Pedagogical Principles for Teaching and Learning - Coursework Example

To some children it might be their first experience in a group setting although to other who possibly might have attended toddler groups, day care, or even home setting but with a childminder to name but a few, it might be a continuation of a group experience. Whichever the case, a practitioner is an important person in a child’s learning at this stage. A practitioner in this case might include a teacher, health visitor, portage workers, speech therapist, or a district nurses among other cadres along those lines.

Practitioners play a very important role in the children learning and should therefore draw on a range of teaching strategies and child development knowledge. If anything children deepen their knowledge through playing, planning, observing, questioning, testing, experimenting, reflecting, repeating, and reacting to adults and also to each other. In this case, practitioners ought to plan the highest quality learning experiences, putting into consideration the learning needs and achievements of the children and the scope of their learning experiences that will enable them progress. . There are a number of important lessons that should be leant from plays as far as childhood education is concerned.

Play should be child-centered where the teacher sets the activities, but also allows children to explore and engage in the tasks making up these plays in order to develop their learning, if anything, learning is not always about setting out tasks but most importantly, making sure that children have developed these tasks or seeing whether they have met the learning objectives as set-out by the practitioner as part of the learning process. This has been reinforced by Fromberg (2002), when he points out that when a teacher asks children to do a task with them, they automatically label this as an activity.

This therefore shows just how important it is for a practitioner to strike a balance between play and tasks for children. It is important for the practitioners not to separate pedagogy, learning and behavior through play, but to integrate this into a curriculum, as adult intervention is important as organized play places a great contribution to children’s learning and development. The quality of adult interaction in planning children’s play and organizing the play environment all has a part in the contribution towards children’s learning and in enabling them to learn how to function successfully within and out of the classroom environment (Samuelsson & Carlsson 2008).

This adult intervention is particularly important in that it establishes the children’s relationships with children while planning the both the learning environment and the curriculum. It is also the role of childhood education practitioner to not only support but also extend children play, learning and development, while assessing their