Chapter 1
Defining Developmentally
Appropriate Practice:
What It Is
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Developmentally Appropriate
Practice—What Is It?
a. Programs are based on the accumulation of
data and facts about what children are like
b. Programs designed for young children must be
based on what is known about young children
c. Early childhood educators must be steeped in
child development knowledge
d. Children must be considered in the context of
their family, culture, community, past history,
and present circumstances
© 2007 Thomson Delmar Learning. All Rights Reserved.
Basic Principles of
Development
• Domains of children’s development—physical, social, emotional,
and cognitive—are closely related.
Development in one domain
influences and is influenced by
development in other domains
• Development occurs in a relatively
orderly sequence, with later
abilities, skills, and knowledge
building on those already acquired
• Development proceeds at varying
rates from child to child as well as
unevenly within different areas of a
child’s functioning
• Early experiences have both
cumulative and delayed effects
on individual children’s
development; Optimal periods
exist for certain types of
development and learning
• Development proceeds in
predictable directions toward
greater complexity,
organization, and
internalization
• Development and learning
occur in and are influenced by
multiple social and cultural
contexts
© 2007 Thomson Delmar Learning. All Rights Reserved.
Basic Principles of
Development
• Children are active learners,
drawing on direct physical and
social experience as well as
culturally transmitted knowledge
to construct their own understanding of the world around them
• Development and learning result
from interaction of biological
maturation and the environment,
which includes both the physical
and social worlds that children
live in
• Play is an important vehicle for
children’s social, emotional, and
cognitive development, as well as
a reflection of their development
• Development advances when
children have opportunities to
practice newly acquired skills
as well as when they
experience a challenge just
beyond the level of their
present mastery
• Children demonstrate different
modes of knowing and learning
and different ways of
representing what they know
• Children develop and learn
best in the context of a
community where they are safe
and valued, their physical
needs are met, and they feel
psychologically secure
© 2007 Thomson Delmar Learning. All Rights Reserved.
Common Misunderstandings about
Developmentally Appropriate
Practice
• There is only one right way to
carry out developmentally
appropriate practice
• Developmentally appropriate
classrooms are unstructured
• Teachers teach minimally or
not at all in developmentally
appropriate classrooms
© 2007 Thomson Delmar Learning. All Rights Reserved.
Common Misunderstandings about
Developmentally Appropriate
Practice
• Developmentally appropriate programs do not
include academics, generally interpreted to be
the formal skills of learning reading, writing,
and arithmetic
• Developmentally appropriate programs are only
effective for particular populations, “usually
assumed to be typically developing, white,
middle-class children”
• In developmentally appropriate classrooms, there
is no way to tell whether children are learning
© 2007 Thomson Delmar Learning. All Rights Reserved.
Common Misunderstandings about
Developmentally Appropriate
Practice
• Developmentally appropriate practice can be
achieved simply by acquiring certain kinds of
toys and materials
• Developmentally appropriate practice uses no
goals or objectives
• In developmentally appropriate practice, the
curriculum is child development
• Developmental appropriateness is just one in
a sequence of changing trends in education
© 2007 Thomson Delmar Learning. All Rights Reserved.
Results of Appropriate versus
Inappropriate Practices
• Self-esteem
– mastering
– meaningful
• Self-control
• Stress
• Later academic patterns
© 2007 Thomson Delmar Learning. All Rights Reserved.