Developing young children's thinking skills in Greek early childhood classrooms: curriculum and practice

In early childhood education, opportunities for developing children's thinking skills are unlimited. One of the most effective teaching strategies for this purpose is open-ended questioning. The study presented here aimed to explore the degree to which Greek early childhood teachers promote the development of thinking skills in their pupils. Data were collected by presenting teachers with five hypothetical teaching situations and asking them to write down the learning goals they would set for children in each situation and the questions they would ask in order to achieve these goals. The questionnaire was given to 110 early childhood teachers during a professional development course offered by Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, between 2010 and 2012. Data analysis suggests that the majority of teacher questions are at the recall level and guide children to focus their attention to declarative knowledge instead of procedural knowledge. The cases in which teachers picked up on and supported children's actions with the purpose of enriching their experience and extending their thinking skills were alarmingly few. The paper concludes with a discussion of the implications of the findings for teacher training.