ELLEN FANNING:
Well, welcome back. Who's figuring things out? Who's having the time to have a think, talk to colleagues? Just get a moment to think without having to do 20 things at once.
I often think it's the lunchtime and the afternoon tea and all the rest of it. Online too, the discussion that's been going on there, is almost like the unwritten curriculum, isn't it? It's what we learn from one another and from musing on what we've heard, what we think about it, and how we might apply it to our practice. And really, that's how the day is designed, starting with a very high-level briefing about where the evidence is directing us and right through to increasingly practical reflections and observations that might provide a focus for tomorrow and into the future for your professional practice.
We're now gonna hear from Professor Marilyn Fleer, Foundational Chair of Early Childhood Education and Development at Monash University. She was selected in 2022 for the Victorian Honour Roll of Women for her outstanding work in significantly shifting understanding of how young children think and learn, particularly girls. So, she's very much got practical, evidence-based strategies in mind today for her discussion with you, briefing with you. So, we'll welcome her to the stage. Her address is gonna lead us up to afternoon tea. If there is time, we'll have questions at the end. But otherwise, I'm sure that her presentation will be very engaging and very much discussing practical and evidence-based ideas that you might take back to the workplace. Please make her very welcome.
MARILYN FLEER:
Thank you so much, Ellen, for that warm welcome. And it's such a wonderful thing to be here with the leaders in Victoria. This is such an honour to be invited to speak to you. And I have to say, I feel like I've got the hardest gig because it's after lunch and so I'll do my very best to make the time that you have, and we know that your time is very precious, but to make it as rich as possible and hopefully, you'll be busy noting things and thinking about what's important for you to take back and talk to your teams and just to work towards the strategies that you're wanting to put in place to really focus on how do we really embrace and how do we build capacity in such a way that it's positive, rich experiences, like Iram was suggesting to us, that the evidence says really matters. And how Jane talked to us very much about, you know, the sorts of things that we value and think are really important and that amazing group of leaders that were on the panel, they were just extraordinary.
So, I'm gonna connect with some of them, Sunil in particular. So, Sunil, where are you, so I can... You promised me you'd wave, and I can't see you. There's so many of you. But anyway, I want to, first of all, begin by acknowledging the Wurundjeri Lands on which we are. I come from the Bunurong community, known as the Mornington Peninsula, where our campus is at Monash University. And I also want to acknowledge the Australian Research Council because the evidence that I'm going to be sharing with you comes from a series of research projects over time that have been funded. And it's really, for those of you who may not know, the Australian Research Council supports high-quality research. It's peer-reviewed. That means that the research has been selected and approved by the scholarly communities to say this is really worth investing in.
And so I'm going to take you back, and DP just means Discovery Project and LP means Linkage Project and FL just means the Laureate Fellowship that I was awarded in 2018. So, it's to say that there is what I'll be sharing with you, and I won't go into statistics and lots and bits and pieces, what I want to do is do like a litmus test because I've been thinking, what does this mean for you in Victoria? Everything we've learned and a lot of this research has been done in Victoria and some of you out there might have been participating in it. And so, thank you. And so it's really important for me to be able to share what we learn and for it to actually be used in practice. And as Ellen said, this afternoon is very much focused on what's the evidence to support the practices that really matter in terms of pedagogical leadership, but also in terms of the strategies that we use as practitioners, as educators, as teachers.
And I've been asked to talk about, and these are the outcomes that were suggested that we would work towards. And I particularly want to, I've mentioned the first one about showcasing new thinking for practical and evidence-informed strategies that foster child development and learning through intentionality. And of course, we know with the Victorian Early Years and Learning Development Framework that intentional teaching in play-based settings is really a cornerstone of what we do. But as we go through and I talk about this, you'll see it's actually, there's still a lot of confusion about what this means in practice. And so today in my presentation, I'm going to share with you some practice examples of what that could look like and some of the spots that are tricky to navigate as leaders so that you can work more intentionally with the people in your centre, service, classroom, however you want to name where you are, cause I know that varies across the board. And the second area is about the importance of content to build understandings of concepts.
