Teaching in preschool: heads of preschools governance throughout the systematic quality work

The purpose was to investigate how kindergarten coordinators manage teaching in practice through systematic quality work. The inclusion of teaching as a concept in kindergartens in Sweden is relatively new, and the author wants to investigate how kindergarten coordinators manage teaching in kindergartens in practice, with the aim of providing new insight into where improvements should be made in order to further develop the practice in kindergartens and strengthen kindergarten teachers’ task of teaching.

The results show a lack of management and leadership among kindergarten coordinators regarding teaching. The term teaching is not used at all in 40% of the reports, and the term was only used once or twice in many of the reports. In six of the reports, the term teaching was mentioned more than 10 times, but the use of the term was uncommon. The results regarding the kindergarten coordinators who used the term teaching more often showed two dimensions of use: in connection with skills development and in connection with variation in teaching. There was no common definition of the term teaching.

The method used is a text analysis of 120 systematic quality reports. 62 reports are from 2015 and 58 reports are from 2016, all of which have been retrieved from kindergartens in northern parts of Sweden. The reports are annual reports written by kindergarten coordinators, and all kindergartens in Sweden are required to write them. The researchers analysed the reports using a content analysis.

Each systematic quality report contains a large amount of text. On average, the reports contained 25 pages. In total, there were 3000 pages of text.

Öqvist, A. & Cervantes, S. (2018). "Teaching in preschool: heads of preschools governance throughout the systematic quality work". Nordic journal of studies in educational policy, 4(1):38-47.