ERIC ED312034: Early Childhood Teacher Decision Making pdf

ERIC ED312034: Early Childhood Teacher Decision Making

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Description of the Book:

This study is one of the few that have addressed the teacher’s involvement in children’s peer interactions. Some of the ways in which teacher beliefs and intentions interact reflexively with contextual factors to produce particular social realities in preschool settings are examined. Four experienced early childhood teachers of acknowledged ability participated in the study. About 1,000 pages of data were accumulated on each teacher through observations and interviews. The first part of the paper describes the study’s methodology. This part covers the decision to focus observations on the teacher’s involvement in children’s peer interactions, the implementation of a number of data-gathering strategies to provide triangulation, interviews exploring beliefs and intentions, pursuit of interview themes in the observation data, idiosyncratic and regulated coding procedures, and development of case studies focusing on each teacher. The second section briefly discusses findings. Observations suggested that teacher involvement in children’s peer interactions could be grouped in six areas: developing a sense of community; helping children gain access to peer play groups; involvement in children’s dramatic play; use of social conduct rules; resolving peer conflict situations; arrangement of the physical environment to support peer interaction.

Teachers identified a number of mental activities associated with teaching. Apparently similar situations were read in very different ways, indicating the importance of the teacher’s definition of the situation. (RH

• Creator/s: ERIC
• Date: 1989-08
• Year: 1989
• Book Topics/Themes: ERIC Archive, Beliefs, Case Studies, Classroom Research, Classroom Techniques, Cognitive Processes, Context Effect, Preschool Children, Preschool Education, Preschool Teachers, Research Methodology, Social Behavior, Teacher Behavior

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