By Charlotte Whalley, Operations Manager at the Early Years Alliance
Piaget stated in his writings that, “Play is the work of children”.
But if the child is at work while playing where does the adult fit in?
Children may play alone, in one sense, but they do not do it in a vacuum.
Learning through play, and the quality experiences and opportunities for this, are created and nurtured when adults are involved in the process.
This pedagogy takes on various forms and the role of the adult may differ throughout the changing ages and stages of child development.
Let’s explore what roles an adult may take on as they support children to learn through play
The Facilitator
The facilitator enables play to happen. They organise the environment, provide the resources, adapt the opportunities so that there is differentiation for each child, and are on hand to respond to the needs of the child.
The adult’s role is in constant flux here as they become more or less involved in the play, as determined by the interaction with and reactions of the child.
As suggested in , the non-statutory guidance for the Early Years Foundation Stage 2021, seven features of effective practice discuss the pedagogy of helping children to learn.
This includes the statement that “practitioners carefully organise enabling environments for high-quality play. Sometimes, they make time and space available for children to invent their own play. Sometimes, they join in to sensitively support and extend children’s learning."
The information that we can source from Development Matters 2020 goes on to suggest that the role of the adult should be to facilitate guided work for children in a group or individually, and also to provide a well-planned learning environment, both indoors and outdoors.
Observation plays a big part in facilitating learning through play. Our observations determine the journey and action of the adult in their facilitation.
The Scaffolder
The scaffolder focuses on supporting the development of emerging skills. Vygotsky (1978) encourages us to recognise and respond to the ‘zone of proximal development’. Scaffolding supports a child in their acquisition of skill from not being able to complete a task, to completing it with help, to eventually completing it on their own.
The role description for scaffolding includes techniques such as offering help, modelling, and prompting.
Sustained shared thinking derives from scaffolding and the role of the adult here is to engage in the child’s play and to work with the child to develop and extend their thinking and learning.
This is a highly skilled position to get to and involves working together to solve problems, clarify concepts, evaluate activities, and extend a narrative.
The Teacher
°ϲʹ’s definition of teaching is an excellent description of this role, mainly because if practitioners are confident and competent in the criteria given by °ϲʹ then practice should be heading towards an outstanding level of quality.
‘Teaching in the early years should not be taken to imply a “top down” or formal way of working. It is a broad term that covers the many different ways in which adults help young children learn. It includes their interactions with children during planned and child-initiated play and activities: communicating and modelling language, showing, explaining, demonstrating, exploring ideas, encouraging, questioning, recalling, providing a narrative for what they are doing, facilitating and setting challenges.’
Here we can pick out the role descriptors in which °ϲʹ recommend for an early years’ practitioner, including communicating and modelling language which is embedded very much within the Education Inspection Framework as well as the revised Educational Programmes (EYFS 2021).
The description given for this role within the handbook goes on to reinforce the notion of providing enabling environments, differentiation, and following children’s interests.
So, to summarise, it is evident that we can draw information about what the role of the adult should be in supporting children’s learning through play from child phycologists, theorist and documentation which shapes our sector.
Ultimately it is clear that the role of the adult is paramount in so many ways and is an ever-evolving role as we learn more and more about child development.
References
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— Look out for daily blogs throughout our National Week of Play, as we explore different aspects of play and its benefits, with plenty of ideas on how to support play in the early years along the way.
— And if you want a free resource pack with more ideas, visit our National Week of Play page, register via the online form and you'll get a link to the resource pack. Or click on the button below...
