S7 E9 - Why We Should Keep the Early in Early Childhood

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Hello, hello. Welcome to this episode of the Structured Literacy Podcast recorded here in Pataway Burnie in Tasmania, the lands of the Palawa people. Today's episode has been prompted by an increase in the number of posts I'm seeing in Facebook groups from early years teachers, particularly Foundation teachers, concerned about the style of instruction they're being asked and required to use in their early years classrooms. It's a message that I have been thinking about and talking about for a number of years, and this episode is going to be a little different from the previous few that have been a bit challenging, shall I say? This one is about affirming what we know about the early years.

If you've been sitting with an uneasy feeling about what the push towards rigid, intensive, highly explicit instruction all day looks like in your Foundation to 2 classroom, I think your instincts are good and the research backs you up. Today I'm going to talk you through why. Now let me start by saying what this episode is not about. This is not an argument against explicit teaching. Explicit teaching is essential. It is the foundation of effective literacy and numeracy instruction. What I want to push back on today is a particular version of explicit instruction, the scripted, tightly paced, fidelity-driven kind of explicit instruction being applied as the dominant model of teaching from the moment five-year-olds walk through the door to the moment they leave.

That version of the day is hard to justify when we know what we know about how young children learn. And before you send me an email saying, "Jocelyn, stop being so sensationalist, that's not happening anywhere," I can assure you that it is. And this is what I'm seeing in anonymous posts from teachers. They are truly conflicted. They are not questioning the value of explicit teaching for the core instruction, they're asking, am I right or am I wrong in thinking that this is all too much?

The distinction that matters

So when I talk about explicit teaching, I mean teacher-led, appropriately scaffolded instruction with clear modelling, guided practice, checking for understanding, and adjusting pace based on how students are actually responding, and this is what Rosenshine's Principles describe. That's what evidence supports. This is different from scripted, tightly paced, fidelity-driven teaching across most of the day, where teacher responsiveness is squeezed out by pacing guides, and every single lesson in the school looks the same, regardless of who the teacher or the students are in the room. Now, explicit teaching done well can be active, dialogic, hands-on, and genuinely engaging. And those things, I don't think, sit in tension with explicit instruction. They're part of what makes it work.

A word from experience

I'm speaking to you about this from experience, not from a theoretical discussion or a thinking about what might work. I've taught every year level in the primary school, including preschool. I've also run a creche. And one of the observations that I keep coming back to is that much of the pedagogical architecture of the heavily scripted, tightly managed, explicit instruction that we're seeing as the dominant model, all of this comes from secondary schools and is then just transferred into the primary setting. Now, there are elements of that that work beautifully, but sometimes it doesn't account for the students who are in the room and ask, is this appropriate? Because five and six-year-olds are not small 10-year-olds. 10-year-olds are not small 15-year-olds. Each age group has particular characteristics and needs. And what works for Year 8 simply doesn't scale automatically down to Year 1. Now I am not talking about dumbing down instruction or expecting less in terms of content. Not at all. I'm saying that trying to teach Year 1 as if they're Year 6 is a recipe for overwhelm and stress for the students and for the teacher.

Age-Appropriate Pegagogies

When I was a principal in a small rural school, I made the decision that we would implement Age-Appropriate Pedagogies right across the school from preschool to Year 6 within a strong, explicit approach to instruction. Now, Age-Appropriate Pedagogies is a Queensland initiative to bring a range and balance of approaches to instruction. And before you groan at the use of the word balance, please know that this is not about saying, well, we'll do a little bit of this and we'll do a little bit of that and we won't do anything effectively. Within age-appropriate pedagogies, there are characteristics of instruction, and I'm going to share them with you briefly now.

There is the characteristic of being active, which requires physical and embodied engagement across learning.

There's agentic, which is about students having voice. This is not about saying the children will decide what they're learning next, but they have a voice in their learning. Their ideas and interests are considered when instruction is planned.

There's the characteristic of being collaborative, which is social and co-constructed. Collaborative learning is about working together. Again, I'm not advocating for a pure inquiry discovery approach where a small group of children go and figure things out for themselves. But working together, that's a really good thing.

