Please note:

• At checkout, please enter the details (name and email) of the delegate who will be attending in the “Contact information” section (as well as in the Ticket section), not the name of the person making the booking. This is because for technical reasons the login for the eLearning platform will be sent to the email supplied in the “Contact information” field, not the one given in the “Ticket” field.

This project will be delivered by Debi Keyte-Hartland.

This project-based course is a set of five half-day staggered sessions, exploring the principles of Birth to 5 Matters with a specific focus on creating your own curriculum design that is engaging, responsive and impactful to your specific context.

Course description

This is a specialist offer of training designed as an opportunity for participants to learn together as part of a learning community over a series of facilitated sessions by Early Education Associate Consultant Debi Keyte-Hartland. Each session is designed to explore, support and challenge how you ‘do’, ’support’ and therefore ‘design' curriculum to support the progress of young children’s learning and development, in your setting with a focus on working with children’s interests, motivations and enquiries that promotes and activates learner agency in the process of learning.

The aims of this learing community is to provide time and space for reflection and evaluation of your curriculum design as lived out in daily practice and also over the longer term that is interconnected with teaching, pedagogy, values and assessment that will enable you to ensure that your curriculum is ambitious and meaningful for all your children. It also has aims to increase participants confidence and to support your articulation and defence at different levels whether you are a practitioner or leader within your setting of your' Intent, Implementation and Impact' supported by practice-based evidence with theoretical underpinnings.

We will critically consider for example, how the principles of Birth to 5 Matters can be interwoven with pedagogical approaches that value the socialness of learning, where children play and learn alongside of each other, sharing discoveries and building knowledge of the world in dialogic and communicative ways. We will study documentation and case studies to identify the characteristics of effective learning and other cognitive processes and habits that children use to develop comprehension and understanding and how these characteristics can act as drivers for thinking critically about the intent and implementation of curriculum design that uses reflective cycles to value and identify children’s prior knowledge to observe development, learning processes and the construction of knowledge over time. We will learn to sharpen our skills of observation to analyse and interpret what we see/hear/feel/notice to then carefully reason how as educators we might re-launch enquiries and everyday contexts of learning together with the children that is generative to achieving complex learning and understanding.

Through building and designing curriculum with children’s enquiry and curiosity at the heart, we enrich our observation skills to help us identify and build on the variety of ways in which children make-meaning and develop understanding through the interwoven and interconnected areas of learning. We will discover how to build and design curriculum that values being in deep connection in relationships to nature, each other, community and ways of knowing and to activate those relations in our settings and back out again to families and carers to enable deeper expressions of curiosity, creative thought and reasoning within a process of continuous and evolving enquiry.

Essential Questions

What is curriculum and how we can co-design it with children?

What does it mean and what does it take to ‘observe, analyse and plan’ for engaging, responsive and impactful learning experiences for children?

What characterises the processes of effective, meaningful and joyful learning and what we need to do as adults to foster it?

How can we build and co-design with children a curriculum that amplifies enquiry, curiosity, creativity and deep connection with nature, people and the world?

The project will take place on the following dates and times (please note the revised dates below):

Session 1: Wednesday 16th March, 4pm-6.30pm

Session 2: Wednesday 4th May, 4pm-6.30pm

Session 3: Wednesday 22nd June 4pm-6.30pm

Session 4: Wednesday 13th July, 4pm-6.30pm

Session 5: Wednesday 14th September, 4pm-6.30pm

Please note: due to the nature of this being a collaborative project, the sessions will not be recorded.