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Berry 2015). Second, this process of open documentation should go alongside the educator’s and child’s own records of the child’s activities, enthusiasms, and achievements, most helpfully in the form of portfolios. Taken together, these two sets of records enable the educator to assess individual children’s development and to make decisions about next steps for individual children and future planning for the class. This reflective style of assessment gives young children ownership and agency in relation to their own learning and has been shown to have positive impacts on children’s confidence, motivation, achievements, and self-regulation abilities (MacDonald 2007).
Key Takeaways • Although curriculum is necessarily organized in subject areas, it is vital that a whole-child approach be considered. • A whole-child, evidence-based curriculum should include activities supporting children’s development in five areas: physical health and development, social and emotional development, emergent literacy and numeracy understandings and abilities, ways of understanding the world, and self-expression through the creative arts. • Documenting children’s activities, interests, and achievements through displays on the walls or in class books or albums, including records of discussions, photos of activities, and children’s creative products, can help assess children’s development and inform the educator’s future planning for the class. Open documentation should be complemented with the educator’s and child’s own records of individual children’s activities, enthusiasms, and achievements.
GUIDANCE ON IMPLEMENTATION The discussion in the previous section makes a compelling case for the importance of high-quality curricula that reflect research-based pedagogy as a cornerstone of any early childhood program. This section now turns to the “how,” focusing on key aspects of implementation. In particular, the “how” is framed in terms of the three elements of pedagogy detailed earlier: (1) communicating meaning, (2) self-regulation skills, and (3) playful learning. To ensure the uptake of these three elements of pedagogy, there are implications for curriculum that support teachers in various ways. This section discusses the necessary conditions for implementation of the three elements of pedagogy and supportive curriculum.