And of course, the Victorian Early Years Learning and Development Framework is very much oriented to that. And of course, as you would know, the new version of the Early Years Learning Framework 2022 that only just came out that everyone's been mentioned previously, also talks about concepts as well. So, I want to talk about those and those two things, intentionality and concepts really matter, particularly in the context of the myth that we think that play alone is sufficient to embed concepts. And that's gonna be my provocation. And you might take that provocation back to your team for further discussion. So, with that as the outcomes that we're going to achieve and you can tick to see whether I get there or not at the end. And if I didn't, there's an opportunity potentially to ask some questions about that. But this is also what I've been, this is the roadmap that I was asked to work on to take us there to those outcomes.
So, it's about the practical and evidence-based strategies. And I've really bolded that, because to me that's really important around implementing intentionality in play-based learning and also about the embedding of concepts within play-based programs. How do we do that? What's a concept, what do we mean by that? And that's where I really want to draw out some, you know, to revisit things we know, like the triple helix, because I think it's in that material that we have access to and that we're charged to use to plan and deliver the quality programs that we do. And similarly, the last one is that because, as Ellen mentioned and others who know me and been on our website or have participated in our research, essentially for the last million years, I've been involved in science, technology, engineering and mathematics, but mostly in the science and technology and engineering space for young children.
But I'm using that only today as an example because we might know concepts to do with engineering or we might know about concepts to do with mathematics, but there are also professional concepts that we work with, like intentionality, and professional concepts that are really important to us in our planning, like executive functions or self-regulation or many other parts of the work we do. So, I'll talk more about that as we go along. So first of all, I'm going to begin with the first part, the practical and evidence strategies. And what I wanna do as I launch into this, is to, first of all, to say that, and I know Iram's here with us. Iram's work has been incredibly powerful internationally and nationally, which is why we have so much evidence and so much intentionality in our Victorian Early Years Learning and Development Framework.
We have the intentional teaching model and because over the years I've known Iram for a long time, she's been so impactful in Australia, because if I go back, and I'm an elder now, so I'm allowed to go back, if I go back a long period of time, we were at a crossroad about 25 years ago where we were just starting to think about the professionalisation of the work we do. And the debate at that time was about curriculum. Do we have a curriculum? Oh, no, we can't have a curriculum because we're following the child. We're following their interests or following what they want to do. We don't need a curriculum. And that was a really big debate.
And I think we're also now at a really important crossroad in the context of national and Victorian reform, where governments are investing so heavily in supporting us to do the work we do even better, which is why this leadership event is so important, because without us working together to achieve that reform, we won't get to where we wanna be. And we wanna bring everyone with us, which is why leadership is so important, and particularly pedagogical leadership, which is what I'm speaking to today. But in looking at that key concept that I see consistently coming through around intentional teaching as a practice principle, as something that really matters in the work that we do, I want to just share, and I'm just gonna use my notes for this so I can be a little quicker. And then I'm going to share lots of examples around this.
But one of the things that consistently comes through in reviews is that it's really hard. People feel confused about it, as I mentioned earlier on. And there are different views on what it means and what it looks like, but if we go back to the evidence around it, that's where we have to start. And so I want to, first of all, say that those pieces of research that have been done have shown really strong links between positive outcomes for children in different discipline areas such as mathematics, and that was mentioned this morning as well, and more broadly, such as executive functions when intentional teaching takes place.
So, when there isn't the confusion and people know what it is, then there are those outcomes. But there are the preconditions for that around the kind of sustained and shared thinking that emerges in those interactional moments. And the preconditions that come through strongly in the literature are in relation to focusing more on teacher participation or educator participation in play-based practices. And that links to that myth that play alone can do this work, 'cause it can't. That's what the research is showing us because we need to have play-based programs that also bring concepts in the service of children's play.
