Leading by Listening:A Playful Approach

The "Leading by Listening: A Playful Approach" framework actively supports early years and primary school educators in prioritising children's voices for change. The PLAYFUL acronym guides educators through stages like Problematise, Action Plan, and Findings & Feedback, emphasising understanding, avoiding assumptions, and influencing future change based on children's input. Positive initial feedback highlights its inclusivity and practical application in shaping educational approaches. The ongoing project involves the formation of a national network in Scotland to further advance this impactful approach

Leading by Listening:A Playful Approach

The "Leading by Listening: A Playful Approach" framework actively supports early years and primary school educators in prioritising children's voices for change. The PLAYFUL acronym guides educators through stages like Problematise, Action Plan, and Findings & Feedback, emphasising understanding, avoiding assumptions, and influencing future change based on children's input. Positive initial feedback highlights its inclusivity and practical application in shaping educational approaches. The ongoing project involves the formation of a national network in Scotland to further advance this impactful approach

Children’s Voices through play-based practice:listening, intensities and critique

Purpose: This paper offers a reflection of a research process aimed at listening to young children's voices in their everyday school life through a play-based context in a Scottish school. Throughout the research process, the complexity of conducting this research was kept in mind as listening to children's voices presents methodological and conceptual difficulties and tensions. Reflecting on the research process after the data was collected, the process was critiqued using Deleuze-Guattarian ideas. The critique aims at opening and challenging each researcher, allowing them to think-again about the next research project aimed at listening to children's voices. Design/methodology/approach: The research involved an observation study that took place over one week in a primary school in Central Scotland. As part of the educators' approach to play-based pedagogy, children had the opportunity to engage in free play throughout the day. Observations were chosen as the main approach to “capture” children's voices in their natural settings. Findings: The empirical research brought forth two main ideas, that of children as agents, and how children amplify their voices through play. The reflective part offers the possibility of understanding the intensities and forces when conducting such research and the possibilities of engaging with these. Originality/value: This paper offers a critique of research aimed at listening to children's voices. The aim is not to limit engagement in researching children's voices but to open, or make complex, such processes.</p

Optimising and enhancing human performance through nutrition

1 Introduction 545 2 Eating to optimise training 545 2.1 Energy needs for training and the ideal physique 545 2.2 Strategies to reduce mass and body fat 547 2.3 Requirements for growth and gaining lean body mass 548 3 Protein needs for muscle gain, training enhancement and repair 549 4 Fuel needs for training and recovery 550 5 Eating to minimise illness and injury 551 5.1 Calcium, bones and the female athlete triad 551 5.2 Iron depletion 552 5.3 Nutrition for the immune system 553 5.4 Vitamins, minerals and the antioxidant system 553 6 Eating for competition performance 554 6.1 Making weight to meet competition weight targets 554 6.2 Fuelling for competition 554 6.3 Fat adaptation and glycogen restoration strategies 555 6.4 Pre-event eating (1–4 h) 557 6.5 Fuelling during events 558 6.6 Postevent recovery 558 7 Conclusion 559 References 55

Shall we play?:Listening to Children’s Voices using a Playful Approach

There is a paucity of research that has effectively listened to children's voices on matters important to them and has asked them how they would like to be listened to. This study used a playful approach to listen to children's voices about play spaces in their primary school. The research questions were:•How can a playful approach be used to listen to children's voices about what children would like their new play space to look like?•Why did children choose particular resources to communicate their thoughts about those spaces?Forty-two primary school children (ages 5-6 years) chose which method/s they would like to engage with to share their voices from blocks, clay, drawings, percussion instruments and loose parts storytelling. In line with our Playful Research Ethics Framework (PREF), interactive ethics sessions were delivered using puppets, music and Makaton and on-going assent was monitored.This article focuses on clay and blocks data; children's favourite and preferred methods to listen to their voices. Rich data were collected through artefacts, photographs and conversations. The findings suggest that incorporating a playful approach and providing multiple ateliers and resources to choose from, can ensure children's voices can be heard and amplified.The study makes several original contributions, namely, designing a Playful Research Ethics Framework, aligning the research design of multiple ateliers with free-flow play and including a large sample size. This study also highlighted children's agency within the research process as children chose how and when their voices should be heard, and invited children to share their preferences for being listened to in future

Developing Young Thinkers: Discovering Baseline Understandings of Effective Thinking among Children and Teachers and Intervening to Enhance Thinking Skills

This thesis considers teachers’ and pupils’ conceptions of effective thinking, and analyses how these are developed through an explicit thinking skills intervention. An analysis of children’s concepts of intelligence has shown that, with age, children tend to associate ‘cleverness’ with knowledge acquisition rather than active thinking. Perhaps as a reflection of this it is increasingly popular to teach thinking skills in schools, although how best to support practitioners in this task remains contested. This thesis presents findings from three linked studies conducted to discover pupils’ and practitioners’ understandings of ‘effective thinking’ (which few research studies have attempted) before intervening to explicitly enhance children’s thinking skills. Study 1 was questionnaire-based and investigated teachers’ definitions of effective thinking, their views of thinking skills taught within the curriculum and whether thinking skills are fostered developmentally. 127 questionnaires were returned representing teachers from 36 primary schools in central Scotland. A qualitative analysis of teachers’ concepts indicated that many did not have a clear understanding of ‘effective thinking’. Quantitative data indicated that practitioners believe thinking skills are more frequently integrated into some curricular areas than others and highlighted the lack of a developmental progression of thinking skills being taught throughout primary school. In Study 2, 75 children were interviewed with 25 children from each of the following ages: 5, 7 and 11 years. This study explored the development of children’s definitions of intelligence and effective thinking and the characteristics and causes associated with each. It also produced novel data on how children’s knowledge of thinking skills changes over time. Content analysis revealed age trends in children’s definitions of intelligence, as, with age, children were increasingly likely to hold cognitive views and incorporate knowledge into those definitions. Whilst no age trends were found in children’s concepts of effective thinking, with all three age groups defining it as a cognitive ability, clear developmental trends emerged in children’s understandings of individual thinking skills. The final study (involving 178 primary 7 pupils and their teachers) challenged these concepts through an intervention designed to evaluate the effects of infusing thinking skills throughout the curriculum, and investigated the belief that collaborative learning enhances thinking skills. There were three intervention conditions: collaborative, individual and control. Six thinking skills were focused on, with training sessions and curricular lesson plans devised to support practitioners. The intervention lessons were based on an identified underpinning pedagogy of effective thinking (i.e., making the thinking skill explicit; fostering appropriate thinking dispositions; developing metacognition and encouraging transfer). The intervention evaluation utilised standardised and study-specific pre- and post-tests. Results demonstrated statistically significant gains for the individual and collaborative learning conditions in a range of thinking skills. The greatest increase in performance was seen in the collaborative learning condition. These three studies highlight the importance of gathering baseline data on understandings of effective thinking before intervening to successfully develop awareness of the cognitive processes involved in ‘good thinking’ and enhance children’s thinking skills. The findings from this thesis have significant implications for education; practitioners need clearer guidance on how to teach a coherent developmental progression of thinking skills, and need to be supported when explicitly infusing thinking skills throughout the curriculum