There's the characteristic of being creative. This does not necessarily involve painting, but it might. Fundamentally, it's inviting the students to consider what if and encourage thinking to think about possibilities and make connections.

There's being explicit, of course, which is what this podcast is all about.

There's the characteristic of being language-rich and dialogic. We need to talk, we need to engage, we need to communicate.

There's being learner-focused, recognising that different students have different needs. Now, when we talk about being data-driven, we are talking about being learner-focused. Again, it's not about that old idea of that student-centred learning puts them in the driver's seat. That's not what we're talking about.

There's the characteristic of narrative and the role of story in learning, which is a powerful mechanism for engagement.

This is one that I really like. It's being playful. Now, note it says playful, not playing. They're two different things. And when we are playful in the classroom, we're embracing our humanity. We can have a little joke, we can have a chuckle. We can be a little bit, and I'm going to say it, I'm going to say the F-word, a little bit fun. And that doesn't have to detract from the seriousness and the intentionality of the explicit teaching that we're working with.

There's being responsive, which is about ensuring that learning is always appropriate for the students in front of us.

And there's being scaffolded. So with modelling, encouraging, questioning, adding challenges, giving feedback, all of that is about being scaffolded.

So while this approach, this AAP, Age-Appropriate Pedagogies, was put together for the early years, in my school, we applied it across the school. What happened when we looked at instruction through the lens of these characteristics was genuinely wonderful. We saw higher levels of student engagement, visible improvement in students' ability to discuss their learning and retain content. And there's something that is a little bit harder to quantify, but just as important, which was the students feeling like they were an active part of the learning process. Learning wasn't just something done to them all day. They started to feel like it was done with them. And in a very short space of time, we saw improvements in the quality of student writing because they had ideas to discuss. So this was not just about it feels nice. This was absolutely related to academic improvement. And for us teachers, doing all of this helped us reconnect with what we loved about teaching in the first place, which was about helping the students enjoy learning, helping them be switched on and tuned in and proud of themselves. And all of this happened within a backward mapped, I do, we do, you do, knowledge-rich and teacher-led explicit approach to teaching and learning.

So what does the research say?

There's a body of research (and I will be sharing a reference list in the show notes of this episode) that tells us something important about how young children learn and what conditions support their learning. So, first let's define a term that keeps coming up in the research and the literature, which is executive function, often written as a capital E and F. Executive function (EF) refers to a cluster of cognitive skills that include attention, working memory, and inhibitory control. Working memory is that ability to hold information in your mind while you complete a task. Inhibitory control is the ability to stop an automatic response, like calling out an answer, in order to do something more adaptive, like raising your hand. These skills are not fixed traits. They develop over time, and the conditions we create in classrooms influence that development. I want to be really careful though, in terms of working memory, we cannot grow a students' working memory. We can help them use what they have more efficiently.

And here's what the research tells us: children with stronger executive function skills tend to have better early academic outcomes in literacy, in maths, and in their general readiness to engage with the classroom (Blair & Razza, 2007; McClelland et al., 2007). That relationship holds from preschool right through to upper primary and beyond.

The second thing the research tells us is that these skills can be developed. They respond to experience, particularly things like inhibitory control. And one of the conditions that supports the development in this area, particularly for the youngest learners, is purposeful guided play opportunities. Not free play, not putting the blocks and the train set out to see what happens. But we're talking about purposeful, structured, teacher-scaffolded play with clear cognitive demands built in and not just as separate play time, but within instruction as well (Skene et al., 2022; Muir, Howard & Kervin, 2023).

The third thing here is that executive function is situational. It's not fixed. Observational research by McCoy and colleagues in 2022 found that the same children displayed markedly different levels of attention and inhibitory control across different classroom contexts during the same day. Now, this could have been because the day went on and the children became tired, but it also tells us that when we see dysregulation, when children can't focus, when they're fidgeting, when they're poking and annoying each other, it's worth asking whether that behaviour is telling us something about the contextual demands of that moment rather than just interpreting it as a characteristic of the child. And so before we start saying things like, that child is dysregulated and so can't learn in this way, we need to first be saying, we as the architects and the engineers of success have an opportunity to set the learning experience up so that children can engage and learn in this way. Play should be seen as a context for practicing self-regulation, not a guaranteed way to make self-regulation carry over to every part of the school day. And that's a really important distinction. I'm not arguing that play is a cure-all or should replace literacy in the day. I'm saying that the conditions of the school day, including where the children have opportunities for movement, interaction, and some degree of choice and voice, shape how well children can regulate themselves when we do ask for focused teacher-directed attention.