So, they actually have content to lift them. And we heard about the uplifting of the profession, it's the uplifting of the interactions that really matters. And we also know that teacher talk and that comes through in all sorts of literature, that teacher talk that's rich and has a language of the concepts being used also makes a really big difference. I'm gonna show you some examples of teachers talking about what that looks like in some video clips just to keep you on your toes and engaged. And there's also evidence around, and I'll read it because many people have used Iram's work, and this work, it comes from those that have. There's a clustering of studies that talk about interactions that are oriented to intentional interaction of sustained and shared thinking of different concepts or skills in contexts that build early knowledge matter.
And finally, there's also teacher knowledge. So, teacher knowledge has a really big impact. And of course, that means educator knowledge, teacher knowledge, however you want to define what the person is that's leading that interactional moment. So, with that as a backdrop, we have to still acknowledge that we as leaders, even when we know that evidence, it still is hard how to be intentional. And so what I want to do is take you on a little journey in relation to the research that I've done and then show you these examples of this. And so when I go back to 2009, well, it was actually before that, because the dates of publications usually reflect a whole body of work that took a long time between educators and researchers.
So, one of the things I was really interested in very early on, probably before people talked about concepts as deeply as they do now, was actually how do we, in a play-based environment, how do we bring in discipline concepts, or how do we bring in certain concepts that we think are really important in mathematics, in literacy, in emotion regulation and so on? How do we do that? And what I noticed in the research that I was doing, and we have Dr Rebecca Lewis, who did her PhD in this area, and what she noticed that it was very difficult to be intentional, to be an intentional teacher, when you are always following the children's interests.
And from the work that we've been doing in our play, it's not to say we don't follow their interests, but if that's all we do, if we are followers, and this is very much for all of you who know about Piaget, if you've been around, you've been through all the different child development models and learning models, and will know that the interpretation has been to sort of kind of have your hands behind your back and not intentionally teach. It's the environment that does the teaching. The children play, and we watch, we observe from the outside. But that is what our research is showing in our play lab, is consistently when we look at naturalistic settings where we don't do any intervention, we don't think about intentionality in the way I'm gonna take you down, what we find is what I call butterfly learning.
It's like following this child, then following this child onto another flower and following this child onto another flower. And we are so busy following all these, like, butterflies going on to all these beautiful individuals trying to nurture their mind, but we can't go really deep because we are very focused on the individual or a small group. And so we're finding that the depth of interaction is not as deep as we would really like. And if we really wanna make a qualitative difference, we have to look at this because it's not just the shared sustained thinking, but actually, how does that shared, sustained thinking and intentionality is planned for in relation to the concept? And more of thinking of our role as being in many ways very different to just following the child. Which we know in the Victorian, and I'm gonna get to that, the Victorian Early Years Learning and Development Framework, there is a really important point in there about thinking about our role in a balanced way when we're leading, when we're following, and when we're equal together with the children. So, to be thinking about that too.
So, as Jane said, you know, you get in the moment as a leader and you observe your name and your claim that make visible that moment of your peers that you're supporting as a leader, pedagogical leader. Then having a bit of a framework around thinking about what that feedback might look like might be very important. So, I'm going to give you some examples of that soon. I've got to keep an eye on the time. So, that's where we began. So, let's give you some pegs from which to think about what do we mean by a concept and so on. Because what I wanna do is take you, and this is where I really enjoyed Sunil's example of the snail, because in the context of the work that we do, we really explore what do we mean by a concept.
And so, in the next part of my journey as a researcher, we really work together with educators to try and actually look at what that means. And Sunil gave a wonderful example of the snail, and I'm gonna give the example of the slater, but it could be the snail as well. So, in some research that we did some time back, which was published in 2011, what we found was when teachers were very intentional with their teaching and they were planning in relation to the concept that what we had to try and do was work out, what do we mean by a concept? And so, loosely, the way that most curriculum documents discipline areas think about a concept, that I think is very helpful for us in the professional work we do, is that when the child and the educator are having those shared interactional moments that are rich with conversation in the way that Sunil described, what is it that we have planned previously in relation to the kind of concept that we want to support? And she talked about Habitat.
