4.5 Developmentally Appropriate Practice
Angela Blums, Ph.D.
Early Childhood Educators have a wealth of resources to draw from as they plan ways to meet the developmental needs of each of the children in their care. The National Association for the Education of Young Children (NAEYC) is the main professional organization for Early Childhood Educators. The NAEYC defines developmentally appropriate practice Methods that promote each child’s optimal development and learning through a strengths-based, play-based approach to joyful, engaged learning] as “methods that promote each child’s optimal development and learning through a strengths-based, play-based approach to joyful, engaged learning” (NAEYC, 2020a, p. 5). It is the job of teachers to make sure that our practice meets children’s developmental needs. For example, there has been an unfortunate trend for modern preschools to include formal academic content taught at a level meant for older children. These practices are not developmentally appropriate. Developmentally appropriate practice dictates that any academic content should meet children’s developmental needs first (NAEYCa, 2020). That means that children are given opportunities to learn academic content that are in keeping with their developmental level – such as learning through play.
For a practice to be developmentally appropriate, it must consider developmental domains and a child’s age, individual needs, and individual culture.
Developmental Domains
To consider development in planning curriculum means understanding what is appropriate at a given age or stage of development. Developmental milestone charts (Centers for Disease Control, 2023) can help with this. It is vital to know what children should be capable of at a given age of development and plan activities accordingly. For instance, we know that young children are concrete thinkers who learn best by using real, tangible items rather than representations of items. If we want a group of three-year-old children to learn about apples, we will give them real apples to smell, touch, see, and taste. In this way, they can develop a long lasting, deep concept about apples. This is developmentally appropriate. Offering them a book about apples is a useful support and vital for language development, but the book alone will never give them the conceptual understanding about apples. Likewise, well-meaning families often expect early childhood teachers to have children complete worksheets in preschool. From what we know about child development, young children do not have the executive function to allow them to sit in a chair for long periods of time to learn from worksheets (National Center for Education Evaluation, 2022; Tomlinson, 2016). Further, their bodies are designed to wriggle and move. Sitting at a desk will not help preschoolers learn. That is why many high-quality early childhood programs focus on play-based learning.
Individual Needs
Considering an individual child’s needs means