Personally, I do call students names such as sweetie and honey unintentionally. I think that the students names should always be used but students are also use to getting called these things by their parents so I think culturally it is appropriate but not professionally.

In general, early childhood educators are expected to call children by the given name that their parents use and ask you to use. However, among some cultural groups, there is a more extended family-type relationship between teachers/caregivers and parents and their children. In these situations, it may be culturally appropriate to call children endearing names. But children’s given names should also be used.

Of course, focusing on children’s health and fitness isn’t really new, but the obesity crisis among young children in our country is a recent and alarming problem. Many people link the crisis to technology, especially passive television viewing, but it has many causes. Just as a teacher wouldn’t let the children spend excessive amounts of time engaged in any one activity, adults need to monitor the amount of time children use technology and how it is used. Some technologies available today actually involve children in whole body exercise and this can be helpful if outdoor play time isn’t available.
A developmentally appropriate curriculum should fully integrate and draw on the great potential of technology as a tool. Such curriculum isn’t an electronic workbook to drill children on skills, but rather programs and tools that put children in control and enable them to do what they otherwise could not. For example, when children put together a puzzle, there are strict limits on how pieces can be placed but with well-developed mathematics software children can expand or contract space and even transform a geometric shape (Clements & Sarama, 2003). Similarly, trying to correct or change marks formed on paper can be difficult and frustrating. But with drawing software, a child can change the shape of a design or instantly change colors and easily alter their creations. In this way, the computer helps a child become explicitly aware of and intentional about what they are doing – which supports the development of executive function and self-regulation (Clements & Sarama, 2007).

As in most questions about good early childhood practice, the first two words out of our mouths are “It depends.” One of the main things it depends on is how the teachers do group time. One critical factor is how active the children are—physically, cognitively, and verbally. Many great circle time activities involve standing up and moving. And what about language participation? Rather than requiring children to hold up their hands and wait for a turn, some teachers encourage them to give their responses or comments out loud (all at once) or invite the children to each turn and tell their “buddy” what they want to add to the conversation. In gauging the length of the group time, of course you will want to watch the children to see how engaged they are. If they’re actively involved, you can probably count on around 20 minutes for 4-year-olds (30 minutes tops) and 10-15 minutes for 3-year-olds.

This is a big question because technology is a big subject, and it is changing at a pace we can barely imagine. To directly answer your question, technology does fit in a developmentally appropriate classroom, but we have to remember that technology is a tool. It has the potential to be an incredibly effective learning tool for young children but like every other aspect of developmentally appropriate practice, teachers need to make informed decisions about what, when, and how to use technology. Today, technology goes well beyond computers to digital cameras, hand-held mobile devices, and social networking. Any type of technology should be integrated and connected to the larger curriculum. For example, children may e-mail a favorite author, create a blog or wiki, read a book in their home language, watch a short video clip on a topic of study, create documentation of their learning – the possibilities are only limited by the creativity of teachers and the available resources. Having said all that, technology use should never replace essential elements of good early childhood classrooms such as socio-dramatic play, block-building, shared book reading, etc. NAEYC is developing an excellent position statement on technology with the Fred Rogers Center on Children’s Media – stay tuned and check back on their website.

It may help to first clarify that the Common Core Standards were not exactly developed from the top down, though I understand what you mean. It’s true that a key goal of the Common Core was to develop standards that enabled students to be prepared for college by the end of high school. But the experts who developed the standards at each grade level, as well as the people who reviewed them, were professionals with extensive knowledge of the given age group as well as the subject matter. They didn’t do their work by mapping backwards from high school to kindergarten without regard to children's developmental abilities at each age level. Rather, they examined what is known from research and practice about the learning trajectory by which children acquire a given concept or skill.

Now, on the question of time. There’s never enough of it, is there? Especially in a half-day program. I don’t have the whole answer to this perennial challenge. But I think one valuable strategy lies in integrating writing across all the activities of the program day (and at home, for example, through children writing daily in their journals). Such integration not only enables us to get more writing time into the day; it also shows children that writing is a natural and important part of learning and communicating. They will be writing when they make field notes and report their results in science, when they describe with words and pictures how they solved a math problem, and the like. In Writing to Learn (Harper, 1993), William Zinsser says: "Writing is how we think our way into a subject and make it our own." Young children are just beginning to gain competence in writing, of course, but using the tool of writing in all their learning experiences is an important habit to acquire early.

