Lauren: I think the whole process just makes you more conscious of the way
that they talk and the questions that you ask. (Author' s bold)
It requires a degree of maturity and confidence for a fully qualified teacher with several years of experience, to be able to admit that she has needed to have
"been practising,
learning diffirent ways I can "
with her peers. The possibility of such openness being perceived as a threat would be high in a centre consisting of staff with a variety of levels of qualifications. A mature teaching team is flexible in its application of agreed procedures: Lauren: Barbara: Lauren: Susan: Barbara: Susan:We have a plan, which / haven't really been following, I tend to ignore what we plan as a team and do what's appropriate for the day so I can confess up now. Yeah, I tend to pick up on what's interested them.
So you plan the week ahead, do you, for whanau groups? Yeah I think that's almost ... .
That's actually. as a stop-gap in case you get to the end of the moming and your brain's dead and you can 't think. But if you've got something going you just go for it. Yeah.
So the whanau group might be the time when you would go back to this?
Someone in my whanau group might bring a caterpillar or a moth or something so therefore the planning that we did on Friday goes out the door and you focus in on what happened today_
Here, Susan and Lauren both "confess" to sabotaging the "team' s interpretation of the whanau planning". It was this gentle give and take, sometimes in a joking tone, but always with the intention of reflecting, clarifying, debating, which characterised this team's interactions.
Chloe: Susan: Chloe:
Like, that is a dilemma, an issue, but we're not superhuman and I can only do one thing at a time and ...
I thought you could do 10 things!
You can tell me everyday that I can do everything at once, but I
know. But it's that sort, those are the issues for me as a
professional. . . . "I'm thinking now, I'm stopping· and I'm thinking now
are they . . . or are they ... ?"
The teachers were each working at a different level of understanding and expectations, especially at the beginning of the year, when a new staff member had joined the team. The senior staff member showed considerable restraint on several occasions, as her ideas had to be postponed to allow the other teacher(s) to reach her level; this was done with good humour:
Susan: Yeah. That would be interesting, I think. See, I thought the reason that we were doing this was that, so that it would help us to figure out how children are thinking.
Chloe: Identifying the reasons why dialogues are interrupted. Listing what some of them are and then perhaps coming up with some ideas or strategies that we can put in place to eliminate them or reduce the invading influence that they have.
Susan allowed the discussion to continue in the direction of ChI-oe's interest, at least for a while:
Susan: But I'd like to go back to that origina l thought that we had when we started. Like finding out how children think. I really WOUld, you know, I don't know .how you'd do it. But that little conversation that I had with those kids. They were talking about flying through the clouds. They had a whole lot of concepts that were really amazing. They'd been in an aeroplane and Cameron - his dog was so big it went to the sky and he couldn't reach the lead - and in my thought I was thinking, well, maybe he was little 'cos I asked him how old he was when those dogs were big. Maybe, when you're a little baby, dogs are enonnous. Or whether it was fantasy because they were up to the sky but his dad could reach them but he couldn't. I'd like to find out how or what he was thinking.
Barbara:
Susan: Barbara: Lauren:
And I'm wondering again, (about) the Reggio Emilia idea of picking up on the child's interests and ideas and the children getting into the habit of exploring their ideas with each other and that becomes a project that is ongoing. I'm wondering if that is one way that you would be able to pick up on the children's ideas and extend them. So, to have the children sourcing information from other children? Somehow you need to use these snippets of conversations that you've got. Any of them could be the beginning of a project if the children showed enough interest.
I'm just thinking about that drain and that pump and things Like, Cameron, he started a lot of conversation about how pumps worked and then that moved on and the next day I brought a pump from home. But he talked about the car battery and that sort of thing to make a pump with and I could have brought a car battery or something like that, couldn't I? To extend that.
From the outset of our work together Lauren had been adept at providing equipment to extend children's activities. Now she was doing so in response to children's expressions of their understandings and ideas.