Vertti Kivi (dSign Vertti Kivi & Co) has created an interior design for a harmonious, exiting and playful kindergarten for our project. The design has a great variety of surroundings and moods inspired by Finnish forest. Especially inspiring are the adaptable (automatic, programmable, creative or manual) lighting designs, for example, sunrise, noon, sunset, moonlight and starlight. You can see world in a different light. In the end, all we ever see in this world is light.
An interesting meeting with the Vice Dean of Beijing Normal University Wang Jun and Cissy Chen from the Sino-Finnish Joint Learning Innovation Institute. Hopefully we can start to study Early Childhood Education together.
In Järvenpää, at the Nummenkylä kindergarten, we work on a Progressive Feedback practice, where the kindergarten, each group and each child (if the parents want it) get detailed and real-time feedback of the central ingredients of their well-being. Of course, the confidentiality has to be secured in every way.
In Helsinki, we have collected more than 10 000 observation in the term of 2017-2018. Feedback of the results was delivered for all kindergarten principals. For example, the results support the new guidelines for increasing planning time. Also, happy to announce that the objectives for physical activity were met in Helsinki! Congratulations.
The participating municipalities and cities shared their development in a whole day conference in Helsinki. The municipalities do excellent development work and the day was very inspiring. A lot of good things have happened, but we still have a lot of work ahead. In the picture, city of Hämeenlinna present their plan of pedagogical principals doing the observations, giving staff feedback and building development tasks together. An exciting plan, that can be executed in reality. Among other new developments, we are going to enhance the observation of childminders and Helsinki starts Progressive Feedback process with the city playgrounds, this will give everybody a fresh perspective!
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ogressive Feedback (PF) cooperation between Finland and China is getting concrete. On Thursday 26 April 2018, In the Chinese Ministry of Education, Department of Ethnic Minorities, we agreed to conduct Chinese early education enhancement research & development project based on Finnish PF. We will have close working research teams in Finland and China. We’ll have 200 observers trained by Finnish experts to get a valid picture of Chinese early education and to give guidelines for future development. The picture is from the successful meeting at the Ministry. From the left is Tibet representant Sherab Songmo, Jouni Veijalainen, Jyrki Reunamo, the Director of the National Education Development Center Yan Guo, mr Han, the Director of the Center for Quality Monitoring and Research Xianqiang Zhou and Frank Wen.
We have started a pilot, in which individual kindergartens, groups and maybe even children can get real-time feedback of their processes. In the first stage the pilot includes Siimapuisto kindergarten in Vantaa and Nummenkylä kindergarten in Järvenpää. We aim to have the tools ready by spring 2019 and it is applicable then also in other kindergartens and with childminders. The picture is from the first observation training in Siimapuisto 15 March 2018.
It is one small step for early educator, one giant leap for early education! To start using the new progressive feedback interface with a regular web-browser. In the interface there are both readymade analysis and a possibility to edit the results in many ways, resulting in a versatile and real-time feedback for the early educators. Now the cities have access to Finnish results in real time. What’s more, now the city’s own results can be seen in comparison. We have started a new era in the evaluation, feedback and development of Early Childhood Education.
The cooperation between China and Orientation project at the University of Helsinki is getting more profound. China is fast becoming the leader globally also in educational quality and development. The awareness of the importance of Early Childhood Education is getting stronger in China. Finland is small in comparison to China, but we can provide the tested tools of progressive feedback to guide the development. Our main partner in the project is the CEAIE Education Committee. The Shanghai Expo Invitation is available here.
A new article about immigrant children’s participation has been published. The research data includes more than 300 immigrant children observed in their daily activities. Especially peer relations are important, but the educator is the one who can help these children in positive participation. You can read the article by clicking the link below.
Arvola, O., Lastikka, A-L. & Reunamo, J. (2017). Increasing Immigrant Children’s Participation in the Finnish Early Childhood Education Context. The European journal of social & behavioural sciences EJSBS, 20 (3), 2539-2548.