Now, what I loved about this project that I was involved in was that what we learned was that for a child to have a concept, like a concept of an ecosystem, means that the child, when they go into the environment, they don't just look at the slater, they already know where the slater can be found because they have a sense of what slaters eat. So, they know about the structure of the slater, what it looks like, you know, how it can digest food. And I don't mean that in terms of chemistry so much, but the structural features. You know, do they have teeth, you know, or do they have eyes? What is it, how is it that they can actually look at and use, and break down the rotting wood, for instance? But also, what forms part of that concept, cause it's like a little germ cell of understanding, like the genetic matter in our body is like a germ cell that tells us what our whole body can do, the cell of the concept is something really, it's like the smallest unit that matters.
And that's the work we can do really well because the child who has a sense of the slater has a sense of the organism, the child who has a slater in terms of its structure will know where to look for it because it already has, as Sunil said, a sense of the habitat because the structure of the organism is related to the food that it eats. And if you change any variable there, you know, the slater starves, you know, so and that becomes like a cell. If you think of it like a triangle and you have the organism, the slater and you have the habitat. So, that's the environment where we find the slater and we know the food sources in that environment. Then the child has a sense of, and we began with insect habitat as the beginnings of our concept. And why I labour that just for a little bit, it's to say it's like they're related to each other.
So the child just doesn't go out, as I started to say, looking at the environment, looking for a slater up in the sky, they already have knowledge that they're bringing for a very purposeful engagement in their world because they're forming concepts already. And when they go from thinking about it as a slater to thinking about it in terms of a snail, then they're starting to build that relational, conceptual understanding of habitat, food source, a structure of the organism. And we might not use those words with children, but we might. And you'll see some examples soon that I'll share with you. So, that's what I mean about what are the concepts that we think are really important when we do our planning for this intentional teaching that we want to do. And so, our next part of the research journey that we did was that we learned another part of this work cause we started to create what we called educational experiments. And that's where we started to look more deeply at creating opportunities to intervene a little more. And so instead of it being like butterfly learning with some intentional moments that may or may not have been planned, we started to talk about, well, as leaders, as pedagogical leaders, how can we start to plan the learning and learning with concepts in play in a very meaningful way?
So, what we learned from our next lot of research was that we brought in Gunilla Lindqvist's work from Sweden in relation to playworlds, but her work was not focused on concepts. And so, but we knew that that mattered here in Victoria. We knew it mattered because the Victorian Early Years Learning and Development Framework supports us to be thinking about this content because children can't play without some content. They bring content, but we also provide content so that their play gets richer. And we know that from international research as well.
So, what we learned was we started to work with educators over time about how do we use playworlds for it to be a very meaningful experience for young children in a way that their play, that concepts start to build their play experiences so that if they wanted to recreate a playworld around visiting the outdoor area to look at Sunil's snails, could they become snails? Could they become microscopic? Could they pretend that they were down in the environment and engaging with other snails? So, it's to say, I'm just giving you a little taste in relation to Sunil's example. But if we start to look at this, one of the things we did was we explored actually what really mattered here for children's learning. And what we learned in relation to this was that there were certain characteristics that supported the emotional side, supported the cognitive side, in such a beautiful way. And so the excitement and the drama of being the snails with knowledge about the structure of snails, with knowledge and doing research around that so when they're snails, they have some resources to draw upon.
