Allowing Children Space And Opportunity To Explore And Investigate, And What That Looks Like
Trust your professional judgement and you'll know when to interact and when to let your children loose
Recently, when working with practitioners, I have observed that some do not always have the confidence to allow children to explore and investigate independently.
Why do I think this is? As practitioners there is a pressure or expectation to ‘show’ that we are interacting, engaging and extending children’s learning, at all times. While I fully support the requirement to do this, we also need to respect and value the learning that can take place without continuous adult input.
Looking at the work of Magda Gerber and the Educaring approach and that of Janet Lansbury with Elevating Child care, I wonder if we are missing key learning opportunities in giving children time, space and opportunity to explore.
We have these aspects detailed within the Early Years Foundation Stage (2017) and practitioners are keen to encourage exploration and investigation skills within their planning of provision. However, there appears to be an expectation that this is followed with making sure that the practitioner is part of this process, including open-end questioning and a running commentary.
I believe that we need to turn this on its head and look at the situation from an adult perspective, recognising that, in the same way as children don’t always need adult support, there are times when we require differing levels of support from our fellow co-workers.
There can be times when we are working on a project or piece of work where we want to be alone, independent and solitary so that we can concentrate and problem solve, whilst giving us time to think and process. However, there are other times when we might just need to have the guidance or support of knowing that we have our co-worker(s) close by to help us or to be a sounding board to our questioning.
There are no hard-and-fast rules as to when we might need either of these approaches, but it is having the security of knowing that this is available to us ‘as and when’, which helps us to be successful in our daily work.
So, how do we see this when working with our children? There are days when children need to have the practitioner close by, to offer them reassurance and co-regulation; this doesn’t always mean that there needs to be a continuous dialogue though – just having the adult there can be enough.
I was recently asked by a practitioner if she should always be talking and engaging the children when they are involved in play, because she felt that sometimes she was interrupting and felt that it could be detrimental. My response to her was that she had answered her own question; she needed to trust her own judgement and would know the times when engagement with the children was appropriate and when it wasn’t.
I asked this same practitioner to imagine herself in that situation and how she might feel. So, if you were working on an important piece of work and you had a work colleague continually asking you about what you were doing, why you were doing it and giving suggestions as to how it should be done – how would you feel? What would be the outcome of this? It is likely that the piece of work would be poor quality because of the continual interruptions and subsequent changes of your thought process.
This respect for personal time and space also needs to be recognised and valued by senior members of staff when supporting and guiding practitioners.
When observing staff interactions with children, senior staff need to be looking for the responsive non-verbal interactions between adult and child to gain a holistic and balanced understanding of what is happening within that moment. It cannot always be assumed that if a practitioner is not verbally interacting, there is not an important and valuable learning opportunity taking place.
We need to eliminate any concern of how it might reflect on the practitioner if they were to be observed not actively engaging with a child but sitting back and allowing the child time and space to explore.
As practitioners, we need to be confident in our abilities of objective and discreet observation, trusting our instincts and having the confidence to know when to step in to support and when to sit back and allow high quality play or learning to take place on the child’s agenda.
Claire Burgess is a Norland nanny and the Head of research, consultancy and training at Norland College and follow her on Twitter at @Belles28.
