This resource allows you to record your own reflections after watching the video below.
Video transcript
Jo Darbyshire
Regional Manager South Coast & West Region
The Creche & Kindergarten Association
Early childhood educators gather lots of information and data about the children that they're working with and there has to be a system or a way of using that effectively to support your planning, to support your intentional teaching, and to make an assessment of where the children are currently at and where you'd like to take them to.
If you have a system to support how you're monitoring children's learning and development it helps you to understand whether there's any areas that you're missing. So there's a lot of children that will come in to an early childhood program and they've got really good strengths in certain areas. It might be in their communication, it might be in their active learning they're really interested in that. And you tend to gather a lot of data in that area initially. And if you're not monitoring children, if you're not keeping an idea or don't have a system of the whole learning and development, there could be gaps. So you might find that you get towards the end of term three and you're starting to think about your transition statements, and you think, 'Oh, I don't really know if they've got that knowledge or if they've done that because I haven't been capturing that information'.
So I think if you set yourself up well at the beginning of the year, with all the learning and development areas in mind, make sure that you are gathering some data or some way of, you know, it could be artifacts of the child's work, they could be jottings, they could be learning stories, they could be group learning stories. You can then go in and make sure that you are capturing all the learning and developmental areas and make sure that there is progression happening. So if you use the continuum to make an assessment of where the child is at the time and then where you want to take them to, that will support your learning goals and your decision-making about your intentional teaching that will occur next.
Lisa Kennedy
Teacher/Director Lowood Kindergarten
Well, it's been a really big journey.
Our monitoring tool is our assessment profile.
So, when I look at a student's assessment profile I look at where they're at on the continuum of learning. So, if I can see that they're challenged in a certain area, or they need more support in that area, I'm able to then plan intentional teaching moments that can really support them in developing that journey. And then I can also see the progress that they've made over the year, and to make sure that they are progressing in all those developmental areas. And if there are any gaps in that where they need more support, I can really visually see that and my whole team can see that. And then in the moment of, spontaneous teaching moments, we're really able to capture those goals and bring that into our teaching moments.
Each term when we review each child's assessment profile, we would do an overall summary of that child, making sure that we have looked at all the developmental areas. So that we know that when we're going into the next term, we know what goals we're working towards for that child.
Our team contribution into our assessment profiles has been a really big part of our journey. And so at staff meetings we would bring our assessment profiles up a lot, and we would talk about how we contributing to them so that we all have the same understanding of what goals we're working towards. And then if I have any staff that do have any concerns or aren't sure about how to do something, I can then as educational leader bring that in and really support them in how they can contribute to the assessment profiles.
- Last updated:
- 18 December 2025