So, it begins to resource their play and through the resourcing of their play, cause they know now about snails and the snail's habitat but now, can they add more to it? Can they have a snail-slater conversation? You know, what's the magic here of imagination that the play can actually ignite and further the children's curiosity for the awe and wonder that Jane mentioned earlier on? So, what came from this wonderful work with our collaborators in the field was this model. And I'm not gonna spend a long time on it. I'm just going to share some aspects of it because it's only an example of practice. You may have other models that you draw upon, but I want to use it to illustrate what we learned and why it mattered. So, that squiggly little thing around there is our Conceptual PlayWorld for STEM. But it could be Conceptual PlayWorlds for literacy, for emotion regulation, could be for things to do with sustainability. It could be anything.
But the STEM is like a proxy for what we think about what concepts we really want to explore with children. And so, we learned that it's not smooth in the implementation. It's like what I just showed there, but what sits under it in terms of what we learned together with educators was that right in the middle there, we learned when we did all of our analyses together was that the concepts help solve a play problem.
So, it's not so much serendipity going out into the field with the child to become the snails, but we need some sort of exciting problem that motivates the children to want to draw on that concept, which, you know, we have planned for, and to be able to use that concept to solve the problem in their play so that the play can continue. And the example of the Conceptual PlayWorld is not to say this is the only model of practice that we're talking about here, but we also, in drawing on, you can see the children's book to create these imaginary situations, imagination really matters. Imagination in play is so important, as we know, when a child creates the imaginary world and works with play partners to create a story as we see them do. Use meta-communicative language where they rock the baby and say, "Rock, rock, rock," so their play partners can understand what they're offering to the play narrative, we know that that's really important.
When children take an object and make it become something else. So, you know, my clicker can become the little doll or the puppy. But in reality, it's not a doll and it's not a puppy. But we've changed the meaning of what we see. And that is really, really important for learning. Because when a child can imagine something that's not there, then we know that they're able to think abstractly and we see evidence of that in children's play. But we can also support that to happen if we are much more intentional in our teaching. And so, this is the model that sits under the other material. And so, where I wanna take you is now to make it a little bit more exciting and have a look at how some of the key things that are really important, and I particularly, I'm going to, where I'm going now is to just give you a little bit of a background to what this looks like, the conceptual, what's underpins it.
And so, making alive, if I go back to this one here. Huh, it doesn't go backwards. Yes, it does. Make this come alive for you a little more. And one further back. And this squiggly... This is what you're gonna see. You're gonna see this kind of what you see on your right-hand side. You'll see this in practice as we talk. But I'm only going to be highlighting some parts of it because we don't have time to go into all of the characteristics that really matter in terms of how to be intentional in the teaching of concepts in children's play when you're planning to do explicitly that. And so, this is a very short three-minute video just to highlight some examples and then I'm going to walk us through some details. So, this is just to warm you up a little bit.
(VIDEO PLAYS)
Research shows us that play is how children make sense of things. It's central to how children learn, particularly in the early years. Through imagination, a stick becomes a horse and a child its rider. The same stick can become a ruler and the child imagines measurement. New concepts form and the child's world begins to transform. I'm Marilyn Fleer from Monash University, and Professor of Early Childhood Education and Development. Imagination in play is central to imagination in learning. The real trick is to align play with curriculum and to give teachers the tools to assess the learning that's taking place. Our research has created a model of teaching and learning in foundation that does exactly that. We call it the Conceptual PlayWorld. It starts with a favourite story. An imaginary world is created and teachers and students go on adventures. They encounter problems that need to be solved through play to progress. And that's where the magic happens. Teachers are play partners. Children question, visualise, create and model their new understandings. Genuine and connected learning occurs across the different disciplines. We know this method works and we've got the research to back it up. It's about harnessing a child's natural curiosity and fostering a new generation of 21st-century thinkers.
(VIDEO ENDS)
MARILYN FLEER:
So, that was just to give you a quick overview, because what I want to share with you now are the things that connect very strongly with the Victorian Early Years Learning and Development Framework and what our research shows that we as pedagogical leaders have to really pay attention to. That's really hard. And for some, it'll probably feel very easy because you're succeeding. But to make that conscious, or to create the journey as new staff enter your service and you want to support them, what are the kinds of things that are challenging? So, that's what takes me to the second part of the roadmap that I was asked to talk to. Was how do we embed those concepts that really matter? And I've given you a little bit of an overview of Conceptual PlayWorld just as an example.
