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Becomings

Changes to my thinking or practice which are emerging as a result of my current training

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The love, curiosity, energy, learning, imagination, problem solving and fun shared with them. All the ideas they have, helping them explore, seeing their ah ha moments, listening to their explanations and chat. I also love seeing my colleagues interacting with the children and offering them wonderful provocations and experiences

I am refocusing on the efforts of my colleagues and becoming more adept at seeing, allowing for and developing their potential. I am caring more, aware of an emerging building connections and communication part which encourages participation, initiates and elicits practice sharing. I genuinely praise and express gratitude for my colleagues initiatives, input and skills. I am developing reflective and mediation skills and tolerance when there are inevitable pedagogical and practice disagreements.

I believe there are two sorts of child-centred practice, one is of consultation, accessible resources and choice and non intrusive observation, open ended resources accessibility and unconstrained play and exploration, aka community learning. The second is sharing, through attuned non judgemental intentional scaffolding, whilst offering the children tried, tested and accrued skill building experiences to practice, master or adapt, aka community teaching. I am child-centred on the floor and when it comes to co-creation, shared language of learning and planning. I understand intuitively how to create experiences with children through offering and changing up provocations through play to provide continuous provisions following the children's teachable moments thus extending, changing or adding to the play, teaching and learning value of the experience. I see the need for team practice to be child centred, where this is the case, where we need to create awareness of the necessity, know how and practicalities of enabling our learning communities contribution of our total effort, real consultation and equitable participation. I want to make evaluation and non intrusive recording, consultative progression and observation a genuine consenting partnership allowing children to explore and inspire each others learning knowing that each child as a predisposition to learn and will given the right opportunities and support follow their natural developmental needs

Our environment is rich, accessible and allows free exploration, we need more robust investigative resources and offered experiences, we need more joined up opportunities that: include identified diverse outcomes, allow for individual and group progression and allow the children to accrue transferable skills to self scaffold whilst leading their own learning, explorations and goals in tandem with our support to remove barriers to learning and engagement, supporting creativity and realising their zone of proximal development. My focus is developing a lens of enabling rather than demonstrating as I participate with, reflect on and review our provision . I like Froebels teaching of skills, social education and strong sense of day to day practice.

Not enough, there is still a feeling of 'being done to and for', even if the rhythm is unstructured as it is- this could be seen as maximising practice but it leads to missed opportunities through lack of boundaries. I believe there is not enough of a joined up approach in our practice and provision. Children are offered islands of experiences which leads to exclusive play and learning engagement uptake. There is inconsistent team awareness makes childrens participation more responsive than inovative.

Froebel as the founder of kindergarten, with his anecdotal respectful leadership of and with children, followed a clear coherent set of principles and comprehensive goals , informed by reflective, democratic, consultative, cooperative and courageous intent. Froebel states 'I must look for help outside myself and try to gain from others the knowledge and skill I needed' and he says this as a competent, well informed, pragmatic, charismatic leader able to lead from a place of caring, respectful, curiosity understanding that it is better to put us 'in the way of finding answers' (Lilley 1967:126). He states 'I wanted to educate them to be free, to think to take action of themselves' (Ibid 41), he wanted to create 'an institution where children instruct and educate themselves and where they develop and integrate all their abilities' (Lilley 92). I want to be part of helping bring out what children know and what they can learn using what I learn and have learned. I believe relationships are more important than outcomes.

I understand apathy as fear of change and raising your head above the parapet, to be instrumental in advocating for social justice requires courage. Doing a Froebel's view of leadership course should inspire me to activity in the pursuit of social justice. I have done a lot of learning recently around world centric interpretations of human historical process, increasing some of my awareness of social (in)justice. If we integrate this can create tolerance and understanding countering devision, polarity and mistrust, so it is important in my practice to foster communication, understanding, relationships and cooperation in our learning community. I am inspired by Augusto Boal's Theatre of the Oppressed and Paulo Friere's Pedagogy of the Oppressed, which view change as an imperative, promoting critical thinking and action to empower the pursuit of social justice.

I hope to learn and strengthen my practice through improving my capacity to be part of change, to understand how to influence, contribute, remain positive and take inspiration and take direction from and with others. How to lead from a place of informed integrity.

The support of historical and current example, my learning community, other peoples talents and my own trust in the process.

Learning journal

Reflections on my developing practice over the three stages of learning: Beginnings, Becomings and Recent.