Evidencing the Planning Cycle in EarlyWorks

Something that has become very clear to us at EarlyWorks, is that our industry has been gifted with some amazing educators who are expert at using their understanding of each child’s learning and development to plan and deliver engaging and creative experiences for the children in their care.

While most of us are confidently implementing the assessment and planning cycle, the challenge seems to be documenting that cycle of planning. And at the end of the day, being able to confidently evidence that cycle when it comes time for Ratings and Assessment.

Educators and Administrators can check that every child has at least one complete individual planning cycle from the click of a button in the Child List. When the ‘Recent Planning Cycle’ button is clicked, EarlyWorks will generate an individual planning cycle report for the child.  The report will show the most recent two cycles when available. Where there are more than two observations of an experience, EarlyWorks will choose the most recent one. Where there are journals and observations of an experience, the most recent observation will be selected. Where there are only journals, the most recent journal will be selected.

This feature will serve so many purposes in a busy service:

• Education Leaders will be able to easily check that every child in every room is having their learning documented as part of an ongoing cycle.
• Educators will be able to check that they are linking their observations and experiences and creating learning cycles for all of the children in their rooms.
• Educators and Education Leaders will be able to use these automatically generated planning cycle reports during ratings and assessments to talk through the planning cycle for randomly selected children in their rooms.
• When sharing learning journeys with families, educators will be able to more easily explain the cycle of learning.