1. Work hard, play hard – Developing assessment practices to support children’s key competences in the infant classes of primary school.
Hello everyone. Name is Sarah Keane. I am a primary school teacher, currently teaching Junior Infants in St. Paul’s N.S., Dooradoyle, Limerick. My involvement with the Aistear Tutor Initiative, a collaboration between the National Council for Curriculum and Assessment (NCCA) and the Association of Teacher Education Centres in Ireland (ATECI), has had a significant impact on my role as a teacher. Through implementing Aistear’s Guidelines for Good Practice, I came to understand the importance of developing assessment practices to support children’s key competences in the infant classes of primary school.

2. Aim of presentation provide an overview of Aistear
highlight the learning benefits of child-led play in children’s holistic development
explore assessment practices that support children’s key competences in infant classes

3. Guidelines for good practice
Aistear’s components
Principles
Guidelines for good practice
Themes
Aistear supports and builds on the PSC principles. Yet there are some differences in Aistear that further enriches the PSC. The main differences include HOW children are viewed as learners and HOW learning happens and can be supported in early childhood.
Aistear promotes a sharing of ‘power’ between children and the adult-while the PSC advocates a child-centred curriculum, it tends to promote an approach to teaching which the teacher largely directing learning activities most of the time
Aistear also highlights professional autonomy for practitioners-to make decisions about how children will be helped to progress in their learning, based on the teacher’s own professional knowledge and expertise.
Aistear’s four themes describe learning and development for early childhood education. These interconnected themes are: well being, identity and belonging, communicating and exploring and thinking.
As I use the Primary School Curriculum to direct my teaching, at first I was unsure as to where a curriculum framework could fit into my practice. I soon learned how the Primary School Curriculum is what I teach with Aistear offering me new approaches and methodologies along with practical ideas for how I can help my students learn and develop. As the primary curriculum is revised, the key ideas in Aistear relevant for primary teachers will be embedded in the primary curriculum. We can already see Aistear’s presence in the draft integrated language curriculum. 3 3

4. Guidelines for good practice
ncca.ie/earlylearning; ncca.ie/primary
Guidelines for good practice
Aistear’s guidelines describe good practice in:
building partnerships between parents and practitioners
learning and developing through interactions
learning and developing through play
supporting learning and development through assessment
Based on research and evidence from classrooms, Aistear is a guide for teachers on key elements of effective teaching and learning.
In a nutshell, using Aistear is about working in a particular way with children and their parents. It is about ‘sharing the lead in learning’ with children. In this way, Aistear is not something we do for an hour a day and it is not confined to the hour of play. It is about teaching in a particular way throughout the day and week in the infant classroom. 4

5. Socio-dramatic play
Aistear shows the potential of quality play for deep and meaningful learning for children. This can give rise to some fundamental questions about how to facilitate and assess play.
Dr. Elizabeth Wood speaks about how we use the term “Child’s play” to define something that is easy. However pedagogically framing the time, space, resources for play is far from easy in a busy diverse class of up to thirty junior or senior infants.
Elizabeth Wood (2013, p.101) describes how "the twin concepts of pedagogical framing and pedagogical strategies are helpful for thinking about how practitioners can support child- and adult- initiated play". Although I decide what the play areas are, the children can freely engage with the resources and choose what to play with or how to play.

6. Structure of play session
Aistear recommends working towards an hour of child-led play every day in infant classrooms.
Suggested structure for each play session:
Plan (5 minutes)
Play (40-45 minutes)
Tidy Up (5-10 minutes)
Review (5-10 minutes)
Beginning and ending the play session with planning and reviewing is very effective in helping the children self-assess. Planning and reviewing play was not something I had put much emphasis on in the past but now I appreciate how these stages make the process far more meaningful for the children and gives them the opportunity to share the fun, excitement and sense of achievement in their play with their friends and peers. 6

7. Interaction strategies
Social constructivism is clearly evident in Aistear as rather than always being the “sage on the stage”, I often view myself as the “guide on the side”.
Aistear has made me reconsider my practice, because in the past I directed the play but now my class experience child-led play. Play is no longer an activity I use to keep children busy while I listen to phonics, change shared readers or organise the classroom; it is now a methodology I use to teach a range of subjects. In order to ensure that play has learning consequences I know I have to interact meaningfully with the children. I do this by playing with them at their level rather than instructing them and by engaging in conversations with them rather than questioning them. At first I found it difficult to change my instinctive behaviour of continually questioning to assess children's knowledge, now I put a greater influence on having conversations with children. I used Aistear's guidelines on learning and developing through interactions for examples and advice for how I can assist children's thinking and support communication with my students. Initially, I found it challenging to take a back seat and let my class direct their play and learning. It can be difficult to give the children freedom to lead but I soon discovered that rather than me being the single teacher in the class, the children now had 30 teachers as they learn from each other through play.
The continuum in the graphic represents the idea of reciprocity – in the case of some interaction strategies, the teacher is leading the learning and with other strategies, children are leading and the teacher is more a facilitator (e.g. play).
(Aistear, Guidelines, Table 2, p.28) 7

