Discussion: Striving for Excellence in Early Care and Education—Intended and Unintended Consequences

Discussion: Striving for Excellence in Early Care and Education—Intended and Unintended Consequences
As you know, children enter early childhood programs with varied strengths, skills, and needs. What are the most effective ways to address these differences? And, in what ways can such efforts be aligned with the proposed need for a more standardized approach to fostering development and learning in the early years? These and similar questions are part of the ongoing debate in the early childhood field with regard to national standards and assessment, implementing DAP (Developmentally Appropriate Practice), and bridging achievement gaps.

The notion that every decision has intended, as well as unintended consequences is by now quite familiar to you. This week consider the following: With regard to striving for excellence, what happens to children, families, and early childhood professionals when the requirements for a standardized curriculum are put into place? What are the consequences when a rigorous academic curriculum is “pushed down” into early care and education environments including, and before, kindergarten and the primary grades? What are the implications of marginalizing or eliminating arts, music, and movement in preschools and primary grades because more academic areas are being targeted as areas for growth? What are the consequences of replacing play and child-centered learning with formally structured lessons? As you know, these are only some of the possible intended and unintended consequences of striving for excellence, which then become issues unto themselves.

With this assignment, you will have an opportunity to engage in a Discussion about intended and unintended consequences regarding one of the policy issues from this week. The readings present a wide variety of topics from which you can choose. They range from school readiness to performance standards; from reflections on DAP to inequities in early childhood education; from the face of the new kindergarten to changes in preschool curriculum; and from indicators of excellence in early childhood environments to ideas about the future of the early childhood profession.

In preparation:

• Review the required readings for this week.
• Choose an issue discussed in one of the articles that engages your current professional interest.
• Find and review a segment in the conversation with Delila Vasquez on the media segment that also engages your current professional interest.
• Compose a summary statement that includes the following five parts:

• • The policy issue you chose to analyze from the written resource
  • The main point(s) from the conversation segment you chose from the media segment
  • Ways in which this conversation helped broaden your understanding of current issues related to early care and education
  • What you perceive as intended and unintended consequence(s) of this policy issue for the well-being of children, families, and/or the early childhood field
  • What new insights you gained from determining possible consequences of the policy

By Wednesday:

Post

• Your summary statement as outlined above
• A citation of the resources you used, in APA format

Article: Graue, E. (2008). Teaching and learning in a post-DAP world. Early Education & Development, 19(3), 441–447. Retrieved from the Walden Library databases.

Solution Preview

The policy issue discussed in the article involves the best curriculum in early childhood development between an academic-based curriculum and a play-based early childhood learning. From the conversation segment, one of the main points is that academic-based programs are……………………..