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Introduction to ECE . Baela R Jamil B.Ed ECE November 30 2013 Building Vocabularies : Developmentally Appropriate Practice The Great Innovators in ECE Comparing Pre –School Programs . Developmentally Appropriate Practice (DAP) –a much used ECE term – what does it mean .
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Introduction to ECE Baela R Jamil B.Ed ECE November 30 2013 Building Vocabularies : Developmentally Appropriate Practice The Great Innovators in ECE Comparing Pre –School Programs
Developmentally Appropriate Practice (DAP) –a much used ECE term – what does it mean Defining Developmentally Appropriate Practice : Over time, the phrase developmentally appropriate practice has been defined and used in different ways. Its definition has evolved as new research and knowledge have become available. What Is Developmentally Appropriate Practice? Developmentally appropriate practice is teaching that is attuned to children’s ages, expe-rience, abilities, and interests, and that helps them attain challenging and achievable goals. The foundations of developmentally appropriate practice, as it is defined today, lie in the history of early childhood education. Most fundamental is the premise that teaching young children should be based on what is known about how they develop and learn optimally. Within the field of developmental psychology, the concept ofdevelopmentallyap-propriate has been widely used for more than a century and refers to age-related and in-dividualhuman variation. Early childhood educators have long used the phrase developmentally appropriate to describe materials, learning experiences, or expectations of children of varying ages. For example, during the late 1970s, the federal government charged the Head Start program with helping children acquire basic educational skills. Most early childhood educators agreed that this goal was acceptable if, and only if, the program was implemented in a “developmentally appropriate way” (J. Klein, personal communication, 1980) Source: http://www.pearsonhighered.com/education-ataglance/pdfs/bredekamp_ch3.pdf
Roots of ECE http://teacher.scholastic.com/products/ect/roots.htm • How did it all begin? Where did our "big ideas" about early childhood education come from? We'll fill you in on the founders of early childhood education and their theories and approaches that are alive and well in our own classrooms today! Friedrich Froebel: Founder, First Kindergarten • John Dewey: Father of Pragmatism • Maria Montessori: A Sensory Approach to Learning • Lev Vygotsky: Playing to Learn • Jean Piaget: Champion of Children's Ideas
Pioneers In Our Field: Friedrich Froebel - Founder of the First KindergartenThe first installment in Early Childhood Today’s series on the Roots of Early Childhood EducationBy Early Childhood Today Editorial Staffhttp://www.scholastic.com/teachers/article/pioneers-our-field-friedrich-froebel-founder-first-kindergarten • "Children are like tiny flowers: They are varied and need care, but each is beautiful alone and glorious when seen in the community of peers." - Friedrich Froebel (1782-1852) • Friedrich Froebel was a motherless child. Losing his mother before the age of 1, and being raised by a father who had little time for him and his two brothers, left Froebel with a yearning for something seemingly impossible to satisfy. Froebel spent much of his time alone in the gardens surrounding his home. Here, as a young boy, he would play all day and explore his surroundings. This led to a deep love of nature that would remain with Froebel to the end of his days and influence all of his future achievements. As a young man, Froebel accepted a teaching position at the Frankfurt Model School. Frankfurt Model School was based on the teachings of Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi, a well respected educator of the day. Pestalozzi welcomed the poor into his school, including orphans practice that was revolutionary. His philosophy included the idea that children need to be active learners. Froebel applied his "hands-on learning" approach when he left the school to be a private tutor. The parents of the children he tutored offered Froebel a small patch of their property to use as a garden. The learning experiences with the children in the garden convinced Froebel that action and direct observation were the best ways to educate. In 1837 Friedrich Froebel founded his own school and called it "kindergarten," or the children's garden. Prior to Froebel's kindergarten, children under the age of 7 did not attend school. It was believed that young children did not have the ability to focus or to develop cognitive and emotional skills before this age. However, Froebel expressed his own beliefs about the importance of early education in the following way: ". . . because learning begins when consciousness erupts, education must also." Froebel labeled his approach to education as "self-activity." This idea allows the child to be led by his own interests and to freely explore them. The teacher's role, therefore, was to be a guide rather than lecturer. In the end, Froebel's most important gifts to children were the classroom, symbolically viewed as an extension of a lovely, thriving garden, and that which he needed most as a child a teacher who took on the role of loving, supportive parent. • This article originally appeared in the August, 2000 issue of Early Childhood Today.
