The Teach in Sync Project

Learning to Teach in Sync with Children’s Thinking is a complex process that involves interpretation of children’s meaning during play and on-the-spot decision making in support of their thinking and purposes. The Teach in Sync with Children’s Thinking project was designed to capture video segments demonstrating a range of examples of teacher-child interactions that can be viewed and analyzed by early childhood students, teachers, and educators.

Consider critiquing these video segments with the following teacher practices in mind that are inspired by Constructivist principles and emergent curriculum.

1. Finding opportunities to push curiosity

   • Asking questions about the reasoning behind the play (Why, how, etc.)

2. Finding opportunities to challenge thinking

   • Asking questions that challenge their decisions based off on real-life scenarios

   • Using statements to bring their attention to the problem again

   • Identifying a problem in the play and ask children to find a solution.

3. Staying close to children’s interests

   • Adding materials to extend the play.

4. Using materials to draw children to explore the world and their ideas about the world

   • Recommending materials to extend/support the play

   • Giving children the opportunity to explore the materials.

   • Providing resources to help children find the answers

5. Using dialogic strategies that push children to explore, challenge, and revise their ideas about the world.

   • Repeating children’s words

   • Asking for clarification

   • Asking about the reasons

   • Thinking out loud

   • Observes quietly as children play

6. Staying close to children’s thinking

   • Entering the play with a role that is reasonable to the children’s purposes

   • Talking about the play

This project was initially funded by an ETSU Instructional Development Grant awarded to Dr. Jane Tingle Broderick in 2013.

Peer Culture

The Peer Culture project was designed as an extension of Teach in Sync. The Peer Culture video segments capture children engaged in play at times when there is little or no teacher facilitation.

Ways to view and discuss these video clips are inspired by the ethnographies of William Corsaro (1985, 2014), in which he observed the ways children use language to organize a hierarchical structure to their peer culture during play episodes. As you view these segments consider which children are superordinate players and which are subordinate. In some settings there may be a stratification, with different degrees of superordinate to subordinate relationships.

Corsaro (1985, 2014) also observed children using many strategies to enter play and to resist entry to play. He theorized these as relevant for children in order to maintain control over their play for as long as possible. He viewed children as sensing the fragility in their opportunities to control play without constraints of adult intervention. He found there were close to 50% of rejections of entry into play by a newcomer. Teachers can threaten the structure of these play experiences by asking children to share with peers. Children develop problem solving skills as they observe peers to interpret the meaning of the play so that they can strategize many ways to try to enter the play.

Things to consider while viewing the Peer Culture video clips

Status is used as an acceptance or rejection strategy to protect the play space or focus for as long as possible. Notice the length of some play episodes and the focus of children.

Successful entry can occur as a result of:

• Finding a role

• Negotiating

• Introducing new play ideas

• Adding new materials

Also, Children use the term friend

• to gain access to play

• to protect shared play spaces from intrusion

• to build solidarity and trust among group

• to attempt to control peers’ activity

Corsaro, W. A. (2014). The Sociology of Childhood (fourth edition). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.

Corsaro, W. A. (1985). Friendship and Peer Culture in the Early Years. Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger.