Welcome to the Brighter Thinking Pod from Cambridge – the podcast that brings you advice and conversation from authors, teachers and academics. In today’s episode we are discussing one of the most important stages of a child’s development: early years.
In the episode, we discuss tips for developing children’s skills, including everything from play-based learning, involving parents and assessment.
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Ep 45: Early Years Teaching and Learning
Rosie Howden: So hello and welcome to our latest episode of the Brighter Thinking Pod from Cambridge. I’m Rosie Howden and I’ll be your host today. We created the Brighter Thinking Pod to support teachers all around the world. Each episode brings you helpful advice and interesting conversation from some of our brighter thinkers, including authors, teachers, and academics.
Today, we’re going to be taking a closer look at teaching and learning in the early years, and we’ll hear from two special guests. For this episode, we’re joined by Abigail Barnett, Director of Cambridge 3-19 Curriculum, who has overall responsibility of the Cambridge Early Years Programme. We’re also joined by Alison Borthwick, International Education and the Mathematics advisor with a particular interest in early year mathematics. They’ll be answering questions submitted by teachers and practitioners from around the world.
Remember, all the links and info that we discuss are available in the show notes for your ease, and if you want to get your voice heard on the show, you can get in touch on X or as we all know it, Twitter, or Instagram using the hashtag BrighterPod or by email at [email protected].
So let’s start by saying hello to our guests. Welcome Abby and Alison. It’s so great to have you here today. How are you both doing?
Abigail Barnett: Fine, thanks. Great to join you for this, Rosie.
Alison Borthwick: Yes, thank you very much. Lovely to be here.
What is your earliest memory of education?
Rosie Howden: Perfect. Great to have you here. We begin each show with an icebreaker to help our listeners get to know our guests more. For this episode, keeping within our early years theme, our question is, what is your earliest memory of education and what made it stand out for you? So we’ll start with you first, Abbi. What’s your earliest memory of education?
Abigail Barnett: Oh, well, actually, this brings back quite a feeling of anxiety because I was very nervous. I was really insecure, I think about, being away from my mum, being away from home, but I remember going to play school for the first time, which was a really old building, and I remember the address. It was Berry Hedge Lane. So I remember being taken there, and then I must’ve been very young, so I’ve got quite a few sort of sensory impressions of playing with Play-Doh, and how that kind of smelt and felt to do that.
That was quite exciting, and being given a drink of milk, I remember the cold milk and the cold metal containers that you had there. So just a few sensory impressions, but also, I just remember being really happy when I got to see my mum again and escaped at the end of that. I mean, luckily, that sort of anxious feeling didn’t last very long because I soon loved going to school, but yes, it’s quite scary, isn’t it, walking through the doors for the first time?
Rosie Howden: Absolutely, and isn’t it strange how those really sensory experiences stay with you and just are that vivid even today?
Abigail Barnett: Yes.
Rosie Howden: Absolutely. Oh, thank you. Alison, how about you?
Alison Borthwick: Oh, well, thanks, Rosie. This was a tricky question because I can barely remember what I did yesterday, let alone what I did in school, but I kind of trawled through my memory banks. I do remember my infant school. Now, I actually went to a primary school, but it was a very, very small primary school, what we would call a mixed age primary school today. So there were two classes. There was the infant class and there was the junior class.
I do remember loving going to infant school in particular. I loved my teacher, but more than anything, I loved helping and sorting. It’s really made me kind of pause and reflect on my current job because I remember at the time, my teacher and my parents would say, “You’re going to be a teacher, Alison,” and I would say, “No, I’m not. I am not going to be a teacher, but what I am going to do is I’m going to sort those pencils into, I don’t know, different categories such as color or length or where they were in the classroom.”
You know what? My teacher was brilliant because she never once stopped me and said, “Alison, could you just go out and do something else?” or, “We don’t really need the pencils or the toys or the blocks rearranging,” and she just let me do it. Quite often, I remember I’d be doing this at break times, not that I wasn’t going outside, I was still having my outdoor social playful education, but I just remember her supporting that playfulness and allowing me to sort, even though she was absolutely probably desperate for a coffee.
So I just have that lovely memory of sorting, and if you could see my desk now, I have carried on that trait throughout my adult life. It had all categorized and beautifully sorted. So there you go. That is my earliest memory, Rosie.
