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Introduction and guidance
Introduction and guidance
Supporting children’s development is an introductory course for anyone who is interested in children’s development, especially support staff in schools, such as teaching assistants. It builds on your knowledge and skills to develop a deeper understanding of children from the early years to school leavers. You will be introduced to some core ideas surrounding development and learning, behaviour, special needs and disabilities.
Each section of the course offers short, interactive quizzes to test your knowledge and provide you with the opportunity to earn a digital badge.
Successful completion of the course will enable you to gain a suite of online badges and a statement of participation. The badges are validated by the Social Partnerships Network (SPN), a group of organisations with a shared commitment to extending education opportunities to all those who wish to benefit. These courses do not carry any formal academic credit. However, they do provide a way to help you progress from informal to formal learning.
Supporting children’s development is one of a suite of six free online SPN-badged courses that aim to provide you with an opportunity to engage with learning informally, studying as much or as little of the course and at your own pace.
Guidance for accessing alternative formats
You can download this section of the course to study offline. The alternative formats offered that will best support offline study include Word, PDF and ebook/Kindle versions of the materials. The other alternative formats (SCORM, RSS, IMS, HTML and XML) are useful to those who want to export the course to host on another learning management system.
Although you can use the alternative formats offline for your own convenience, you do need to work through the online version of the course for full functionality (such as accessing links, using the audio and video materials, and completing the quizzes). Please use the downloads as convenient tools for studying the materials when away from the internet and return to the online version to ensure you can complete all activities that lead to earning the section badge.
In order to access full functionality in the online course, we recommend that you use the latest internet browsers such as Internet Explorer 9 and above and Google Chrome version 49 and above.
If you have difficulties in streaming the audio-visual content, please make use of the available transcripts.
Structure of the course
This course has five sections, with each section focusing on a particular aspect of supporting children’s development.
- Developing and managing relationships looks at the stages of child development through the use of case studies and an introduction to child development theory. It considers the roles of family, as well as support workers, in relation to this development.
- Encouraging reading considers how children learn to read and develop literacy skills from when they are babies to secondary school.
- Behavioural management looks at possible causes of children and young people’s behaviour and some common strategies for managing behaviour.
- Special needs looks at what we mean by special educational needs and disability (SEND) and the role of teaching assistants in supporting children with SEND.
- Professional development plan (PDP) looks at the importance of reflecting on your own practice and how drawing up a PDP can help you to think about your personal and career development.
Together they amount to approximately 15 hours of study time. Each section has a mixture of reading, video clips, activities and quizzes that will help you to engage with the course content.
A further section, Taking my learning further, will enable you to reflect upon what you have learned within this course. It also directs you to relevant websites and resources, which further relate to the development of your learning and career prospects.
Once you have studied a section, you will be asked to complete a short online quiz of no more than five questions per section. This helps to test and embed your learning. If you pass the quiz (and you do get more than one attempt!), you will be awarded with a downloadable badge for that section.
Supporting children’s development is designed to allow you to dip in and out of the resources and collect badges as you wish, so that you can study in small chunks to fit around your work and life commitments. If you choose to complete all sections of Supporting children’s development and collect the full set of badges, you can download a statement of participation that recognises your achievement. You may find this useful to show your employer as evidence of your learning. For more information on how to obtain your badges, read What is a badge?
Please note – there is no badge available for Section 5.
Navigating the website
To find your way around this course, you simply click on the links. The home page has links to all the sections, quizzes and relevant resources. When you are in a section, the left-hand menu has links to that section’s topics and its associated quiz. The menu also has links to the other sections of Supporting children’s development and to the resources section.
If you feel unsure, practise hovering your mouse over a link in the menu and clicking on it. This is the easiest way to move from page to page. You can also click on the ‘Next: … ’ link at the end of each page of text. Don’t worry about breaking a link or damaging the web page – you won’t. Have a go as soon as you can before you begin your study.
Why study this course?
Jennifer Colloby, one of the contributors to this course, will now give you a bit of background into why you might like to study this course.
Transcript
Hello. My name is Jennifer Colloby and I am a member of the team that developed this course.
Welcome to Supporting children’s development. By studying this course you are gaining an introduction to some of the rewards and challenges faced by teaching assistants and other colleagues working with children in schools. If you complete the short assessment at the end of each section you will be able to collect a section badge. These virtual badges provide a form of recognition for your learning and you can display them on your social media profiles, for example, on LinkedIn and Facebook.
