Infants & Toddlers

An online course from The Education Hub

This is the personal workbook of

Below are your notes and reflections from Part 1: Core principles for infant and toddler pedagogy

Notes on your focus child

What do you know about this child? How would you describe your relationship with the child and with the family?

Notes and reflections from ‘How do you view babies?’

When you reflect on your current pedagogical practices, which image of the infant or toddler do you think informs them? What might other images offer you and your practice? Which image of the infant or toddler do you think would be most empowering for the child?

Notes on What matters in infant and toddler pedagogy?

Key terms and concepts:

Notes and reflections from ‘A portrait of an infant/toddler-caregiver relationship’

How do the strategies that Mia uses to build a relationship with Cole relate to the principles explained in the reading? Can you see examples of a calm and unhurried environment, listening, presence, responsiveness, reciprocity, imitation, and joint attention or intersubjectivity in this portrait?

Relate your learning to practice

Drawing again on the ideas presented in the previous reading, in this activity we want you to cultivate (or further enhance your skills in) the art of presence. Remember that presence means both physical and emotional presence, and the total orientation of your attention towards the child and what they are experiencing. It requires the careful use of eye contact and body language, as well as responsiveness to the child’s cues (you might choose to review the sections of the reading on listening, responsiveness, reciprocity, imitation and joint attention/intersubjectivity which can help you to be fully present). This attentiveness should be akin to engrossment: you should be still and quiet, not trying to do something else at the same time (so it will be important to choose an appropriate time to practise this skill). After your practice, make some notes in response to the following reflective questions:

What kind of atmosphere does being present create for you, the child, the room? How does this principle (presence) come together with the other principles in the reading? Did you find yourself using other pedagogical strategies mentioned in the readings more when you are present?

Below are your notes and reflections from Part 2: Responsiveness

Notes and reflections from ‘Developing intersubjectivity with infants and toddlers’

Key points from Developing intersubjectivity with infants and toddlers Think about a time when you have experienced intersubjectivity with a friend or family member, a time when you have felt really understood by, connected to, and heard by another person. What things did they do that made you feel that way? Can you translate some of the actions you identify into appropriate actions that would make an infant or toddler feel cared about, supported and understood?

Notes and reflections from ‘An introduction to serve and return’

Key points from An introduction to serve and return What factors do you think might impact on your ability to engage in uninterrupted moments with infants and toddlers in which you can give your full attention to watching, listening and responding to a child? What can you personally do to improve this?

Relate your learning to practice

In Part 1, you chose a focus child with whom you will work on all of the following activities. This week we want you to try out a serve and return interaction with your focus child. It is a good idea to ask your critical friend to video this so you can reflect on your success. Consider the following reflective questions, and seek your critical friend’s perspective too: 

How did you feel during the interaction? How easy did you find it to ‘catch’ and respond to the child’s serves? Did you achieve moments of intersubjectivity? How do you know? How does this interactional style help you to enact the key principles for effective infant-toddler pedagogy? (You may like to revisit these in our reading from Part 1, What matters in infant and toddler pedagogy?)

Below are your notes and reflections from Part 3: Communication

Notes and reflections from ‘Why you must talk to infants and toddlers’

Key points from Why you must talk to infants and toddlers How can you reconcile the idea of providing children with lots of language with the principle of quiet and calm environments that we learned in Part 1 is so important for infants and toddlers? In a similar vein, you might like to reflect on your thoughts on the use of parentese or baby talk in interactions with infants and toddlers. Can this be used respectfully and in a calm manner, do you think? (Hint: it might be important to define the style of parentese we want to use with infants and toddlers).

Notes and reflections from ‘supporting infants and toddlers to develop social skills’

Key points from Supporting infants and toddlers to develop social skills With a focus on providing infants and toddlers with calm environments, and on being emotionally available for them, even when they are dealing with difficult emotions themselves, how do you keep yourself emotionally grounded? It is incredibly important for infant and toddler teachers to be highly aware of their own emotional state, emotional triggers, and to have tools for managing emotions. How do you deal with emotions as they come up for you, such as when dealing with emotionally-charged situations such as a toddler’s peer conflict, or an infant’s incessant crying? How might you develop your self-awareness and reflection to improve your skills in this area so that you can be truly emotionally available and present to the children in your care?

Relate your learning to practice

Try out one of the ideas below for increasing your language input to your focus child, and then answer the reflective questions that follow. You could:

1. Practice talking through a routine or process, or
2. Practice commentating on children’s play, or 
3. Practice picking up on and adding language when children ‘serve’.

Try to think about the quantity and the quality of the language you offer. If you have the opportunity to record your conversation with the child (using audio or video), it will make it easier to reflect on the quantity and quality of your language input to the child, and you might also notice the more subtle responses that the child makes. Again, share your video and your reflection with your critical friend and see what they think. 

