Findings

Through reflection, we recognised the importance of understanding children’s perspective in relation to the Froebelian Principles. During professional dialogue we discussed what does perspective actually mean to us. As a team we wanted a shared vision of what we desired to achieve from this project. We came up with “perspective means to understand what the child is experiencing, to know what the child wants and what we might need to do to help get that child’s needs met”. Through having this vision, we recognised the importance of slowing down throughout the day and ensuring that we all use the approach of freedom with guidance to allow the children the time to be able to express themselves through their own method of communication as we disused that all children have a voice but it isn’t just what we hear.

As a staff team we observed that one of the children would find objects around the room so that they could roll them to staff members and would get very upset if it wasn’t rolled back. Through slowing down and observing we were able to identify that this particular child had a rotational schema. So when analysing the video observation, I broke it down for myself to be able to ensure that I was understanding this child’s perspective. I first asked myself “what is this child gaining from this experience?” – was it that he was wanting to investigate movement of different objects. The second question I thought about was “what does this child want?”- he was rolling it to staff members so he wanted the staff member to engage in play with him rolling the ball back and forth. The third question was “what do we have to do to get this child’s needs met?”- This question I felt was answered with my two pervious questions as we recognised that this child wanted to explore objects that were able to roll and he wanted a staff member to join him with this. So to get this child’s needs met, we ensured that we had several resources both indoors and out for this child to roll. Following from this we then ensured that when rolling it to a staff member we engaged in this experience with him. As time went on and more observations were obtained this child began to encourage more staff to engage in these rotational experiences where he would roll the ball to them and create a turn taking game of 3-4 people. He then began to involve children in this experience where he would then roll the ball to children instead of adults. This observation showed how this child has progressed which linked in with the value of childhood in its own right as “Froebel wanted educators to understand that every stage depends on the one before it. He emphasised the necessity for every child to experience each stage fully and totally, without rushing it. This entails understanding how children learn when given the space and time to explore, experiment, manipulate, practise and master new abilities” (A beginner’s guide to Froebel. Dr S Louis. 2023).

Another observation obtained was, one child was in the block area with a member of staff and took out all of the blocks and placed them on the floor before picking each one up looking at it to analyse it and placing them into size piles on the floor. Again with this I asked myself the same questions “what was this child gaining from this experience?”- The child is able to see all the blocks on the floor rather that in the unit. What does the child want?”- they want to play with the blocks in their own way by taking them out and categorise the blocks by size into their own piles. “What do we have to do to get this child’s needs met?”- This made me think of the freedom with guidance as some staff can make assumptions that the child is just taking all the blocks out and not using them purposely but by giving this child the freedom and standing back observing we were able to see that this child was using her own piles of blocks on the floor to categorise them by size before exploring them in her own way. Through this observation it was clear that the child was being an Autonomous Learner as it states that “Children learn best when they are trusted with responsibility, allowed to try new things, acknowledge as independent learners, and allowed to make mistakes and judgements” (A beginner’s guide to Froebel. Dr S Louis. 2023).

This revealed to me that staff had developed a clear understanding of how to support children’s perspectives and understand what children are communicating to us. Throughout this project it was clear to see the benefits that it has had on staff as we have allowed the children to have more freedom and independence in experience instead of making assumptions on what we presume a child is doing.

Conclusion

This project enabled me take a closer look at how we ensure that we embed the Froebelian principles of Autonomous Learners and The Value of Childhood in its own Right in respect to children’s perspectives. Overall we understood that all staff have different perceptions of what they take from each individual child’s perspective but we worked together to come up with an overall understanding of perspective and all had a shared vision on how we support each individual child. Now each time that we are observing we are thinking about these aspects “what is this child gaining from this experience? What does this child want? What do we have to do to meet this child’s needs?”. In conclusion, myself and other staff feel that we were able to understand children’s perspective in relation to these two principles. This project has helped towards staff confidence and encouraged all staff to slow down throughout daily practice taking in the principles of slow pedagogy.

Going forward, I would like to look into how we understand children’s perspectives in relation to all of the Froebelian principles.