A framework for teaching learning: the dynamics of disposition

This paper draws on examples from New Zealand early childhood settings to illustrate a dynamic approach to learning dispositions. It sets out three dimensions along which a ‘learning curriculum’ can strengthen valued responses to learning opportunities: increasing their frequency and robustness, widening their domain, and deepening their complexity and competence. It is suggested that learning environments can be variously affording, inviting or potentiating (powerful) and that in potentiating learning environments teachers explain, orchestrate, commentate on, model and reify learning responses, and frequently the families and children participate in these processes as well. Although the question of ‘what’ learning dispositions is set aside, the paper argues that it is better for teachers in early childhood settings and classrooms to be explicit about valued responses and their trajectories than to leave them implicit, and therefore often unacknowledged and unattended.