How do you feel using this strategy? For example, does using language this way feel awkward or natural? How does the child respond? What do you think about the quantity of talk you are offering? Could you ever talk too much? How would you know? What quality was the talk you provided?

When we think about supporting communication, we must remember that learning to communicate involves so much more than learning to use language. To collaborate with others in ways that enable children to share meanings and understandings requires a whole host of personal, emotional and social skills. Infants and toddlers are learning social and emotional skills alongside language as they learn to be effective communicators.

Below are your notes and reflections from Part 4: Caregiving

Reflections from ‘Developing respectful relations with infants and toddlers

What other practices in your centre, or in wider society, do you think are (unintentionally) belittling or disempowering for infants and toddlers? Have you ever noted a practice for interacting with or handling infants and toddlers that has made you feel uncomfortable? You might like to consider particular items of baby equipment such as certain sleep aids, baby seats or toys, or the way that you have observed other people respond to babies.

Notes from eight features of quality caregiving for infants and toddlers

Jot down the eight features of quality caregiving for infants and toddlers

Notes from The importance of one-to-one caregiving routines in infant and toddler care

Alex makes an interesting point about the ‘fundamentals’ of a caregiving moment that are the same for every child. What do you think these are?

Relate your learning to practice

In this part of the course, we focus on the quality of your caregiving moments with your focus child. Choose a caregiving moment and have your critical friend either observe or video the moment. You might choose to focus on a particular aspect of the interaction: for example, you might focus on a quality such as attentive responsiveness or partnership, or on how you might use the caregiving moment as a learning moment. Answer the following questions in a reflective conversation with your critical friend: 

What cues did you notice? Were there things you missed? (Video can often reveal these!) How responsive were you? How effective were you in gaining the child’s cooperation? In what ways did you empower the child with agency in their own care? What could you have done differently?

Repeat this exercise with the same child later in the week, using your reflective discussion with your critical friend as a source of professional learning.

Are you able to improve the quality of your caregiving interaction, and in what ways?

Below are your notes and reflections from Part 5: Play

Notes and reflections from What is play and why is it important for learning? and the two example videos of Jack, and William and Ollie.

Look again at the reading and the list of valued learning that play in early childhood promotes (benefits for wellbeing, academic/cognitive benefits, social and emotional benefits, and physical benefits), and then go back to each video.

Can you make a list of valued learning outcomes that the children are achieving through their play? What role do you think their teachers took in this play?

Notes and reflections from Materials for play: Why open-ended loose parts are important and the example video of Mila.

What materials had been collected and presented to Mila? Why do you think that was – what affordances do they have for play and experimentation? In what ways does Mila manipulate, combine and arrange them? What sort of concepts does this involve?

Notes and reflections from The importance of play for infants and toddlers.

If teachers are not interrupting play, or ‘filling the silence’ with words, how do teachers ensure a rich language environment for children and time for serve-and-return interactions? Where do these important aspects of pedagogy fit?

Relate your learning to practice

Drawing on the ideas from this part of the course, prepare a treasure basket or some open-ended loose part resources for play. Observe, interact when appropriate (remember to give children space to think and explore, but also to be waiting for the serve for you to return – this is a perfect place to practice these interactions) and then answer the following reflective questions. You could use these observations and reflections as a basis for a learning story.

What do you think your focus child was thinking about as they manipulated the materials? What patterns of play/movement did you observe? What working theories and dispositions might have inspired the play/movement? What kinds of materials might you offer next and why?

Below are your notes and reflections from Part 6: Movement

Notes and reflections from How infants and toddlers develop movement skills.

Key points from How infants and toddlers develop movement skills Thinking about the principles of effective pedagogy that we examined in Part 1, what do you think are the important components of supporting infant’s and toddler’s motor skill development?

Notes from the videos of infants on the move, showcasing their physical skills

Can you see examples of children developing postural control? What are some of the challenges that children have to manage in each sequence?

Notes from the two videos show the variety of movement skill

Note down the types of movement you observed in these videos, and anything else you think might be going on for these children.

In these videos you will have noticed that the children are engaging in activities that are not principally focused on movement skills, but on exploring objects, resources, spaces and other people.

How important do you think resources and environments are in promoting infants’ and toddlers’ exploration of movement? How can you intentionally support children’s physical development through the environment you provide?

Relate your learning to practice

Observe your focus child at play, focusing particularly on movement (again, it would be a good idea to record this on video so that you can revisit it).

Write a reflective note about the skills observed.

Share the video with your critical friend and see what movement skills they notice. After you compare your observations, you might discuss with your critical friend the sort of opportunities the child needs to continue to practise and refine these movements.

You may like to make notes here:

You could develop these notes into a learning story, or upload the video onto your assessment platform with an assessment note.