Rosie Howden: Oh, thank you, and that really shows the patience of an early years teachers, doesn’t it? Just to kind of embrace and allow all of those things to happen.
Alison Borthwick: Doesn’t it just? Yeah, lots of things that have made me reflect on that experience that we’ve taken forward into our pedagogy today.
Rosie Howden: That’s fantastic, and you say that you absolutely didn’t want to be a teacher. Do you remember what you did want to be at four or five years old?
Alison Borthwick: To be honest, I think I wanted to be prime minister.
Rosie Howden: Great. Good for you.
Alison Borthwick: Anything that allowed me to make decisions, but I think maybe the decision to be a teacher and then later on an advisor was, I mean, now my parents just raise their eyebrows and say … They don’t quite say, “I told you so,” but they’re saying it with their eyebrows.
Rosie Howden: But they knew.
Alison Borthwick: They knew.
How can we develop skills like comprehension and vocabulary?
Rosie Howden: Oh, perfect. Thank you both so much for sharing those memories. Now, we’re going to move on to some of our questions from our teachers, and we’re going to start today with a question from Pooja from our teacher community in India. So Pooja asks, “How can we develop skills like comprehension and vocabulary in the early years classroom?” So Alison, I’m going to come to you first on this one. Do you have any advice for Pooja on this topic?
Alison Borthwick: Yeah. I mean, thank you very much, Pooja, for your question. Really, really good question. I think there’s lots of things to say here. What I would start by saying is really make sure that you develop and model a love of books and anything printed, actually. When we say books, I mean any kind of printed material, but really developing that love and showing your children, your learners that love of books and really valuing and protecting them is really, really important to begin with.
Certainly model reading aloud wherever possible and, again, reading aloud from any form of text, but really making sure that you have that clear intonation and you have that enthusiasm when you are reading, but certainly that modeling reading aloud really helps with that comprehension and that vocabulary.
I know it sounds really simple to say, but make sure that all adults, and I really do mean all adults use correct vocabulary. We sometimes think that the younger the child, we need to use different words, we need to make it a little bit simpler. Children are very, very clever. They can use extraordinarily clever language. So whether you’re thinking about your science vocabulary, your mathematics vocabulary, they absolutely love that vocabulary. So it’s really important to use model and explain that vocabulary. Then of course, you can explain it if it’s more complex, but certainly don’t shy away from it.
I think finally, my final question before I hand over to Abbi would be to also use those questions that promote thinking, kind of that awe and wonder, and that really draws on and draws attention to that comprehension in particular. So when you’ve read something, then pausing and being able to say and invite the children to think about, “Well, I wonder what would happen if … Why do you think the author wrote that? What do you think that means?” will enable them to have that level of comprehension and that’s different from you telling them. So those would be my first tips, but I’m sure Abby has got a lot more.
Rosie Howden: Yeah, absolutely. Thank you, Alison. That’s fantastic. Abbi, can I hand over to you now?
Abigail Barnett: Yes. Firstly, obviously, Alison’s covered some great points there. I was thinking a little bit about play and the play-based learning and the play-based approach that we promote as best practice for early years, and that can be a really good context for developing those speaking and listening skills and for developing and increasing the vocabulary that our learners have. So if you imagine a guided play session that might be set up in a particular area of the learning environment that you’ve set up and you’ve put various kind of objects in there, then it’s great to get the children there and involved, and they’ll be starting those discussions with each other, starting talking to each other about what they’re doing in that particular area.
So there’s a really good opportunity for the adults involved in that session to identify those opportunities, to introduce new vocabulary, but introducing it in context so the children are understanding as well. So I think there’s just constant opportunities. Remember, children at this age, they’ve just got such an ability to take on new vocabulary all the time. You may have experienced that, those of you listening with your own children, those periods where suddenly there’s like an explosion of new words that they have and they love it as well, and they have their favorite words and ones they want to use all the time.
So it’s such an exciting period. It’s not something that we have to work really hard at, but it’s something that we pay attention to, and we just make sure we’re taking all those opportunities to spot the places where we can just help them and move them on with introducing new vocabulary. So I think our early years learning environments can really support that process as well.
