Nola Harvey: If I was using Talking together, I know this sounds really strange, but I'd start with the back page. Now the back page is part of your sort of reflection on your work. But I thought the first two questions were really useful. When you're looking at a self assessment, what are our strengths here? And what are our areas for development? And that is the way to find out the strengths that you have in the team.

Kaiako can share that, “Oh yes, well, I do understand a little bit of Telugu.”

“Oh, I thought you spoke Indian.”

“No, I speak Telugu and Tamil as well.”

So there are ways in which you look at your own personal strengths as a kaiako. What are you like as a communicator? And are you the person that can be almost like the primary carer for that child as they are settling in that first year?

And this advice in this text tells you to look for the children's strengths. It advises you how to enrich the everyday interactions.

Professor Claire McLachlan: I think probably your point about how would you use it for self review is a very good one. Because I think that that would be a good starting place where you could go through the back of the resource and look at the questions about, is your practice basically well developed? Or is it emerging? I think you could start there.

But I think probably what I would use it for would be for self review of oral language and hopefully of early literacy in the early childhood setting.

Dr Jane Carroll: It is a very good resource for teachers to be dipping into, not just using as a one off and putting it back on the shelf or leaving it on the computer. But actually being really mindful and looking at it as an individual staff member, but also with other staff members. How does my practice complement other teachers’ practices? Are we all doing the same types of practices? Can we vary our practice? And in what way?

Professor Claire McLachlan: So we looked at the structure for oral language and for early literacy within the setting, which is how is the environment set up to support language and literacy? And secondly, we looked at process. So what are the pedagogical strategies that teachers are using to support oral language and literacy?

So I think that would be what I would do with it is I would go through, review it, think about my own practice and say, really honestly, what are the things I'm doing well, and what are the places in which I could be stretching my practice? You know, how could I strengthen what I'm doing to support young children? And then, once I've done that review, and found out how could I improve both structure and process in the setting? I would then start to think about the intentional strategies that I would use to support learning in different areas.