Supporting children’s development is made up of five sections. The sections you will be studying are based on common themes and theories that offer insights into how best you can support children’s development.
In Section 1 you will be exploring the development of children’s relationships in both families and in schools.
Section 2 aims to introduce you to some aspects of child development in relation to the development of literacy and reading skills.
In Section 3 you will discover that effective behaviour management in the classroom supports children to behave in ways that helps them participate successfully in lessons, so they both learn and achieve their potential.
In Section 4 you will consider the types of support that can be drawn on for children with special educational needs and disabilities during their primary and secondary schooling.
Section 5 focuses on a discussion with Katie, who is a teaching assistant, and you will discover what Katie finds rewarding about her job and how she sees her career developing. In this section you will be allowed time to reflect on your current situation, and to create a plan for your own personal development.
At the end of the five sections you will find information on ‘Taking your learning further’. These signpost you to relevant websites and resources relating to the continual development of your own learning.
You can study each of the five sections separately and in any order, and collect virtual badges as you go along. The course is flexible and there’s no time limit for completion. This means you can study at your own pace and when it suits you best to do so. We recommend you try to engage with all of the sections, as this will enable you to receive a statement of participation that recognises the learning outcomes you have met. You can then show this to your employer as evidence of your study and learning on this course.
There are guided activities throughout the course that will help you to reflect upon your own practice, and a range of interactive quizzes at the end of Sections 1–4 that give you the opportunity to earn your badge for these sections.
There may be many reasons why you have chosen to study this course. It might be to support your professional development by improving your basic skills, or simply for personal interest as well as to develop your confidence as a learner.
It is not essential that you are employed as a teaching assistant in order to study this course. You may have encountered this course as part of your journey to find out more about how children develop – perhaps you are a parent or you may be considering moving into a career working with children. Whatever your reason, studying this course will give you an insight into the many ways you can support children’s development.
I do hope you will enjoy this course and I wish you luck for your future career development.
If you are already a teaching assistant, you will find it helpful to consider how your role and experience match the topics covered in the course. The guided activities throughout this course will help you to learn and reflect on your own role. If you are in a paid teaching assistant role, completion of Supporting children’s development will allow you to demonstrate to your employer your understanding of children’s development. Your employer might also ask you to study this course as part of your induction into a new role, or for your professional development.
Throughout the course you will find activities that ask you to write down your thoughts and feelings based on the issues being discussed. There will be a few simple questions that encourage you to focus your thinking. It would be helpful for you to spend some time thinking about what you have learned within each section, and how it relates to your current role.
These activities are not there to test you, but designed to help you reflect in more detail upon what you have read. These activity spaces are entirely for your own use to help you recognise what you have learned, even if you haven’t yet encountered it within your role. Nobody else will see what you write here. The aim is to help you become more reflective, by bringing together aspects of both your personal and professional experience so you can review and learn from them.
Learning outcomes
After completing this course you will:
- have gained an insight into the varying perspectives of children from early years through to secondary school
- be able to reflect on personal experience and practice, identify strengths and weaknesses, and apply this to your practice issues
- understand how some theories attempt to explain children’s development
- be able to reflect on the value of the work of teaching assistants, the support skills involved, and think about your future role.
Before you begin
Spend a few moments thinking about your current learning needs and opportunities by doing Activity 1 below.
Activity 1
Below is a link to a short questionnaire to get you thinking about:
- What are your current priorities for learning?
- How does studying a short online course fit into your everyday lifestyle?
- What goals are you hoping to achieve by studying this course?
Hopefully, by the end of the course you will be able to reflect on your answers.
Acknowledgements
This free course was written by Isobel Shelton and Sue McKeogh (staff tutors at The Open University). Contributions were made by Katie Harrison (teacher and member of the ATL Union).
Except for third party materials and otherwise stated (see terms and conditions), this content is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 Licence.
The material acknowledged below is Proprietary and used under licence (not subject to Creative Commons Licence). Grateful acknowledgement is made to the following sources for permission to reproduce material in this free course:
Every effort has been made to contact copyright owners. If any have been inadvertently overlooked, the publishers will be pleased to make the necessary arrangements at the first opportunity.
Video
Course introductory video © The Open University