What is intentional teaching?

Learning and teaching in early childhood involve complex interactions between teachers, children, contexts and content. Intentional teaching approaches recognise that teachers have a large role to play in orchestrating these interactions in order to bring about learning for children.

Intentional teaching involves constantly thinking about what you are doing as a teacher and how it will support or enable children’s development and learning. It requires an awareness of, and being deliberate, thoughtful, considered and purposeful in, your teaching behaviours. It means actively planning and acting with specific goals or outcomes for children’s learning in mind so that you can select the most appropriate ways to interact and extend children’s thinking and development. It involves being intentional across all decision-making areas including curriculum, relationships, and administrative responsibilities.

Being intentional originates in your aspirations for children – knowing what valued learning you are aiming for children to achieve. It then requires that you be deliberate in your teaching to support or scaffold children towards those learning outcomes.

Intentional teaching is a dynamic process of decision-making, involving both planned experiences and spontaneous responses to children’s emerging inquiries. Teaching actions and interactions must be constantly adjusted to adapt to children’s responses and current level of competence in ways that promote teachers’ aspirations and learning intentions.

Intentional teachers need a range of pedagogical strategies, an understanding of how children learn, and knowledge of children’s individual learning capabilities and processes. Teachers also need to recognise children’s intentions and be in tune with their interests so that curriculum is co-constructed rather than teacher-determined. Co-construction involves more than just learning alongside and from children – it requires teachers to support children with deep-level conversations to critique understandings and develop a range of skills for inquiry and critical and creative thinking.

Intentional teachers might:

• sensitively observe children and intentionally plan to deepen, extend and sustain children’s interests through provocations, tools and resources, documentation and dialogue
• organise and maintain the physical environment to ensure access to appropriate resources and optimal support for positive experiences
• create specific challenges and plan interactions designed to extend children’s capabilities and higher-order thinking skills
• participate in child-initiated play activities and develop complex imaginative role play narratives with children
• model and demonstrate skills as well as providing specific direction or instruction

However, developing a more intentional role should not be interpreted as requiring didactic techniques, nor should teachers neglect to focus on children’s learning and their interests in favour of teachers’ desired outcomes.

How does intentional teaching fit with teaching theories and philosophies?

Both developmental and constructivist approaches to early childhood curriculum emphasise teachers’ intentionality in providing an environment appropriate to the child’s current cognitive level that will facilitate learning and natural development. These approaches to early childhood education are often labelled ‘child-centred’ and are dominated by principles of freedom, children’s interests and learning through play. While not entirely incompatible with intentional teaching, these approaches position the teacher as facilitative, non-directive and reactive, focused mainly on establishing and maintaining the learning environment, which makes teachers and teaching less visible.

Sociocultural theory emphasises children’s cognitive activity occurring through social interaction with more knowledgeable adults and peers who are directly engaged in and guide the process of the construction of new understandings through participation in shared activities, including play. These approaches re-position teachers from a non-directive role to include intentional teaching and active involvement in children’s play. While a constructivist or developmental perspective might emphasise children’s free play as a means of developing abilities, sociocultural theory considers that children’s interests, abilities, thinking, skills, and knowledge, as expressed through child-initiated play, emerge as a result of stimulation by the people, places and things in their communities.

When quality play-based learning is considered to involve social relationships, interactions, and modelling, intentional teaching can be balanced with child-centred and play-based environments in which children are perceived as intentional learners. Children need opportunities to initiate activities and develop their own interests, but teachers are not passive observers. Instead, teachers can consider teaching to be a legitimate part of their professional practice as they support children to explore and extend their interests and learning experiences.

Why should I adopt intentional teaching?

Early childhood teachers have over 1000 interactions with children during a day, many of which are spontaneous and unplanned. Being intentional can help teachers make the most of these interactions. International and local research finds that sustained, reflective interactions are important for promoting increased learning for young children. Children are found to be engaged in more complex cognitive activities and effective learning when they play with and have positive social interactions with teachers.

Intentional teaching techniques such as scaffolding and extending children’s learning are found to contribute to greater learning and positive outcomes for children. A key characteristic of quality early childhood settings associated with higher outcomes for children in the UK is the prevalence of high quality social and learning exchanges between teachers and children. These exchanges involve sustained shared thinking, scaffolding, explaining, questioning, modelling and extending children’s ideas and activities, teachers’ active involvement in children’s play, and planning of challenging activities. In settings in which children’s achievement is lower, staff are found to spend most of their time monitoring and observing children’s play rather than interacting with children.

Well-resourced free play is not always found to be a sufficient condition for learning: for example, research finds that opportunities for free exploration within a richly resourced environment do not lead to sustained and meaningful encounters that support learning. A ‘hands off’ or laissez-faire approach in relation to free play, which relies solely on children taking the lead in their own learning and places responsibility for learning progress on children, can result in missed teaching and learning opportunities.

The relationship between assessment and intentional teaching

Effective assessment practice is hugely important in supporting children to achieve positive outcomes because effective assessment practice is as much about informing teachers’ intentional actions so that they best support learning, as it is about making judgements about children’s achievements. Assessment in the early childhood context is about figuring out the meaning of children’s play and learning in order to take appropriate and intentional action to support it. With knowledge of children’s learning progress, and clear goals for their development, intentional teachers help children make the most of the varied opportunities and experiences that their settings and programmes have to offer through techniques such as active involvement in play, questioning, scaffolding, and co-constructed and sustained conversations involving shared thinking. Research suggests that when teachers use these kind of intentional teaching strategies, children make more progress. Ultimately, the quality and responsiveness of our intentional teaching depends on the quality of our assessment of children’s play and learning. Assessment can help us with the following aspects of intentional teaching:

• planning interactions and activities with children that are meaningful and responsive to their current learning and interest
• evaluating and improving our pedagogies, environments and teaching interactions
• sharing information about children’s learning with families to enable families to effectively participate in supporting children’s ongoing learning

In this course we’re going to look at how we use assessment for all of these functions. We will also focus on a particular type of assessment: formative assessment. Formative assessment is the kind of assessment activity that informs the next steps for teachers to support children’s learning, such as planning and providing activities, interactions and environments that will extend children’s learning. In contrast, summative assessment is about ‘summing up’ a child’s current achievements, skills and knowledge at a specific point of time, and might be useful, for example, at school entry. However, summative assessment is much less useful for informing subsequent teaching. Rather than assessment of learning, assessment should be for learning, for informing and improving the effectiveness of subsequent learning and teaching.

Formative assessment is going on all the time as we observe and interact with children. It is involved when we respond in the moment to something we hear the child say or see them do, as well as when we record our observations and reflect on them through the format of a learning story. Formative assessment is best understood as including the range of ways, informal and formal, in which we observe children’s learning, try to interpret and understand what is happening for the child, and then put that understanding to good use by being intentional in our teaching and planning. 

In this course, we’re going to be looking at formative assessment in a more formal sense, involving reflection and analysis in relation to documented observations. We will provide a few different tools and strategies that you might use to collect assessment information about children and their learning, and then explore how you might put these together within written assessments such as learning stories and other forms of pedagogical documentation used to inform learning and teaching. The learning story is the tool for documenting assessment practice that we are going to use in this course, although the skills we employ for writing a learning story can be applied to all kinds of written and reflective forms of pedagogical documentation. Not all assessment is formal (in fact, much is informal assessment that occurs in the moment when you play and learn alongside children) and not every recorded assessment needs to be in the format of a learning story. However, learning stories are a method of assessment recognised by both the Ministry of Education and the Education Review Office.