This paper focuses on a particular institutional context, that of the vocational training of early childhood educators in Switzerland. The paper is interested in the practical problems encountered by participants in the context of guided professional practice, namely situations characterized by contingencies related both to educational work with children and to training issues involving students learning to become childhood educators. To cope with the demands of these situations, participants such as trainees, tutors and children often engage in parallel interactions and must manage situations of splitting and reconfiguring participation frameworks. These phenomena have been documented in the literature as conversational "schisming". This article describes the conditions under which parallel participation frameworks emerge in a corpus of video data recorded in early childhood institutions and the nature and role of the multimodal resources mobilized by the participants when negotiating parallel interactions. It also highlights the practical functions associated with the emergence of schisming in the specific institutional contexts concerned.