Over the last few decades, early childhood schooling (0–3 years of age) has grown exponentially to become a generalized reality (European Commission, 2019). This has given rise to an increase in studies centered on the assessment of educational programs and interventions in nursery schools (Kaufman et al., 2015; Escolano-Pérez, 2020). A number of these studies warn of poor quality in such centers, especially in terms of educator-child interaction (Turnbull et al., 2009; Durlak, 2010; Hallam et al., 2016). This is largely due to the fact that this educational phase lacks its own identity (Herrán et al., 2014) for two reasons: on the one hand it has inherited educational traditions from successive cycles, introducing content that does not fit with the specific characteristics of early childhood (Sarmento and Ruiz, 2011); and, on the other hand the job is carried out in an intuitive, affectionate, maternal way, neglecting the professional dimension of daily tasks (Herrán, 2013; Falk, 2018a). Considering the proven effect of early experiences on human psychological development (Bick and Nelson, 2017), more and more authors are calling for a system rooted in the natural circumstances of infant daily life (Duncan and Magnuson, 2013; McLachlan et al., 2018), that helps to fulfill their early developmental needs (Csibra and Gergely, 2009; Bonawitz et al., 2011; Hallam et al., 2016; Tomasello, 2016; Salcuni et al., 2017). However, there are few rigorous training programs aimed at educators and early education professionals that provide a specific guide as to how to carry out everyday activities in the infant classroom, as well as how to assess progress in the performance of these activities.

Previous works have justified the interest and unique nature of the Pikler-Lóczy education (PikLEd) system as a reference for early education centers covering the 0–3 age group (Tardos, 2007; McCall et al., 2010; Herrán, 2013, 2018; Herrán et al., 2014; Salamon and Harrison, 2015). The PikLEd is an institutional childcare proposal exclusive to early childhood. It is based on over 70 years of practical and professional experience in the Lóczy Institute of Budapest (Pikler, 1968, 1971; David and Appell, 1986, 2010; Falk, 2002), which began as a foster home (1946–2011) but later became a nursery school (from 2006 to the present day). Assuming that an early experience of competence is crucial for the future shaping of the psyche (Bruner, 1972, 1973; Wallon, 1980; Pikler, 2018), this model revolves around two fundamental axes of everyday infant life: daily care and autonomous infant activity. It entails a set of original action protocols, known as choreographies, that transform everyday activities (for example, breakfast) into an educational field (Belza et al., 2019, 2020). The authors who have gone deeper into analyzing the practice of PikLEd have highlighted its relevance as a responsive care system (Hevesi, 2018; Pikler, 2018; Falk, 2018b) that is truly paedocentric (Falk, 2008; David and Appell, 2010; Herrán, 2013; Tardos and David, 2018; Vincze, 2018), and which facilitates infant socialization without violence (Kàllò, 2014, 2016; Pikler, 2018).

Over the last few years, a number of studies have provided new knowledge about PikLEd through the application of observational methodology (OM; Belasko et al., 2019, 2022; Belza et al., 2019, 2020; Sagastui et al., 2020, 2022). OM allows us to assess spontaneous behavior in its everyday context (Anguera, 1979, 2003; Portell et al., 2015). This methodological option offers valuable procedural resources for the study of daily life in the classroom and the adult-child relationships that are established therein (Anguera, 2001a). It also provides the objectivity and rigor essential for educational assessment, whilst at the same time affording the necessary flexibility for capturing the many, often complex processes of development and early learning in real life environments (Anguera, 2001b; Herrán, 2008; Early Head Start National Resource Center, 2013; Escolano-Pérez et al., 2017; Escolano-Pérez, 2020). OM offers guidelines for justifying and analyzing the quality of the records obtained using study dimensions and segmentation criteria of the spontaneous behavioral continuum in its natural context. Thus, OM involves the systematization of initial descriptive records – first dataset – through an observation instrument in order to obtain an equivalent code matrix – second dataset – that is built on the first (still qualitative data, where columns are dimensions/sub-dimensions, and rows are the successive units), which will be analyzed through specific quantitative techniques for categorical data. This way of connecting qualitative information and quantitative data has led to OM being considered as mixed-method in itself (Anguera and Hernández-Mendo, 2016; Anguera et al., 2017, 2018a; Onwuegbuzie and Johnson, 2021; Hitchcock and Onwuegbuzie, 2022).

Beneath the scope of OM, observational instruments were legitimized and applied, in order to capture details about the behavior of the expert PikLEd educator that facilitate the detection of two dimensional, instrumental and relational patterns in the daily performance of each everyday activity: breakfast, dressing and undressing, free play, etc (Belasko et al., 2019, 2022; Belza et al., 2019, 2020; Sagastui et al., 2020, 2022). This research shows that the habitual behavior of the expert PikLEd educator ensures the stability of the environment and the consistency of educational behaviors, these being understood as precise and adjusted ways of responding to the development of infant autonomy. Within the research line begun by Herrán (2013, 2014, 2016) and Herrán et al. (2014), important progress has been made in characterizing the action protocols or choreographies followed by these professionals in each educational field, thanks to the use of procedures designed to capture essential details of the sequence of educators’ instrumental actions and their connection with relational behaviors deployed with the child.

