Active Experimentation

We would like you to be active in your learning, be confident to take risks and to try out your learning in your classes and interactions with the children in your care.

A key part of the course is to reflect, to think and to dig deeper into areas of interest to you. Being reflective improves practice and benefits children. It translates the theory and knowledge into what you do in your context and setting.

We named this step Active Experimentation, inspired by the American theorist David Kolb, who constructed the theory of experiential learning (1984). This states that successful learning comes from four sequential processes where the fourth one, Active Experimentation, is about using what you have discovered and applying it in your life.

Here there are some videos and links to explore this topic, how children learn and how they acquire language. Choose one or two resources below to look at in more detail and note your ideas and reflections in your observation journal. This will help with the peer graded assignment later on in the course.

• Read this article on how to help young children learn English as another language.

• Watch What do babies think? by psychologist Alison Gopnik.

• Watch The linguistic genius of babies by professor of speech and hearing sciences Dr Patricia Kuhl.

• Read this article about how talking to babies and young children builds their brains.