This week we explored what ‘provocation’ really means. From reading Kathy Walkers, ‘Play Matters’ (2011), a provocation is shown as a tool that is placed with a learning area that relates to learning intentions and children’s interests. These include the developmental objective, target learning outcomes and the children’s or schools’ current events and interests. ‘Learning to Teach in the Primary School’ (edited by T Cremin & J Arthur, 2014) extends on this saying that it is vital that the teacher works towards including provocations that will excite students curiosity without needing teacher intervention. In comparison to this Jan, from Early Life, has said that she believes that a provocation is ‘something that a teacher uses to spark questions, interests, ideas, theories, discussion and debate.’ Through this definition she also shares that materials can include questions, media, resources or even the teachers themselves.

After doing some research on the term provocation we decided that it was broader than first thought and covers a range of materials. As a team we came up with the following definition:

‘A provocation is a tool that is intentionally placed in a learning space to engage and extend the child’s thinking’.

Today was my first chance to work alongside our Level 2 team to set up some Provocations within our Investigation stations. We are working towards linking the learning intentions into each area. Coming in half way through the year I haven’t got a strong understanding of Walker Learning yet and so the opportunity to work alongside the others has allowed me to begin to build on my own learning.  Tanya has been working on including Fractions into her Dramatic play area while I am looking at including aspects of recounts and reports into our mini beasts And sensory area.