Exploring Polyadic Sustained Shared Thinking-Interactions during Free Play, Meal and Tidying Up

In the discourse on quality in early childhood education, educator-child interaction is considered to influence children's developmental progress (Wirts et al. 2017). Sustained Shared Thinking (SST) was identified as an important factor of successful interaction in early childhood institutions (Siraj-Blatchford et al. 2002). However, SST-interactions are rarely observable in kindergarten practice and usually identified and analysed in dyadic sequences. As communication in kindergarten also takes place in group settings the present study focuses on polyadic SST-interactions. Using an explorative qualitative research design, micro-processes were analysed in order to identify strategies of kindergarten teachers that facilitate SST in groups of children during free play, meal or everyday sequences. The data include videography and information on children's family language from the international “SpriKiDS” study (Vogt et al. 2019). The analysis was conducted through Linguistic Conversation Analysis (Brinker & Sager 2010) and Grounded Theory (Strauss & Corbin 1996) supplemented by visualisations (Waibel 2021). Ten SST-sequences were explored in different group sizes involving ten kindergarten teachers and 43 monolingual and multilingual children. The results indicate that kindergarten teachers show an explorative and process-oriented approach and use combinations of several strategies to facilitate SST in groups. No differences can be observed in the applied combinations of strategies in multilingual and monolingual groups. Sensitive responsiveness to the interests and imagination of children and questions seem to facilitate SST as well as referring to children‘s life and switching between practical actions and cognitive reflections. The findings will be discussed regarding possible implications for pedagogical practice.