Froebel:The learning experiences with the children in the garden convinced Froebel that action and direct observation were the best ways to educate. • Froebel's Kindergarten GoalsFroebel's kindergarten was designed to meet each child's need for: • physical activity • the development of sensory awareness and physical dexterity • creative expression • exploration of ideas and concepts • the pleasure of singing • the experience of living among others • satisfaction of the soul • A Classroom Garden • Children can discover Froebel's "gifts" with indoor garden experiences. • Plant window boxes with bulbs. Paper-white narcissus bulbs will grow and bloom quickly indoors. • Create a classroom terrarium in a clear fish tank. Fill the tank with layers of gravel, sand, and soil and plant with mosses and ferns. Caring for this mini-ecosystem lets children observe life. • Plant seeds of fast growing vines such as beans and sweet peas.
John Dewey: Father of Pragmatismhttp://www.scholastic.com/teachers/article/pioneers-our-field-john-dewey-father-pragmatism • "Education is not preparation for life: Education is life itself." - John Dewey (1859-1952) • Although he was one of the most famous educators of the 20th century, what may have been most remarkable about John Dewey was his ability to see the extraordinary value of the unremarkable, everyday experience for young children.In most classrooms across the United States during Dewey's time, children could be found sitting quietly and obediently in their seats, passively receiving information from their teachers and committing random facts to memory. Every classroom and every teacher would be doing the same thing at the same time.How unsettling this was for Dewey! He knew that, out of necessity, even the youngest children participated in household chores and activities, and he quickly recognized the wonderful learning opportunities these everyday experiences provided. He came to believe that the child's own instincts, activities, and interests should be the starting point of education.Dewey's strong beliefs fired his passion for educational reform. After receiving a Ph.D. in philosophy from Johns Hopkins University and teaching at the University of Michigan, Dewey founded his now-famous Laboratory School at the University of Chicago in 1896. The Lab School came to have a powerful influence on American education. In designing the curriculum, Dewey took advantage of the teachings of early European educators such as Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi, who emphasized that children learn by doing, and Fredrich Froebel, who recognized the value of play in children's development. Important skills such as problem solving, language, and math concepts were developed as children were allowed to move freely in and out of the classroom and explore their surroundings. Education was truly child-centered-teachers were trained to observe children's interests and help them follow through on those interests. Throughout the entire process, teachers and children were "learners together.""When we look at early childhood classrooms today, we see children building language skills as they share snacks with classmates, learning important science concepts as they water and care for plants, and developing math skills as they cook up a special treat for lunch. All these commonplace preschool activities stem from the ideas of a forward-thinking and most uncommon man." - John Dewey • This article originally appeared in the October, 2000 issue of Early Childhood Today.
Dewey: A child's own instincts, activities, and interests should be the starting point of education.A Pragmatic Approach to Learning • You can exercise Dewey's approach to learning in your own program by: • Starting each day by gathering children for a group meeting, where the development of language skills is an inevitable outcome. • Planning cooking activities in which children learn important math skills in the process. • Taking a nature walk for a hands-on exploration of important science concepts. • Dewey's DoctrineDewey's beliefs about education for young children were based on the following ideas: • Education and life are interrelated, not separate. • Children learn best by doing, by acting on the world. • Continuity of experience is essential to growth.
