Assignment One EDE 3103

Teacher presence is an important facet of all areas of curriculum. Quality interactions between teacher and child form the foundation for a successful and effective early childhood program. This essay will discuss the use of scaffolding as one of the strategies of intentional teaching, and its importance in facilitating children’s play. It will explore various theories relating to scaffolding and show clear links between these theorists and how they view the teacher as an integral part of learning. It will go on to explore the term ‘Intentional Teaching’ and discuss its benefits in the early childhood context. Furthermore, it will show that a positive teacher presence improves learning outcomes for children.

Scaffolding is a strategy used by educators to help children reach their goals and extend their learning. It helps children to achieve a task that may be too difficult for them to just work out on their own. Without this help the child would possibly just give up, viewing the task as too hard for them. It may be something simple like the child needs adult help to guide them how to clip some blocks together to build a tower, if the blocks go together a particular way small children sometimes get very frustrated and without help would give up and stop building, provided with this small amount of scaffolding and they are then able to continue on their building master piece. This is only one small example, scaffolding comes in many forms and will depend on the age and stage of the child and what they are trying to achieve. By using scaffolding as a strategy the educator can extend the child’s learning. According to Vygotsky’s Zone of Proximal Development the ZPD is ‘the distance between the most difficult task a child can do alone and the most difficult task a child can do with help’ This “help” is referred to as scaffolding (Turner, 2011). Arthur, Beecher, Death, Dockett & Farmer (2005) suggest that scaffolding is the process where others offer guidance and

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