Research To Enhance The Role Of The Game’s Preschool Teacher Observation Ability

Observation has long been considered a fundamental component of preschool teacher’s professional development. It is said by Montessori that what makes an effective teacher is not the knowledge that he or she has grasped but his or her ability of observation. Presently early childhood education in Shanghai has paid more and more attention to individual child’s development, which requires teachers to know children on a personal level. Information documented from observation is vital in identifying a child’s strengths and weaknesses. Based on such information, teachers can offer guidance to children and help them choose appropriate ways of achieving objectives.However, owing to the fact that observation has not been included in most undergraduate curriculum throughout China, most teachers are not well trained to be a skillful observer. Working as a teacher ’s training mentor, I am well aware of the problem and realize that such a problem may slow down the development of early childhood education in China. The paper thus intends to explore effective approaches to improve kindergarten teachers’ observation skills. Considering a fact that children behave more natural and relaxed in role play, the research takes role play as a key training site where teachers make observation and keep records of multiple behaviors of various children. In addition, role play is a less structured activity that unexpected events are more likely to happen. This may help teachers to develop more flexible skills to document children ’s developmental information.The research probes into teachers’ lack of observation skills by analyzing forty records from kindergarten teachers in Jiading, revealing such problems that teachers are short of sharp senses of observing, documenting and understanding children. Based on such problems and difficulties that teachers come across when observing, the paper has successfully studied five effective methods that im prove teachers’ observation skills.(1) modeling method setting examples for teachers to learn necessary observation skills;(2) participating training workshop helping teachers apply flexibly observation skills to education practice;(3) cafeteria sharing method enabling teachers to share freely with their counterparts;(4) comparative analysis method providing cases for teachers to reflect appropriately on their own practice;(5) operation manual method instructing teachers to observe in a proper and effective way. As a result, kindergarten teachers are more skillful in observing, analyzing and knowing children through our action research. More important, teachers are more confident to provide children with appropriate educational instructions.