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Authentic learning through quality interactions
Authentic learning through quality interactions
Authentic learning through quality interactions
Children learn best when they are given ample opportunities to interact with people, objects, and their surroundings in contexts that are real, relevant, and meaningful to them. Quality interactions involve teachers and children being actively engaged in sustained and shared conversations.
What are the benefits?
Quality interactions stimulate children’s creativity, promote exploration and experimentation, expand their thinking and enrich their learning across different areas of development.
Quality interactions help children:
- Build positive social and emotional connections with their teachers and friends.
- Develop language and communication skills
- Learn to solve problems and think critically
- Develop their creativity
- Expand their thinking
- Explore their interests and motivations
How can you do it?
The goal is to create a learning environment with physical, interactional and temporal aspects that are designed to encourage children’s interactions with people and objects in the environment.
Here are some strategies to promote quality interactions:
Creating a positive and supportive environment
It is important to create an environment where children feel valued, respected and empowered so they feel comfortable expressing their thoughts and feelings.
- Design spaces and activities: Create opportunities and use daily routines for children to talk with one another about their ideas.
- Value children’s opinions and perspectives: Listen to and show that you value children’s views and perspectives.
- Tap children’s interest and give them autonomy and choice: Allow children to explore their interests and make their own choices and decisions.
- Provide sufficient wait time and be a good listener: Give children enough time to think and respond to your questions. Actively listen to their responses and build upon their ideas.
- Model positive communication skills: Show children how to express feelings and thoughts, and how to show appreciation and respect for each other’s ideas and views.
Organising the classroom and using a variety of strategies and materials
Educators should set clear classroom expectations and routines and ensure proper classroom organisation to maximise time for quality interactions with the children.
- Be fully prepared for all the planned learning activities
- Provide clear behavioural expectations for children to actively participate and engage in large and small group discussions. For example, taking turns when speaking, listening to and respecting one another’s ideas.
You can use a variety of strategies, materials and modalities to engage children. This helps children to be more motivated to contribute ideas and interact during activities and play.
- Present information through different modes like hands-on demonstrations, videos, stories, posters, graphic organisers and dramatisation
- Use a variety of resources such as open-ended materials and natural materials
- Provide hands-on and authentic experiences and contexts, including field trips and outdoor experiences
- Use a variety of strategies such as role-playing, storytelling, collaborative projects, cooperative learning strategies
- Involve families and community partners
Effective questioning, prompting and language modelling
By skilfully asking questions and using prompts and language modelling, you can engage children in meaningful conversations and discussions. This arouses and sustains children’s interest, fosters cognitive development and extends children’s learning.
Here are some examples of questions to ask depending on your purpose. You can use these to promote thinking, reasoning and reflection in children. Good questions scaffold, reinforce and extend children’s learning. Remember that when asking questions, it is important to use a calm and encouraging tone and give children enough wait time to respond.
Besides using a variety of questions, consider providing prompts (e.g., sharing of your own experience) to expand children thinking and using language modelling to help children put into words their thoughts about what they have seen, heard, experienced or learnt.
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Purpose |
Examples of Questions |
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Invite interest and curiosity
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Make meaningful connections in learning
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Extend thinking and promote process skills |
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Reflect on learning
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Besides using a variety of questions, consider providing prompts (e.g., sharing of your own experience) to expand children thinking and using language modelling to help children put into words their thoughts about what they have seen, heard, experienced or learnt.
Examples
