Planning and Assessment Resources for Early Childhood Educators

What is intentional teaching?

Intentional Teaching is where early childhood educators work purposely and deliberately. Therefore, it begins with creating specific goals for each child - then adapting these as the child progresses. The aim is to identify children’s strengths and needs, engage their interests, and help them think creatively.

Intentional teaching practices are both planned and spontaneous. Learning opportunities can emerge through planned activities, or via child-initiated responses. It is the role of early childhood teachers to encourage children when these situations arise. 

The intentional teaching approach places early childhood teachers as active participants in the learning process.

Intentional teaching involves incorporating a variety of teaching practices to encourage learning. These practices and some examples of intentional teaching include:

• Intentional curriculum design – Including opportunities for literacy and numeracy in activities. 
• Intentional pedagogies – Incorporating a range of play opportunities, from free play to adult-guided experiences. 
• Intentional interactions – Setting up activities with no expectations of the results to reward creativity. 
• Intentional environments – Placing materials to create learning experiences.  
• Intentional assessments – Informal assessments where you observe, listen to and interact with children as they do activities. 

Why is effective planning important?

Effective planning is important because, “Planning is at the heart of curriculum and program implementation in early childhood settings.” This is from Bridie Raban’s Assessment for Learning.

Planning involves deliberate decision-making about the priorities for learning. The priorities need to align with the individual child’s needs, as well as the Early Years Learning Framework (EYLF). Children need to be given opportunities to develop the EYLF Learning Outcomes. Planning ensures they do so.

Additionally, effective planning is important because it:

• Prepares and organises educators for each day’s activities, for example, are there enough floorbooks? 
• Provides documentation of what an ECE teacher is doing, as well as how and why. This makes their decisions clear to parents, families and other colleagues. 
• Ensures early childhood educators are responsive to each child. It allows them to individualise activities to meet children’s capabilities, culture and dispositions.  
• Provides documentation for ECE teachers to look back on for reflective purposes.    

What is reflective practice?

As described in the EYLF, reflection is when teachers think intentionally about their practices with specific goals or problems in mind.

Liz Rouse’s Reflective Practice traces reflective practice back to the early 20th century in the work of John Dewey. Dewey saw reflective thinking as “being purposeful and active” when thinking about a problem, the first step in reflection. 

Additionally, reflection is a process by which we use inquiry to find a solution to a problem. Here the search for the solution is organised, structured and active.

Once a solution is found, the process does not end. The knowledge from the inquiry needs to be applied to the early childhood setting. 

Following the change, there should be further observation and reflection on its impact on children’s learning or teacher practice. This leads to a never-ending cycle – the reflective action cycle.