Challenge and Risk in the Early Years Summit

 Early Years Summit: Challenge and Risk in the Early Years

Speaker: Alistair Bryce-Clegg

 Alistair spoke about how we need to be providing children with challenge and risk not just in outdoor play but also cognitively inside our classrooms as well.

Children today will experience far more challenges in their life than our parents or their parents before them. They live in an ever changing world where science and technology are constantly experiencing innovation and paradigm shifts. Gone are the days where children choose one career choice in highschool and stick with it through their entire career - changing workplaces and technologies require workers to be adaptable and life long learners and the skills to thrive in this environment are instilled in the early years as the brain is developing and being hard wired in its thinking and problem solving patterns. 

The challenge for early childhood educators is that skills such as resiliency, creative thinking, problem solving and conflict resolution and other life skills are not tangible 'pass or fail' academic skills like 2+2 equals or ABC recitals .... it is our role to advocate for how this learning happens through documenting children's 'investigations' of the world around them, recording their trials and failures.  

Cognitive Load Theory, learning difficulty, and instructional design ... there is working memory and long term memory. Working memory has a finite amount of space in the brain to work where long term memory is almost infinite as pathways are built over time to store things we practice and master.  Cognitive Load Theory proposes that the more skills we give children to help with long term learning the better they can than later draw on those when exposed to something new in their working memory to help solve problem and critical think about it. 

About the Speaker

Alistair Bryce-Clegg enjoyed a successful 10 year career as the Head teacher of three-form entry Infant school and Early Years Unit in Cheshire. Alongside his headship he established a consultancy career specialising in the education of children in the Early Years. Demand for his consultancy became so great that Alistair left headship and established ABC Does

Most of his time is spent supporting practitioners in their settings or delivering keynotes and training, specialising all aspects of Early Years practice and management for both the maintained and non-maintained sectors nationally and internationally.

Alistair is also an award-winning author and product designer, whose work has been published in a number of books and magazines.

Alongside support and training for a range of settings and schools, Alistair also works internationally and with Local Authorities across the UK.

He has a Masters in Education and is currently studying for his Doctorate in Early Years education.

His website is abcdoes.com/
Facebook: facebook.com/abcdoes/
Twitter: twitter.com/ABCDoes
Instagram: instagram.com/abcdoes/