But we want to look at this sort of balance of teaching practices to support children. And so, therefore, the Double Helix, in my view, are very useful for taking us there. So, and what I wanna do is I've mentioned, well, what do we mean by a concept? We've talked about that already, but I'm just gonna add another layer to it because if you think of it as the germ cell of some really important information, or the concept is important for facilitating certain things, there are differences. And I'll give a quick example. There is always, what we found in our research is that often what we do in the butterfly learning approach, where we don't go so deep, we stay with the phenomenon. That is, the rainbows.
We explore the rainbows, we celebrate the rainbows. We go have our magical journey on rainbows. And that's not to say that's not important, absolutely is important. But do we ever get to, what is a rainbow? It is the refraction of light. And so, therefore, the concept of light is really, really important because when children have a concept of light because they usually focus on its absence, darkness, because they're a bit scared, don't wanna go to bed, or they worried. And so the focus is, but children don't know that light travels in straight lines. You can block it to create a shadow. There are all these beautiful things that you can actually explore. And so what often happens in our research, we found that we stay at the phenomenon level.
We never go that little bit further down to a deep concept. And the other part of this that potentially will be helpful for you, I hope, is that there are different forms of knowledge that we support, that we generate in our services, in our centres, our settings. And there's narrative knowledge, there's empirical knowledge and there's theoretical knowledge. And the narrative knowledge is, of course, the work that Bruner has done around being able to tell a really good story, the best story, have that wonderful journey, the climax, you know, all that wonderful work that happens in literature as well. So, I'm not saying one's better than the other. I'm saying there's just different knowledge forms, and the PlayWorlds, the original work, was very much about narrative development. How do you support children to create the narrative in their play? How do you develop the play narrative further? And that's important. There's empirical knowledge, which are the building blocks, and we often see curriculum as created like building blocks.
So, we have this form of knowledge. Then as the children progress into another set of curriculum, you know, into the school sector, there's all these other concepts that they're developing. And so, they have these building blocks of knowledge. But theoretical knowledge is what I was sharing with you before that we often don't think about, and that's the relationship. So, we can learn about habitat, we can learn about the structure of an organism, we can learn about food sources. But it's only theoretical when a child can bring those things together and to think about their world in a whole new way. And that's what I mean about deep learning and learning with concepts. And that's so different to butterfly learning because you just don't have the time to do that. And that's not to say we shouldn't follow children's interests.
We still do that. And I'll show you how and why as we go through. But this is where we can be very, with a balance in our intentionality, we can have the guided play and learning, we can have the adult-led learning and we can have child-directed play and learning as part of what we plan. So, we don't wanna miss the opportunity to go to those deep, conceptual spaces that really matter because children, when they have that, the child who plays with the stick, as you saw in the video, who can imagine that that's a horse and then can imagine it as a measurement tool when they're in school, they're already galloping away because they don't have to start from scratch. They've had those rich opportunities to be able to imagine something that's not there. And we know that the stick is only the beginning of the standard unit in measurement and that you need a standard unit if you're going to talk to each other at a distance.
As you all know in the theory and learning of that discipline area, which you would have all had as part of your early learning experiences to build your diplomas and degrees. And so, we all are very comfortable, I hope, and familiar with this. But just to revisit some of this, because I'm going to showcase it in relation to the examples, and I do need to hurry on. We know about guided play and learning occur when adults are involved in children's play. Involved in children's play. This is really different to the concept of, we can't interfere in children's play. So, there's the provocation to be thinking about if your services are we never get involved in children's play because that's their domain and there's a lot of work that's out there which is a mythology. There's no evidence, there's no evidence to say that's actually harming the children.
