High Quality Adult Interactions

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At Waddington All Saints Academy, high quality interactions are at the forefront of teaching and learning.

This is underpinned by positive relationships, where our practitioners know the children’s interests and needs well, and in turn can promote emotional security and wellbeing, confidence and resilience and develop executive functioning and self-regulation skills.

High-quality interactions:

  • Develop communication and language skills 
  • Support emotional security and building positive relationships
  • Promote thinking and problem solving, an important factor linked to the Characteristics of Effective Learning. 
  • Extend learning opportunities within play experiences. 
  • Allow for adaptive practice
View our Adult Interactions in Reception Policy

Observing High Quality Adult Interactions

At Waddington All Saints Academy, we reflect on, observe and strengthen the quality of our adult interactions within our early years provision. High-quality interactions are central to children’s learning, underpinning language development, thinking skills and sustained shared thinking.

The link below is intended to guide professional dialogue, helping adults notice effective practice, identify areas for development and ensure interactions are purposeful and responsive. It can be used as part of coaching, peer observations or self-reflection to promote consistent, high-quality practice across the setting.

Observing High Quality Adult Interactions grid
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Supporting meaningful, purposeful conversations

We use a combination of ShREC, STAIRS and Sustained Shared Thinking to support meaningful, purposeful conversations that extend children’s language, thinking and learning. ShREC promotes back-and-forth communication, STAIRS supports adults to scaffold and model learning, and sustained shared thinking enables adults and children to work together to solve problems and deepen understanding. To support consistency across the team, we have developed a set of shared question stems that guide interactions and ensure all adults are equipped to respond effectively in the moment.

Question Stems Resource