One of the everyday activities transformed into an educational field for PikLEd is breakfast. The systematic observation of this activity has revealed the sequence of basic actions that the educators repeat, as many times as necessary, so that the child has breakfast in a way that suits them, meaning that the child eats comfortably, calmly and quietly, in accordance with the hunger they feel at the time and their own perception of being full. These sequences are the detours (Wallon, 1985) they carry out in order to provide each child, at the table, with the utensils and food laid out on the countertop (Belza et al., 2019). The reiterative circularity of this instrumental sequence, together with the specific, unique and meaningful management of distances and postures (proxemic behavior), has shown that the expert PikLEd educator promotes the appearance of shared intentionality (Tomasello et al., 2005) in the development of mealtime routines (Belza et al., 2019). It is this shared intentionality that forms the basis of early cultural, instrumental and social learning (Tomasello, 2016). Furthermore, enlightening results have been obtained through analyzing the differentiated use of the utensils specific to the activity, along the lines of object pragmatics (Rodriguez and Moro, 1999) which views objects in terms of their social use and functions in everyday life, functions which children gradually appropriate thanks to adult-instigated mediation. Significant relationships were detected between various breakfast utensils with differing complexity and each child protagonist, showing that the educators adapt, and provide utensils depending on the level of autonomy and interest of each child (Belza et al., 2020).

The evidence provided by the aforementioned studies about the breakfast activity was made possible thanks to the diachronic analysis of observational data (Anguera et al., 2021); more specifically, lag sequential analysis (Bakeman and Gottman, 1989; Bakeman and Quera, 2011; Quera, 2018) and polar coordinate analysis (Sackett, 1980; Anguera, 1997). Lag sequential analysis detects regularities in behavior, making patterns of behavior visible, whereas polar coordinate analysis enables the vectorization of behavior, creating a complete map of interrelationships between behaviors. These techniques enabled the characterization of significant parts of the choreography, but not the choreography as a whole. A third very important technique for diachronic analysis in OM is based on the algorithm developed by Magnusson (1996, 2000) and used in THEME software, which makes the description and detection of complex real-time patterns possible. Its basic concept is the T-pattern, a statistical, hierarchical, self-similar (pseudo-fractal) pattern, recurring with significant translation symmetry since detected in human, animal, and brain network behavior (Casarrubea et al., 2015, 2018; Magnusson, 2020). T-pattern detection and analysis (TPA) with THEME has led to new insight into the structure of behavior. This third technique used for diachronic analysis in OM may be the best option for a complete characterization of the choreography. Until now, the use of TPA within the framework of OM, in the field of education, has made it possible: to identify patterns of academic persistency in pre-school age-groups (Santoyo et al., 2020), to examine the development of cognitive skills in infancy (Escolano-Pérez et al., 2019; Escolano-Pérez, 2020), to evaluate teaching-learning strategies in motor skills (Castañer et al., 2009), to assess the interaction and communication models of physical education teachers (García-Fariña et al., 2018; Camerino et al., 2019; Valero-Valenzuela et al., 2020), and to design and assess training programs focused on the professionals’ change in behavior (Portell et al., 2019; Sene-Mir et al., 2020).

Therefore, through the use of TPA within the framework of OM, it is possible to facilitate the design and evaluation of formative interventions of PikLEd aimed at novice educators; and this application would allow us to compensate for an important deficiency in the generalization of the PikLEd model. The Lóczy Institute in Budapest – now the Emmi Pikler nursery school – rigorously prepares its educators in situ, with periodical observations of their actions with the children which are then discussed by the pedagogic team as a whole (Kelemen, 2016). However, in other centers there is no training material for novice educators associated to evaluation guidelines, that would allow professionals to track the acquisition process of essential elements of the choreography (what to do) and non-verbal communication (how to do) inherent to PikLEd. The general aim of this research is to provide new insight into the choreography followed by the expert PikLEd educator, which is considered seminal for the creation of an innovative training plan that includes T-patterns as elements of a self-modeling strategy (Dowrick, 1999, 2012). Based on the main dimensions that have been established to structure the breakfast activity (Belza et al., 2019), the specific aims are: (1) to adapt the instrument Giving Breakfast in the Emmi Pikler Nursery School, GBEPNS (Belza, 2020) which increases the molarity of its instrumental and proxemic dimensions, in such a way as to make it easier for an educator who is not an expert in PikLEd to understand the training material created from its elements; (2) to identify invariant aspects that structure the expert educator’s behavior by analyzing the T-patterns from both an intra-individual perspective – between patterns obtained from the same expert educator when modifying the molarity of the observation system –, and an inter-individual perspective – between the behavior patterns of different expert PikLEd educators.

