Just imagine what would happen if nursery practitioners didn’t rely on predetermined learning objectives?
by Dr Christina Tatham
Handprints Early Learning Centres in Northern Sydney are pioneering a novel approach to observations in their three kindergarten settings. I became aware of Handprints because my sister’s children attend one of their early learning centres (or ‘nurseries’ as we say in the UK) and she shared educators’ observations of her children with me. The observations had an incredible level of depth and described the children’s engagement with each other, with objects and with space in detail. What struck me in particular was how each observation I read wasn’t formulaic. The observations didn’t follow a predictable pattern as early years observations I had seen in the past tended to do. Furthermore, the educators wrote observations about the everyday, seemingly mundane moments of incidental learning that take place through spontaneous child-initiated, child-led, activities. It was clear there was scope for unpredictability and activities were not tethered to a particular learning objective. The range and depth of observations reflected this, demonstrating how staff engaged in deep noticing, with an open mind, finding the significance in the small moments that could easily have been overlooked. The observations went beyond description- they contained rich analysis of children’s activities, explaining why it was important and what learning could be seen to be taking place.
In October 2024 I had the opportunity to visit Sydney and spend time with Julia, the managing director of Handprints. We had a lengthy discussion about the centres’ ethos, values and the challenges of implementing these while ensuring compliance with New South Wales education requirements. I told Julia how the observations I had seen had made such an impression on me, and I asked Julia how the educators became so skilled in their observations. Julia explained that the educators were encouraged to go beyond the language of learning objectives in their observations. The educators could use the language of learning objectives in their observations, but using the learning objectives verbatim was not part of the nursery’s practice.
More and more nurseries are relying on apps that are programmed with items from the curriculum, enabling the practitioners to select from a predetermined set of learning objectives when conducting their objectives. Such apps can be beneficial in that they create a time-efficient way of logging children’s progress. However, I would argue that nurseries should not aspire to be saving time. The relationship between time and learning is examined in detail in Clark’s (2022) seminal work ‘Slow Knowledge and the Unhurried Child’ where she advocates for a slow pedagogy. Clark warns that the dominant regime of ‘accelerated learning’ leads to us “only skimming the surface of learning and relationships” (Clark, 2022, p.5). If deep learning takes time, space and repetition to crystalise, it follows that educators observing such deep learning need to slow down, to take it all in, and to really notice the deeper learning that is taking place.
A further issue related to such apps is that observations are reduced to a finite list of learning objectives. Adhering rigidly to pre-established learning outcomes limits possibilities for new ideas (Dahlberg et al. 2009, p.117) and in doing so, stifles the potential for creativity and newness. At Handprints Early Learning Centre, the children are engaged in open-ended activities and the educators have open minds regarding what they observe. As educators at Handprints have demonstrated, being released from the ties of fixed learning objectives leads to a more flexible, creative approach to observations. Handprints’ approach to observations allows the educators to step back and see the multiple layers of complex learning without the limitations of fixed learning objectives.
Dr. Christina Tatham is a Lecturer in Education at the School of Education