Rosie Howden: Thank you. That’s really fantastic. Some really, really good points there. Okay. Next question is about the transition from early years to primary teaching. I know this is something that a lot of teachers may be quite concerned with, so I know your answers here will be super valuable.
How can we support children move from play-based to a more formal curriculum
So this question comes in from Alison in Jordan, and she asks, “My question concerns the transition from early years to year one. In what ways do you recommend we support children from this change of play-based learning to a more formal curriculum, particularly for those children who may not have met the early learning goals by the end of the year, so children that may be slightly behind in their learning?” So Abbi, I’m going to come to you first on this one if that’s okay.
Abigail Barnett: Yeah. Thanks, Rosie. I mean, thinking again about what I said first on the podcast about my own anxiety about first experience of school, here’s another potential point that can cause a little bit of anxiety or nervousness for children, I guess those transition points. So here, they’ve been very used to their early years environment, and they know they’re moving to something that’s a bit different. So let’s think about that from the child’s point of view and what it’s going to look like, what it’s going to mean, and make sure that we are not just doing it all in one scary leap.
So I think thinking about making this a gradual process, making sure that children have experienced some time in their new learning environment before they make that sort of permanent move and making sure there’s really good collaboration and communication going on between the staff that are involved. So obviously, the more that they are working together and the children are seeing their teachers working together, then the more we’re going to support them to make that transition. Of course, those staff are absolutely key in understanding the relevant information about all of their learners, which is important for them to have before they introduce and start children off in year one or in their more formal primary classrooms.
Also, I was thinking about, yes, there are going to be some differences, but also, there’s lots of similarities which are going to help the children to feel reassured. There’s lots which they should find familiar in what they’re learning and what they’re doing. They’ll just be adapting to a different environment which has different expectations. So I do think the communication about that is key.
Although, yes, we’re saying primary school does involve a more formal curriculum, there’s definitely space for playful learning there as well, so we’d want to see that continuity of playful learning into the primary classroom as well. We don’t want to leave all that behind. So I’m going to leave it there because I think Alison’s got some really good points to address about the early learning goals side of this question.
Alison Borthwick: Great. Thanks, Abbi. I would actually just like to start with your last point and just reiterate the importance of … I understand why a lot of practitioners might think that moving from an earlier setting to a primary setting, you lose the play-based approach, but actually, you don’t have to. So Abbi’s absolutely right in saying we wouldn’t necessarily want to have a divide. Now, that of course is up to individual teachers, practitioners, and schools, but just a little pause for thought is that you don’t have to lose the play-based learning approach in primary. So I’m just going to put that out there as a dot, dot, dot.
What I do want to do, as Abbi said, is just pick up the second part of that question. What happens for those children who have not yet met what we might call the early learning goals or wherever they were hoping, intending to have reached by the end of their early years time at school?
So I think the first thing to remember is it’s really important to think about where the child is and start from where they are, not from where you think they should be, and that’s a really interesting perspective. We have these measures and we know where we have these measures in place where children need to have achieved X, Y, and Z by the time they’re four years old, five years old, six years old, but learning doesn’t happen like that, does it? It’s a very different picture. Children learn at different rates. I mean, and that’s a good thing. We need to celebrate that they learn at different paces and different rates, so they might not be ready for a more formal style of learning.
So really going back to those previous points, if they are not yet ready, if they haven’t met certain expectations by the end of their early years program, don’t worry is the first thing to say, but absolutely think about what they have achieved and what you need to do next. It might be that you carry on that play-based learning when you start primary. What we do know is that the older the children get, the more they close their gaps. They do catch up, but they just might not yet be ready when they’re six years old, for example.
So don’t rush ahead. Really make sure that all children have those firm foundations. We know, don’t we? We know that if they haven’t got those foundations in place, whether it’s looking at communication language, literacy, mathematics, understanding the world, physical development, et cetera, et cetera, then we can see those gaps start to appear and widen as they move through primary school. So just take a little pause. Don’t throw out your play-based learning, just because you are in a primary school. Absolutely think about where the children are.
Rosie Howden: Thank you, Alison. That’s really fantastic. I’m just thinking about your point. Obviously, parents are very invested in their children, especially at this young age. They want to make sure their children are developing at the right rate. Do you have any advice for teachers dealing with parents and helping those expectations and helping to reassure parents that things are fine with their children?
