Practitioner change journeys: A mixed-methods study of play facilitation in Danish daycare

Executive summary
Research suggests that young children can learn through play in a range of practices: from children’s self-chosen and self-directed play to more guided forms of play and games designed around specific goals (Jensen, et al., 2019). Each practice has benefits for children’s learning. For instance, ample opportunities for less structured activities, including free play, are associated with children’s improved executive functions (Goble & Pianta, 2017; Barker, et al., 2014), socio-emotional development, and mental health (Pyle, et al., 2017; Whitebread, 2017). When it comes to specific academic skills, direct instruction tends to outperform free play unless adults engage with children as active facilitators (Goble & Pianta, 2017; Nicolopoulou, et al., 2015; Alfieri, et al., 2011). Facilitating children’s engaged learning through play requires tact and intentionality as adults adjust the degree of guidance provided and even join children as co-players; understandably, this can be a very difficult balance to achieve (Pyle, et al., 2018). The challenge of play being understood both as having a purpose in itself, while also holding considerable potential for children’s learning and development (Winther-Lindquist & Svinth, 2019), can hinder the participation of early educators in play and cause them to switch between being an observer of children’s play and being a leading organizer of activities – that is, switching between low and high involvement (Pyle, et al., 2017).
This report presents results from the Practitioner Change Study, a collaborative, mixed-method research effort exploring the change journeys of 26 Danish early educators who underwent professional development in play facilitation with young children. Participants took part in the diploma module ‘Play, Creativity, and Learning’. Through this module, they were given the opportunity to engage with a whole spectrum of playful practices and accompanying adult roles, ranging from child-led play at one end to co-creative and guided forms of play in the middle of the spectrum, and onto structured forms of play at the other end. By investigating their approaches to play facilitation over time, the study has made several contributions to our understanding of what it means for early educators to be and to become proficient play facilitators. Further, the study sought to explore the influencing roles of personal and contextual factors, for example how professionals with different starting points adopt playful facilitation practices and what kinds of support they need. These findings are summarized in this executive summary, followed by an in-depth account of the study’s theoretical background and investigative framework, methodology, and detailed findings.
Insights on play facilitation as pedagogical practice
Play facilitation as a pedagogical practice was explored in two ways. First, through a contextualized version of a theorized practice spectrum with four positions: children’s own play, co-created play, guided play, and adult-led play. Based on both survey and observation data, most educators in the study were found to have a wide role repertoire from the outset; that is, they reported frequently using at least three of the four approaches in both children’s own play, fantasy play and role-play, physically active play, language activities, and science activities. More classic forms of child-centered play, such as being physically active, fantasy play, and role-play, and children’s own self-chosen play, happened more frequently in the daycare institutions than formal learning activities such as language and science; this trend resonates well with Nordic practices being perceived as child-centered with an emphasis on active, imaginative, and child-led play. In terms of the different learning and development potentials, which educators associated with their own positions in play, interviews found them to be aware that each play situation could support multiple potentials.
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Over time, there was an increasing focus among participants on co-created play as being especially powerful in a learning and developmental context. This finding resonates well with the educators beginning to use both co-created and guided play more deliberately, especially as they practiced sharing initiative and control with the children in play. Both observations and interviews pointed towards the educator’s role in play being highly dynamic, and frequently changing according to the situation. Importantly, the investigations of the four pedagogical positions in playful contexts highlighted a dynamic interplay where positions shifted many times and within the same play situation. Inspired by this dynamic interplay of pedagogical positions, the early educators’ approach to play facilitation was investigated in a second manner – through play scenarios.
When looking at the early educators’ involvement in a given play situation over time, some appeared to ‘flutter’ back and forth between children engaged in different, shorter play scenarios, while others had an almost ‘magnetic pull’, drawing more and more children into longer and evolving play scenarios. Further analyses suggested that both styles had two subgroups. The shorter play scenarios could be divided into a) those defined and steered by the educator, involving a fixed group of children either engaged in activities, games, or excursions (e.g. trips to the forest), and b) shorter scenarios with shared initiative, and which tended to dissolve rather than evolve with time. The longer ‘magnetic’ play scenarios could be divided into a) educators exhibiting a higher degree of involvement and control in the play situation, and b) scenarios where educators shared taking the initiative with children. These latter scenarios appeared to hold particular potential as a play facilitation practice: the educator often engaged bigger and fluctuating groups of children, helping them to step in and out of unifying shared narratives, which evolved noticeably over time as the children were encouraged to contribute new ideas. In both groups of longer play scenarios, children appeared to be highly engaged. Finally, there was a fifth group of play scenarios where the educator mainly observed the children, supporting their practical needs, or taking minor roles in several different play scenarios with smaller groups of children. Here, the adult role shifted frequently, and children’s engagement seemed more superficial. When looking at which scenario styles focus participants used later in the study, analyses suggested that educators from across various groups were able to shift towards the longer scenarios. This pattern resonates with the findings above where educators spent more time in the middle of the spectrum, often engaging children in co-created and guided forms of play.
