Abstract
Research has shown that schoolteachers often prepare children for success in standardized reading assessments by ‘teaching to the test.’ Concurrently, research exploring children’s emergent literacies and ‘school readiness’ has shown that early childhood teachers often feel pressured to ‘prepare’ children for school and may do so by focusing on print-related literacies, to the detriment of earlier stages of the oral-to-print continuum. This raises the concern that teaching children as a group, preparing them for the next ‘stage of education,’ will disadvantage children who are working below or above expected levels of development. Our study explores the teaching approaches used with a group of foundation-year children who achieved more advanced reading outcomes than children from four adjacent classrooms in their first year of schooling. We collected the reading and letter-identification outcomes of 16 children in the teacher’s foundation-year class and interviewed her about her practices. Findings showed that the teacher used her knowledge of what the children should achieve in standardized assessments as a minimum expectation and moved beyond the content of such assessments when warranted, as determined by informal assessments. As a result, every child in the class met, and many exceeded, minimum reading standards by year’s end. We conclude that using an individualized, child-centred pedagogy, informed by a combination of standardized and informal assessments, allowed the teacher to support her students to develop a range of reading abilities and to reach their full potential.
Highlights
Access to high-quality early childhood learning experiences has a long-term impact on children’s intellectual and social development, and well-being [1]
We explore how a foundation-year (The first year of compulsory schooling in Victorian primary schools in Australia) teacher’s child-centred approach worked to countermand the tensions and challenges that testing regimes can invite in early years classrooms
We argue that using an individualized, child-centred pedagogy, informed by a combination of standardized and informal assessments, allowed the teacher to focus on the needs of each child and what each child could achieve with support, rather than narrowly focusing on what each child should achieve in standardized assessments
Summary
Access to high-quality early childhood learning experiences has a long-term impact on children’s intellectual and social development, and well-being [1]. Within the domain of literacy, the focus on academic achievement has led to problematic repercussions for children’s early reading development, narrowly defining ‘reading’ as the ability to achieve the expected outcomes that are assessed via standardized tests [4], for younger and younger age groups [5]. Framed within this problematic discourse, our study sought to investigate how a teacher may circumvent such narrow and limiting expectations—expectations that would fail to address the diverse needs and potential of every child and ensure equity and access for all children. In turn, allowed the teacher to support her students to develop a range of reading abilities, with every child meeting, many exceeding and some far exceeding, minimum standards in their very first year of compulsory schooling
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