Alison Borthwick: Absolutely, and the key is communication. Absolutely communicate with your parents because we all know that parents are absolutely desperate to help their children, and so they read lots of information, they are guided by the teachers, they are guided by the schools. So it’s about being able to say, “Well, this is where we think the children might be around about this point in time,” but actually, sharing with them that children learn in different ways and at different pace is absolutely fine.
So my big thing would be communicate with the parents and help them to help their children at home because all parents want to support, but sometimes they don’t quite know the best ways to support. So I would absolutely involve parents right from the very beginning, but also say to them, “Don’t worry. Look at what your children can do.” All children are brilliant at doing lots and lots of things. They might just not all do the things that are on a tick box. So that’s really important to remember.
How do you assess a kindergarten student?
Rosie Howden: Thank you. That’s really, really helpful. So our third question today is from Odeth in Rwanda who asks, “How do you assess a kindergarten student, especially moving between those stages of kindergarten one and three?” and building on that, we also have a question from Dhara in India who asks, “What are the ways teachers can contain preconceptions or prejudgments in their observational assessment?” So there’s two questions here, but let’s handle Odeth’s first. So do you have any advice for assessing early years learners? I’m going to start with Alison. What do you think?
Alison Borthwick: Thanks, Rosie and Odeth. I think this is probably going to be one of the most asked questions in early years. It’s probably been one of those questions that’s always been asked, and I think it will always be, what about the assessment side of an early years curriculum? So really good question to have a look at. I think I would start by saying assessment should be really based on observations in early years, and it is very different. We’ve just been talking previously about how play-based learning can go across both early years and primary, but assessment is very different. I think we do need to acknowledge that assessment in primary and lower secondary and upper secondary will look and should look very different to how it looks in early years.
So the first thing to really think about is that watching children, listening to them, knowing when to interact with a question, when to step back is a really important part of assessing in early years.
My second thing is that it does not have to be written down. We would very much encourage an informal approach to assessment. So you don’t need to document everything, otherwise you will spend every minute of every day writing things down, trying to file them away, and then of course, that’s drawing away from your high quality interactions with the child. So it’s really thinking about, “What do I want to observe?” and it might be that you’ve planned to observe something and then you observe something else. That’s absolutely fine, but based on those observations, then trying to decide what that child needs to do next, either what they need to do or a situation that you need to enable to potentially help them to do something and then enacting on it and then doing it. So there’s a really important assessment cycle that does look very different potentially to what it looks like in primary. So really think about observations, decide what to do, and then do it.
I just want to finish by really thinking about the purpose of observations because we can observe a child, but we maybe don’t see necessarily what they’re doing. So it’s that watching, looking, listening, and how do we find those observations? Well, what we do as practitioners is we set up interesting playful situations where we can observe children apply their knowledge and their skills, and then that helps us to think, “Well, are they doing it in the way that we thought? I thought this particular situation where I’d set up outside an obstacle course, I assumed that the children would do it in this way, but they’re doing it in another way. So why is that?” It’s really trying to acknowledge that particularly in early years, the children are in control of their own learning, and as adults, we are facilitating.
So they might do something in completely a different way than we’ve expected them to or anticipated. That’s absolutely fine, and it goes back then to that assessment cycle that I was talking about. If we’ve observed the child doing something and we thought they were going to do it in a particular way, maybe they do, maybe they don’t, we can then decide what to do next. It might be that we really want to see if they can climb, run, walk, maneuver around an object, so we maybe kind of interact in a particular way or we set up another situation and then we go ahead and do it. So I think to answer the first part of the question, observations are absolutely key.
Rosie Howden: Fantastic, and I can completely see how if you’re really experienced early years practitioner, this kind of stuff starts to come naturally, but I guess if you’re fairly new to this, that can seem quite daunting. So I’m sure people will find that really helpful to hear. Can I pass over to you now, Abbi? Do you have anything to add to what Alison was just saying?