We do not yet have strong direct studies that track children in a named, heavily scripted, tightly paced curriculum across most of the day while specifically measuring sustained attention, fatigue, and physiological stress. Most of the evidence here is observational or drawn from small comparison studies. But what the available evidence tells us is pretty consistent. Young children have limited capacity to sustain top-down control. And really, I think we know this just from spending time with them. When the day is dominated by long, tightly paced adult-directed segments, the cost may show up as reduced involvement, more dysregulation, or even stress. When the day includes recovery contexts built in so that movement, hands-on tasks, and guided interactions are a part of instruction, children may well be more able to engage during teacher-led learning, and that's coming from McCoy and colleagues from 2022.

The study I want you to know about

So this is all a plausible interpretation of the evidence, it's not a proven single mechanism to hack instruction, but it is consistent with what we know about development. I want to share just one study that I found super interesting and affirming because I'm someone who advocates for mat time and intentional teacher-led time in the preschool/kinder space, and it's called different things depending on where you live. So when I taught this age group here in Tasmania, half of my kinder or preschool students went to the Foundation year knowing the phoneme-grapheme correspondences, being able to recognise them for the alphabet, and being able to blend and segment at CVC level. Now, all of that was within a play-based approach for three days a week with the short mat time and short focus time for learning. But I want to be really clear, here in Tasmania, our students are older. You cannot go into Foundation until you've turned five by the first of January. So the students that I had in this kinder/preschool cohort were four and a half when they entered the year level. And they were often five and five and a half in term three and four of that year. So I want to be really careful, I'm not advocating for that for every single state and territory in Australia. I'm just sharing with you what my own experience has been.

But if we think about just teacher-led mat time, this paper has some really interesting contributions to make to our discussion. So Tominey and McClelland published a paper in 2011 where they described their research that involved a randomised controlled trial with 65 preschool children in Oregon in the United States. Half of the children participated in 16 small group playgroup sessions over eight weeks, twice a week of about 30 minutes long. So the games were simple, they were teacher-led and build around music, movement and rules, like a version of red light green light where the colours would change so that students had to override their automatic responses. Freeze dancing where they had to dance slowly to fast music or quickly to slow music. An orchestra game where children had to stop playing when the button moved and play when it was still. These were all simple games with no expensive resources. They were specifically designed to build attention, to encourage working memory use, and inhibited control in a playful social context.

Now the overall findings were modest, and the sample of 65 children is relatively small, and we need to be clear about that. But the interesting bit here is that for the children who began the year with the lowest self-regulation scores, those who came into that experience the least school-ready, participation in the playgroup sessions predicted significantly greater gains in behavioural self-regulation. And this bit is also really interesting, that those children showed significantly greater gains, not performance over their peers, but gains from their starting point in letter and word identification at a very basic level. Now, they didn't get any additional literacy instruction, the games didn't have any letters or words in them at all. It's important to note that the researchers do not claim that improved executive functioning caused the literacy gain. What they suggest is that children who developed stronger self-regulation were better placed to benefit from what was already happening in the environment around them.

So self-regulation appears to act as a kind of enabling condition for learning. It's not a direct cause of academic skill development. We cannot say that from the research. But the capacity to pay attention, practice holding information in your head, and inhibiting impulses may allow children to get more from good instruction. And this is a really meaningful distinction and one worth remembering when you're discussing this with colleagues.

When I reflect personally on this paper and think about the students who I have taught and who I'm seeing in classrooms still today, what I think about is this, if all of the instruction we provide is a tightly controlled EDI style of instruction across the school day, the children who arrive at school with the greatest developmental needs, those who we're trying to enact the best games for, the ones who need playful, structured, socially engaging experiences, for them, this work is not a luxury. This work could actually be part of the active ingredients that supports their capability and capacity to learn. So when we fill every minute of the school day with tightly paced, compliance-heavy instruction, we might be inadvertently removing one of the conditions that would most likely help these students to be able to engage well.

