ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on observation, documentation and engagement with children as tools for understanding young children’s thinking. It looks at some aspects of more formal approaches to the assessment of young children’s thinking and understanding. Practitioners in Reggio Emilia talk of a pedagogy of listening to young children’s multimodal communication and representation, which implies emotional engagement with children. A widely used experimental approach with young children, particularly babies, is habituation studies. Observation as a pedagogic practice to support planning, provision and reflection has its roots in the work of Friedrich Froebel, who argued that observation was crucial for practitioners’ understanding of children, and later educationalists such as Rudolf Steiner and Margaret McMillan. The work of Chris Athey has been very influential in its contribution to views on the development of young children’s thinking and understanding. One important outcome of Te Wha-riki, alongside the idea of dispositions, is that of children’s ‘working theories’.