In fact, there's all the evidence to show otherwise. But we don't do it all the time because we need to give children the play spaces in which to practice those concepts and make them their own as well. And to relive the experience, or measurement as it might be, or relive the experience of going and looking at the snails and creating a new narrative and a new problem and a new inquiry that they wanna solve. The child-directed play and learning, of course, we know, is about that exploration process and that's really important. And you can see in there there's some really important words like exploring, imagining, experimenting. And our research shows that the depth of that work without an adult around is not as deep because the adult acts like a bit of glue.
They glue everyone, all those children, all those little butterflies and all those little flowers, they glue that together on a purpose for something that they're interested in and that the teachers have planned for. So, it's very important to be thinking about this, you know, how do we support that process? What is that glue and what does it look like? And then we have the adult-led learning. And the Conceptual PlayWorld is an example of not just adult-led learning, but an example of all of those things coming together at different times. But I'm only going to talk to a couple of those areas. So, for me, then, and the couple of areas that I wanna talk to are really the big challenges. And for us as leaders and developing the future leaders, because as we heard this morning, you know, we are all in this together. And if we disappear, as Jane mentioned, if we get hit by a bus, or was it, Iram, can't remember now, I'm starting to fuse them together. Can this quality work continue? So, that means and if it can, we know we've done our work well.
So, what are the biggest challenges for us as leaders to support this? Well, we know this is a little excerpt from the Early Years Learning Framework. The new version. We know that it connects so well with the Victorian Early Years Learning and Development Framework with our Triple Helix model because it says planning opportunities for intentional knowledge building. And I'm gonna talk about a little bit about that. It also has, further up, it talks about the second dot point above that big circle, support children's progress in play-based learning through the thoughtful extension of children's knowledge, skills and concept development and just foreground that. So, how do we do that, and what's the best evidence around it?
So, now I'm gonna take you to how do we do those two really important things in particular, and how do we bring the Triple Helix into this in a really purposeful way and intentional way? This is, I know you can't see this, but you can jump easily onto the website. We have a truckload of material and I've got a QR code at the end. It'll take you straight to our website if you're interested to see the detail. But the fourth characteristic, this is a planning pro forma. The fourth characteristic, this one here is planning the concept. And that's the thing our research shows us that teachers and educators are sometimes reluctant to do or feel uncomfortable to do or are not sure how to do. And so let's have a look at that in relation to adult-led learning, one of the things that our Conceptual PlayWorld model and the research we've done has shown us that is really important. And this is really, this is like the litmus test of intentional teaching. Can you come up with an authentic problem that you know will help children to bring concepts into their play?
So, what's the problem that you can actually plan for? So, is it about the snail? Is it just, is the concept, sorry, is the problem too, can we find a snail, or is it actually deeper than that? Or when we go out, can we do an order? Do we need a map to try and go out into the environment? Cause that's what we learned from our teachers. It wasn't enough to just go and look in the environment. But when children draw a picture of where they find things and then they build this relational knowledge, they find the insects in different places, they've drawn a picture of their outdoor area and then they draw the little bits to go with it and they can go on all sorts of adventures to do this and build this over time. This is very different.
But with our play-based learning model, we actually start with something really motivating and engaging, a really exciting problem. And I want to share with you now an example of that, of Kerrie, who actually introduces the story. I think I've got the right video here. She introduces here with the storybook of the 'March of the Ants'. She introduces the infants and toddlers, and I've picked them quite deliberately because if you can do this with infants and toddlers, teach concepts in their play, you can do it anywhere. And we've done this work with year sixes and it works for year sixes as well. And there's a different challenge there. You know, will they wanna play, and so what Kerrie and Michelle, so Kerrie and Michelle are the team, and Kerrie and Michelle have worked with the infants and toddlers and the children are familiar with the story. They've been reading the story of the 'March of the Ants' together many times. They've provided all the props and things in the environment.
