Early Years practitioners frequently use words like 'passionate' to describe themselves and their attitudes to working and playing with young children. But how is this emotive and emotional word to be interpreted by others? Given any evidence of real political in uence or strength, this mainly female workforce cannot perhaps be said to be suf ciently passionate or forceful in justifying and promoting their beliefs and ideologies. Herein lies one of many paradoxes in early childhood: it seems impossible to work effectively with very young children without the deep and sound commitment signi ed by the use of words like 'passionate'. Yet this very symbolisation gives a particular emotional slant to the work of early childhood practitioners which can work for or against them in their everyday roles and practices, bringing into question what constitutes professionalism and what being a 'teacher' means in such diversi ed contexts. This paper will show that working in partnership with researchers, different groups of early years practitioners have shown themselves able to engage in high level, critical (and passionate!) re ection on their own practices, to link associated theory and to challenge political prescription.

This paper reports the methods and findings of the Study of Primary Interactive Teaching (SPRINT) project carried out in English primary schools, which set out to determine teachers' understanding and use of 'interactive teaching' as a characteristic of 'successful teaching' in the National Literacy Strategy (NLS). Thirty teachers of children aged five to 11 years became either 'focus' teachers or 'comparison ' teachers and were videoed twice over a six to eight month period doing 'interactive teaching' during the daily Literacy Hour as part of the NLS. The focus teachers were videoed doing interactive teaching in a different curriculum area and they participated in a process of video stimulated reflective dialogue (VSRD) with a higher education based research partner. Semi-structured interviews, held with every teacher before and after the fieldwork period, were analyzed to show teachers' changing conceptualizations of interactive teaching. In addition the Concerns-Based Adoption Model (CBAM) was used to measure teachers' concerns about interactive teaching, and systematic observations were made of the video data. The results revealed few differences between the focus and comparison groups but provide significant evidence that whilst teachers have increased levels of interactivity dramatically by increasing the frequency of their questions, they still spent over half the time giving information and telling children what to do. Cognitive challenge was significantly higher in the literacy hour but lower in other Downloaded by [University of California, San Francisco] at 10:curriculum areas for children aged eight to 11 years, whereas children aged five to seven years lower levels of cognitive challenge were experienced in literacy than in other curriculum areas. Finally, a major shift away from teachers asking children about how they might do their work compared with pre-NLS levels, suggests that literacy hour teaching is more likely to engender learned helplessness than independent learning.

No abstract

No abstract

No abstract