“It has to work fast and with assurance”: Challenges in implementing assessment of children’s learning and well-being in one preschool

Abstract

The article describes a collaborative action-research process conducted in a preschool setting in Iceland. The study is part of a larger project, Assessment of Children’s Learning and Well-being in Preschools, conducted in collaboration with the Center for Research in Early Childhood Education (RannUng) at the University of Iceland and the five neighbouring municipalities of Reykjavík. Participants in this section of the study were three preschool teachers working with children aged five to six years, along with the school’s headmaster and the authors of this article.

According to the Icelandic National Curriculum for Preschools, teachers in each preschool shall develop a variety of methods to gather information on children’s learning and well-being, focusing on their abilities, strengths and interests. The aim of the study was to support the preschool teachers in their first steps of developing their documentation methods through learning stories or pedagogical documentation. The study also sheds light on the preschool teachers’ ideas as to what assessment is, what kind or kinds of documentation should be conducted in preschools and what is important to document and assess in children’s daily activities in the preschool. The data generation was in the form of individual interviews and group conversations over the course of one school year.

The participants were introduced to the learning stories approach and pedagogical documentation, as a way to gain insight into the social and emotional factors of learning by focusing on the learning taking place as children construct knowledge when participating in play and creative activities. The participants perceived that the learning stories approach was more difficult to comprehend in the beginning, so they decided to start their journey with pedagogical documentation.

The findings show that, in the beginning, the participants’ ideas about the assessment of children’s learning and well-being were unclear. The teachers thought that social competence and good communication skills should be the focus of preschool children’s learning. The documentation methods they were using, by contrast, were focused mostly on children’s language development. The preschool teachers tried various things to find their rhythm regarding pedagogical documentation. They tried documenting at different times during the day, in small and large groups of children, and figuring out how much they could write down of what the children were doing and saying during their play. In the process of documenting children’s learning and well-being the participants realised that the same approach would not fit them all. Therefore, some documentation was made with the help of technology and other aspects were handwritten.

Despite their various attempts to find their rhythm, the challenges to teachers of implementing pedagogical documentation were considerable. The participants’ experience was that the structure of pedagogical documentation was unclear, for example, what should be written and how the documentation should be presented. They all agreed that it in order for them to be able to make pedagogical documentation of children’s learning and well-being the documentation process had to work fast and with assurance. They felt they did not have enough time to document and reflect together with other teachers. The participants observed that documenting children’s learning and well-being was just one more task they had to do during the day, and they did not see the purpose of it. Therefore, it was difficult to integrate documentation into the daily life of the preschool. The analysis of data in this research reveals that a significant reason why integration of pedagogical documentation was so difficult relates to the fact that the preschool teachers and staff did not have enough time ? or take enough time ? to learn new ways of working.

A few pedagogical documentations were made during the research process. However, the influence of the study was more subjective, with the teachers changing their views regarding children’s learning and well-being in the preschool. There were significantly altered attitudes towards children’s play and how the play process could be useful for assessing children’s social competence and communication skills. Notable changes were also seen in how the participants perceived children and the ways in which children communicated with each other.

These findings suggest that an attitudinal transformation is needed regarding methods of assessing and documenting children’s learning and well-being if Icelandic preschools are to fulfil the conditions set by the Icelandic National Curriculum for Preschools.