And the children, they notice, 'cause they read the babies, they read the toddlers, they see what they're interested in. So, it's not about not following their interest completely. They read what they appear to be gravitating towards. And there were a number of children who are interested in phones, and I'm sure those of you who've worked with infants and toddlers know that phones are quite interesting devices. And so they use the phone too, and they receive, pretending to receive a phone call from the queen ant who says, I need some help. And this is the motivating condition that I'm talking about because we know from our research, children want to help the characters in the story. They want to jump into the story and be the characters along with the teachers cause the teachers are in the play world together with them. And so let's just listen and watch what Kerrie and Michelle did.
(VIDEO PLAYS)
KERRIE:
As we were reading the story, we realised that the children were curious about the things the ants did. And so one of the ideas was us to look at food, the water, the tools and the map. We do a lot of pretend cooking in our home corner area, and we eat food every day and talk about it and learn about it in our meal times. So, the food thing seemed to be a really tangible concept that the babies already understand and that we would, as the grown-up people, get food for babies. So, the baby ants interested them. Come and collect the food. Oh, here's some apples for the ants to eat." Michelle and I, we plotted out where we would march and what time we would get the phone call because then it would allow the children to not be too distracted or not get lost in the timing and give them something to do. Yeah, sure. We are just on our way marching."
And the phone call just pulled the children together with the marching, and of course, you know, the Queen Ant, and that's like the mum, is ringing, you know, first to get some food for the babies. If you take it out of the ant world, that idea of the mum wanting food for a baby, they understand things like that. They use their imagination. They pretended to eat the food and share the food, and it was really lovely to see how deep the imagination went with our young babies.
(VIDEO ENDS)
MARILYN FLEER:
And because of time, I'm going to take you to just a quick short video of Kerrie again talking about her expectations.
(VIDEO PLAYS)
KERRIE:
We have much higher expectations for the babies than ever before. It's totally changed the way Michelle and I teach in the room because we realise that there's a lot of talk around projects and that's very older children where PlayWorlds are really, really great with babies because it's got an element of that sort of learning. But it's also then got what they love the most, which is playing and enjoying and being imaginative. STEM is in everything and we can see it in everything. And we use words now that we probably didn't use before. And we also talk, you know, anatomy, antenna, colony. These are all words that you wouldn't think to teach a baby, but they know what those things are. And so we talk to them in a more realistic way than ever before. And, you know, we know that things will go on longer than a moment. It extends, the PlayWorld will go, learning about ants might last months if we keep attending to where they're going with it.
(VIDEO ENDS)
MARILYN FLEER:
And to just say, there's the link if anyone's interested to connect with our work cause we've got lots of material on this. But Kerrie, and in a time of reform, she says, and this is my closing words, it's not more work it's different work. And I think that epitomises how we as pedagogical leaders should be thinking about the reform and our important role in it. So, thank you, everyone.
ELLEN FANNING:
Thank you so much, Marilyn. It really is something that the whole educators right across Australia are really thinking very hard about. How do we learn? How is it that we humans learn? And the idea that you might invert what you're doing in a way so that the concepts start to build the play experiences, as well as looking for opportunities where, as Marilyn was saying there, that the butterfly moments are infused with some intentionality that's been planned beforehand. And I know there was a conference in New South Wales late last year that heard from educational psychologist John Zoeller, who's most famous for cognitive load theory. How much can we understand new stuff? Can we understand at any given point, which I suppose is, you know, the younger we are, the newer things are for us, that the idea of creativity and thinking critically is actually only possible when we have a basis of learning to inform it. So, concepts lead to creative play and so forth.
So, I think that is really cutting edge what Marilyn has said there, but also intensely practical. And I could see with the attention that everyone was paying today, what a wonderful audience you are, and at home all staying online with us, that this is very much attending to the sorts of professional development that you're reaching out for. So, please thank Professor Marilyn Fleer again for that wonderful discussion.
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