This is Part Two of our series on understanding children's interests and identities. In Part One, I explored what interest really means, where it comes from, and how funds of knowledge helps us understand who our tamariki are. In this article, I want to go deeper into how we recognise the learning that is happening within those interests.
At Our Kids, recognising dispositions has been part of our practice for many years. Our kaiako notice and document qualities like persistence, creativity, concentration, and leadership in children's play. This is good work and it matters.
But I have been thinking about how we can go deeper. One of our teachers wrote a learning story about a child using connector blocks, organising them by colour and creating a symmetrical structure. She noticed the concentration, the patience, the determination, and his ability to follow tasks through. When he ran out of blocks and another child wanted more, he suggested combining their blocks and building together. The teacher recognised this as leadership and named it in front of his peers.
What made this story strong was that the teacher focused on the process and attitudes rather than the end result. She saw the dispositions in action. But what if she also asked: where does this child's drive for symmetry and precision come from? Is this something he does at home? What does his whānau value? That extra question connects dispositions to funds of knowledge and starts to build a picture of who this child is as a learner across all the contexts of his life, not just at the centre.
Working theories is an area I want to develop at Our Kids. Helen Hedges describes them as evidence of inquiry where children process intuitive, everyday, spontaneous knowledge as they attempt to make connections between what they currently understand and new experiences. The word "working" is important. It suggests these theories are tentative, speculative, and constantly being refined. They are a creative form of knowledge.
I had come across working theories before. I understood them as the big wonderings: a child's theory that babies come from tummies, or a child asking where does the snail go when it rains. But Helen Hedges showed me that working theories are in everything, not just the dramatic moments.
Her example of a toddler learning to jump captured this beautifully. Over five months, this child was observed on three occasions. The first time, she was in the sandpit, bent her knees, enacted a bouncing movement, but her feet did not leave the ground. A teacher encouraged her to stand on a raised edge with a short drop. She concentrated intensely, positioned herself carefully, raised her shoulders up and down, and eventually stepped off one foot at a time.
On the second occasion, she climbed onto a high box that older children were jumping off. She wanted a teacher to hold her hand. Instead, the teacher brought out bean bags and invited her to try smaller jumps. She did, safely, several times.
Three months later, with no jumping activity set up, she climbed onto a box on her own, asked for a mat, counted "1, 2, 3" twice, concentrated, and jumped, landing on two feet.
Her working theory about jumping included: you need to watch what older children do, you need to bend your knees, you need to judge distance, you need to take a risk, you need to stay safe, and you need to engage others to help you achieve a goal. She demonstrated knowledge (height, distance, body positioning), skills (bending knees, counting before action), and attitudes (curiosity, courage, perseverance, trust that the environment and teachers will support her). All interwoven. All in a child not yet two years old. The richness of this learning only becomes visible when we observe closely over time and connect what we see.
Helen Hedges shares another example in her book. A child said "if your heart isn't booming you die." Another child challenged this: "mine isn't booming and I'm not going to die." The teacher brought a stethoscope so the children could listen to their heartbeats. This then led to a visit to a medical centre where the children became interested in blood and skin. A child's theory, tested by a peer, supported by a teacher who provided the tools to investigate, and extended into real subject knowledge about science and the human body. That is a working theory being refined through inquiry.
Helen Hedges proposes seven fundamental inquiry questions that sit underneath children's interests. These are not questions children ask out loud. They are the deeper questions driving their play and exploration:
A child cooking in the sandpit because dad is a chef. A toddler bathing dolls after observing a new sibling's care routine.
The complexities of friendships, negotiating, sharing ideas, working through conflict.
Drawing, painting, early writing, communicating through gestures and expressions. Children learning to read and write words that are meaningful to them, like their own name or their pet's name.
The natural world, animals, insects, lifecycles. A child who makes a home for a spider is asking this question.
Risk-taking, trust, body control. The toddler learning to jump was working on this question.
Art, music, dance. Interests often linked to cultural backgrounds and growing physical capacities.
Children observing and emulating older peers. Toddlers insisting on putting their own socks on, using a fork instead of a spoon. This connects directly to our mixed-age philosophy where younger tamariki learn from their tuakana.
The overarching question Helen Hedges arrives at is: "How can I build personal, learner, and cultural identities as I participate in interesting, fulfilling, and meaningful activities with my family, community, and culture?"
These questions give kaiako a completely different lens for observation. Instead of writing "this child is interested in cooking," you can ask: what question is this child working on? What are they trying to understand about their world?
At Our Kids, our learning stories follow a notice, recognise, and respond framework. Under respond, teachers document ideas for "what next." It is fine to think about what next, but children may not participate in those experiences. Planning is really more about responding in the moment. If kaiako do not record how they responded in the moment, there is no evidence of their teaching or the progress that may have happened as a result. Reflecting when writing a learning story helps teachers see how they responded and how they can improve.
What funds of knowledge, working theories, and these inquiry questions add is depth to the "recognise" part. Instead of recognising only the disposition (persistence) or the schema (trajectory), kaiako can also ask: what does this child know from home that is driving this play? What theory are they testing? What fundamental question are they working on?
Teachers do not need to learn all of this at once. We are building this understanding across our organisation step by step. Some of our kaiako are already recognising much of this intuitively. What Helen Hedges gives us is the language and the framework to make it more intentional, more visible in our documentation, and more consistent across all our centres.
Helen Hedges' model brings it all together: children's and teachers' interests and knowledge at the core, surrounded by relational pedagogy, leading to holistic outcomes through working theories and dispositions, all within a spiral curriculum that revisits and deepens rather than moving in a straight line.
It is worth noting that teachers' interests and knowledge sit right at the centre of that model alongside children's. Helen Hedges questions the idea that child-centredness means teachers should hold back their own passions and knowledge. In her research, the most interesting and worthwhile learning most commonly occurred when teachers' interests and knowledge were involved. A teacher with a background in engineering could recognise a child's exploration of gravity and momentum on a ramp in ways another teacher might not. A teacher who brings shells from the beach and says "look what I've got" is not directing learning. They are opening a door that children's curiosity can walk through. A parent who is skilled at face painting can come and paint at the centre, and some children may be inspired to take up that interest themselves. New interests develop when people share what they know and love. Our kaiako bring life experience, subject knowledge, and passions that are a genuine contribution to curriculum, not a contradiction of child-led practice.
Helen Hedges calls this relational pedagogy: knowing children and their families well, providing opportunities for children to recreate and represent their play experiences, using a range of strategies appropriate to the child, avoiding hijacking interests through surface interpretations, and using conceptual language to extend children's understandings. This is what we are working towards at Our Kids. It starts with listening, grows through understanding who the child is and where they come from, deepens through recognising the richness of what they are learning, and is strengthened by what kaiako themselves bring to the relationship.
And that picture is not a linear checklist. It is a living, evolving picture of each child.
This article is Part Two of our series on understanding children's interests and identities. Part One, "How We Really Get to Know Our Tamariki," is available on our website.
Reference: Hedges, H. (2022). Children's Interests, Inquiries and Identities. Routledge.
