Explanation of tags

(Pianta, La Paro, & Hamre, 2008; La Paro, Hamre, & Pianta, 2012)

• Positive climate
  Warmth, enjoyment, and respect displayed by teachers and children
• Teacher sensitivity
  Comfort, encouragement and responsiveness to children's needs
• Regard for child perspectives
  Emphasis on children's views and encouragement of independence
• Behavior management
  Effective methods to monitor, prevent and redirect misbehavior
• Instructional learning formats
  Maximization of child engagement

(Pianta, La Paro, & Hamre, 2008; La Paro, Hamre, & Pianta, 2012)

• Facilitation of Learning & Development/Concept Development
  Facilitation children’s learning
• Quality of feedback
  Feedback that extends children's learning and understanding
• Language modeling
  Language-stimulation and language-facilitation techniques

(Laevers, 1994)

Wellbeing: “feeling like a fish in water” or children feeling all right. This can be expressed in various ways:

1. Enjoyment: having fun, taking pleasure in interacting with others and in activities. The children look happy, smile or laugh easily, engage in spontaneous chatting or even singing.
2. Relaxing and inner peace: having a relaxed expression. Children have an open facial expression with no signs of tension or restlessness. Their muscles are relaxed.
3. Vitality: another signal is energy or vitality. This often can be read from children’s faces: the look is lively and expressive. Their posture also gives a lot away: not shrunk or with hanging shoulders but upright, not afraid to take the space they are entitled to.
4. Openness: when children feel o.k., they have an open attitude towards the world around them. They are open, accessible, and approachable to others. They are happy with the attention they receive: a hug, a compliment, a word of comfort, an encouragement or help.
5. Self-confidence: self-assurance, self-confidence, a sense of self-value makes one less anxious or stressed. This can be noticed in a posture expressing a certain pride, literally feeling ‘big’. That positive self-image is the foundation of resilience. Children then do not allow others to walk all over them; they are assertive.

Involvement: a child is completely ‘absorbed’ by the activity.

1. Motivation: a child being truly interested and driven to engage in a task or activity. Motivation must come from within. You cannot achieve high levels of involvement if you do things only because others ask or force you to.
2. Intense mental activity: involvement means being open to experiences: the impressions you get are very strong. Bodily sensations and movements, colors and sounds, smells and tastes have a certain range and depth that is not there otherwise. You fully address your fantasy and mental capabilities. When involvement is low the sensations are not really lived through and remain superficial.
3. Satisfaction: An experience of energy running through your body. Children spontaneously take initiatives to get into this state. If involvement is lacking, you become bored and get a feeling of emptiness and frustration.
4. Exploratory drive: the child has an urge to discover or explore, to experience the world, to use ones senses, to get a grip on reality.
5. At the limits of your capabilities: an activity/task should be challenging, not too easy and not too difficult, children with a higher level of involvement operate at the very limits of their capabilities. They fully address their skills and they get the best of themselves.

(Alexander, 2006; Muhonen et al., 2016)

The episode of educational dialogue is defined as a segment of an extended exchange between the teacher and children, in which the topic continued essentially the same. Further, each episode must manifests three of the five principles of dialogic teaching (Alexander, 2006;) i.

• purposefulness (teachers plan and steer classroom talk with specific educational goals in mind);
• collectiveness (teachers and children address learning tasks/topics together as a small group or as a the whole classroom)
• reciprocity (teachers and children listen to each other, share ideas and consider alternative viewpoints)

Choosing to use the aforementioned three criteria is founded on the work by Muhonen et al. (2016), who has gained empirical evidence on the validity of exploring dialogues  with 6–8-year-old childr

(Pastori et al., 2016)

Children as resources [E-RESOURCES]: 

Children are resources and a high-quality teacher-child relationship takes place where the adult supports their active role and their competence to share and co-construct projects  and activities, knowledges, products, or to discuss social rules.

Peer relationships as a trigger for learning [E-PEER]:

Peer interactions are a key-factor in promoting children’s learning and socio-cognitive development. Teachers intentionally fosterpeer interactions, socialization, reciprocal support and learning as a quality indicator of teacher-child/children interactions.

Broader conceptualization of learning [E-BROAD]:

Learning is not solely cognitive and linguistic learning, a broader vision of what learning embraces children’s socio-emotional development and the role of teachers in fostering it providing children with opportunities to learn to cooperate, to be part of a group or a community, to be responsible for others, to regulate their emotions and to understand and recognize those of others, to acquire basic life skills, opportunity to learn to deal with with and respect diversity (Inclusiveness)

Non intervention strategies [E-NON INTERVENTION]:

Teachers need to be aware of children’s needs, concerns, conflicts and unacceptable behaviours. However, an effective teacher should refrain from acting always at the first signal from the child. Rather, he/she should take enough time to observe the child and the peers’ reaction before deciding if and how intervening.  This idea is in tune with a conceptualization of the teacher as a reflective professional, whose professionalism lies, indeed, in his/her ability to question, reflect and observe children and their own educational practices.