TCHR5010 Assessment Task Two: Portfolio

TCHR5010: Competency and capability of Preschoolers Assessment Two: Portfolio

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

TCHR5010 Assessment Task Two: Portfolio — Reflective Practice and Ethical Dilemmas in Early Childhood Settings

The Importance of Reflective Practice in Early Childhood Education

Early childhood education professionals who want to understand how to write a high-quality reflective practice response for TCHR5010 Assessment 2 will benefit from recognising that reflective practice, in the academic and professional sense, is substantially different from general self-awareness or intuitive adjustment of practice. Reflective practice is a crucial component of early childhood education that enables educators to critically examine their teaching experiences and identify areas for improvement. According to Colmer et al. (2021), reflective practice involves “purposeful and conscious thinking about one’s actions, beliefs, and values in order to gain new insights and understandings that can inform future practice” (p. 3). The operative word here is “purposeful”: high-quality reflective practice uses systematic frameworks — the EYLF, the NQS, the Early Childhood Australia Code of Ethics — to interrogate experience, rather than simply narrating it. By engaging in reflective practice, early childhood educators can enhance their professional growth and provide high-quality learning experiences for young children.

Contemporary scholarship on reflective practice in ECEC distinguishes between technical reflection (examining whether a technique worked), practical reflection (examining the values and assumptions underlying a choice), and critical reflection (examining the social, political, and ethical dimensions of practice) (Colmer et al., 2021). Assessment 2 requires all three levels, but it particularly rewards the third: students who can situate their ethical dilemma within the broader structural context of the ECEC sector — the power relationships between families and institutions, the regulatory obligations around mandatory reporting, the competing ethical claims of confidentiality and child protection — will produce responses that meet Distinction and High Distinction criteria.

Identifying and Responding to Ethical Dilemmas

A key aspect of reflective practice is the ability to identify and respond to ethical dilemmas that arise in the early childhood setting. Ethical dilemmas can occur when there are conflicting values, beliefs, or responsibilities that require educators to make difficult decisions (Kilderry, 2019). These dilemmas are not failures of professional competence; they are features of the ethical complexity inherent in working at the intersection of children’s rights, family autonomy, professional obligation, and regulatory accountability. For example, an educator may face an ethical dilemma when a child discloses sensitive information that may require reporting to child protection services. In such situations, educators must carefully consider the perspectives of all stakeholders, including the child, family, and relevant authorities, and make decisions that prioritise the wellbeing and safety of the child.

The most productive approach to ethical dilemmas, both in practice and in academic reflection, is a structured stakeholder analysis: systematically identifying every party affected by the decision, articulating their interests and rights, noting where those interests conflict, and then applying the relevant ethical frameworks to determine a course of action. The Early Childhood Australia Code of Ethics (2016) provides four domains of ethical responsibility — to children, to families, to colleagues, and to communities — and explicitly acknowledges that these may sometimes be in tension. When they are, the Code places children’s wellbeing and safety as the primary obligation, but it requires that educators engage in genuine and respectful consultation before acting.

Sample Ethical Dilemma: Navigating a Child’s Disclosure

During professional experience, a five-year-old child in my preschool room disclosed, during a quiet one-on-one conversation at the art table, that “Daddy hurts me when he gets angry.” The disclosure was brief and was not elaborated despite gentle follow-up questions. The child then returned to their drawing as if nothing had been said. The dilemma involved three competing obligations: my duty to report any reasonable suspicion of child abuse to the statutory child protection authority; my responsibility to manage the disclosure in a way that did not compromise the child’s safety or dignity; and my obligation to communicate with the family in a way that maintained the working relationship without alerting a potentially abusive parent to the fact that a report was being made.

My immediate response was to remain calm and not express alarm, continuing the conversation briefly before quietly excusing myself to consult with the director. This response reflects best practice in managing disclosures: children should be heard without leading questions, supported without dramatisation, and given no indication that their disclosure has created distress or urgency in the educator (Early Childhood Australia, 2016). The director and I jointly reviewed the mandatory reporting obligations under the relevant state legislation and made a report to the child protection authority within the same session, as required.

What was done well: the child felt safe enough to make the disclosure; the immediate adult response was measured and child-centred; consultation with the director occurred promptly and the mandatory report was made without delay. What could have been improved: I had not previously rehearsed the exact language for this type of disclosure conversation, which meant my follow-up questions were less precise than they might have been. Professional development in trauma-informed communication and mandatory reporting obligations is a gap that this experience has motivated me to address (Kilderry, 2019).

EYLF and NQS Frameworks Applied to the Ethical Dilemma

To effectively navigate ethical dilemmas, early childhood educators must be equipped with a strong understanding of the EYLF and the NQS. The EYLF provides a framework for educators to support children’s learning and development, while the NQS sets out the quality standards that all early childhood education and care services must meet (ACECQA, 2022). The mandatory reporting obligation derives not from the NQS directly but from state-level child protection legislation; however, NQS Quality Area 2 (Children’s Health and Safety) provides the quality framework within which child protection practices are situated, requiring that services have clear, accessible policies and that educators are regularly trained in their application (ACECQA, 2022). The EYLF’s principle of children’s agency and wellbeing — particularly Outcome 3, which encompasses children’s rights to safety and protection — provides the pedagogical grounding for why the educator’s primary obligation was to the child rather than to maintaining family harmony.

Ongoing Professional Learning as Ethical Practice

Furthermore, reflective practice requires educators to critically examine their own actions and identify areas for improvement. This involves asking: What went well? What could have been done better? How can I improve my practice in the future? By engaging in this type of self-reflection, educators can develop a deeper understanding of their own strengths and weaknesses and identify strategies for ongoing professional development (Semann & Slattery, 2020).

The experience of navigating a child protection disclosure in real professional experience generates a kind of professional learning that no lecture or case study can fully replicate. It surfaces the gap between policy knowledge and situated judgement — the gap between knowing what the framework says and knowing how to act when a child is looking at you across an art table and the situation does not match any of the scenarios rehearsed in a workshop. Closing that gap requires deliberate post-placement reflection, structured peer discussion, and engagement with scholarly literature on trauma-informed practice and ethical decision-making in ECEC contexts (Kilderry, 2019; Semann & Slattery, 2020). It is precisely this kind of transformative, evidence-informed reflection that Assessment 2’s Task 2 is designed to generate.

References

Australian Children’s Education and Care Quality Authority (ACECQA). (2022). National Quality Standard. https://www.acecqa.gov.au/nqf/national-quality-standard

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

Colmer, K., Waniganayake, M., & Field, L. (2021). Developing a culture of reflective practice in early childhood education and care settings. Australasian Journal of Early Childhood, 46(1), 3–14. https://doi.org/10.1177/1836939120979079

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

Semann, A., & Slattery, K. (2020). Reflective practice in early childhood education: An essential component of professional growth. Educating Young Children: Learning and Teaching in the Early Childhood Years, 26(2), 12–15.