Part C: Responsive engagement
Practice: Responsiveness to children
Practice Principle: Respectful relationships and responsive engagement
“Attuned engagement between an adult and a child is a key feature of a responsive relationship. When an early childhood professional is attentive when interacting with children, the nature of the engagement could be described as 'a state of alert awareness, receptivity, and connectedness to the mental, emotional, and physical workings of both the individual and the group in the context of their learning environments, and the ability to respond with a considered and compassionate best next step' Rodgers & Raider-Roth (2006, p. 265)”. Cohrssen, Church & Tayler (2010, p. 7)
Measurement in education
“The critical unanswered question in the value-added definition of teacher effectiveness involves the mechanisms through which classrooms exert their influence on students’ development and how such effects can be reliably produced and maximized. That is… what did the teacher do in the classroom that led to these outcomes?” (Hamre et al, 2013, 462; emphasis added).
EPPE/REPEY Study
“when two or more individuals work together in an intellectual way to solve a problem, clarify a concept [or] evaluate an activity … Both parties must contribute to the thinking and it must develop and extend the understanding” (Sylva et al., 2004, p. 6).
Iram Siraj: “sustained shared thinking”
Language development
Barnett, S. E., Levickis, P., McKean, C., Letts, C. & Stringer, H. (2021)
Ted Lasso explains the offside rule in football:
“I’m gonna put it the same way the US Supreme Court did back in 1964 when they defined pornography. It ain’t easy to explain but I know it when I see it”.
Rowe and Snow (2020, p.7)
How do we achieve responsive engagement in child–teacher interactions?
"A detailed description of what the participants say and do in an interaction is not the same as an analysis of a practice that participants will use to accomplish an action. One model of an analysis of a practice is that it should enable someone to competently use that practice to perform an action. This involves moving away from discussing what particular people did on the occasion, to considering what people need to know and do in order to appropriately perform the action in any new situations they encounter." (Pomerantz and Fehr, 2011)
References
Barnett, S. E., Levickis, P., McKean, C., Letts, C. & Stringer, H. (2021). Validation of a measure of parental responsiveness: Comparison of the brief Parental Responsiveness Rating Scale with a detailed measure of responsive parental behaviours. Journal of Child Health Care, 26(1), pp. 56-67. doi:10.1177/1367493521996489
Cohrssen, C., Church, A., & Tayler, C. (2011), Evidence Paper. Practice Principle. 5: Respectful Relationships and Responsive Engagement. Department of Education and Training, Victoria.
Harris, J., M. A. Theobald, S. J. Danby, E. Reynolds, and S. Rintel. 2012. “What’s going on here?” The pedagogy of a data analysis session. In Reshaping doctoral education: International approaches and pedagogies, ed. A. Lee and S. J. Danby, (pp.83–96). London, UK: Routledge.
Hedge, K., & Cohrssen, C. (2019). Between the Red and Yellow Windows: A Fine-Grained Focus on Supporting Children’s Spatial Thinking During Play. SAGE Open. https://doi.org/10.1177/2158244019829551
Howard, S., Siraj, I., Melhuish, E.C., Kingston, D., Neilsen-Hewett, C., de Rosnay, M., Duursma E. & Luu, B. (2018). Measuring interactional quality in pre-school settings: introduction and validation of the Sustained SharedThinking and Emotional Wellbeing (SSTEW) scale, Early Child Development and Care, DOI:10.1080/03004430.2018.1511549
Mashburn, A. J., Pianta, R. C., Hamre, B. K., Downer, J. T., Barbarin, O. A., Bryant, D., … Howes, C. (2008). Measures of classroom quality in prekindergarten and children’s development of academic, language, and social skills. Child Development, 79(3), 732–749.
Pomerantz, A., & Fehr, B. J. (2011). Conversation Analysis: An approach to the analysis of social interaction. In T. A. van Dijk (Ed.), Discourse Studies: A multidisciplinary introduction (2nd ed., pp. 165-190). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Romeo, R. R., Leonard, J. A., Robinson, S. T., West, M. R., Mackey, A. P., Rowe, M. L., & Gabrieli, J. D. E. (2018). Beyond the 30-Million-Word Gap: Children’s Conversational Exposure Is Associated With Language-Related Brain Function. Psychological Science, 29(5), 700–710. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797617742725
Rowe, M., & Snow, C. (2020). Analyzing input quality along three dimensions: Interactive, linguistic, and conceptual. Journal of Child Language, 47(1), 5-21. doi:10.1017/S0305000919000655
Sylva, K., Melhuish, E., Sammons, P., Siraj-Blatchford, I., & Taggart, B. (2004). The Effective Provision of Pre-School Education (EPPE) Project: Findings from Pre-school to end of Key Stage1. Retrieved 25 June 2023, from http://eppe.ioe.ac.uk/eppe/eppefindings. htm.
Tayler C., Cloney, D.,& Niklas, F. (2015). A bird in the hand: understanding the trajectories of development of young children and the need for action to improve outcomes. Australasian Journal of Early Childhood, 40(3), 51-60.
Tayler, C., Ishimine, K., Cloney, D., Cleveland, G and Thorpe, K. (2013). The quality of early childhood education and care services in Australia. Australasian Journal of Early Childhood, 38, (2), 13-21.