Maria Montessori:A Sensory Approach to Learning By Early Childhood Today Editorial Staff Grades: Early Childhood, Infant, PreK–Khttp://www.scholastic.com/teachers/article/pioneers-our-field-maria-montessori-sensory-approach-learning • Now, what really makes a teacher is love for the human child; for it is love that transforms the social duty of the educator into the higher consciousness of a mission." - Maria Montessori (1870 - 1952) • When she was only 10 years old, a seriously ill Maria Montessori told her mother, "Do not worry Mother, I cannot die; I have too much to do." With such a strong will, it's not surprising that Montessori's achievements were so extraordinary. She began by becoming the first female doctor in Italy, but today she is known worldwide for her work with young children. • Montessori turned her attention to education for the first time while working with mentally disabled children as a doctor at the Psychiatric Clinic of the University of Rome. Although the children had been dismissed by both teachers and doctors as unteachable, Montessori viewed their disabilities as a failure of teaching methodology rather than a medical problem. She established a special form of education for these children using the principle, "First, the education of the senses, then, the education of the intellect." The nation was shocked when her students learned to read and write and passed the same examinations given to "normal" children of the same age! • Her successful work with these children inspired her to undertake a new project in education: to understand how best to educate children in ordinary classrooms. During Montessori's time, classrooms were crowded and teachers used rigid drill methods for teaching young children. Montessori insisted that teaching involved great devotion and an understanding of how young children learn. • Surprisingly, Montessori's famous first class, the "Children's House," was actually a child care center in an apartment in a poor neighborhood. Montessori refused to impose arbitrary tasks on the children. Instead she showed them ways to develop their own skills at their own pace, a principle she called "spontaneous self-development." Her classroom had low cubbies where children could take out and put away their own supplies, child-size furniture, a garden and pets for them to care for, and assorted objects to encourage children to teach themselves. • Montessori made a breakthrough in the education of children when she realized that the way to teach a skill is not to have a child try something over and over but to prepare the child to learn skills by teaching the movements and actions necessary to perform them. For example, to teach her students how to write, she cut up large sandpaper letters and had children trace them with their fingers, and later with pencil or chalk. Soon, her 4-year-old students were able to write letters-and then words - on their own! The Montessori classroom was the first of its kind, with its emphases on cultivating a warm and comfortable environment and on independent and active learning. • Today, schools worldwide have discovered the wisdom of Montessori's methods, grounded in her own belief that - "early childhood education is the key to the betterment of society."
Teaching the Montessori Way • To promote optimal learning: • Provide classroom objects, including wooden cylinders, fabrics of different textures, gymnastic equipment, and counting rods, that will stir children's interest and capture their attention. • Encourage children to explore these materials freely. • Allow children to work on tasks or projects at their own pace, • You are bringing Montessori`s methods into your own classroom as you: • Plant seeds so that children can care for plants and observe their growth. • Include children in the preparation and serving of snacks. • Provide both sandpaper and three-dimensional shapes and letters that children can trace with their fingers to reinforce shape and letter recognition.
Lev Vygotsky - Playing to LearnThe fourth installment in Early Childhood Today’s series on the Roots of Early Childhood EducationBy Deborah J. Leong PhD, Elena Bodrova PhD Grades: PreK–K http://www.scholastic.com/teachers/article/pioneers-our-field-lev-vygotsky-playing-learn • In play, a child is always above his average age, above his daily behavior; in play, it is as though he were a head taller than himself." - Lev Vygotsky (1896-1934) • Lev Vygotsky is often called the "Mozart of psychology." Similar to the famous composer, Vygotsky applied his genius early in life to many different areas. And like Mozart, Vygotsky died young, at age 37, after a battle with tuberculosis. Born in 1896 in Belorussia, he began his career as an educator and a psychologist at the time of the 1917 Russian revolution. After moving to Moscow in 1924, Vygotsky set out to create what he hoped would become a new way to understand and solve the social and educational problems of his time. At the core of Vygotsky's theory, called the Cultural-Historical Theory, is the idea that child development is the result of the interactions between children and their social environment. These interactions include those with parents and teachers, playmates and classmates, and brothers and sisters. They also involve relationships with significant objects, such as books or toys, and culturally specific practices that children engage in the classroom, at home, and on the playground. Children are active partners in these interactions, constructing knowledge, skills, and attitudes and not just mirroring the world around them. Vygotsky opposed the psychologists who believed that children's development occurs spontaneously and cannot be affected by education. He also differed with those who claimed that teaching had the power to alter development at any time regardless of the child's age or capacities. Instead, Vygotsky felt that learning could lead development if it occurs within the child's Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD). The ZPD contains skills and concepts that are not yet fully developed but are "on the edge of emergence" emerging only if the child is given appropriate support. For the skills and concepts that lie outside a child's ZPD, even significant instructional efforts may fail to produce developmental gains. Vygotsky recognized that the kind of assistance needed to help children develop new skills and concepts within their ZPD took different forms for children of different ages. For instance, fostering make-believe play with preschoolers could provide the same support that formal instruction offers for older students. "A child's greatest achievements are possible in play, achievements that tomorrow will become her basic level of real action." Lev Vygotsky has contributed a wealth of ideas to early childhood education. Most important, he has shown us how children's efforts to understand the world around them, working in concert with teachers' sensitive, responsive interactions, rouses their young minds to life.
