TCHR5010 2000 words Portfolio of planning cycle

TCHR5010: Competency and capability of Preschoolers Assessment Two: Portfolio Information Booklet

Assessment name: Portfolio of planning cycle
Due Date: Monday 10th June 2024 @ 11:59pm
Weighting: 60%
Length: 2000 words

Task Description: This Portfolio is comprised of two tasks. You must submit your assessment as one document.
Task 1: Anecdotal record and learning experience (approximately 1000 words)
Task 2: Reflective practice (approximately 1000 words)

TCHR5010 Assessment 2: Portfolio of Planning Cycle — Anecdotal Record, Learning Experience, and Ethical Reflection

Task 1: Anecdotal Record and Learning Experience Plan

Anecdotal Record

Graduate-level students approaching TCHR5010 Assessment 2 should understand from the outset that the anecdotal record is not simply a description of what a child did — it is the foundational evidence document upon which all subsequent analysis and planning is built, and its quality determines the validity of every interpretive and pedagogical decision that follows. Demonstrate how you have engaged in the planning cycle during your professional experience by submitting your best, most detailed anecdotal record of your focus child and a learning experience plan that you implemented to extend on your observation and analysis.

Date and Time: Wednesday, 22 May 2024, 10:15–10:45 am
Child observed: Aria, 4 years 3 months
Setting: Outdoor construction area; large hollow wooden blocks, planks of varied lengths (60 cm, 90 cm, 120 cm), cable spools, rope, and milk crates arranged accessibly in a shaded area adjacent to the sandpit. Three other children (ages 3–5) were present in the area. Lead teacher positioned near the sandpit; assistant educator seated at a low table at the edge of the construction zone.
People present: Lead teacher, assistant educator, 4 children including focus child.

Observation: Aria approached the construction area and stood still for approximately 20 seconds, surveying the available materials. She then collected two of the longest planks and placed them side by side on the ground, declaring to the adjacent child, “We’re making a bridge, but it has to go over the water.” The nearby child (Theo, 4 years 8 months) immediately joined the construction, and the two children worked together for the next 18 minutes, negotiating the placement of cable spools as “pillars,” testing plank lengths by walking across them, and resolving structural failures by adjusting the spool positioning. When a plank slipped, Aria examined the join carefully, said “It’s too slippery here,” and independently retrieved a length of rope to lash the plank to the spool. Her language throughout was rich with spatial vocabulary: “higher,” “underneath,” “the middle one,” “too far apart.” Theo deferred to Aria’s design decisions throughout but actively contributed materials and monitored structural stability by pressing down on completed sections with his hands.

Analysis — Children’s Strengths and Interests: Aria demonstrated sustained concentration across an 18-minute self-directed construction task, a level of executive function persistence characteristic of children at the higher end of the 4–5-year developmental range (Yogman et al., 2018). Her spatial reasoning — evident in her judgements about plank length, spool spacing, and structural integrity — reflects the kind of informal mathematical thinking that Verdine et al. (2017) identify as a strong predictor of later mathematical achievement. Her use of rope to solve the slipping problem demonstrated flexible problem-solving: she identified the cause of failure, generated a solution independently, and implemented it effectively without adult prompting.

Theoretical Links: Vygotsky’s zone of proximal development (ZPD) is visible in Aria’s collaboration with Theo: she operated at the upper limit of her current capacity, with Theo providing a form of peer scaffolding through his physical assistance and monitoring. The construction activity also maps directly onto the EYLF Learning Outcome 4 — children are confident and involved learners — particularly the indicator that children “engage in learning relationships” and “use play to investigate, project and explore new ideas” (AGDE, 2022, p. 40).

EYLF Learning Outcomes and NQS Links: Outcome 4 (confident and involved learners); Outcome 5 (effective communicators — Aria’s spatial language and negotiation); NQS Quality Area 1 (Educational Program and Practice — play-based, child-initiated, educator-supported learning).

Learning Experience Plan

Aim/Objective: To extend Aria’s spatial reasoning, collaborative problem-solving, and scientific inquiry by providing a follow-up experience that introduces the concept of structural load-bearing, connects to the Australian Curriculum Science strand (Foundation: Physical Sciences — “the way objects move depends on a variety of factors,” ACARA, 2022), and invites peer collaboration in testing and refining a design.

Rationale: Aria’s independent identification and solution of the slipping problem suggests she is ready for experiences that make the principles behind structural stability more explicit. Providing materials that allow testing of different joining methods — clips, rope, elastic — alongside blocks of different weights will extend her inquiry into the domain of basic engineering thinking, supporting Australian Curriculum Science and Technologies outcomes at the Foundation level (ACARA, 2022; Campbell & Howitt, 2024).

Resources: Previous hollow block set; added — spring clips, elastic cord, timber offcuts of varied weights, a simple balance scale, paper for drawing design plans; educator-prepared “engineering challenge” card with image prompts.

