Kei Tua o te Pae
Kei Tua o te Pae/Assessment for Learning: Early Childhood Exemplars is a best-practice guide that will help teachers continue to improve the quality of their teaching.
The exemplars are a series of books that will help teachers to understand and strengthen children's learning. It also shows how children, parents and whānau can contribute to this assessment and ongoing learning.
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Continuity and change in competence – Te motukore me ngā nekeneke i roto i te kaiaka
Continuity and change in competence – Te motukore me ngā nekeneke i roto i te kaiaka
Another way of looking at the assessment of continuity is as an ongoing record of continuity and change in competence. Over time, a child’s competence in a range of areas becomes more secure, more widely applicable, and more complex. As competence becomes more secure, the child teaches others and increasingly relies on invoking competence to follow through tasks, make sense of the world, take on roles, solve problems, and engage in further learning. When competence becomes more widely applicable, the child makes use of it in their reciprocal and responsive relationships with a range of people, places, and things. When competence becomes more complex, it becomes more interconnected, flexible, and creative.
In the exemplar “George makes music”, George’s mother describes him as a “lovely mix of bookworm, musician, artist, friend”. The assessment illustrates George’s pathway as a musician as his competence becomes:
- more secure: he moves from exploring on his own to also playing a role in interactive, small-group music activities;
- more widely applicable: he explores the sounds he can make with an increasing range of objects;
- more complex:
- he incorporates sound making and singing into his social play;
- he develops a sense of rhythm and beat.
Greer’s increasing competence (and resulting confidence; pages 14–17) becomes:
- more secure: she takes on the role of supporter for the younger children;
- more widely applicable: her dispositions for participating in the life of the centre grow, and she develops her communication skills in an increasingly diverse range of media;
- more complex:
- her engagement in reading and exploration of O-Huiarangi and volcanoes are integrated into the development of a new friendship;
- communicating and initiating contribute to another developing friendship as Greer and another child collaborate in dramatic play and building.
Well-being, belonging, communication, contribution, and exploration have become interconnected in complex ways in George’s and Greer’s records of increasing competence.