Developmentally Appropriate Practice in the United States: Why and How it is Changing?
Presented to
Taipei Municipal Teachers College
May 15, 2005
George S. Morrison, Ed.D.
Professor and Velma E. Schmidt
Chair in Early Childhood
Education
University of North Texas

What is Developmentally
Appropriate Practice (DAP)?
• The National Association for the Education of Young
Children (NAEYC), published
Developmentally
Appropriate Practice in
Early Childhood Programs
Serving Children From
Birth Through Age 8 in
1987,and Developmentally
Appropriate Practice in
Early Childhood Programs
(revised edition) in 1997.

What is Developmentally
Appropriate Practice (DAP)?
• Developmentally Appropriate Practices result from the process of professionals making decisions about the well-being and education of children based on at least three important kinds of information or knowledge:
1. What is known about child development and
learning – knowledge of age-related human characteristics that permits general predictions within an age range about what activities, materials, interactions, or experiences will be safe, healthy, interesting, achievable, and also challenging to children;

What is Developmentally
Appropriate Practice (DAP)?
2. what is known about the strengths, interests, and needs of each individual child
- Individualized instruction: age, gender, culture, learning styles, needs and interests,
SES, life experiences/ circumstancesdivorce, birth order, lost employment, parent-called to civic, health, abuses, nutrition, and language.

What is Developmentally
Appropriate Practice (DAP)?
3.
to ensure that learning experiences are meaningful, relevant, and respectful for the participating children and their families.

What is Developmentally
Appropriate Practice (DAP)?
• Developmentally Appropriate Programs are programs that contribute to children’s development and are based on what is known about how children develop and learn. Such programs promote the development and enhance the learning of each individual child served.

DAP-Classroom Indicators
• Integrated Curriculum
• Child Centered
• Emphasis on Social-emotional
Development
• Individualized Instruction
• Emphasis on Active Learning

12 Principles of Child Development and Learning That Inform DAP
• Principle # 1 – 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.
• Principle # 2 – Development occurs in a relatively orderly sequence with later abilities, skills, and knowledge building on those already acquired.
– Development is stage/age related

Motor Development Milestones

12 Principles of Child Development and Learning That Inform DAP
• Principle # 3 – Development proceeds at varying rates from child to child as well as unevenly within different areas of each child’s functioning.
• Principle # 4 – Early experiences have both cumulative and delayed effects on individual children’s development. Optimal periods exist for certain types of development and learning.

Importance of Early Language Experience
Morrison, G.S. (2004). Early Childhood Education Today, 9 th Edition.
Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall.

12 Principles of Child Development and Learning That Inform DAP
• Principle # 5 – Development proceeds in predictable directions toward greater complexity, organization, and internalization.
• Principle # 6 – Development and learning occur in and are influenced by multiple social and cultural contexts.

Bronfenbrenner ’ s Ecological Systems
Theory
Morrison, G.S. (2004). Early Childhood Education Today, 9 th Edition.
Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall.

12 Principles of Child Development and Learning That Inform DAP
• Principle # 7 – Children are active learners, drawing on direct physical and social experience as well as culturally transmitted knowledge to construct their own understandings of the world around them.

Nature vs. Nurture
Morrison, G.S. (2004). Early Childhood Education Today, 9 th Edition.
Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall.

12 Principles of Child Development and Learning That Inform DAP
• Principle # 8 – Development and learning result from interactions of biological maturation and the environment, which includes both the physical and social worlds that children live in.
– Active learning is based on Piaget’s and
Vygotsky’s Theories

12 Principles of Child Development and Learning That Inform DAP
• Principle # 9 – Play is an important vehicle for children’s social, emotional, and cognitive development, as well as a reflection of their development.
– Play and learning is based on Froebel’s beliefs of unfolding and Piagetian and Vygotskyian theories.

Vygotsky ’ s Zone of Proximal Development

12 Principles of Child Development and Learning That Inform DAP
• Principle # 10 – 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.

12 Principles of Child Development and Learning That Inform DAP
• Principle # 11 – Children demonstrate different modes of knowing and learning and different ways of representing what they know.
– Knowing children’s individual learning styles
• Principle # 12 – 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.

Policies Essential for
Achieving/Implementing DAP
• 1. A comprehensive professional preparation and development system to ensure that early childhood who knows
DAP:
• teachers in early childhood programs
• specialists in early childhood special education
• administrators of early childhood programs

Policies continued
2. Funding to ensure adequate staffing of early childhood programs to promote continuity of relationships among adults and children.
• funding to ensure adequate student/teacher ratio
• staff salaries and benefits commensurate with skills and qualifications
• staffing and grouping might include multiage grouping and/or multiage teacher-child relationships

Policies continued
3. When children do not make expected learning progress, neither grade retention nor social promotion are used: instead, initiatives such as more focused time, individualized instruction, tutoring, or other individual strategies are used to accelerate children’s learning.

Policies continued
4. Early childhood programs use all development domains to evaluate the multiple indictors of progress effect of the program on children’s development and learning and regularly report children’s progress to parents. Group-administered, standardized, multiple-choice achievement tests are not used before third grade, preferably before fourth grade.

Why is DAP Changing?
• Discussions of developmentally appropriate practice move beyond the exclusive focus on pedagogy (the and how says who?).
of children’s learning) to include the political and personal ( what? why?
• Controversy centers around the defining features of developmentally appropriate practice.

Why is DAP Changing?
1. DAP is a philosophy, not a method.
2. Difficult to explain
3. Difficult to implement
4. Requires constant decision making on the part of teacher-needs highly trained teachers

Why is DAP Changing?
5. DAP is individualized- Could have an individualized plan for each child
6. The standards-based climate of early childhood education today
7.Academic achievement not supported by research

Why is DAP Changing?
8. Emphasis on:
• Academics
• Achievement
• Early intervention
• Closing the gaps between
–Gender
–Socio-Economic status
–Achievement

Why is DAP Changing?
• DAP is an evolving concept that changes due to the influences of:
– Public concerns
• Beliefs about children
• Beliefs about the purpose of schooling
– Research findings
• Brain research and what children can do
• Reading research
– Alphabetic principle
– Political influences
• Early learning
• Accountability

Why is DAP Changing? Literacy
• DAP and Early Literacy: The Great Debate
20 th century – definitions of literacy within the United States focused on basic reading and writing competencies. The how of literacy entailed formal reading instruction beginning at age 6. This practice was associated with compulsory schooling.

Why is DAP Changing? Literacy
•
“ Emergent literacy” has been replaced by
“early literacy”. From this perspective, literacy begins at birth, is ongoing, and is influenced and interpreted by the surrounding sociocultural context.
• All families do not place the same value on early literacy experiences and on the purpose and value of schooling.
New, R. (2002). Early literacy and developmentally appropriate practice: Rethinking the paradigm. In Neuman, S. and Dickinson, D. (Eds.). Handbook of early literacy research.The Guilford Press: New York.

How DAP is Changing
• New views of children
– Child is capable of much more than previously thought
• New views of teachers
– Teacher is instructional leader rather than facilitator and guide

How DAP is Changing
• New views of purposes of school
– Expectations for children are much higher
• Reading before Kindergarten
• Close the “gaps”

How Early Childhood Education and
Learning are Changing
• From DAP to standards
• From child-centered to teacher-centered
• From play based to instruction based
• From play based to academic based
• From children's interests to standards

The Future of DAP in the U.S.
• DAP will continue to influence theory – but not practice
• DAP no longer only early childhood education approach
• Public schools emphasize academics, not
DAP