AGILE TEACHERS - Harness 7 Dynamic Learning Zones to Expand your Teaching Range!

The information in this article is elaborated upon in detail in my book, The Power of Play: Mastering the 7 Dynamic Learning Zones. For more articles by Lili-Ann, go to: https://authory.com/kriegler-education

AGILE EDUCATORS

7 Learning Zones to Boost Children’s Conceptual Understanding

Imagine you enter a preschool orearly primary setting and find children at a water tray table actively pouring turquoise-colouredd water from one container to another. They have access to tubes, funnelsstraws, and other containers of all sizes,s from thimbles to a 400ml measuring jug. The activity is fun and absorbing.

Do you ask yourself, “Why is it there?” There are many answers. It could be as simple as a teacher finding the bits and pieces in a crate neatly labelled, ‘water play’ in the storeroom. At the end of the week, the activity is disassembled and stored back in its place. The play is an interlude and not connected to anything beyond the immediate sensory enjoyment.

Free play like this is a highly valuable learning zone, allowing children to observe and experiment with materials, which gives them control over their own time and space. But if left at that, their learning won’t spiral upward, and their opportunity to master important concepts may be lost. By the time we are five years old, our human brains are already 90% developed, making these years critical for learning, especially in the area of conceptual language acquisition.

Even though concept formation would seem to be the core work of early educators, play is such a key theme in early years’ frameworks that some teachers suffer from decision paralysis about how and what to teach young children. They are regularly warned not to engage in a top-down curriculum.

If kids need to play, how do we teach them?

The fear is that as we scale up the cognitive expectations, we drag children away from what they want to be doing. Of course, we want children to be motivated and follow their own interests and goals. But we also want them to learn stuff, so structured learning is vital. What is needed is a framework of presentation modes that respect the roles of both student and educator. This article proposes seven different learning zones within which teachers can confidently monitor and present learning content.

Agile Teachers Preschool and early primary teachers are adaptive and able to present content to children in different ways at different times. They can follow the child, but they can also attract the child to follow them! Within education settings, teachers regularly change their proximity to the child. Maya Angelou, the US author and philosopher, says,“When we know better, we can do better.” Imagine an agility wheel which, like a pie graph, maps seven different zones. Each zone denotes a different learning relationship between the teacher and the student, with varying degrees of involvement and direction. Sometimes, in the larger triangles of the agility wheel, the child has more freedom to follow his or her own goals and there is less or no direct mediation from the educator.In the smaller zones, or triangles, the teacher mediation is much closer and the content more directive and specific. Teachers can assess what they need to teach and plan a particular method in advance, or a moment, they can dramatically pivot from what they are doing to employ an alternative zone, technique and strategy. In each zone, the role of the educator and the student is clearly defined. What are the seven zones? The Zones are mapped on the Agility Wheel.

The size of the zone indicates the extent of a child's freedom, and the height of the zone indicates the proximity of the educator, or how closely they are guiding the child.

• Free Play • Mediated Play • Embedded Concepts • Concept Clarity • Closed-Ended Mobilisation • Open-Ended Mobilisation • Auto-Generative Creativity

The water activity above can help to explore the zones. Perhaps the teacher didn’t randomly select it. Instead, the water play is part of a well-planned project on the value of water as a life source on our planet, marking the beginning of an intensive and structured investigation. The next stage of the project will not be to pack it away, but to ask children to share with us what they are doing and their ideas about the water. In this mediated play, the teacher is closer in proximity and assesses the level of children’s vocabulary, asks questions, and might even add more materials. However, the flow remains in the direction of the child's exploration. Building on the initial water investigation, additional activities are provided elsewhere in the room. In these activities, materials are purposely selected to surface embedded concepts. There might be melting ice and a place to draw or write on a small blackboard using only water and a small paintbrush. The information about states of water which freeze or evaporate is not directly taught, but is latent in the activity and ready for children to wonder about and discover. New vocabulary is made available in the immediate context. This vocabulary includes content words such as 'evaporate,' 'condense,' 'volume,' and 'liquid,' as well as process words like 'plan,' 'predict,' and 'compare,' alerting students to their thinking processes.

At a stage when experimentation and discovery are advanced, we enter a zone of concept clarity. The logical relationships are so well understood that students can confidently articulate them.

The educators mobilise the information in either closed-ended tasks, where the outcomes are known and predictable, or open-ended challenges, where children might solve small (or large) problems in a variety of ways. They can explore them in movement,mathematics, dance, music, science and stories!

An exampleof a closed-ended mobilisation might be a maths challenge to find out precisely how many smallcontainers of water are needed to fill a large one. There is only one answer, but there is learning alongthe way, because if the small ones aren’tfilled to the brim, they aren’t full, and the correct outcomewon’t be reached.

In two examples below, students are encouraged to draw and paint their understanding about water. In the triptyche, they demonstrate how animals use water on land and in water and the also indicate how it is reticulated to their homes via networks of pipes.

In the secone group of paintings, students study the photographs of patterns of water and recreate them in individual paintings.

But an open- ended project to make a raft so that some toy animals make it safely across the pond, might result in many wonderful inventions, solutions, paintings and stories. Throughout the seven zones, children’s mastery of concepts is scaling upwards. Their knowledge is being connected both within and across various activities, experiences, discussions, and challenges.

Several of the children were determined to create a water dance. This is completely open-ended as they developed their own choreography, including the popular hip-hop Worm move they were obsessed with at the time.

In this painting, a family is swimming together. Several of the painting techniques have been included. The father's total reflection is included and there is a sense of his importance with his arm curved around the entire family.

After all that, they go back to free play, but this time, they use all the knowledgethey have mastered along the way. When they create something you haven’t planned or even imagined, using the collaborative learning that has been consolidated, the students enter the realm of auto-generative creativity.

Not just one or two, but seven learning zones give teachers permission and options to incorporate meaningful learning into free play, while also making formal learning look and feel like play.

Lili-Ann Kriegler Lili-Ann Kriegler (B. A Hons, H. Dip. Ed, M.Ed..) is an education consultant and author of 'The Power of Play - Mastering the 7 Dynamic Learning Zones. Her specialisations include early childhood education (birth-9 years), leadership, and optimising human thinking and cognition. She runs her consultancy, Kriegler-Education. Find out more at www.kriegler-education.com

16