This work forms part of a line of research into PikLEd developed under the scope of OM. In accordance with the design classification established in OM (Anguera et al., 2001), the study design as a whole is nomothetic, follow-up and multidimensional (N/F/M design), since the observation units are greater than one; there are two educators, to be exact. However, it is worth qualifying that, for each educator, the design used is ideographic given that the behavior of each one was observed and recorded as an independent unit, with an intra-session and inter-session follow-up over a 3 month period; and is multidimensional since it includes different criteria in the observation instruments used to record and code behavior (I/F/M design). This study applied systematic, direct, non-participative observation.

In relation to the behavior of Educator-1, 4,716 configurations or data points were analyzed, whilst 2,319 configurations were analyzed in the case of Educator-2. The number of configurations was maintained both with GBEPNS-IP, and with GBEPNS-IPv2. In line with the second specific aim, we present the results below, in two sub-sections that show the intra-individual and inter-individual comparisons between patterns.

This study focused on two dimensions: one of instrumental behavior, and the other of the expert PikLEd educator’s non-verbal behavior during the breakfast activity. The relevance of both these dimensions, instrumental and proxemic, has been revealed in previous studies as backbones of behavior flow on two levels – physical/instrumental and human/relational (Belza et al., 2019; Belza, 2020). Furthermore, due to their high degree of perceptibility and relationship with reality, these dimensions offer better training opportunities for novice educators than others perceived in the GBEPNS instrument. It was expected that the detection of T-patterns would identify greater levels of structuring in everyday behavior compared to other diachronic analysis techniques, and thus provide an account of the choreography as a whole. Below we discuss the results obtained relating to Educator-1ʼs behavior, in order to compare the identifying and explanatory capacity of the two observation instruments, GBEPNS-IP and GBEPNS-IPv2. Subsequently, we explain the T-patterns of Educator-1 and Educator-2, obtained with GBEPNS-IPv2, in order to clarify the potential behavioral homogeneity between the two.

Firstly, we can see that the variability of event-types drops to almost half when GBEPNS-IPv2 is applied to the analysis of Educator-1ʼs behavior, compared with the use of GBEPNS-IP. This fact adds more consistency to the record and reduces the dismembering of the behavior by residual aspects, without prejudicing significant information, given that the versatility of the events compared to the total is still high. The amount of different event-types, interpreted as behavior variability, shows that the PikLEd expert constantly adjusts to each moment, circumstance and child (Kàllò, 2016; Hevesi, 2018). If one of the defining aspects of early education is the educators’ capacity to adapt their practice to the children’s basic needs (Durlak, 2010; Escolano-Pérez, 2020), then PikLEd prioritizes the establishment of a close, continued relationship between the educator and the children in her/his care. In this way, everyday interactions can be furnished with the particular and individualized traits that come from mutual knowledge and which are so necessary at early ages (Falk, 2008). Despite this variability, the obtained results relating to Educator-1 support the use of the GBEPNS-IPv2 instrument which, combined with TPA, has allowed us to discover a more complex everyday behavioral structure for the expert PikLEd educator. It also provides new aspects of the choreography during breakfast whilst integrating the findings of previous studies (Belza et al., 2019, 2020) – the basic sequences that instrumentally order this mealtime routine and its cultural-socializing character. Therefore, the results sustain the idea that THEME is effective in obtaining clarifying patterns of this intervention in its natural context – a nursery school classroom.

Secondly, the aim was to check whether applying the most molar GBEPNS-IPv2 instrument and the same analysis strategy with THEME would lead to Educator-1ʼs results being replicated in Educator-2. Before going on to compare the patterns obtained from both, we want to highlight differences in the two breakfast situations. Since the temporality of the sessions was marked by the children’s attendance, together with the desire and rhythm in the breakfast itself, the duration of the sessions was disparate. This means, for example, that Educator-2ʼs sample, although including a greater number of sessions than that of Educator-1, produced a lower quantity of data due to fewer children having breakfast and the sessions being shorter. However, this fact does not appear to impede the detection of a similar structure in the behavior of both educators. The two T-patterns obtained are made up of event-type symmetries and have similar characteristics: (1) Chain linking of instrumental actions for breakfast management, (2) Recurrent cycles of accompaniment without action, (3) Finalization using a napkin. These results provide evidence about the stability of everyday intervention at breakfast time in this school, in two senses: On the one hand, they add evidence about the detours (Belza et al., 2019) made by the educators from the counter where the utensils – that they move, put down or serve, moving closer to the children at the table – are kept, until they return to the counter. Furthermore, the T-patterns obtained illustrate that it is the proxemic dimension that characterizes this instrumental sequence; guaranteeing coherence between the physical and human elements that make up the early educational breakfast environment, and showing the relevance of the intentional use of the space when it comes to establishing educator-child relationships. The expert PikLEd educator’s choice of posture and distance is neither accidental nor improvised, but is a response to the level of intervention/interaction that she needs to establish for the joint action (Tomasello et al., 2005; Sagastui et al., 2022). On the other hand, that both educators should display such similar behavior is due to the fact that, since its beginnings as a foster home, the main aim of the Lóczy Institute has been to provide the emotional security necessary for the healthy psychological development of institutionalized infancy (Pikler, 1971). Such important acquisitions in the earliest years cannot be integrated into the personality being structured if the child does not carry out her/his experiences within the framework of an interpersonal system of stable, continuous relationships (Falk, 2008). To this end, the aspects that make up each care were detailed and examined, in order to organize them in the form of a choreography, and thus ensure the continuity and homogeneity in the daily tasks of the educators who interact with the children (Herrán, 2013).