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Below are your notes and reflections from Part 7: Approaches to infant and toddler care and education

Notes and reflection on The Pikler/Resources for Infant Educarers approach 

Where do you see aspects of difference between the research-based principles and the Pikler/RIETM approach? Note how caregiving and play moments have different levels of teacher involvement. What do you think about this?

Several features of the Pikler/RIE^TM approach, including the promotion of attachment, attunement to the child, joint attention and responsiveness, align with the broad principles for infant-toddler pedagogy that we introduced in Part 1. As we know, research supports the value of attachment between infants and their caregivers and the value of joint attention and serve-and-return interactions. It also confirms the capacity of infants and toddlers to construct their own learning. 

However, as the Pikler/RIE™ approach to infant and toddler care was developed for a Hungarian orphanage, and adapted for parent and toddler groups in the United States, it was not specifically designed for infant and toddler group care situations, and nor is it responsive to the context of bicultural, and increasingly multicultural, Aotearoa New Zealand. Our next reading explores a more local set of perspectives on infant and toddler care and education.

Notes and reflections on Māori and Pasifika cultural perspectives on infant-toddler care

Think carefully about how culturally specific the practices and pedagogies you employ for infants and toddlers are.

What are the benefits of being aware of different cultural strategies and preferences, and how can you accommodate these whilst still maintaining quality infant and toddler care and education principles?

Notes and reflections on The importance of Māori approaches to infant and toddler care

What might alternative practices for infant and toddler care and education offer you and the children in your care?

You might focus here on communal caregiving, or on the practice of carrying babies, or a stronger focus on children as cultural beings, as described in the video.

Relate learning to practice

As we come to the final parts of the course, we’d like you to spend some time gathering your thoughts about what you’ve learned about your focus child from your sensitive and careful observations of and interactions with them. What have you learned, specifically, about:

their ‘serves’, and what sort of ‘return’ they like (Part 2)? their response to your language input (Part 3)? their caregiving experiences, needs and preferences (Part 4)? their exploration in play and their current interests, urges, schema or working theories (Part 5)? their current and emerging movement skills and abilities (Part 6)?

At the beginning of the course, you wrote a list of what you already knew about this child.

How has this cycle of observation and interaction with them as your focus child supported you to get to know them better? How has it changed your relationship with them? How important is it to make time for these observations and interactions? Finally, how could you make changes to your current practices and routines to do more of this?

Below are your notes and reflections from Part 8: Working with families and colleagues for the best infant and toddler care

Notes and reflections about Partnership with families

Look again at the list above about family expectations about their relationships with teachers, and ask yourself how you currently provide for these needs.

How could you find out? What might you need to change?

Notes from What is parent partnership?

Key points from What is parent partnership?

Notes and reflections from Principles for partnership: A four-step approach

Key points about parent partnerships:

There are some real challenges for us as teachers in implementing partnership with children’s families.

Thinking back to Part 7 of the course on the diversity of models of infant and toddler care, how easy is for you to genuinely affirm all family practices, particularly if you and your team have committed to a particular approach? Do you find aspects of dissonance with families in regard to any of your pedagogical practices? How might you work with these differences when reflecting on your pedagogy?

Notes and reflections from The importance of teamwork and supportive relationships in infant and toddler care

How effective is teamwork in your setting? Are there any barriers to teamwork and how could these be alleviated? Also think about the personal actions you might take to improve team relationships and understandings about practice. For example, what attitude do you bring to teamwork with colleagues? How could you promote more time to get to know each other, share joy and discuss ideas about practice?

Relate learning to practice

In this activity we want you to bring together the information that you collated about your focus child during the activity for Part 7 of the course, and to build on and use your relationships with the child’s family and your teaching team to evaluate learning and develop some shared goals for the child. There are three parts to this activity:

Have another look at the Principles for partnership: A four-step approach resource and decide what level of involvement would be appropriate for the family, depending on the stage of relationship development you are at (strengthening your relationship, developing reciprocal information-sharing, taking mutual responsibility for learning, or shared decision-making). In a manner appropriate for this stage of relationship development, share some of your observations of the child and their learning with the family, and invite their perspective, analysis, or decision-making in relation to the next steps.

How did it go?

Bring your observations and understanding of your focus child to a staff meeting or some other opportunity for reflective discussion. Make the most of this chance to hear your colleagues’ perspectives on the child and their development and learning by developing a specific question or two about your observations that are likely to promote a deeper level of conversation. Remember that sharing thoughtful, reflective and deeply meaningful dialogue is a key way to strengthen your team, and is likely to support your pedagogical understanding and practice with the child too! 

What did you gain from sharing? Personally, or with your team and the child’s family, reflect on all the perspectives you have gathered to plan future goals for the child.