8. Assessment methods (Aistear, Guidelines, p.80)
Seeing children as active participants in assessment and recognising and acknowledging that children themselves play a vital role in the process, may for some teachers, present a new perspective on assessing early learning.
Aistear’s principle of reciprocity: there are certain assessment methods such as testing (standardised, screening etc) when the teacher is leading. With other assessment methods such as self-assessment and conversations, children can lead.
Could link back too to AfL and AoL.
Clarify the status of Aistear’s learning goals in the context of the Primary School Curriculum – primary school teachers use the Primary Curriculum’s subjects and content objectives rather than Aistear’s themes and learning goals. Could mention that the new language curriculum for the infant level will be ready for schools in Sept The revised infant curriculum will be ready in Sept As these parts of the curriculum are revised, they will be informed by Aistear’s principles and methodologies.
The focus of the assessment is on the child’s learning progress
(Aistear, Guidelines, p.80) 8

9. Assessment of key competences
Dispositions e.g. curiosity, concentration, perseverance, resilience
Skills e.g. writing, cutting, problem-solving
Attitudes and values e.g. respect for others attitude to learning
Knowledge and understanding e.g. classifying objects, relationship between letters and sounds, people in their community
As teachers we are continually assessing children’s learning. Assessment is part of the teacher’s day-to-day interactions with the children and is often intuitive. Teachers continually make judgements about the child’s learning and development.
Over time, a teacher builds a picture of a child’s learning progress. This picture is continually being shaped by information that is collected about how the child learns (the learning dispositions) as well as what the child learns (development in skills, knowledge and attitudes). The teacher documents the information, and arrives at judgements about the child’s learning by reflecting on it.
But the picture itself, while important, is not the end of the process. The teacher has to decide how to use the information.
How we use the information determines what we call the assessment approach.
Aistear’s purpose is to develop the child as a confident and competent learner.
The focus of the assessment is on the child’s learning progress:
How the child learns: dispositions e.g. curiosity, concentration, perseverance
What the child learns: skills, attitudes and values, and knowledge

10. Assessment practices Stories A play diary Checklists
Samples of children’s
work
Observation notes
Photographs
Audio and video clips
An understanding of early learning is crucial for effective assessment in early childhood. Tensions that arise in practicing appropriate assessment in infant classrooms can have significant influence on what is assessed and how assessment is carried out.
Story detailing a child’s experience of communicating with a peer
A ‘play diary’ noting the vocabulary a child used
Checklists focusing on constrained skills
Sample of a child’s mark making or writing for a portfolio
Observation notes on post-its of words a child read in the classroom
Photographs and video recordings of children’s socio-dramatic ‘scripts’

11. Conclusion
“The playing adult steps sideward into another reality; the playing child advances forward to new stages of mastery.”
Erik Erikson
“Play is often talked about as if it were a relief from serious learning. But for children play is serious learning. Play is really the work of childhood.”
Fred Rogers
The theory of utilising a child centred, play based approach to the education of young children has been widely accredited by renowned educators such as John Dewey, Friedrich Froebel, Maria Montessori, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Rudolf Steiner (Wood and Attfield, 2005). Play is a collective, social activity that helps develops a child as a confident and competent learner. Despite constant validation from key researchers of the benefits of play, it continues to be undervalued in Irish primary schools. There is a common misconception that play is opposed to “real work” as the learning benefits of play can be difficult to quantify and play does not fit neatly into policy paradigms. From experience I have seen how implementing Aistear’s Guidelines for Good Practice has significantly changed the way I facilitate learning and use assessment practices to support the key competences of my students.
In the past decade, children’s play has moved from a relatively marginal position in State early childhood education policy to a place where it is, at least in aspiration, valued, supported and holding a prominent position in policy and practice guidelines in relation to ECCE provision within the diverse range of settings in Ireland. However, a key question arising concerns the gap between aspiration and action, between policy and practice, between vision and everyday reality
As an Aistear Tutor, I support other primary school teachers of young children in becoming familiar with Aistear and what it has to offer them in terms of developing their practice. When I facilitate Aistear workshops I am often asked “How come Aistear is not compulsory?” Aistear is based on current research and good practice and I would encourage all infant teachers to use it to develop their classroom practice. The teachers who voluntarily attend the Aistear workshops I have facilitated are eager to discover what Aistear has to offer. Despite their enthusiasm, I often sense that many teachers feel disillusioned as to how they can possibly manage to incorporate play into their already busy day. The challenges in embracing Aistear are always a topic of much discussion during the workshops. Time, planning, lack of space, limited resources, an overloaded curriculum, large class sizes, a lack of training and misconceptions about play are some of the many deterrents teachers feel discouraged by. Wood and Attfield (2005, p.11) explain how "achieving good quality play is resource-intensive, and requires high levels of pedagogical skill and organisation, as well as time and expertise to observe children's play behaviours and activities."
From experience, I feel that the challenges teachers face are not insurmountable and although overcoming them may take considerable effort, the benefits of developing a pedagogy of play are extensive as they help develop the child cognitively, socially, emotionally and physically (Stone, 1993, p. 4). I believe that the advantages for teachers are significant also. From experience, I have realised that instead of adding more to my workload, Aistear helps me cope with the many demands of the Primary School Curriculum. 11