What kind of play? A note on the evidence

So let's talk about what kind of play we're talking about. Because research doesn't give a blanket endorsement of play in all its forms. The strongest evidence for the positive effects of play on executive function come from studies with preschool and kindergarten children, or Foundation children here in Australia, that consistently describe a particular kind of play. And it's worth mentioning that we don't have this evidence for Year 1 and 2, so we're talking specifically about preschool and Foundation. The features of the play that seemed to matter were role-based rules that required children to hold a framework in mind. Response inhibition where children had to stop an automatic behaviour and substitute a different one. Putting a little bit of desirable difficulty onto working memory loads so that the kids could practice holding things in mind. So rules were changed or complexity was increased over time. Switching between perspectives or rule sets and socially coordinated interactions with peer engagement, turn taking, and collaborative activity. Now, the circle time games in the Tominey and McClellan (2011) study had all of these features. And that's quite a different story from unstructured free play that doesn't have any clear cognitive demands or goals. So the active ingredients are the structure, the social coordination, and the adult scaffolding, not the playfulness alone. And that's quite affirming for me personally, I have to say, because thinking back to my time teaching kinder/preschool, when we had the dramatic play, there were three dress-ups available. And those dress-ups were the ones that related to the dramatic play that that station was focused on. It wasn't get out the dress-up box, put a fairy costume on, and run around the room aimlessly. So the message here is about being purposeful.

Free play alone is usually the least well-supported option for executive function gains. And the evidence does not support replacing explicit teaching with play. What it does support is purposeful, guided, adult-scaffolded interactions and experiences as part of a well-designed school day, particularly in the early years (Skene et al., 2022; Muir, Howard & Kervin, 2023; Takács & Kassai, 2019).

The Age-Appropriate Pedagogies framework

So let's swing back now to Age-Appropriate Pedagogies, that framework from the Queensland Department of Education that my school implemented as part of a trial when I worked in the Northern Territory. Now, it draws on a review of more than 100 research articles and 10 influential longitudinal studies into early childhood education. The key message from that framework is that learning in the early years needs range and balance. And what I love about this and that list of characteristics is that it's not a rejection of explicit teaching. It's also not saying that you could switch out explicit teaching with playful and agentic to teach literacy and you'll get the same outcomes. It's not what it's saying. What it is saying is that explicit teaching on its own, in one mode, for everything, all through the day, all through the year, is not sufficient. Effective instruction also reflects those other characteristics, particularly when it comes to the early years. And this is entirely compatible with explicit teaching. That is, if our version of explicit teaching is what is described by people like Anita Archer and Barack Rosenshine: teacher-led responsive that includes checking for understanding, scaffolding, breaking things down into small parts, and gradually releasing the heavy lifting that students do. In that context, something like the AAP framework gives us a practical lens for thinking about how we can engineer instruction for our students.

Three principles to take away

So there's three principles that I'd like you to take away. The first is dose and recovery. We are 100% keeping our explicit teacher-led instruction in its current form in place, particularly for literacy and numeracy. That is a not negotiable. But within the explicit teaching, we can protect recovery and interactive windows across the day. So in science, HASS, creative arts, health, ask how the practice and thinking phases of those lessons can include movement, dialogue, manipulation of materials and student choice done in a way that is not a distraction from the learning at hand. If you're a Resource Room member and you use our Text-based Units, you'll see drama to engage is a step in just about every single unit. That is intentional and not because we love acting, it's because it allows for high engagement and helps to engineer that range and balance of tasks as part of an explicit unit of work.

The second principle is that explicit can be active and really needs to be. Little people were not built to sit on the floor for 40 minutes, they were not built for passive seat work. They were not built to not move their bodies and not interact. Now I'm not saying teach your phonics via song and action, that's not what I'm saying, but within our teacher-led segments, we can include partner talk, choral responses, gestures, manipulatives, discussion, and particularly in the early years, the opportunity to stand, and sit, and move for a purpose. So if you've seen me teach a phonics lesson, you will see the students moving, from the floor to the desk, from the desk to the floor, all done in a really controlled way. Because little people were not made to sit still for extended periods of time.

