Jenkins – training for cognitive sensitivity

We’ve been working on – in childcare centres throughout a number of different childcare centres in Toronto. We have a coaching model. We do some didactic teaching, a small amount of didactic teaching that we do for the early childhood educators.  But we’re also going to childcare centres and we have coaches who go in and then try and improve by showing, by videotaping how the educators are being with and talking with the kids, how they’re building on their interest. We show those videos back to them and we try and improve their practice by really a greater awareness on their part of how they’re interacting with the kids.  

We’re on our second wave of intervention and so we’re just tracking all of the educators at the moment. But I think what is critical in this – when we’ve looked at a lot of longitudinal data on this process what is critical is about how people – the effect on children’s language. So, I think the issue of how you watch what the child is interested in, build on that. So, you follow a child’s initiation, you build on that. The child then gives you something back. You build on that. All of that turn taking in the context of what the child is really interested in seems to have an important effect on that early language development, and that early language development in turn is important for executive function, children’s reading, their theory of mind. So, the language itself seems to be a critical organizer early on in the children’s development for these skills that are totally important to us later on around the kid’s ability to self-regulate and learn.  

We have this very simple measure that we’ve been able to develop and it’s a good sort of scientific measure. We’ve been able to look at whole families and how whole families contribute to the development of this and that – so, you know, we get effects of fathers, we get effects of mothers, we get effects of siblings and I think what’s important about that is it’s really about an enculturation process.  

So, you have everyone in the family doing it and I think cognitively for the child it makes it much easier to build up that skill themselves. And so, I’m thinking that the same thing will be operating in childcare centres. The more teachers around you, the more children around you who are able to pick up on what you’re thinking about and looking at and interested in and respond appropriately, I think the more that builds the cognitive structure for the skill.  

But the context of the childcare is you have three or four children there and you’re trying to have the educator sensitive to all of those kids and lift all of those kids. So, we’ve been thinking about how you do that and how you get the kids not being rivalrous or difficult with one another, how you support the individuality of each kid and what they have to offer to the group.