Collins – conversations with children

So my priority for early years educators is the same as it is for all educators in this regard, and it’s about constantly improving the conversations we have with children. It’s always about the conversations and the relationships, that is the heart and soul of the matter. How do I construct my conversations with children that encourage them to progress, that support them to think harder because that’s when you learn, to make – to take the extra step, to trust me and risk a new step into the – you feel like from the known to the unknown. So it’s always about improving constantly my capacity or our capacity to have better learning conversations with our children. 

I think the link between better conversations, sustained shared thinking is very strong and profound. We, in England, we’re increasingly talking about the notion of dialogic discourse with our children at all ages. How do we create conversations which by the way I’m supporting and encouraging children are through the conversation moving thinking forward, creating new ways of thinking and new ideas of being constructed on the run? 

So it’s not seen as a conversation that confirms or a conversation that asks you to describe or a conversation that gives you an instruction to do the next thing. It’s actually the conversation that is the learning. And I think there’s much more we can do in that. It does mean that you have to step back as a teacher from constantly believing that the task is to keep everyone on task. The task is the management of the space.  

That is a big bit of it but actually it’s when the opportunity comes at the right times really looking at something in the eye with a child and really having a meaningful authentic conversation together about it. That’s a hard thing to do by the way. It’s a really difficult challenge. And it’s not talking more, that’s not the same as using your language to ask children to elaborate, exemplify, move their thinking forward, create new connections, these are very difficult prompting conversations as adults as well as with children. 

I think we underestimate what children’s understanding is all the time. And the consequence of that is that they begin to shut down and give us what they think we want to hear. They think we want too often short low level utterances and therefore that’s what they give us. Because if they dare to take a risk and go further in conversations they can be cut off, they can be reminded that actually that isn’t what we’re talking about, we’re talking about this narrow thing here. 

I think we miss out on genuine authentic conversations which enrich all our lives. But we, as teachers, miss out on the opportunity to, through the talk, help deal with the misconception, move the child on, go deeper, make a new connection. I think it’s a very efficient way of teaching as well to use conversations. And I wish kind of I wish I could do it better and constantly working on that which I think we all should.