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Education Durham: The Early Years Curriculum Project
This episode and article stems from the Education Durham Early Years Curriculum Project, which involved 26 schools focusing on strengthening purposeful curriculum design and implementation, and empowering leaders and educators in creating meaningful contexts for progressive teaching and learning.
A focus on learning behaviours in the early years curriculum
In the early years of education, fostering a child’s love for learning and developing foundational skills is crucial. Embedding learning behaviours and characteristics of effective teaching and learning into the early years curriculum ensures that children develop the necessary skills to become lifelong learners. As Jan Dubiel states:
“The critical ‘Learning Behaviours’, the capabilities that enable and empower the drivers, understanding, connection and purpose of learning, need to be fully understood, facilitated, supported and challenged with the same focus and priority as any other part of more ‘traditional’ curriculum content,” (Dubiel, 2023).
An exciting and thought-provoking part of the project was exploring how learning behaviours, and knowledge and skills, exist in a symbiotic relationship enabling learning, development and progress to take place. Through the sessions we as participants explored whether learning behaviours were content defined or whether they were an entity in their own right. As early years educators the response was overwhelmingly the latter, babies are born motivated and curious. Learning behaviours are transferrable and ‘generic’ rather than subject specific in the context of early years.
Debates moved on to how we could view learning behaviours progressively in order to embed them into our curricula and plan for them more effectively. Specific learning behaviours were unpicked and attempts to plot them into progressive stages was undertaken – a challenging task which gave rise to a deeper understanding and appreciation that learning behaviours were interlinked in many complex ways. It was also noted that if mapped in a linear way children could be at one point and then appear to ‘move back’ depending on context and situation.
Exploring in such depth enabled us to re-focus our early years curriculum and shine a lens on learning behaviours, so we questioned how did we ensure that learning behaviours were a central part of our curriculum? And what did the ‘teaching’ of learning behaviours look like in the early years classroom?
A focus on regulation as part of our curriculum
We entered the project with a well-established curriculum, strong pedagogical approaches and outstanding outcomes for children. Staff had strong knowledge of the seven areas of learning and development, and time had been invested in professional development in communication, reading and early maths. Therefore, our focus going into the project was going to be to further explore the characteristics of effective teaching and learning through our curriculum.
During the project the sessions exploring learning behaviours resonated with us on our own school journey. With the new intake of children to nursery we grew increasingly aware that our curriculum was not supporting learning and their development in the way it had done previously and needed to be adapted. Despite the prime areas of learning being embedded across the nursery curriculum, our children were entering our provision functioning at much lower levels than anticipated and there was a curriculum mismatch. We took steps to explore this, and our findings pointed to self-regulation. Our children were not entering nursery with the skills to be able to recognise emotions and respond in an appropriate and measured way. We needed to implement strategies to able to help our children to learn about their emotions and how they could become more regulated in themselves.
Developing our own approach to regulation
Drawing from discussions within the project we set about deepening our understanding of regulation in early childhood development. We accessed specific support from experts, listened to podcasts, read articles etc. and began to unpick how we could support our children to develop an awareness of their emotions and regulation skills. Many approaches that were shared did not begin at an early enough stage of development to be useful for our children, so we set about developing our own staged approach and began implementation of the approach earlier this year.
We initially set off by exploring what typical development in regulation would look like. We thought about different schemes and offers available for older children and how to make these accessible to our youngest children and our children with SEND. We decided to use our own knowledge alongside elements of zones of regulation, introducing colour, texture and visuals initially before introducing language with children. A staged approach was developed highlighting four stages with a shared language introduced at each progressive step. Techniques of how to support children at each stage were highlighted and used simple resources to support regulation at appropriate stages. All staff were involved with the development and therefore the approach was used consistently and progressively across the nursery from our two-year-olds up to our four-year-olds.
Calm time was introduced in groups to support delivery of simple mindfulness techniques. Time was set aside each day to model techniques such as windmill breathing, fist squeezing and breathing balls. Regulation colours, feelings and language were then added once the guided technique had been practiced.
Examples of impact
Below are some examples from the children of the impact the project and our focus on regulation has had, and in the podcast episode we discuss these examples and more, including impact on the staff.
Child A: ‘My daddy made me feel blue. What happened… he was shouting. I think maybe a hug might make me feel better.’
Child B is observing another child very upset in nursery: ‘I think John Patrick is feeling cross, he should take a few big breaths.’
Child C is often brought to nursery late and this results in big feelings when separating from mum:
Child C: ‘I don’t like you I feel really cross.’
Adult: ‘I can see your face is red, your hands are scrunched up and you are shouting. You are cross and feeling red. It is ok to feel cross. It is ok to miss mummy. A butterfly hug might make you feel less red.’
Child C agrees and gives herself a butterfly hug and then accepts a hug from the adult. Over time Child C calms.
Later on Child C says to adult: ‘I don’t feel bad now.’
She reaches for the adult’s regulation cards on her lanyard and shows her the green happy face.
Child C: ‘I feel green now.’
The adult shares how she feels green too because she is happy for Child C.
Concluding thoughts
In a very short time we have had so many success stories. Our curriculum re-focus was beginning to meet children’s needs and enable them to access the areas of learning and development. Our staged approach was beginning to have impact thanks to the coherence with which it was embraced and the consistency with which it was delivered.
Key takeaways
- It is important to look at your own setting, cohort, team and needs of the children at the time in order to decide on what is the direction or area(s)of focus of your curriculum.
- Implementing new practices and approaches requires a consistent whole team approach.
Critical considerations
- Do you take time as a team to step back and really evaluate the work you do, the provision for children, how effective this is and what can be addressed?
- When putting together your curriculum do you consider the characteristics of effective teaching and learning/learning behaviours as well as the EYFS areas of learning?
Explainer
Characteristics of Effective Learning: The Characteristics of Effective Learning describe behaviours children use in order to learn. To learn well, children must approach opportunities with curiosity, energy and enthusiasm. Effective learning must be meaningful to a child, so that they are able to use what they have learned and apply it in new situations (Early Years Coalition, 2021). These abilities and attitudes of strong learners will support them to learn well and make good progress in all the EYFS (DfE, 2023) Areas of Learning and Development (Bawler, 2024).
References
Bawler, M. (2024). Proactively promoting positive mental health. The Voice of Early Childhood [Online]. Available at: https://thevoiceofearlychildhood.com/proactively-promoting-positive-mental-health/ [Date accessed: 22 November 2024]
Department for Education (2023). Early years foundation stage statutory framework for group and school-based providers [Online]. Available at: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/65aa5e42ed27ca001327b2c7/EYFS_statutory_framework_for_group_and_school_based_providers.pdf [Date accessed: 25 August 2024]
Dubiel, J. (2023). How children learn: part1. Nursery World Magazine [Online]. Available at: https://www.nurseryworld.co.uk/content/features/learning-development-how-children-learn-part-1-in-the-process/ [Date accessed: 1 November 2024]
Early Years Coalition (2021). Birth to 5 Matters: Non-statutory guidance for the Early Years Foundation Stage. St Albans: Early Education [Online]. Available at: https://birthto5matters.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/Birthto5Matters-download.pdf [Date accessed: 20 August 2024]
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