Understanding Children: An Interview and Observation Guide for Educators

This hands-on guide for interviewing and observing children in educational settings is a supplement for child development courses taken by elementary and middle school education majors. It includes a rationale for interviewing and observing children as a way to understand their behavior, learning, and development and makes connections to the work of major developmental theorists and educational researchers. It provides practical tips for incorporating observations and interviews of children into teachers’ busy schedules and discusses the analysis of observational data and its uses for guiding educational practices (e.g., instruction, cooperative grouping, and parent conferences). The guide’s organization follows the topical organization of most child development textbooks.