Supporting High-Quality Interactions
What is a High-Quality Interaction?
An interaction is a reciprocal action, influence, communication or direct involvement with someone.
According to Early Years author, Julie Fisher “the purpose of any interaction is to consolidate, extend, or provoke children’s learning and development.”
Interactions are central to successful play pedagogy and are essential for the development of warm, positive, nurturing relationships which are at the heart of quality learning co-constructed between the child and practitioner.
High-quality interactions can extend children’s learning by helping them to think more deeply. They enable practitioners to know and understand a child better, allowing for meaningful, sensitive conversations that let the child know the practitioner is ‘in-tune’ with them.
Research states that high-quality interactions are important for children’s learning and development, helping to promote and support the following:
- Inter-thinking and shared enquiry.
- Opportunities for adults to support and scaffold children’s construction of knowledge.
- Recognition and valuing of the child as a powerful agent and active participants in their own learning.
- Social and emotional development as well as thinking skills.
Why do High-Quality Interactions matter?
“The key part of the environment for children is the human, social environment of positive nurturing interactions.”
– Realising the Ambition, Page 15.
Interactions enable children to understand what is happening, anticipate what will happen next, learn about respect and empathy, manage their emotions, and work with others to develop confidence, creativity, and curiosity. Early interactions are central to building the structures that children will require throughout their lives.
The 2017 Scottish Government document ‘A Blueprint For 2020’ states that the quality of interactions that children have with the adults who care for them fundamentally affects their enjoyment of ELC and is a contributing factor towards their development. The document emphasises that children need practitioners who:
- Understand and act on the importance of relationships.
- Listen to their needs, desires, and curiosities.
- Respect them as active, discriminating, competent learners.
- Can support them as they develop self-control and self-regulation in relationships with peers and adults.
How can I support High-Quality Interactions?
Early Years author, Julie fisher, states that “there is a tendency for adult talk to dominate nurseries and schools in an attempt to manage, organise and interrogate children’s learning; this closes down children’s own investigation and capacity for through.” Here, Fisher points out that the very act of being an educator can sometimes distort the nature of an interaction to the extent that it inhibits the very learning it is trying to promote.’
In nursery, educators should strive to be ‘mind-minded’; remaining calm, reflective, and mindful, capable of seeing things from the perspective of the child.
Practitioners can support learners through interactions by:
- Commenting
- Modelling
- Pondering
- Imagining
- Connecting
- Thinking aloud
- Talking about feelings
- Providing thinking time
- Reflecting back
- Giving control
- Posing problems
- Remaining quiet when necessary
All strategies when used in the right way at the right time can enhance a child’s learning.
Many of these strategies are examined in greater detail in the Speech & Language Therapy Service’s ‘Communication Handbook’.
