The sustained shared thinking and emotional well-being (SSTEW) scale is designed to consider some of the intentional and relational pedagogical strategies strongly associated with child outcomes. It considers practice that supports children aged between two and five years of age in developing skills in sustained shared thinking and emotional well-being, as well as developing strong relationships, effective communication and aspects of self-regulation. It is designed to be used for research, self-evaluation and improvement, audit and regulation. Using the SSTEW scale alongside other environment scales (including ECERS-E, ECERS-R or ITERS-R) gives users a more complete picture of what high-quality early childhood education and care can look like. It is aspirational in that it considers high quality pedagogy and practice. It can be used by researchers, heads of centers, managers, teaching staff and practitioners, as well as advisory staff and in professional development.
The long-anticipated new version of the internationally recognized Early Childhood Environment Rating Scale®, ECERS-3, focuses on the full range of needs of preschool- and kindergarten-aged children. This widely used, comprehensive assessment tool measures both environmental provisions and teacher-child interactions that affect the broad developmental needs of young children, including: Cognitive Social-emotional Physical Health and safety ECERS-3 also includes additional Items assessing developmentally appropriate literacy and math activities. Designed for preschool, kindergarten, and child care classrooms serving children 3 through 5 years of age, ECERS-3: Provides a smooth transition for those already using ECERS-R. Emphasizes the role of the teacher in creating an environment conducive to developmental gains. Is designed to predict child outcomes more accurately and with greater precision. Provides a stronger method of distinguishing between good and truly excellent programs. Offers a complete training program with ongoing support available at the Environment Rating Scales Institute (ERSI) website (www.ersi.info). ECERS-3 is appropriate for state and district-wide QRIS and continuous improvement; program evaluation by directors and supervisors; teacher self-evaluation; monitoring by agency staff; and teacher education. The established reliability and long term evidence of validity of the ERS family of instruments make this new version of ECERS particularly useful for RTTT-ELC accountability and research. Suitable for use in inclusive and culturally diverse programs, ECERS-3 subscales evaluate: Space and Furnishings Personal Care Routines Language and Literacy Learning Activities Interaction Program Structure
ECERS-E is designed to be used with the Early Childhood Rating Scale-Revised (ECERS-R), an internationally recognized measure of quality in education and care written by Thelma Harms, Richard M. Clifford, and Debby Cryer. It not only complements the ECERS-R but extends the scales to provide additional insights into important aspects of literacy, mathematics, science and environment, as well as practices related to issues of diversity. Given the current focus on emerging literacy and numeracy skills, the ECERS-E provides unique guidance on the kinds of environments that enhance learning in preschool settings. The curriculum domains within the scales bear important relationships to children’s (age 3–5) cognitive and social/behavioral developmental outcomes. Using the ECERS-E alongside the ECERS-R gives users a more complete picture of what a high-quality early childhood education program can look like. It can be used by program directors, teaching staff, agency staff, and in teacher training programs. Convenient organization: Literacy Items: Print in the environment Book and literacy areas Adults reading with children Sounds in words Emergent writing/mark making Talking and listening Mathematics Items: Counting and application of counting Reading and representing simple numbers Activities: Shape Activities: Sorting, matching and comparing Science and Environment Items: Natural materials Areas featuring science/science materials Activities: Non living Activities: Living processes Activities: Food preparation Diversity Items: Planning for individual learning needs Gender equality and awareness Race equality and awareness
Used as a measure of quality in the ground-breaking Effective Provision of Pre-School Education (EPPE) project, Sustained Shared Thinking is fundamental to good early years practice. It costs nothing, yet research has shown that it improves outcomes for children by supporting their holistic development. This book clearly explains what Sustained Shared Thinking is and examines the skills and expertise needed to initiate, encourage and facilitate it. The book explores the attitudes, knowledge and understanding that a practitioner must adopt in order to start or develop successful Sustained Shared Thinking. Combining theory with practical guidance, it demonstrates how it can be achieved, covering all aspects of early years practice including the Characteristics of Effective Learning, the Prime and Specific Areas of learning development, the role of the practitioner, the environment and working with parents. Features include: boxed links to key theory and research; practical strategies highlighted in the text; consideration of children at different ages and stages of development; links throughout to the Early Years Foundation Stage. Written by a leading consultant who regularly delivers training on Sustained Shared Thinking, this will be an essential text for students on foundation degree and childhood studies courses as well as early years practitioners.
The book presents a new method of measuring the quality of environment and pedagogy in which young children are encouraged to move and be physically active. It applies the methodology used in the ECERS-E and SSTEW rating scales, making it easy for educators already familiar with these well-established scales to adopt.
First published in 2015, The SSTEW Scale has been widely used in early childhood education and care, in all sectors across the world, to enhance the quality of education, and monitor and assess practice. It explores pedagogy and practice that improve children’s social-emotional development, self-regulation, language, and critical thinking. The SSTEW Scale is an innovative method of assessing the process quality of an early years education environment and pedagogy. It promotes practice where staff provide sensitive, responsive relationships and high-quality interactions, which includes supporting children’s social, emotional and communication skills. This scale also helps educators to engage children in thinking deeply, problem solving and reasoning, including items which support the four competencies: critical thinking, creativity, communication and collaboration, all identified as life-long skills needed for all children in the 21st century by the World Economic Forum in 2016. This new edition includes updated information about the evidence-base for SSTEW and children’s development and learning as well as the expansion of examples and supplementary information accompanying the indicators. In addition, there is a stronger focus on formative assessment and new additions to the assessment section. The SSTEW Scale can be used to support research, auditing and practice uplift. It is a key text for the sector to assess and improve the quality of provision during audits, and for educators seeking professional development by improving their knowledge of excellent practice.
