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may be better targeted to training and other teacher support. Finally, talk with others in the education system, including students, parents, administrators, and other support personnel, to understand how their suggestions for improvement can be taken into account (see chapter 5).
Key Takeaways • Curriculum documents are continually evolving. It is important to have a system in place that allows for continual improvement of materials. • This system of improvement should include gathering data through routine observations and interviews with teachers and others in the education system.
CASE STUDIES Bangladesh, Tanzania, and Uganda In Bangladesh, a small study investigated how play was understood, incorporated, and practiced in semi-rural public preprimary classes (Chowdhury and Rivalland 2016). Among the teachers and parents interviewed, a range of activities, including physical exercises, singing, acting, rhyming, games, outdoor play, and drawing, was described as play and seen as a means of developing academic skills by encouraging the children to follow the teacher’s instructions in correct ways. Subsequently, a three-country study in Bangladesh, Tanzania, and Uganda built upon the initial study by introducing 40 play-based preschool Play Labs into rural villages in each country. This larger study investigated the impact of these Play Labs over two years on 720 of the three-to-five-year-old children’s physical, cognitive, and social development, and their playfulness, oral language, and self-regulation. These children’s progress was compared with that of children living in similar villages, but with either a government- or community-run preschool or no preschool. In addition, the study investigated the features of the children’s family situation and the quality of the Play Lab leaders’ practices that influenced the children’s development. Results indicated a significant change over the course of the study. At the start, for both Play Lab and control children, home factors were related to all aspects of children’s development, but by the end these relations remained for the control children only. This result suggests that the Play Labs exerted a greater influence in young children’s outcomes compared with the home environment. By the end of just the first year, the Play Lab children had made significantly greater progress in a range of the developmental measures, and the strongest relations were between the quality of Play
