Lesson 12: teaching speaking in primary level pupils: monologue and dialogue questions to be discussed

2.What Is Observation in Early Childhood Education?

Observation in ECE is the process of tracking student behavior over time. By creating detailed documentation, educators are able to notice patterns and assess how each child is developing. Observing the children in your care can help you to better understand the strengths and weakness of each individual child. Your observations can then guide your programming and help you make adjustments to your care environment to improve a child’s behavior and facilitate learning. Regular observation and careful analysis of a child’s behaviors and personality traits can also help you build a stronger relationship with each child and connect with them in a more meaningful way. Once you start observation in an early childhood education setting, you’ll be able to monitor the progress of each child’s development over time.

Some of the most important skill categories to observe children’s’ development and track important changes include:

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  Cognitive
  
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  Social
  
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  Physical
  
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  Emotional
  
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  Language
  

You may have additional areas you wish to monitor based on each child’s strengths and weaknesses as well. The more tracking you do, the better your observations will be during your analysis later. To track a child’s development through observations, you need to have a proper system in place to make your documentations.

Traditionally, this has been done on paper daily sheets. The challenge is that ECEs are very busy throughout the day, and end up filling these out at the end of the day based on memory. This results in reports being incomplete or, even worse, inaccurate. Many centers are switching over to digital child care observation apps to help with their documentation. Throughout the day, teachers add observations in just a few taps for each child in their care.