Abigail Barnett: Well, as you said, that’s great advice from Alison, and isn’t this a key professional skill for our early years teachers? I think we’ve recognised that. We recognized that at Cambridge and those teachers who come and work with us on our early years program, we’ve put quite a lot of guidance in place for teachers and tried to make that practical. So we’ve put some case studies together which set out some typical situations that might occur, typical things that teachers do observe when working with children initially perhaps when they don’t know that children, there might be things that come up in terms of their social and emotional development, and then thinking about, “Okay. The crucial thing is what do I do with that information.” There’s that discovery of something about your learner, and then it’s that stepping back, “Okay. So what does this mean? I’ve got a decision to make about what I’d do next.”
So constantly, our early years teachers are in that cycle of, as Alison said, really attentively watching and observing and listening, but also, they’re processing that at the same time thinking, “Okay. So what is it going to be helpful for that learner to do next and how do I support with that?”
As we’ve said, sometimes those observations are planned. We’ve set them up, we’ve thought about them, we know what we might be looking for, but there are those spontaneous moments as well, which also occur and which teachers also are attentive to. It could well be that I’m there in the classroom and I look over and I go, “Oh, wow, Rosie’s handling the scissors really well today. She hasn’t been able to do that before. Fantastic,” and I sort of make a note of that, and that’s one of those spontaneous moments, and I know now that, “I can move you on from there. You’ve done really well.”
So there’s such a lot, isn’t there around observation? As I say, that’s why I think we recognize it’s really a key professional skill for our early years teachers. So there’s lots in terms of support and guidance that we’ve thought about to help with that.
Rosie Howden: Absolutely, and as you say, I think there’s a balance between, obviously, recording everything. Teachers don’t have time to do that. There’s just not the space in the early years classroom to do that, but I guess it’s about recording those key moments in whichever way the setting has chosen to do that, whether that’s writing it down or with an app or something like that.
Alison Borthwick: Yeah, I mean, absolutely. I think the whole purpose of assessment is what to do next, not what to write down. So I think that’s a really good one to remember.
What are the ways teachers can contain preconceptions or prejudgments in their observational assessment?
Rosie Howden: Yeah, thank you. That’s really fantastic. Then obviously, we’ve got the second part of that question. So Dhara was asking about putting aside preconceptions in observational assessment, and I guess that means if they know a child particularly well, what should they bring into that assessment and what should they leave behind? So Abbi, do you have any thoughts about that?
Abigail Barnett: Yeah, it’s a really good question, isn’t it? I think we do have that tendency as humans, we like to be able to categorise things, sort things, label things, but I think it’s really important to resist that natural tendency. It’s very important not to apply labels to children and to do that too quickly and then to always have that in mind as a shortcut or a way of thinking about that particular learner when you’re observing them. So yeah, we do have to pay attention to that and resist that.
I think that discussions with other staff and adults who interact with children can be really helpful. That can help to test out whether actually you’ve made a valid judgment or there is something that’s a preconception, a misconception that you’re applying. So just a couple of common sense checks there to put in place to make sure we’re not doing that.
Rosie Howden: Yeah, absolutely. Alison, have you got anything to add to that?
Alison Borthwick: Oh, yeah, I mean, it’s such a privilege, isn’t it? Working with any age of learner, but there’s something extra special about working with our youngest learners, and I think that comes with its own tensions because it’s so hard not to have any preconceptions or prejudgments about things. We’re adults. We know exactly what we think and why we think it and, of course, we like to be challenged, but it’s really hard. We’ve worked really hard in the classroom. We’ve got this amazing activity. We’ve set up whatever it is, and then the children choose to do something else or they don’t do it in the way that we expected.
So I think what we were saying, really, it’s really interesting and it’s really difficult not to have those preconceptions, but it’s really important not to. Remember, you’re an adult. We view the world from, I was going to say a few meters, maybe not quite that high, but we view the world from a different perspective. We think differently, we act differently to children, and so we should, but it’s also acknowledging that that also can affect our judgments and preconceptions.
I think my third thing really to say is just remember quite rightly, all children are different. They learn in different ways. They learn at different rates, and they cover different aspects. They have different things that they like to do and not do. So again, I always remember I set up this most amazing environment all to do with dogs because one of my children absolutely was obsessed about dogs. So I spent all weekend cutting out pictures of dogs, finding dog baskets, all of that thing. You can imagine I was going back to my infant school. I sorted, I labeled, I organized. I think I was more excited than anybody. Went into the school. Children were like, “Well, yeah, anyway, we’re going to go outside,” and I was like, “No. Go to the area that I’ve spent hours and hours and hours on.”
