Discussing Child & Educator Relationship Within An Observation

Hi David,

When writing up an observation it is based on the individual child and the experience they are having at that particular time. During your "analysis" you use the evidence you gathered from the observation to analyse the child's learning and development. Do you include the outcomes within your analysis? So, if a child was displaying trust towards you one of the outcomes you can add is something like: "Through the above observation it is evident that Joey feels safe, secure and supported during his time at the centre because...... This is evident as Joey build secure attachments with one and then more familiar educators(1.1.4) when he......"

For the follow up experience you could do something based on relationships to extend it further if that's one of the goals you wanted to focus on from the observation. It is not based on a general overview, only what you see during the initial observation and follow up experience.

Using the learning outcomes within your analysis and evaluations really helps to show the goals the child is achieving through the experience as it is easily identifiable and explainable. (Hope this makes sense).

This will help to identify which outcomes to use during analysis and learning:

How Children Can Achieve Learning Outcomes

Hope this helps and happy to help out with any more questions,

,
L.A

Thanks for the quick reply, what you have said sounds exactly like what I did, I wrote my observation about the child's behavior towards me and then did the analysis with the learning outcomes, I wrote the princibles, wrote a reflection and how I intend to extend on the experience in the future, what confused me was that my director said it was wrong because I did not add any other educator to the observation, she said I should not have written the observation instead I should have analysiesd the child's relationship with all educators which I get but is it wrong to observe that this child has a strong relationship with just me?

I really don't see what the problem is... Within the observation the child only initiated interactions with you so that's what you analysed. It's not the only observation for this child so next time maybe you can observe the child interacting with other educators....

I don't see where you went wrong with your observation as it sounds like you did it right to me.

,
L.A

maybe a bit of jealousy on the part of the other educators as they maybe feel they have a better relationship with the child? I agree with Lorina, I think you nailed the observation and analysis as you experienced it and wrote about it, the others were not involved so didn't rate a mention. Maybe they should write their own observations if they feel they have such a great relationship with this child. my 02 cents...

thank you guys for your help

I don't see it as an issue. I've written many obs that revolve around me and a particular child or an experience the children had with me.

Others can write about their experiences with the child, however I have also written obs where Ive written about childrens relationships with other staff and students. I guess it's very dependant on what the experience actually was.

I think sometimes Ego's can be fragile.

Just keep doing that you are doing.

After all it's about the child not the entire Center.