Within professional development (PD), reflection is recognised as a key ingredient to developing high quality practice, however less is known about the context and mechanisms needed to enable this in early childhood education and care (ECEC) settings. This article explores video enhanced reflective practice (VERP), an innovative model of…

This paper investigates adult-child interaction in the early years of education. The intention is to understand how children's initiatives and practitioners' responses support and/or hinder children's agency. Our ethnographic data include 150 h of video data supplemented by observational field notes from a Finnish Early Childhood Education (ECE)…

Infants and toddlers (birth to age 3) learn what it means to be members of, and to belong to and be accepted by, their societies by adopting behaviors, attitudes, manners, and ways of thinking that are deeply rooted in what is valued in their culture. Infant and toddler teachers play a pivotal role as transmitters and maintainers of culture when…

With the advance of technology, additional opportunities for professional development are available through nontraditional means. In this review, we examine the effectiveness of technology-mediated language and literacy professional development (Tech PD) programs for teachers and students in early childhood settings. We review Tech PD…

With the increased accountability of early childhood programs and the need to carefully document each assessment, teachers need to explore videotaping to enhance observational assessments. Observing children continues to be an effective method for understanding the uniqueness of each child's development. In this article, the authors present a case…

The study described in this article sought to enhance the social interaction skills of 3 preschool children using video modeling. All children had been assessed as having difficulties in their interactions with peers. Two were above average on internalizing problems and the third was above average on externalizing problems. The study used a…

This article describes a statewide online alternative teacher preparation program in early childhood special education. The history and evolution of the program is explained along with the programmatic changes that resulted from working with noncertified teachers with a wide variety of backgrounds in both rural and urban districts. Challenges and…

Over one-third of preschoolers with disabilities are fully included in the classroom with their typically developing peers and another large percentage receive some instruction in the inclusive classroom. In order to support young children and increase the likelihood of the desired learning and behavior outcomes, teachers must use individual data…

We acknowledge the importance of scaffolding during play; thus, the present study explores the ways early childhood (EC) teachers provide guidance during children's socio-dramatic play and how they employ creative drama in their play interactions. Data collection included the play video recordings of an in-service teacher with a drama background,…

This article is an empirically grounded contribution to the understanding of how digitalization in education is interpreted and made into being by actors in everyday lives, in this case children and teachers in Swedish early childhood education. The focus is on interactions in an early childhood classroom upon and around a digital interactive…

Early childhood education provides an important arena for fostering valuable habits and practices for sustainability. This paper contributes to understanding the educator's role within early childhood environmental education in foraging and gardening practices. What pedagogical approaches does the teacher provide to foster the children's…

This article builds on a qualitative study of interactions and negotiations with respect to existential questions in an ECEC department with children from 3 to 6 years of age, as part of a larger empirical study on the same topic. In the Norwegian Ministry of Education and Research's 2017 curriculum for Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC),…

Research has demonstrated that teachers working in early childhood education and care (ECEC) are proficient in offering emotional support to young children, but markedly weaker when it comes to instructional support. We conducted a controlled experimental study in the Netherlands, to investigate the effects of targeted in-service training on…

Teachers' professional vision is the ability to notice and interpret classroom interactions and may be considered an aspect of a teacher's competence. Despite research on school teachers, little is known about this competence in early childhood teachers. In this study, the relation between early childhood teachers' professional vision and their…

Children represent their efforts to make sense of their social worlds in various ways. Having, making and being friends are common foci of children's interactions and identity development. These efforts may become visible through analysing video-recorded snippets of children's play. In particular, repeated viewing of episodes of children's…