Procedure: The educator will introduce the activity by referencing the previous bridge-building: “Last week you made an amazing bridge, Aria. I was thinking about the rope fix you came up with. I wonder if we could test different ways of joining the planks to see which holds the most weight?” Children will be invited to document their predictions through drawing before testing. The educator will scaffold through open questioning rather than direction, recording children’s observations and language for later documentation.

Task 2: Reflective Practice — Ethical Dilemma

Reflective practice in professional experience requires early childhood educators to develop the capacity to sit with difficulty — to resist the impulse toward a quick resolution and instead examine an ethical dilemma from the perspectives of every stakeholder affected by it. During my professional experience, an ethical dilemma emerged around the disclosure of sensitive family information within the educator team. Reflect on one ethical dilemma that you observed or experienced yourself, examining how educators responded, what was done well, and what could have been improved.

Description of the Dilemma: During a team meeting, a room leader shared specific details about a family’s domestic circumstances — information disclosed to her in confidence by the parent at drop-off — with the full team without the parent’s knowledge or consent. The information was shared with the stated intention of helping the team understand a child’s recent dysregulation. While the intention was ostensibly child-centred, the disclosure violated the family’s reasonable expectation of confidentiality and raised questions about the appropriate boundaries of information-sharing within an ECEC team.

Stakeholder Perspectives: The parent’s perspective — had she known her private disclosure was being shared across the team — would likely have been one of betrayal; the trust implicit in a confiding conversation with a single educator does not extend to team-wide disclosure. The child’s perspective, to the degree that a four-year-old can articulate it, was served by the team’s increased awareness; however, children’s interests are not separable from their families’ dignity and privacy. The team’s perspective was motivated by professional care but reflected inadequate training in confidentiality protocols. The Early Childhood Australia Code of Ethics (2016) is clear that educators must “maintain confidentiality and respect the privacy of children, families and colleagues.”

What Was Done Well: The room leader’s motivation — to support a child she was genuinely concerned about — was appropriate, and the team did use the information to adjust their responses to the child with greater sensitivity. The discussion was conducted privately within the team meeting rather than in a semi-public space.

What Could Have Been Done Better: The room leader should have sought the parent’s consent before sharing the information with colleagues, or alternatively, shared only the behavioural information relevant to the child’s support without disclosing its private source. A more appropriate course would have been to consult with the director about how to support the child without breaching confidentiality (Kilderry, 2019).

The Planning Cycle as Professional Infrastructure

The planning cycle — observe, document, analyse, plan, implement, evaluate — that anchors TCHR5010 Assessment 2 is not a procedural checklist but the structural backbone of what separates expert early childhood teaching from attentive but unreflective child supervision. When the cycle is executed with genuine rigour — when observation is specific and objective, analysis draws explicitly on theory and policy frameworks, planning is directly responsive to what was observed, and evaluation feeds back into the next cycle of observation — it produces a progressive curriculum that genuinely reflects each individual child’s developmental trajectory. The research evidence from the EPPE project and the E4Kids longitudinal study both identify the quality of the planning cycle as a stronger predictor of child outcomes than structural variables like group size or qualification level alone (Sylva et al., 2020; Tayler et al., 2018).

References

Australian Curriculum, Assessment, and Reporting Authority (ACARA). (2022). The Australian Curriculum. https://v9.australiancurriculum.edu.au/

Australian Government Department of Education (AGDE). (2022). Belonging, being and becoming: The early years learning framework for Australia (V2.0). https://www.acecqa.gov.au/sites/default/files/2023-01/EYLF-2022-V2.0.pdf

Campbell, C., & Howitt, C. (Eds.). (2024). Science in early childhood. Cambridge University Press.

Early Childhood Australia. (2016). Code of ethics. https://www.earlychildhoodaustralia.org.au/our-publications/eca-code-of-ethics/

Kilderry, A. (2019). Ethical dilemmas in early childhood education and care. Early Years, 39(3), 281–295. https://doi.org/10.1080/09575146.2019.1625800

Sylva, K., Melhuish, E., Sammons, P., Siraj, I., & Taggart, B. (2020). Effective pre-school, primary and secondary education project (EPPSE 3–16). Institute of Education, University of London.

Tayler, C., Ishimine, K., Cloney, D., Cleveland, G., & Thorpe, K. (2018). The quality of early childhood education and care services in Australia. Australasian Journal of Early Childhood, 38(2), 13–21.

Verdine, B. N., Golinkoff, R. M., Hirsh-Pasek, K., & Newcombe, N. S. (2017). Links between spatial and mathematical skills across the preschool years. Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development, 82(1), 1–150. https://doi.org/10.1111/mono.12280

Yogman, M., Garner, A., Hutchinson, J., Hirsh-Pasek, K., & Golinkoff, R. M. (2018). The power of play: A pediatric role in enhancing development in young children. Pediatrics, 142(3), e20182058. https://doi.org/10.1542/peds.2018-2058