Every day, early years practitioners engage in interactions with young children that have the potential to enhance their learning. However, such is the temptation to squeeze every teaching moment out of each interaction that practitioners often interrupt children’s thinking and consequently interfere with their learning.
This course, led by Early Years Advisor Julie Fisher, will examine the knowledge, timing and sensitivity necessary to interact effectively and, as a consequence, build important relationships and enhance children’s well-being and motivation to communicate.

Throughout the day Julie’s own research will be woven with expectations from the EYFS programmes of study for Communication and Language in order for delegates to reflect on different ways they might extend and enhance children’s language and communication through natural, genuine, every day conversations. Through the use of video footage, delegates will have a number of opportunities to observe other practitioners engaged in interactions, both indoors and outdoors, and in both adult-led and child-led situations. There will be ample time for discussion and reflection on what has been seen, ultimately coming to personal decisions about how best to tune in to children’s current thinking and respond in ways that are of benefit to their learning and development.

Target Audience: EYFS and KS1 teachers, practitioners and leaders

Training objectives

• To clarify why effective interactions are key to children’s confidence, language and skills of communication
• To examine the educator behaviours that lead to effective interactions
• To clarify the difference in the nature of interactions in different learning scenarios
• To offer delegates a range of strategies for building warm, trusting relationships and enhancing language and skills of communication.

Learning outcomes

• Be clear why talking to – and listening to – children matters so much
• Know how to best achieve ‘back and forth’ interactions
• Clarify who ‘leads the learning?’ and how this alters their role in an interaction
• Explain how and why interactions outdoors differ from those indoors
• Explain the importance of timing in achieving effective interactions
• Have a range of strategies extend, enhance and enrich children’s language
• Understand how questioning can inhibit thinking – and have strategies for what to do instead
• Articulate when, whether and why an interaction becomes interference.

Julie Fisher is an independent Early Years Adviser and Visiting Professor of Early Childhood Education at Oxford Brookes University. She held the post of Early Years Adviser in Oxfordshire for 11 years, before which she was lecturer in early childhood education at the University of Reading. She has taught children from 3 to 12 years and has been headteacher of two urban, multi-cultural schools. To underpin her consultancy work, Julie draws on her own research projects which engage her in constant contact with practitioners and children in both schools and settings.