Talking Stones: Facilitating Early Childhood Teachers’ Thinking

This article provides a brief exploration of three early childhood teachers’ thinking when engaging with the pedagogical tool “Talking Stones”. The data arises from a qualitative study investigating early childhood teacher learning in an Australian independent co-educational school. This study was a twelve-month participatory action research project involving three early childhood teachers and the researcher. The early childhood teachers designed their learning for this project drawing on the cyclical process of action research: planning, acting,observing, reflecting, and replanning. The project involved the teachers meeting on a monthly basis where they discussed and refined their use of Learning Stories as a tool to enhance their practice as early childhood teachers. The researcher also conducted a pre-project interactive group interview utilizing the pedagogical tool ‘Talking Stones’. This pedagogical tool was employed to open up the discussion prior to commencing the project and to assist with triangulation of data. This paper only reports the use of the pedagogical tool.Initial findings indicate that Talking Stones disrupted familiar patterns of talk amongst these teachers and thereby facilitated the verbalizing of internal thinking and a deep-level of reflexivity. Insights into the use of the pedagogical tool are discussed and conclusions drawn about the possibilities of its use to facilitate early childhood teachers’ thinking.