From: CollaborativeClassroom
Quality interactions foster a sense of security and belonging in children and provide a strong root system to strengthen early cognitive, social, and emotional development.
Author Emily Grunt shares the following building blocks that lay a solid foundation for building quality interactions in an early childhood environment.
Quality—as an adjective—is subjective.
However, we can identify common goals for quality interactions with young children, including:
- Increased equitable outcomes for children through an environment where individual differences are honored and celebrated
- Increased child confidence and capability through an environment of safety and respect
- Increased teacher efficacy through positive relationships with the children in their care
High quality doesn’t exist without creating belonging for all and without learning supports for diverse learners.
Equity Early Group
Jennifer Park, Ph.D., University of Florida
Step 1: Trust
The children in our care must believe that we will act with integrity and that they can count on us being as good as our word.
We can establish a trusting relationship by acting with kindness, warmth, and consideration toward everyone—including parents, grandparents, caregivers, co-workers, custodians, administrators, parents, guests, as well as any non-human visitor in the classroom!
Quality interactions include providing routines that offer consistency and predictability help children feel secure and develop confidence to venture and explore their world and relationships. We can be role models for empathy and consideration for others. We can treat everyone in the classroom with respect and assume positive intent.
Our actions prove our recognition that everyone in the classroom has rights that need to be acknowledged and respected.
We are educating future leaders—we must model listening skills for them to emulate.
Step 2: Environmental Safety
Creating safe spaces designed for children includes using visual, tactile, auditory, and olfactory cues to ensure an environment optimal for quality interactions.
Visually, it helps to see things from their viewpoint. Are essential items within their reach? Are pictures, posters, and any other art placed on walls at their eye-level? Conversely, is everything potentially dangerous tucked away?
Basics include child-sized furniture that is free of sharp edges, giving children safe and inviting seating for their small bodies. Have we arranged our rooms so there is plenty of space for active bodies to move around, dance, and play? Are there cozy spaces to curl up and read?
If we have any control over it, we can consider lighting. How can we maximize natural light? Can we ask our institutions to choose warm (incandescent bulbs) over cool lighting?
A diverse classroom will include students with varying capability to weather loud noises and strong smells. Considering their needs will result in a more pleasant environment for everyone.
What are some auditory considerations we can include?
- Sound-absorbing materials such as rugs and pillows
- Closed window curtains or blinds to help when outside noise is a strong disturbance
- Felt or cork board on the walls to absorb sound
- Felt tips on the bottom of chairs and tables to provide a buffer from contact with the floor.
Many students (and adults) are sensitive to strong smells and this can affect behavior in a classroom. How can we help make our environment fragrance-free? Many classrooms today are choosing unscented cleaning solutions and toiletries and asking employees to avoid personal sprays and perfumes. Finally, don’t forget to make sure the trash bin is securely covered and emptied frequently!
Step 3: A Warm Reception
A sense of belonging begins at the door.
Imagine approaching a home where you don’t know anyone and being greeted at the door with a wide smile and an effusive, “Hello, welcome! I’m so glad you are here!” It does a great job in setting the tone, right?
Guiding children in those first few minutes will help them get comfortable in their new environment. Have someone show where their belongings are stored, coats hung up, and let them explore their new surroundings.
Perhaps there is a table with manipulatives where they can play side-by-side with other children without pressure to communicate. Maybe a student ambassador? All of these will help to ensure an ideal environment for quality interactions.
Learn to say hello and goodbye in the languages your students speak, and over the course of the year, teach those words and others to all students.
Provide a diverse range of materials including books, posters, blocks, and art supplies that visualize multiple languages along with traditional and newer crafts and celebrations to foster a warm, friendly, representative-of-all environment.
Step 4: Communicating as Equals
As educators, our goal is to foster positive and respectful communication between every member of the classroom through quality interactions. To help achieve this it’s helpful to understand co-regulation.
As adults, we manage difficult emotions in healthy ways by exercising, talking to a friend or therapist, resting or relaxing, or simply taking time away for ourselves to reflect and process.
Since this capability is something children have yet to develop, we can be role models in recognizing our feelings and modeling regulation. Meeting children where they are with calm sensitivity and assuring them that their feelings are valid will help them process their emotions to feel better.
“At its heart, co-regulation is connecting with a child who’s in distress and being able to evaluate what that child needs in the moment to help calm themselves.”
Lauren Marchette, child, adolescent, and family psychologist and lecturer in psychiatry at Harvard Medical School.
Are we talking to children, or with them? Studies show that in an Early Childhood Education (ECE) environment, more teacher talk time involves directives rather than interactive conversation, resulting in less-developed language and a smaller vocabulary.
Exhibiting curiosity, asking discovery questions, paraphrasing, suggesting, summarizing, and affirming a child’s feelings expands a child’s literacy and language. Acknowledging and naming emotions, waiting, watching, listening and reflecting on their responses helps social and emotional development.
Children who are still learning and expanding their vocabulary naturally turn to behavioral methods of communication. When adults can remember that every behavior—positive or negative—invokes a need, we can better direct our response.
Step 5: Instruction
The four previous building blocks center on creating connections to foster social, emotional, and language development for the best possible quality interactions.
Our fifth block expands upon the foundation we’ve laid through trust, safety, warmth, and communication by adding instructional techniques for building emergent literacy. Intentional literacy instruction helps children learn to read and write, further expanding their cognitive capabilities and means of expression.
A variety of strategies to impart literacy skills exist that naturally build quality interactions and are drawn from the four previous essentials. When educators use embedded, intentional strategies and exchanges throughout daily activities such as scheduled playtime, meal time, and transitions, they are reinforcing routines that build trust.
When surroundings are accessible and considerate of all of the senses, they promote relaxed environments that allow learning with ease. A classroom that represents the diversity of its inhabitants through material objects and spoken word is a literacy-rich environment that encourages curiosity and promotes empathy.
Educators who communicate through frequent conversation and open-ended questions, and respond to challenging behavior with respect and empathy, set the tone for quality instruction.
Given that there are many specific and strategic quality instruction techniques, we can look forward to revisiting the topic of quality interactions and exploring it more fully in future blogs.
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