On an educational level, two other components of this choreography stand out. The accompaniment without action pattern is where the educator sits on her chair, and from that position accompanies both the breakfast of the child sitting at the table next to, or opposite her, along with the rest of those present, including those who are already in the play area. This sub-set of event-types is a recurring loop that is inserted into the choreography. They are attention intervals dependent on the aspiring action of the children, which allows the educator to attend and respond to the requirements of each moment in an appropriate way, even preempting them, thus displaying responsive care (Hevesi, 2018; Pikler, 2018). Her presence increases as the session progresses; something which is logical given that most of the children have been served, are finishing or are already playing. Even so, the fact that this pattern is repeated throughout the session characterizes the delimited space known as “her place” – i.e., her chair, situated near to the breakfast table, between this and the counter – as a transitional space between one action and the next, or between one interaction and the next. This shows another way of organizing and regulating the activity through the use of the space. Finally, it is worth highlighting the appearance of a previously unknown action – the culmination of the breakfast, consisting in the use and placement of the napkin, which closes the activity. In fact, in the case of Educator-2 this action takes place in another sub-area of the dining room – the handrail or corridor that connects to the play area. Therefore, the napkin, which denotes a certain degree of acceptance of social norms or conventions by the child (Belza et al., 2020), marks another important transition: from the breakfast activity to the one that immediately follows, which is play. Once the basic, affective needs have been covered – dietary, emotional and adaptable to nursery school – the children can then unleash their abilities associated with autonomous activity and free play. According to Tardos (2014), attending school involves facing certain daily challenges on the children’s part. In this sense, breakfast constitutes an activity that supports the transition from home to school; each child receives a welcome and a personalized breakfast so that they feel expected and comfortable (Tardos, 2014; Belza, 2015). These transitions are fundamental in infant daily life in order to ensure security and welfare. The expert PikLEd educator prepares them in such a way as to create a solid framework in which children can integrate references that help them settle, find their place and build structure (Falk, 2008).

In short, what can be deduced from this work, in addition to the specific matters relating to PikLEd, are the advantages of using TPA within the OM framework to dissect an everyday activity in its natural context, and explain the components of early education intervention that satisfy basic infant needs. The results reveal a complex structure of the everyday behavior of these educators, which provides insightful information about the breakfast choreography, and how the expert PikLEd educators establish interaction with the children. This represents a starting point from which to generate instructive material for training early education professionals. In this sense, since the detected patterns integrate and structure various dimensions of instrumental and non-verbal behavior, they allow us not only to assess the result of such training, but also to create feedback during the process itself (Santoyo et al., 2020; Sene-Mir et al., 2020). Therefore, this work makes a significant contribution in terms of addressing the gap that exists in specific training programs for professionals working with the 0–3 age group; a gap that has been highlighted by various authors (Herrán et al., 2014; Escolano-Pérez, 2020).

As previously mentioned, one of the limitations of this study was the sample composition. Since the emphasis was on carrying out a detailed study of everyday interactions, the number of sessions was somewhat limited, in addition to its heterogeneity for enabling the analysis of the relationships and integration of the different dimensions of the educators’ behavior with each child in particular. To be exact, it would be interesting to be able to integrate the role of kinesic behavior into these patterns, so that instruction in responsive communicative abilities in early education could be added to the training plan.

The raw data supporting the conclusions of this article will be made available by the authors, without undue reservation.

The studies involving human participants were reviewed and approved by the Committee for Ethics in Research and Teaching from the University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU). Written informed consent to participate in this study was provided by the participants’ legal guardian/next of kin. Written informed consent was obtained from the individual(s) for the publication of any potentially identifiable images or data included in this article.

All authors listed have made a substantial, direct, and intellectual contribution to the work and approved it for publication.

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

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