While the Early Years Outcomes focuses predominantly on what a child could and should be able to learn within an age band, the Characteristics of Effective Learning look at how children learn.
There are 3 CELs and these are:
- Play and Exploring
- Active Learning
- Creativity and Critical Thinking
While there is little information about these in the revised Statutory Framework, Reception teachers must now to provide Year 1 teachers information on how each child learns in relation to the 3 Characteristics.
These 3 characteristics are further broken into sub categories as follows:
Play and Exploring
This focuses on being physically active:
- Finding out and exploring
This focusses on new experiences and having the curiosity to see what will happen
- Playing with what they know
This involves repeating actions that are familiar and perfecting things done before
- Being willing to have a go
This involves trying new things that are familiar but not tried before, willing to make mistakes and challenge themselves
Active Learning
This focuses on being mentally active:
- Being involved and concentrating
When children start to think about what they are doing and how things can be done differently they become mentally engrossed, concentrating on the job at hand – this results in a deep level of learning.
- Keeping on trying
This is about being persistent and being motivated enough to master a skill or learn something new when extra effort is required. Some children who are perfectionists and fear failure will not keep on trying as they want to stay in the safety zone. Others who are not fearful of failure will try to find their way round obstacles and find solutions to their problems.
- Enjoying achieving what they set out to do
Once a child has achieved what they set out to do, this is followed by the satisfaction of achieving what they intended. The emphasis here is on the child’s own goals, and the enjoyment of personal success not goals set for them. This is because if a child is motivated by an external reward like a sticker rather than satisfaction itself once the reward has been achieved there is little motivation for them to carry on with the task.
Creativity and Critical Thinking
This also focuses on mental activity:
- Having their own ideas
Children need to generate their own ideas and think about how to do things differently themselves. This develops originality and creativity, as opposed to simply copying and doing what they see.
- Making links
Linking information together helps children understand what is happening around them and learn more easily. Making links could be as simple as seeing someone crying and understanding they are upset to associating the world around them to scenes described in a story book.
- Choosing ways to do things and finding new ways
This focusses on how a child makes choices, and not simply following instructions.
How do they make decisions? How and why do they change their strategies?
It is thought that when children engage in their own choice of activity, they will want to find solutions to problems they come across.
All of these characteristics about will occur at a greater or lesser degree in each child making them unique.
Be the first to comment