As a kindergarten teacher, I am constantly working to incorporate developmentally appropriate practice into the current trends of standards and test based teaching and learning brought about by government policies such as No Child Left Behind. Because of this, my research topic will be: ‘How can educators incorporate both developmentally appropriate practice (DAP) and standards-based learning into the early childhood setting?’ Reading the assigned chapters and forming the research chart has helped me to learn about the steps I will be taking while researching. To this point, I selected my topic, I am working with relevant literature on my topic for this week’s application-2, and I have formulated my question. I am currently reviewing the literature to take me into my next stage of research.
I would love to hear if anyone else is struggling with incorporating DAP into state mandated standards-based learning. How have you combined the 2 and are there any suggestions you could share with me?
Unfortantly Rebecca, right now at our school we are struggling with politics and this year the administrators have decided to shuffle all the teacher around and have placed them at different grade levels. Last school year I had taught first grade and this year I will be going to second grade, although I think this will not be a big change but it has impact the school curricula. The teacher and I will be working on aligning our curricula to the state standards. I am not really familiar with DAP because our school is mostly test and book driven.
ReplyDeleteRebecca, incorporating best practices for both state and DAP may seem difficult and can be a slow process. I have dealt with the same issues with the early childhood practitioners with curricula and DAP.
ReplyDelete