The third principle is to treat behaviour as potential data about context. So when the fidgets strike, before you go straight to thinking about a child's attentional difficulties or the class dynamics, consider whether that moment is telling you something about contextual demand. The message isn't to throw the explicit teaching out, it's to think, how can I tweak it here in a way that doesn't detract from the impact of the instruction. So if students are struggling to focus in tight explicit lessons after lunch, look at how we can maintain the teacher-led approach while making things more active, hands-on, dialogic, or playful. And remember that this is in service of student learning because fun without learning, without a permanent change to long-term memory, is entertainment. And that is not what we're going for here.

The take-home message

One of the most useful things we can do as teachers of young children is embrace the power of "and". Explicit teaching and active engagement. Teacher-led and interactive. Structured and hands-on, and sometimes playful. The research does not support choosing one extreme over the other. It supports the thoughtful, intentional use of a range and balance of instructional characteristics within an overall commitment to purposeful, explicit instruction.

If we embrace this approach of "and", we can step away from those polarising arguments about which type of instruction is better in all circumstances. That argument is not helpful and doesn't actually reflect what the research tells us. We're not watering down high expectations. We're applying professional knowledge. And that, my friends, is something worth celebrating.

The final thing I want to say is what I hope happens as a result of teachers and leaders listening to this episode. What I don't want to happen is for teachers to share the episode and say, see, I told you we shouldn't be teaching explicitly in Foundation. I don't want this episode to be used as justification for moving away from explicit teaching outside literacy and numeracy. That is not what I'm saying. What I hope is this. If you've been worrying about the loss of early childhood practice in your early childhood classroom, that it's being replaced with heavily scripted, tightly controlled instruction across the day, and this doesn't feel right, I want you to feel affirmed. Just because explicit teaching walked into the door of our classroom and it was overdue, it doesn't mean that age-appropriate, active, interactive, hands-on learning experience should fly out the window.

Alright, everyone, that's it from me for this episode. Thank you so much for being a part of the Structured Literacy Podcast. I want you to keep your eyes and ears out because next week there's an exciting announcement coming from us. So be sure to tune in so you don't miss it. Until then, happy teaching, everyone. Bye.

References:

Blair, C., & Razza, R. P. (2007). Relating effortful control, executive function, and false belief understanding to emerging math and literacy ability in kindergarten. Child Development, 78(3), 647–663.

McClelland, M. M., Cameron, C. E., Connor, C. M., Farris, C. L., Jewkes, A. M., & Morrison, F. J. (2007). Links between behavioral regulation and preschoolers' literacy, vocabulary, and math skills. Developmental Psychology, 43(4), 947–959.

McCoy, D., Koepp, A. E., Jones, S. M., Bodrova, E., Leong, D. J., & Deaver, A. H. (2022). An observational approach for exploring variability in young children's regulation-related skills within classroom contexts. Developmental Science. https://doi.org/10.1111/desc.13250

Muir, R. A., Howard, S. J., & Kervin, L. K. (2023). Interventions and approaches targeting early self-regulation or executive functioning in preschools: A systematic review. Educational Psychology Review.

Queensland Department of Education and Training. (2016). Age-appropriate pedagogies for the early years of schooling: Foundation paper summary. Griffith University.

Skene, K., O'Farrelly, C., Byrne, E. M., Kirby, N., Stevens, E. C., & Ramchandani, P. G. (2022). Can guidance during play enhance children's learning and development in educational contexts? A systematic review and meta-analysis. Child Development, 93(4), 1162–1180.

Takács, Z. K., & Kassai, R. (2019). The efficacy of different interventions to foster children's executive function skills: A series of meta-analyses. Psychological Bulletin, 145(7), 653–697.

Tominey, S. L., & McClelland, M. M. (2011). Red light, purple light: Findings from a randomized trial using circle time games to improve behavioral self-regulation in preschool. Early Education and Development, 22(3), 489–519.

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