Policy reforms in Sweden during the last decades have led to preschool now being included in the Swedish school system. This means that education in preschool, beyond the mandate of care, now includes teaching which is defined as goal-oriented activities (Curriculum for the Preschool, 2018; SFS 2010:800). While the most recent curriculum has been in place since 2018, the shift from care to education has been a long journey, where principals and preschool teachers often struggle to interpret the curriculum. At the center of this debate is the construct of teaching in preschool. While the curriculum contains content areas similar to school subjects such as language, mathematics and science, it states that care, development and learning should form a whole and that play is central to education, as per the Swedish preschool tradition. Thus, it is understandable that teaching is a disputed term in the preschool context as it has to be recontextualized from its traditional application in school (Melker et al., 2018). In a recent report, the Swedish Schools Inspectorate stated that teaching in preschool is not sufficiently goal-oriented and needs to be clarified (Swedish Schools Inspectorate, 2018).

To develop and strengthen evidence-based practices, the Curriculum for the Preschool states that “all members of the work team [should] systematically and continuously document, monitor, evaluate and analyze the results of the education” (2018, p. 12). Staff employed at Swedish preschools are licensed preschool teachers as well as early childhood educators who have completed a three-year high school education program. The variety of educational backgrounds among the staff can lead to disparate understandings of how to interpret and enact the prescribed curriculum, in terms of how goal-oriented activities could be implemented, documented and evaluated.

The present study is an ongoing action research project in collaboration with staff in two preschools who are looking to further develop evidence-based teaching practices through reviewing and revising a reflection protocol that they use in their regular planning and evaluation practice. This study draws upon an ecological view of teacher agency (Priestly et al., 2015) to understand the process of how the staff develop their professional knowledge. We view the staff as agents of change and seek to understand and describe their motivation as well as their process of developing practices based on research and evidence, framed by affordances and constraints of the context.

Notes from meetings between staff and researchers, as well as notes from staff meetings and a questionnaire that the participants filled out, have been analyzed thematically. Initial findings indicate that collegial discussions, centered around questions provided by the researchers, provided a common ground for deconstructing curriculum language and contributed to a shared focus on goal-orientation concerning children’s learning. Uncertainty of the meaning of evidence-based practices, as well as diverse interpretations of key concepts, seemed to constrain the staff’s collective agency in the process of developing teaching in preschool based on evidence-based practices. 

Curriculum for the Preschool. (2018). Swedish National Agency for Education. 

Melker, K., Mellgren, E., & Pramling Samuelsson, I. (2018). Undervisning i förskolan – en fråga om att stötta och att skapa gemensamt fokus. Forskning om undervisning och lärande, 1(6), 64-86.

Priestly, M., Biesta, G., & Robinson, S. (2015). Teacher agency: what is it and why does it matter? In R. Kneyber & J. Evers (Eds.), Flip the System: Changing Education from the Bottom Up. Routledge.

SFS 2010:800. Skollag [Swedish Education Act]

Swedish Schools Inspectorate. (2018). Förskolans kvalitet och måluppfyllelse – ett treårigt projekt att granska förskolan. Skolinspektionen [Swedish Schools Inspectorate]