For a little while, I was really upset, and then I thought, “Yup, that’s what happens when you put all of the effort in and it’s your idea not theirs.” What I should have done was given them the control. So it’s that idea, that assessment. I could have thought, “Oh, well, the children are not doing what I thought they were going to do,” but actually, I just took it all down, put it in a heap, and a few days later, they resurrected it in a way that they thought they wanted to. So it’s a good lesson all round, isn’t it? Keep the preconceptions at the door.
Rosie Howden: Yeah, absolutely, and I guess as a practitioner, that soul-destroying moment when the thing you’ve spent hours over, it just doesn’t turn out the way you wanted, but it’s funny what you said about them resurrecting it a few days later. They found it and they wanted to enjoy it. It just wasn’t in the way that you had in mind.
Alison Borthwick: Quite right, and I learned from that. That was a good learning moment for me, actually. So I’m not saying don’t plan, but maybe just don’t put that adult layer over it. They didn’t really need the pictures of the dogs laminated and cut out beautifully.
Rosie Howden: Those expectations that you had, so maybe just be flexible in those when you’re kind of planning. Thank you. Really fantastic answers.
Why is play-based learning beneficial to young children?
Okay. So moving on now to the topic of play-based learning. So we’ve had a question on this topic from one of our teachers, and obviously, it’s such an important part of early years education. Abbi, I’d like to start with you on this topic. Can you tell us a little bit more about the theory surrounding play-based learning and why it’s really beneficial for young children?
Abigail Barnett: Yeah, sure. Thanks, Rosie. So going back to a few years ago when we first decided that with Cambridge we were going to develop our own early years program, of course, we wanted to look at all the research out there and all the evidence about what makes for really high quality early years learning. One of the first things that comes up, of course, is that play-based learning is the best approach for learners at this age. So it’s one of our key principles, and it underpins everything that we’re offering through Cambridge early years because there’s so many benefits, really.
When you look at the research on play and about how it impacts on children, a very positive impact on how their brains are developing at the time because it means that they are fully engaged. When they’re playing, they are undertaking tasks, they might be solving problems, they’re having to communicate. There’s lots of opportunities for them to develop their social and emotional skills because they’re working with others. They’re learning about that vital skill about how we interact with each other as humans. They’re learning about taking turns. They’re learning about what happens when things don’t go their way. There’s just so many benefits of using those playful contexts in our classrooms.
So a huge amount of positive impact and enhancing the learning that’s going on, the development that’s going on, and really crucially, what we want to happen at this stage is to make sure that learners love learning, they see this as a really fun thing and they see this as a really beneficial thing and this is something that they want to keep doing. So we want them to come through their early years experience feeling that this is something great and this is something they’re really enthusiastic and curious about continuing. So I think it helps to really embed a sense of wellbeing, giving these experiences that are really enriching, really fun, really exciting and interesting, and that’s what we want all of our learners to experience.
One of the things that helps is, of course, there’s different types of play. So there’s many different types of play that we can draw on and think about when we’re planning for our early years classroom. So it might be physical play. Obviously, Alison referenced that, the developing movement and being outside and learning what their bodies are capable of doing. So there’s physical play, there’s play with objects, there’s pretend play, there’s games with rules. So there are these different types. So practitioners can really explore those, develop their own understanding of those and what works really well for them and in their classrooms.
Then I think the other dynamic is around the extent to which the adult’s role in the play. So obviously, you’ve got adult-led play, you’ve got guided play, but also you’ve got child-initiated play. There are times when it’s appropriate to use all of those. They’re all different, they all have different benefits. So I think there’s those different dimensions to play. It’s not one thing. It’s not a simple thing. Actually, it’s a really complex area. I’ve developed my understanding of it and learned a huge amount through the work that we’ve done introducing Cambridge early years.
So I think it’s got so much potential for us to create those enduring experiences for the children that we work with that are going to benefit them and give them this great foundation in their education and a real positive attitude which will persist then and help them as they move forward.
How can you step back?