Vigotsky cont.. Supporting Development Through Play • For make-believe play to support development, the teacher should: Give children the opportunity to create an imaginary situation by offering nonstructured and multifunctional props and by modeling how to use them (for example, a paper plate may be used not only for playing restaurant but may also become a dial in a spaceship or a mirror in a hospital). • Encourage children to act out various roles by introducing different play themes and scenarios (so, when playing out a grocery store theme, children can be shelf stockers, baggers, shoppers, cashiers, and so on). • Be certain that children are aware of the rules that govern the relationship between specific roles in a play (for example, in playing hospital, the "patient" is not supposed to give a shot to the "nurse").
Pioneers In Our Field: Jean Piaget - Champion of Children's Ideas-Grades: PreK–K http://www.scholastic.com/teachers/article/pioneers-our-field-jean-piaget-champion-childrens-ideas • "If logic itself is created rather than being inborn, it follows that the first task of education is to form reasoning." - Jean Piaget 1896-1980 • The legacy of Jean Piaget to the world of early childhood education is that he fundamentally altered the view of how a child learns. And a teacher, he believed, was more than a transmitter of knowledge she was also an essential observer and guide to helping children build their own knowledge. • As a university graduate, Swiss-born Piaget got a routine job in Paris standardizing Binet-Simon IQ tests, where the emphasis was on children getting the right answers. Piaget observed that many children of the same ages gave the same kinds of incorrect answers. What could be learned from this? • Piaget interviewed many hundreds of children and concluded that children who are allowed to make mistakes often go on to discover their errors and correct them, or find new solutions. In this process, children build their own way of learning. From children's errors, teachers can obtain insights into the child's view of the world and can tell where guidance is needed. They can provide appropriate materials, ask encouraging questions, and allow the child to construct his own knowledge. • Piaget's continued interactions with young children became part of his life-long research. After reading about a child who thought that the sun and moon followed him wherever he went, Piaget wanted to find out if all young children had a similar belief. He found that many did indeed believe this. Piaget went on to explore children's countless "why" questions, such as, "Why is the sun round?" or "Why is grass green?" He concluded that children do not think like adults. Their thought processes have their own distinct order and special logic. Children are not "empty vessels to be filled with knowledge" (as traditional pedagogical theory had it). They are "active builders of knowledge-little scientists who construct their own theories of the world." • Piaget's Four Stages of Development • Sensorimotor Stage: Approximately 0 - 2Infants gain their earliest understanding of the immediate world through their senses and through their own actions, beginning with simple reflexes, such as sucking and grasping. • Preoperational Stage: Approximately 2 - 6Young children can use symbols for objects, such as numbers to express quantity and words such as mama, doggie, hat and ball to represent real people and objects. • Concrete Operations: Approximately 6 - 11School-age children can perform concrete mental operations with symbols-using numbers to add or subtract and organizing objects by their qualities, such as size or color. • Formal Operations: Approximately 11 - adultNormally developing early adolescents are able to think and reason abstractly, to solve theoretical problems, and answer hypothetical questions. • For more information about the work of Jean Piaget: A Piaget Primer: How a Child Thinks by Dorothy G. Singer and Tracey A. Revenson (Plume Books, 1996; $12.95).
Piaget cont… • Applying Piaget's Theory in Your ProgramThe art of applying Piaget's theories in your program is in making children's experiences hands-on and concrete. Remember that children need to explore the nature of things through trial and error. • Introduce unusual materials to encourage exploration. • Add aluminum foil and flashlights to the block area. How can you use these with the blocks? • Encourage children to talk about changes they notice when manipulating objects. • Invite children to learn more about the world through field studies and trips.
Take Home Exercise – Make Notes and Complete the slides below on 3 most popular ECE programs
Differences between 3 Programs • As early childhood educators, we all have our own philosophies and approaches to education. Our approach to teaching is created from a multitude of resources and probably includes knowledge from early childhood theorists, an understanding of child development, and our experiences with children in different learning environments. Whether you are a new teacher about to embark on an early childhood career or a well-seasoned professional, it is helpful to know what other educators are doing in different types of programs. New approaches to teaching and learning can be adapted within our own environment and information about how your philosophy of education compares or differs from others can be shared with parents considering your program for their children.We will cover three different types of preschool programs—Montessori, High/Scope®, and Reggio Emilia. The following questions will be considered for each of the three approaches: • What is the program’s history? • What are its main components? • What is unique about the program? • How can one tell if a school is truly following the model?