A major element of emergent curriculum is that teachers make their plans based on children's interests. When done well, the curriculum also is based on the goals for children's learning--what they should know and be able to do (which a good set of standards will specify). The interest areas, play, projects, and small-group and large-group experiences would all reflect teachers' planning in emergent curriculum programs, as they would in any intentional, well-planned curriculum. In other words, without being a full-blown emergent curriculum, a program can have effective, developmentally appropriate curriculum, though it always should be tuned into what interests the children (the degree to which the children's interests lead and shape the planning process can vary somewhat). So a program can be developmentally appropriate without being a whole-hog emergent curriculum program. AND a program can use emergent curriculum and follow children's interests and yet not actually be developmentally appropriate. This would be the case if the curriculum didn't consist of important content and skills--as opposed to just things that children "like"--or if it wasn't suited to children's level of knowledge and development.

“Emergent curriculum” can mean different things to different people. Some people assume that it means the entire curriculum comes from the children and nothing is pre-planned. But Elizabeth Jones and others who advocate emergent curriculum talk about it as an on-going, adaptive planning process that engages children and teachers. The project approach as described by Lilian Katz & Judy Helm involves similar processes. I think of emergent curriculum as drawing on children’s interests and ideas to help them meet important learning goals. Teachers in any developmentally appropriate program have goals for children’s learning and they use many teaching strategies to help children make progress toward those goals. Child-guided, teacher-supported play is one of the most important learning experiences, but good teachers also use pre-planned, teacher-guided small and large group experiences as well as routines. If teachers are responsive to children and provide individually appropriate teaching, aspects of the curriculum are bound to emerge from children rather than be entirely pre-planned.

Meeting each baby’s individual needs is a goal of age-appropriate practice, which is one part of developmentally appropriate practice (DAP). I would have to say that adult’s behaviors you described were not age-appropriate; however, I can’t tell from what you wrote if they are culturally appropriate or not. Culturally appropriate practice is another part of DAP. If the practice fits the cultural context of the families, then it is developmentally appropriate. Also, I’m going by your impression that the adults were trying to get all the babies to sleep at the same time. You described one adult rocking one wide-awake baby in a bouncy seat. I don’t know what made you think the goal was to get all the wide-awake babies asleep. Maybe the adult who was rocking the baby was reading signals that the baby was tired – signals you didn’t perceive. In that case, the adult may have been using another part of DAP – individually appropriate practice. Or maybe the adult was convinced that even happy, awake babies need to be rocked. Sometimes adults rock babies to meet their own needs (instead of the babies). I also didn’t understand why it was hard for the adults if the babies didn’t all sleep at the same time. In my experience it’s much easier to meet babies’ individual needs rather than making them wait until the whole group is ready. As far as your question about how to go about offering infants and toddlers different nap times – it isn’t a matter of offering, it’s a matter of responding to each child’s signals. Of course, it helps to be in partnership with the parents and learn what they do at home and how they read their child’s signals. It would also help to know what the child’s usual schedule at home is. In my experience infant environments are set up so some babies can be asleep while others are awake. I have seen programs where toddlers also have their individual needs met and it isn’t hard on the adults. The way the environment is set up has an influence on whether toddlers can sleep when tired or have to wait until the official naptime.

There are inspiring things going on in many of the classrooms we visit. What particularly stands out varies with the educational approach or model. For example, in a classroom using the project approach (Reggio Emilia or other project-intensive programs) , wonderful work is often going on engaging children in stimulating, in-depth projects. In Tools of the Mind classrooms (among others) we see teachers nurturing rich, high-level play. Challenging, engaging learning experiences in math, literacy, science, social studies, and the arts are going on across a variety of classrooms. Since a picture is worth a thousand words (and video is worth even more), you might want to look at vignettes that show DAP in action, such as the video examples on the CD companion to the DAP 2009 volume (#375), two new DVDs about DAP (#8034 and #8042), and the video that accompanies The Young Child and Mathematics (#167).

Certainly the principles of DAP apply to music education. And the knowledge that developmental science has to offer about children’s learning and development at different ages and stages is important for music educators to take into account in their work. With respect to the credentials and background of those identifying themselves as music instructors, I would suggest that you and others with this concern communicate with the National Association of Music Education (originally known as the Music Educators national conference, hence its acronym MENC. (You may have already sone so). It is able to put more resources into the quality of music education than a broad-spectrum association such as NAEYC is able to do. Do other readers have ideas for Marcie on this issue?

Seems to me that you already know the answers to your questions . Is it that you are wanting a way to educate supervisors?