Rosie Howden: Fantastic. Thank you, and building on what you just said about the differences between adult-led play and child-led play, what would you say to teachers or practitioners who are finding it hard to step back away from always being the leader and the instigator of that play? Obviously, it’s so important for children to instigate that themselves. Have you got any tips for those people?
Abigail Barnett: Yeah, that’s a really, really good question as well. I think often, if you yourself have not experienced that, often as teachers when we’re first starting, of course, what do you have in your minds? What’s your frame of reference? It’s what you experienced, and a lot of us tend to start with withdrawing on what we felt were positive experiences that we might have had. So it’s about developing a repertoire. I think it’s about confidence. It’s about looking out there and looking for examples of good practice.
It might be videos out there. It might be colleagues that you notice working a specific way. There might be training that you look for, but if you’re trying to do it yourself, I think it is just take that leap of faith. Set yourself those tasks that today, “Yeah, I am going to step back and just see what happens when I set up an activity and just let the children do it,” because I think as soon as you do that, then you start to see the benefits of that and it becomes easier, but I know it can be a real sort of barrier. It can be a really difficult thing for us to do for the first time, but I would just urge people to give it a go.
Rosie Howden: Thank you. Yeah, fantastic. Thanks, Abbi. How about you, Alison? Could you tell us a little bit more about your experience with play-based learning, and do you have any tips, again, that you could share with our listeners?
Alison Borthwick: Yes, thanks, Rosie. Brilliant, brilliant answers and responses from Abby there. I’ve been writing down lots while I’ve been listening. I mean, it’s really interesting, isn’t it? Because when we talk about playful learning or play-based learning, it can have different meanings and different reactions for different people. I think if you’ve read the research and you’ve looked at the evidence, you are totally on board with the play-based approach. For all of the reasons Abbi has said, it’s developmentally age appropriate, it’s child-centered, it offers that holistic approach. Children can make lots of connections between different curriculum areas. Ultimately, they have control, self-regulation. They foster positive behaviors.
It’s all there, but what we sometimes hear is that children are playing. I think there is a difference between the behavior aspect of playing, which of course is absolutely fine, and the disposition of a playful environment, a playful curriculum, a playful approach to pedagogy, and I think the two go in harmony, but sometimes people hear, “Well, children are just playing,” and for whatever reason, they don’t think that that then fosters deep conceptual learning.
Actually, I think there’s just a difference in the type of word and whether we’re using it as a noun, an adjective, a verb, a behavior, a disposition. So for all of those reasons that Abby was saying, we would absolutely support a playful approach to learning, a play-based approach to learning certainly in the early years, but I would like to throw out a little bit of controversy and say I would support it in primary as well, absolutely. I know that a lot of the schools that I work with are really attempting more than ever to take their early years pedagogy, which is a play-based approach and move it into their primary pedagogy and classrooms as well.
I don’t need to say what the results are. If anybody’s listening and thinking, “Well, what’s the impact?” the impact is phenomenal because for all of those reasons that we adopt a play-based approach in early years, we have the same outcomes in primary. Children are in control more. They are able to use their self-regulation. It develops their confidence, their curiosity. They’re enthusiastic, they’re risk-taking, and so on.
So I just want to kind of leave with inviting some of the listeners. You might want to pause the podcast. I don’t know whether that’s a phrase, but if you want to pause the podcast at this moment and just think when did you last engage in a playful situation and just think about what was it that you got out of it. Whatever it is you’re thinking, why is that a playful situation? Then take all of those characteristics of learning that we’ve just been talking about and try and recognise what you learnt, what you did, how maybe you did you take the risks, what did you learn between different aspects of what you were doing, and you will start to see that that play-based approach is why it should be in early years, and as I said, let’s go primary too.
Practical tips for teaching young English as a second language learners
Rosie Howden: Fantastic. Thank you so much, Alison. That’s really, really insightful. Thank you for sharing that. Okay. So our last question today is going to be on the topic of English as a second language learning. One of our teachers has asked for advice in this area, and we were just wondering if you’d be able to give our listeners any practical tips for teaching young ESL learners, especially those around the age of three to four, who are new to education. Alison, we’ll come to you first, if you don’t mind.
