy with the doing of practice, of doing the actual work and in early childhood education where any time out away from the children is a premium, and with so much to attend to, that we rarely have the time to deeply think about what we do and as Dory famously said in Finding Nemo we just keep swimming.  But just keeping on swimming is deeply problematic.  Where and why are we swimming and what is the purpose of it? Kline (1999: 15) continues to problematise this effort at just keeping on doing the work, because the quality of the work or, the quality of “everything that we do depends on the quality of the thinking that we do first”.  So it follows, as Kline (1999) identifies, that to improve the action of teaching and learning, we must therefore improve the quality of thinking.

Higgins et al (2014) in considering what makes great teaching tells us that the research is clear that one of the most important things we can do to improve our children’s outcomes is to continuously develop the quality of teaching and learning.  This means that any professional learning must not just be engaging and motivating.  We have all been at those sessions where the speaker is no doubt engaging (often hilarious) but very little changes in terms of practice, a good time was had but there is no lasting effect on ‘professional development’.  In terms of any professional development being effective and lasting it must therefore directly improve the outcomes for children through an investigation of the impact of the relationship between educators teaching and their children’s learning and development.

This week, I lead what I am calling a ‘professional thinking day’.  It was with a federation of two nursery schools who have been developing their intentional and responsive enquiry based pedagogy through developing increased playful learning approaches as a response to the ongoing problems that have arisen since the global pandemic, especially in relation to children’s language and communication and their personal, social, and emotional development.  In recognising the importance of play in young children’s processes of learning and development, the senior leadership team had identified the role of the adult in designing, assessing and facilitating it a priority for their Federation Learning Plan for the year.  

A professional thinking day approach with professional development mechanisms

One approach to this day could have been to about ‘being trained’ in playful learning ‘or talked at’ about it or ‘dazzled with presentations’ that laid out all the research with long and detailed PowerPoints and activities designed to help educators remember was being taught in the day.  I could have given them lots of my ideas, thinking and thoughts too, but this would have ignored their prior knowledge, experience and understanding evident and existing within the two staff teams – for they are not empty vessels just as the children are not empty vessels either.  Instead, I constructed a ‘professional thinking day’ designed to enable both teams to do what Kline (1999) calls our ‘freshest thinking’ about the subject of playful learning and what that meant in the context of the two nursery schools.  This was about facilitating the time and opportunity for all participants to think about their role, and to come up with ideas for themselves on how to increase the playfulness in their work alongside their children.

This different kind of professional development day involved mechanisms identified by the Education Endowment Fund (2023) in bold that involved;

• A strong, motivating, and positive start to the day identifying and reflecting on what everyone felt worked really well for them in the past academic year.  This enabled effective strategies and ideas to be shared that had been impactful in different ways and a way of revisiting prior learning.
• A first round of thinking together sharing and discussing initial ideas direct from individuals current experience about what they thought each could do to increase the playfulness of children’s learning in all that they did.
• Then we looked at practice-based action research from a crediblesource from theProject Zero team at Harvard University regarding the pedagogy of play which had explored 3 interconnected indicators of playful learning, which were;
  • Children leading their own learning; exercising choice and autonomy
  • Exploration of the unknown; experiencing wonder and curiosity
  • Finding joy; experiencing feelings of delight in the process of learning

Time in pairs was then spent thinking about how these 3 indicators looked and felt like in playful learning throughout the week at each of the 2 schools.  This enabled participants to identify any assumptions held and notice the paradoxes at play inplay and practice as well as diagnosing what was missing.

• We then explored as a prompt and cue a way to begin to embed new thinking into practice using examples of the teams pedagogical documentation, specifically the traces of learning collected when alongside children i.e., the photographs and/or film, the artefacts and dialogue of the children. In pairs the strengths and stretches of the documentation was evaluated against the intentions of the playful learning context, the qualities of playfulness evident, and the learning apparent within it. This enabled each educator pair to analyse and critique its effectiveness and usefulness in designing, observing, assessing, and planning for future learning and the impact of their teaching (in all its forms) on their children’s learning. 
• Individual time to think to consider an action plan for a playful learning context that would be reflected on during a pedagogy meeting in a few weeks’ time.  This was important to set and agree goals that will be actionable in practice with opportunity given for monitoring, reflection, and feedback.
• Finally, we returned to the initial question, to identify what everyone was going to work on therefore, rehearsing the technique/strategies identified to increase the playfulness of both teaching and learning for their children so that ongoing support could be arranged and provided.

Identifying what makes a professional thinking day effective

Although the day was based around a variety of professional development mechanisms identified as effective by Education Endowment Fund (2023) what also made this day so effective as identified by the participants themselves was quite simply the time given and facilitated to step aside from practice and to think about what they do together, listening respectfully to each other and talking through their own thinking and ideas.  This time given to thinking together was not just a time, but time and freedom to think without interruption, to think without judgement, to think without time limits and to think without an obsession for narrowly pre-defined outcomes.  These are all rooted in Kline’s (1999) idea of a ‘Thinking Environment’.  It also required of me careful, and attuned listening to be able to ask the questions that would help the identification of any assumptions that could be at play and thus hinder the process of thinking differently and thinking to develop new ideas.  At the end of this academic year, we will come together for another ‘professional thinking day’, this time to explore the impact of the ongoing work on increasing the playful learning at these 2 schools.

The actual outcomes of the day were unimaginable at the start.  What arose were the issues, gaps and assumptions at the heart of each individual’s practice and these were identified by the participants themselves and the ideas to rectify as well as try out new strategies was deduced by the participants themselves.  This was transformational learning that held high levels of engagement by igniting their curiosity and imagination within an arena in which judgement had been removed.  I had listened to them and had enabled the group to listen to each other’s thinking and this is significant because the early years sector in England has been under so much stress and strain and for multiple reasons that early years settings have been in a mode of just surviving –  but we don’t need to just survive, we need to thrive and mutually flourish alongside of the children, each other and their families.  

So, my biggest take away that I reflected on from my facilitation of this professional thinking day, was that for children to thrive, educators must also thrive, and that I can create the conditions for mutual thriving in the training, consultancy and coaching I undertake. To do this, I need to ensure I activate and empower spaces for all to think, in which I am attuned to listening with my full attention and respect and believing that everyone in that space can think well for themselves.  If I can create these conditions to listen (rather than to talk, give out my ideas and instruct) then I am creating the very conditions for all to thrive.  

My invite to ignite your thinking

• If there were no limits, how would you enable a quality of time for your educators to think about what they do?
• What do you think the benefits of developing a listening culture in your setting would be where educators would feel at ease and able to think and share their own ideas about practice and pedagogy?
• What are your current priorities for developing teaching and learning and how could a professional thinking day help you to develop the practice within your setting?

References

Education Endowment Fund (2023) “A Balanced Approach to Professional Development.’    Available at: https://educationendowmentfoundation.org.uk/news/eef-blog-a-balanced-approach-to-professional-development

Higgins, S., Major, L. E., & Coe, R. (2014) ​‘What makes great teaching?’, What works (and what doesn’t), Professional Voice, 11 (3), pp. 11 – 16. Available at: https://www.aeuvic.asn.au/sites/default/files/PV_11_3_Complete_WEB.pdf#page=11

Kline, N. (1999) Time to Thinking: Listening to Ignite the Human Mind. London: Cassell Illustrated.

Mardell, B,. Ryan, J., Baker, M., Krechevsky, M., Schulz, T.S., & Constant, Y.L. (2023) The Pedagogy of Play Available at:https://pz.harvard.edu/sites/default/files/PoP%20Book%203.27.23.pdf