Some of the key messages of the EYFS which relate to self-regulation The enabling environment: how this supports growing self-regulation Does development happen naturally in a favourable environment? Characteristics of effective learning: Sustained Shared Thinking, Creating and Thinking Critically The key person approach and promoting children’s personal, social and emotional development Why it matters

1. Self-regulation and its
implications for best practice in
the EYFS
Dr Julian Grenier
Headteacher, Sheringham Nursery School and Children’s Centre
East London Partnership Teaching School Alliance
www.eleysp.co.uk

2. Overview of this part of the masterclass
• Some of the key messages of the EYFS which relate to self-regulation
• The enabling environment: how this supports growing self-regulation
• Does development happen naturally in a favourable environment?
• Characteristics of effective learning: Sustained Shared Thinking,
Creating and Thinking Critically
• The key person approach and promoting children’s personal, social
and emotional development
• Why it matters

4. The importance of the enabling environment
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DGls-Z4e6OI

5. Self-regulation and
autonomy
• Helping children to develop independence
and autonomy is one of the most common
aims practitioners propose for early
education.
• “For most practitioners the declared
priorities in the early years are on the
development of positive dispositions to
learning, self-confidence and
independence.”
• Researching Effective Pedagogy in the
Early Years
• Siraj-Blatchford et. al., 2002

6. How does autonomy develop?
• It’s not just about enabling
children to be free.
• It’s not just about “training”
• Smith (1999, p.86): “models of
development which emphasise
the child’s natural and
spontaneous development
from within or of development
as being shaped entirely
through learning processes
have been strongly criticised.”

7. Autonomy and teaching
• As the adult has more
knowledge and experience, the
encounter is necessarily
unequal; but it is understood
by the participants as a
process of giving more agency
to the child, rather in the
manner that Bruner (1995,
p.6) describes – “adults
treating the child as an agent
and bent on ‘teaching’ him to
be more so.”

8. Agency and autonomy
• “Learning and development are
facilitated by the participation of the
developing person in progressively
more complex patterns of reciprocal
activity with someone with whom that
person has developed a strong and
enduring emotional attachment and
when the balance of power gradually
shifts in favor of the developing
person.” (Bronfenbrenner, 1979, p. 60)

9. Examples of adults creating the conditions for,
and teaching, autonomy and creative thinking
Celebrating children’s
learning
www.eleysp.co.uk/celebrating-
childrens-learning

12. The EYFS: Creating and thinking critically
• A leading view from the 1970s
• “In simple terms, we cannot and have
rarely tried to demonstrate that there
are beneficial ‘effects’ of education. It
is a matter of common sense and
common faith that there are.”
• (Webb, 1974, p. 25).

13. Oxford Preschool Project
• “when the adult takes the child’s interest and
ideas as a focus and maintains the interaction
contingently rather than programmatically.”
Wood, McMahon and Cranstoun, 1980,
p.205
• adults tutor children to solve problems
through “scaffolding” or “‘controlling’ those
elements of the task that are initially beyond
the learner’s capacity”
• Wood, Bruner and Ross, 1976, p.90

14. Oxford Preschool Project: programmatic
approaches to learning
• a child bursts out with the comment that “my
Daddy’s dead, but I’ve got a grandfather and he’s
going to take me to school”, only for the
practitioner to reply “is he?” and then continue
“asking the children to recite in turn ‘it-is-
Wednesday-the-thirtieth-of-June-hot-and-
sunny’”.
• Garland and White, 1980, p. 53

15. The EPPE Project and Sustained
Shared Thinking (SST)
• “An episode in which two or more
individuals ‘work together’ in an
intellectual way to solve a problem,
clarify a concept, evaluate activities,
extend a narrative etc. Both parties must
contribute to the thinking and it must
develop and extend.”
• Researching Effective Pedagogy in the
Early Years (REPEY)
• Siraj-Blatchford et. al., 2002

16. SST
• Not necessary to be extended/long
conversation. Key thing is “a
contribution to thinking”
• Can be child-to-child.
• “May include ‘standing back’ and
allowing the child to explore,
familiarize, solve problems, and think
by themselves or in pairs as well as
intervening and supporting the child”
• Siraj et. al., 2015

17. The zone of proximal development
• “The distance between the
actual developmental level
as determined by
independent problem
solving and the level of
potential development as
determined through
problem solving under adult
guidance, or in collaboration
with more capable peers”
(Vygotsky, 1978, p. 86)

18. Guided play pedagogy (Dr Sveta Mayer, 2016)
1. Adult creates and manipulates a learning environment for child to play
within which will guide child’s learning experience.
2. Child self-initiates and self-directs their experience of learning within the
environment through play.
3. Adult observes, monitors and presses (prompts) child’s play and thereby
learning experiences when needed.
4. Adult co-plays with child or involves child-peer co-play and
communication as child interacts within both the learning and social
environment.
5. Adult extends or creates new learning environment for child to
spontaneously play within which will further guide child’s learning
experience.
(based on Weisberg et al, 2013; Wood, 2013)

19. In reviewing the literature for this paper, the strongest
theoretical resonances were found with Vygotsky (1978)
who described a process where an educator supports
children’s learning within their ‘zone of proximal
development’. But interactions of this sort have also
been described as “distributed cognitions” (Salomon,
1993), in terms of the pedagogy of ‘‘guided
participation’’ (Rogoff, Mistry, Göncü & Mosier, 1993),
and as ‘scaffolding’ (Wood, Bruner, & Ross, 1976). Similar
examples of participation and interaction also
characterise ’dialogic teaching’ (Alexander, 2004),
‘dialogic enquiry’ (Wells, 1999), ‘interthinking’ (Mercer
2000, p141), and ‘mutualist and dialectical pedagogy’
(Bruner, 1996, p57).
(Siraj-Blatchford, 2009)

22. The key person approach and promoting children’s
personal, social and emotional development
• As we saw earlier, the experience of attuned, warm care helps
children to regulate their emotions and, in turn, care for other
children in the group.
• Approaches rooted in the key person approach and the EYFS promote
what Kochanska, Coy and Murray (2001b) call “committed
compliance” as opposed to “situational compliance”

23. • “Situational compliance is a superficial
compliance with an adults wishes usually when
the adult is present whereas in committed
compliance the child has accepted or internalised
the external agenda and acts accordingly
irrespective of an adult’s presence. Kochanska et
al. contend that this committed compliance is
ultimately the more powerful since ‘the child
embraces the caregiver’s agenda, and thus
experiences compliance as self- generated and
not interfering with striving for autonomy’ and is
therefore more likely to lead to ‘voluntary,
thoughtful adaptive and effective self-regulation’.
(p. 1008)”
• Evangelou et al. (2009)

24. …although
• “…It is important to note, as Schaffer (2006, p.200) points out, that
some degree of non- compliance may also be important in
development, particularly around the second year of life when the
children are learning to assert their own autonomy and
independence.”
• Evangelou et al. (2009)

25. Not just behaviour
management

26. Why are these approaches so important?
• “As Snow, Tabors & Dickinson, (2001) have shown, extended
discourse and exposure to rich vocabulary in the home is a strong
predictor of early elementary language and literacy growth and as I
have argued elsewhere (Siraj-Blatchford, 2009), these practices are
ubiquitous in middle class, western family contexts, but they can’t be
taken for granted elsewhere. The EPPE research (Siraj-Blatchford &
Sylva, 2004) provides only one of the most recent contributions to a
growing body of evidence that shows that there are many
disadvantaged children in even the wealthiest of countries that
deserve our very best pedagogical efforts when they attend pre-
school settings.”
• (Siraj-Blatchford, 2009)