I’m assuming you are talking about assessment to inform your instruction. That is, you and your colleagues want to know where individual children are in their learning, what they’re struggling with, and the like. For this purpose, games and other one-on-one interactions are certainly developmentally appropriate. In most cases, what and how you assess will depend on what you need to know about an individual child, though you may go through some similar questions or game-like interactions with a number of children. Maybe there are four children who don’t seem to be getting the hang of some skill or concept. You need to know more about what each understands, or perhaps misunderstands. Taking these children aside one by one to “play a game” with you to clarify their understanding and the gaps in it will give you important information for differentiating your instruction for them. Informal teacher-generated assessments of this kind are probably best suited to your needs. You will find it useful too to share with other teachers various ideas for assessing children in different learning domains.

It is hard to change someone’s idea about DAP—or anything else. You may have to take small steps, integrating a few elements of developmentally appropriate practice in one or two parts of the day and documenting the results in terms that will appeal to your director. Don’t feel like you have to fight for the term “DAP,” that’s not what’s important. What matters is getting the children engaged, finding the right level of challenge, increasing their learning and development, using effective guidance. And it sounds as if guidance, or classroom management, is a key area for you and for her—actually it’s always critical. Not much learning goes on when behavior problems take center stage. The children you’re teaching is a challenging age group, but not inappropriate. Try to find some experienced teachers at other programs in your community who teach this age group and observe in their classrooms. And here are a few useful resources on guidance: Challenging Behavior in Young Children: Understanding, Preventing, and Responding Effectively, 3d ed. by Barbara Kaiser and Judy Rasminsky (Pearson) or Kaiser and Rasminsky’s shorter book Meeting the Challenge: Effective Strategies for Challenging Behaviors in Early Childhood Environments; and Dan Gartrell’s The Power of Guidance: Teaching Social-Emotional Skills In the Early Childhood Classroom (copublished by Delmar/Cengage and NAEYC).

I have 2.8 year olds to 5.5 year-olds in my program, and I LOVE it. The older ones (hopefully!) model behavior for the younger ones. I gear my expectations, of course as to how they perform, but I wouldn't change this aspect of my program for the world!

The three areas of knowledge that teachers must use when making decisions about what is developmentally appropriate are listed in the introduction at the top of this page. Teachers must consider: what they know about how children develop and learn generally (to be age-appropriate); what they know about individual children (to be individually appropriate); and what they know about the social and cultural context within which children live (to be culturally appropriate).

The trend you describe is that state departments of education and Head Start now require that programs use “research-based curriculum” (also called “evidence- or scientifically-based”). These publicly-funded agencies have an obligation to provide programs that will benefit young children. Research-based curricula are often published and available commercially. Such a curriculum guides teachers to provide learning experiences and teaching strategies that predict children’s later success in school and life. Such curricula may be comprehensive -- addressing all areas of a child’s development and learning – or they may focus on one area such as mathematics or science.
For many early childhood educators who are committed to emergent curriculum or totally teacher-planned curriculum, the trend toward published curriculum may seem inappropriate. But we now have a great deal of research to guide curriculum developers and there are an increasing number of developmentally appropriate, effective curricula available to support teachers. Most teachers, especially inexperienced ones, simply cannot “make up” the entire curriculum and also be effective in individualizing for each child. Regardless of whether a curriculum is “commercial”, as NAEYC states in its position statement on EC Curriculum, Assessment, and Evaluation, “the quality of the curriculum—including its appropriateness for the children who will be experiencing it—should be the important question”.

I am also currently trying to use Creative Curriculum and I wonder how it fits with DAP. Is there a way for this to work in the daily classroom?

DAP (pronounced “D.A.P.”) is an acronym for developmentally appropriate practice, a term that is widely used in ECE to mean ways of teaching that vary for and adapt to the age, experience, interests, and abilities of individual children within a given age range. The five guidelines are listed in the intro information at the top of this page. They describe the complex role of teachers who engage in developmentally appropriate practice.

The 2009 DAP placed increased emphasis on closing the achievement gaps between poor and minority children and their more advantaged peers. If teaching practices are not “a fit” with a given group or individual, by definition they are not developmentally appropriate. So our job as early childhood educators is to figure out what various children’s learning strengths and needs are and then craft our practices to fit these so children will learn and develop well. Let’s take the situation of children from low-income homes where on average they hear less language, a narrower range of vocabulary. To get on pace with their middle-class peers, these children need more intensive language experience in school than do children from language-rich environments. The situation is similar for English language learners (though methods may differ in providing language stimulation and support to children new to English and to children from language-restricted environments). Both groups need to be engaged in sustained, in-depth conversation and to explore books that offer a wide range of vocabulary. Useful resources for thinking about these questions include Linda Espinosa’s Getting It RIGHT for young Children from Diverse Backgrounds: Applying Research to Inform Practice and Karen Nemeth’s Many Languages, One Classroom: Teaching Dual and English Language Learners.