Alison Borthwick: Yes, thanks, Rosie. Well, I think we have to state, I think we’ve already said it in this podcast, but children are super, super clever. What that means amongst lots of other things is that they do have a natural ability to learn languages. So first of all, celebrate that if you have multilingual learners in your classroom, that’s a bonus. That’s not something that we should be afraid of or worried about. We should definitely support it. Certainly having a multilingual approach promotes inclusivity both from a cognitive advantage, but also from a cultural advantage.
So I would definitely encourage all learners to communicate in different languages. We want to support whatever their home language is and whatever the school language is, and encourage all children to communicate with each other, use books, use media, use music to reflect the culture of the languages being used, and just have those high-quality oral interactions and a very language-rich environment.
Rosie Howden: Fantastic. Thanks. Abbi, have you got anything to add to that that our listeners might find helpful?
Abigail Barnett: Yeah. So I think first of all, we recognise that maybe 70% of people listening to our podcasts who are teaching in early years classrooms around the world will have English as second language learners. So we know that’s the reality, we know that’s the case, so we do give that a lot of thought as well. The first time I went into an early years classroom outside the UK was actually in India. There was a large poster on the wall, and it had the names of the children in the classroom grouped. There were actually six different home languages in that classroom. What it had was some very common words in each language written up on this poster, so hello, thank you, can I go to the toilet, just the basic things that those children would be saying and would need to say because the teacher, of course, didn’t speak all of those six home languages. The teacher maybe had three or four of them.
I mean, India, it always blows my mind, and I go about people’s incredible ability to switch languages and to operate in different languages to a very high level. So it was just really good to see that. As Alison said, we need to celebrate all of those home languages, and it gives us the opportunity for the children, of course, when they come in, they’ll be using that language, the teacher can recognise and begin that process of helping them to understand with what they’re saying in the home language to then introduce the English as well so they can start to make those connections and start to develop what they’re able to do in English.
So that one has always stuck with me as just an obvious, but a really good practical thing to do. All the children knew that they were there for … It was recognised what they would be saying and how they would be saying it initially, but also, of course, the teacher was using English a lot as well.
Also, we have thought about that a lot in the way that we’ve developed the Cambridge early years curriculum. I think maybe a lot of programs that people are following internationally in English are aimed at first language users as isn’t it caters for both first language and second language speakers. So when teachers pick up and have a look at the curriculum, they can see that we’ve provided two routes through the language communication and literacy curriculum area. One route is designed for second language speakers in particular. So it takes account of the rate of development of English.
Obviously, first of all, it’s really concentrating on speaking and listening and, obviously, in building those foundations and ensuring that then children develop those pre-literacy skills before moving on to developing their literacy, so starting to think about reading and writing. So it’s important that we don’t overload things. It’s important that, as we said earlier when we’re talking about meeting those early learning goals, we’re not racing through. We do need to take account of that extra cognitive challenge of operating in two languages.
So yes, it’s exciting to deal with. It can be quite overwhelming to deal with for teachers, and we recognise that and we think that what we’re doing is providing good support for what’s a very, very common context for our Cambridge teachers.
Rosie Howden: Thanks, Abbi. I love that example from the India classroom of the poster with all the different examples of different languages on it. While you were speaking then, I made the realisation that, obviously, it’s really important to celebrate those home languages, but, again, that’s a challenge if the teacher themself or the practitioner doesn’t speak all of those languages. It’s hard to celebrate and value all of those languages and interact with those children when there is that language barrier. So there are so many elements to think about as you say, but thank you. I think those are some really good points that you’ve both made.
So thank you both. That’s all we have time for today on our early years episode. Thank you again to Abbi Barnett and Alison Borthwick for being such fantastic guests and sharing some really, really useful insights. I’ve found that I’ve learned a lot and I found it really, really entertaining discussion, so I really hope our listeners have too.
So don’t forget to tell your friends and colleagues about us and rate our show on whatever platform you’re listening to. Our show notes have lots of useful links that we’ve discussed throughout this episode, so please be sure to take a look at them. Hopefully you’ll find them really interesting. You can also follow us on Twitter or, sorry, X as we should probably be calling it, and Instagram @CambridgeInt or use the hashtag Brighter Thinking to get in touch. Thanks so much for listening, and we hope you can join us again soon.
