The Hidden Dynamics of Circle Time: Investigating Preservice Early Childhood Teachers' Pedagogical Dilemmas

Date

2025-09-04

Author

Mumcuoğlu, Ayşenur
Öztürk, Gökhan

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The aim of this study is to explore experiences, perspectives, and suggestions of preservice early childhood teachers(ECT) regarding circle time (CT) during their activities in kindergartens. To achieve this, the study seeks to answer:How do preservice ECT experience CT? How do preservice ECT perceive CT? What do preservice ECT suggest forimproving practices? Previous studies (Suggs, 2019) underscore the importance of CT in fostering children's social,emotional, and cognitive growth. However, there is an ambiguity of structure and content of CT which can hinderthe core essence of CT (Zhang and Quinn, 2018). Also, gaps in teacher preparation, particularly its application indiverse learning environments, have been noted in the literature (Koczela and Carver, 2023). So, grounding thetheorethical framework of responsive teaching and routine-based practices (Hanson and Danyluk, 2022), this studyaims to explore how preservice teachers apply CT in practice. Utilizing a case study design (Creswell, 2013) which isone of the qualitative research methods, data was collected with interviews, classroom observations and documentanalysis, within an interpretivist paradigm. Ethical considerations include obtaining consent, being sensitive duringobservations and observations, ensuring confidentiality and obtaining ethical approval from the university. Keyfindings indicate a discrepancy between preservice teachers' ideal CT conceptualization and their actual practices.The study also uncovers the challenges in classroom management, contributing to the difficulties in delivering high-quality CT. Also, implications for practice and policy include the need for a comprehensive inclusion of CT in teachereducation curricula to implement CT in diverse classrooms.

URI

https://www.eecera.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/Programme-of-symposia-v.4-Sept-2025.pdf
https://hdl.handle.net/11511/117981

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Department of Elementary and Early Childhood Education, Conference / Seminar