Insights on professional change journeys
Overall, insights on the early educators’ initial confidence to enact play facilitation in their own context (despite feeling busy) suggested that they recognized play facilitation as a worthwhile but challenging practice: participants tended to rate themselves as being of medium self-efficacy, indicating an awareness that facilitating children’s engaged learning through play is not a straightforward pursuit, and requires practice. Their initial strategies for succeeding in a busy day centered around individual efforts, rather than relying on colleagues or leadership for assistance. However, careful analysis of the interview data showed that this tendency changed with time: the participants’ reflections became more collective and less individual, shifting more to meetings and informal talks with colleagues. Regarding the focus participants’ depth of reflection, an intriguing finding was that some tended to reflect primarily on their own intentions when playing, while others reflected primarily on the children’s intentions and behavior (although interviews clearly indicated that all educators were able to reflect deeply on both, when prompted). This insight expands the work of Korthagen (2017), and merits further research into the interplay of educators’ orientation and their playful practices.
When looking at the professional learning environment, the early educators felt that play became more legitimized as a professional concern, so that both play in itself and the adult spending more time co-playing with children developed into a shared concern. And while support from leaders and colleagues clearly mattered, educators felt most appreciated and acknowledged when colleagues
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from other teams (i.e. colleagues who were not their closest collaborators) mirrored or reshaped play facilitation ideas and practices into their own work. Further, the analyses suggested that some measure of critical resistance from colleagues could facilitate further learning and reflection; indeed, several of the more reflective educators mentioned colleagues’ slight resistance as a reason for sharing new knowledge even more explicitly. Impediments to change and learning, which were identified during interviews, often related to these same points; namely, limited time and space for individual and collective reflection, and limited time and space for knowledge sharing with colleagues. The early educators generally felt that contributions were appreciated and valued by their close colleagues, but there was also a tendency for them to cluster with colleagues who acted supportively. Finally, there were a few examples of educators who experienced a clearly dismissive culture, and who felt that their change journey had been impeded. When both personal and contextual factors were consolidated to explore how conditions might relate to specific shifts in practice among participants, no very strong patterns arose. This finding could be explained by the promising result noted above: that almost all educators in the study shifted towards the two middle positions of co-created and guided play, showing an increasingly wide range of positions in play over time. As a central conclusion, then, this study found that deliberately practicing and reflecting on their own playful practice, in the context of the diploma module and in a largely supportive professional environment, did indeed make it possible for the early educators to learn to balance these different understandings of play and grow proficient at intentionally positioning themselves in play. Supportive conditions included having the time, space, and clear permission to put novel playful practices, roles, and designs of play spaces into practice – with iterations and systematic reflection. Further, being several colleagues on a joint journey was felt as being key for creating wider, institutional change, and establishing new and shared play facilitation practices.
Study limitations
This mixed methods study has several limitations worth highlighting, and not least due to the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, which colored many aspects of both practice and research at the time (see ‘Methodology’). Considering the study’s purpose, the original intent was to map patterns among a larger group of early educators taking part in the diploma module, and then to hold these patterns up against in-depth insights from a group of focus participants. Both groups were to be followed during and after the diploma module. However, due to constant changes imposed by the ongoing pandemic, several alterations had to be made to the study design, and to the data gathered: a second survey and the use of a structured observational method at both time points were ultimately dropped; likewise, the second of two field visits was shortened, and its timing varied across the three regions taking part. Consequently, the study’s qualitative insights on factors influencing early educators’ change journeys stand out more strongly than those gleaned from its quantitative methods. Hence, the study offers rich insights into the focus participants’ experienced change journeys, without these patterns being clearly traceable for a larger group. Another aspect of the study setup, which may well have obscured efforts to identify patterns of change, was a research team setup that was spread across three regions. This choice was made to ensure that researchers were close to the contexts being investigated and that they knew their local setting, which could help with building participant relationships and with interpreting findings, while also being more familiar to the focus participants. Several mitigations were put in place during the study to promote coherence across regions, including the use of shared, co-created guides for interviews and observations, as well as team meetings in the form of regular research workshops to review and agree on approaches. Even so, this distributed team setup did cause regional variation in the manner in which data were collected and analyzed.