Building on extensive feedback from the field as well as vigorous new research on how best to support infant and toddler development and learning, the authors have revised and updated the widely used Infant/Toddler Environment Rating Scale. ITERS-3 is the next-generation assessment tool for use in center-based child care programs for infants and toddlers up to 36 months of age. ITERS-3 focuses on the full range of needs of infants and toddlers and provides a framework for improving program quality. Further, the scale assesses both environmental provisions and teacher-child interactions that affect the broad developmental milestones of infants and toddlers, including: language, cognitive, social-emotional and physical development, as well as concern for health and safety. ITERS-3 is appropriate for state- and district-wide QRIS and continuous quality improvement, program evaluation by directors and supervisors, teacher self-evaluation, monitoring by agency staff, and teacher training programs. The established reliability and validity of the scale make it particularly useful for research and program evaluation. While the approach to assessing quality and the scoring process remain the same for the new ITERS-3, users will find the following improvements informed by extensive use of the ITERS in the field and by the most recent research: Enhanced focus on interactions and the role of the teacher. Six new language and literacy Items. A new Item on beginning math experiences. Expanded age range to include children from birth to 36 months. A new approach to scoring based solely on observation of ongoing classroom activity (3-hour time sample). The elimination of the parents/staff subscale and teacher interviews, freeing up time for observing more actual classroom practice. Improved indicator scaling, providing more precise and useful scores for use in professional development and self-improvement. Reduced emphasis on the number of materials, along with greater emphasis on how materials are used to encourage learning. Suitable for use in inclusive and culturally diverse programs, ITERS-3 subscales evaluate: Space and Furnishings Personal Care Routines Language and Books Activities Interaction Program Structure
The Covid-19 pandemic caused major disruptions to education around the world. Since the World Health Organization declared a pandemic on March 11, 2020, most students on the planet were affected by the interruption of in-person schooling. To mitigate the educational loss such interruption would cause, education authorities the world over created a variety of alternative mechanisms of education delivery. They did so quickly and with insufficient knowledge about what would work well, for which children, and for what aspects of the schooling experience.Having to create such alternative arrangements in short order was the ultimate adaptive leadership challenge, one for which no playbook existed, one for which solutions would have to be invented, rather than drawn from existing technical knowledge. The nature of the challenge differed across the world and regions, and it differed also within countries as a function of the differential public health and economic impact of the pandemic on communities, and of variations in institutional and financial resources available to redress such impact, including availability of digital infrastructure and previous knowledge and experience of teachers and students with digi-pedagogies and other resources to create alternative education delivery systems.Sustaining educational opportunities amidst these challenges created by the pandemic was an example of adaptive education response not to a unique unexpected challenge but to one in a larger class of problems, just one of the many adaptive conundrums facing communities and societies. Beyond the challenges resulting from the pandemic, other complications of that sort predating the pandemic included those resulting from poverty, inequality, social inclusion, governance, climate change, among others. In some ways, the pandemic served as an accelerant for some of those, augmenting their impact or underscoring the urgency of addressing them. Adaptive puzzles of this sort, including pandemics, are likely to continue to impact education systems in the foreseeable future. This makes it necessary to strengthen the capacity of education systems to respond to them.Reimagining education systems so they are resilient in the face of adaptive challenges is an opportunity to mobilize new talent and institutional resources. Partnerships between school systems and universities can contribute to those reimagined and more resilient systems, they can enhance the institutional capacity of education systems to devise solutions and to implement them. Such partnerships are also an opportunity for universities to be more deliberate in integrating their three core functions of research, teaching and outreach in service of addressing significant social challenges in a context in rapid flux.In this book we present the results of one approach to produce the integration between research, teaching and outreach just described, resulting from engaging graduate students in collaborations with school systems for the purpose of helping identify ways to sustain educational opportunity during the disruption caused by the pandemic. This activity engaged our students in research and analysis, contributing to their education, and it engaged them in service to society. The book examines what happened to educational opportunity during the Covid-19 pandemic in Bangladesh, Belize, the municipality of Santa Ana in Costa Rica, Guatemala, Kenya, in the States of Sinaloa and Quintana Roo in Mexico, South Africa, United Arab Emirates, and in the United States in Richardson Independent School District in Texas. It offers an systematic analysis of policy options to sustain educational opportunity during the pandemic.
The editors, particularly Iram Siraj-Blatchford, Kathy Sylva and Ted Melhuish, are extremely well respected authorities in their field The results of this genuinely ground-breaking study are eagerly awaited by many researchers in this area Includes clear implications of the study for practice and ensuring educational effectiveness Education for All (Richard Pring) is based on the Primary version of this study, so the two books can be promoted together
This textbook assesses existing and emerging practice frameworks in educational psychology and their relation to theory. Covering current frameworks, such as the Monsen et al. Problem-Solving Framework, the Integrated Problem Solving Framework for Practitioners and the Constructionist Model, as well as emerging approaches, such as Systemic Solution Focussed Models and Positive Psychology Frameworks, contributors explore how they support educational psychology. The editors consider how existing and emerging frameworks help address current demands for professional accountability, transparency and effectiveness. They conclude with an exploration of the complex methodology and highly integrated approach required by contemporary educational psychologists. This textbook will be an invaluable resource for all practising educational psychologists, students, trainers, and educators.
