Guidance on Implementation

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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.

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.

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In what ways are these principles enacted in low- and middle-income contexts, and what adaptations can be made to them to fit with cultural models of behavior and interaction? Three areas are discussed below. First, the section considers what needs to be known about the context beforehand to understand how to apply the three key principles of this chapter and then develop supportive curricula and pedagogy. Second, decisions and trade-offs when planning for implementation are discussed. Finally, continuous improvement is considered, along with what is needed to ensure high-quality pedagogy and curriculum.

Diagnose

To develop an effective intervention, the first step is to accurately diagnose what is occurring on the ground. The following areas provide guidance on areas for diagnosis, both for pedagogy and for curriculum revision and development. • Diagnose teacher knowledge using knowledge surveys, interviews, and focus groups to better understand what teachers already know about pedagogy in preschool. This diagnosis can be content-specific (for example, early literacy, early math) as well as general, assessing how educators think children learn best in the early years, and what types of key skills should be emphasized in the early years. For example, one study in the United States carried out a validated survey measuring early childhood teachers’ math knowledge and beliefs (Platas 2015). • Use classroom observations to better understand what instruction looks like in ECE classrooms. Specifically, it would be good to understand the role of play in classrooms currently, attitudes toward it as a pedagogy, how self-regulation may manifest itself in the classroom, how teachers support oral language development, and what meaning-making looks like in the specific context. • Use classroom observations and school visits to learn what types of materials are available in schools, both for teachers (such as teacher guides, scoping documents, and so on) and for students (books at appropriate levels, counters, blocks, paper, and others). • Review the current curriculum documents in the country, with special attention to how instruction is divided up (skills-based, content-based, and so on), and whether and how developmental progression is represented. In particular, review curriculum documents, including teacher guides and student books, to understand whether they integrate key principles of pedagogy and how they support teachers in implementing these pedagogies.

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• Understand school and classroom-level support for teachers’ implementation of new ways of teaching, through interviews with key national and district-level personnel. In particular, it is important to understand what support teachers get at the classroom level, who provides that support, how often it is provided, and whether the support is of high quality. For example, in Kenya, district officers are responsible for providing classroom support to preschool teachers. In other contexts, school principals may provide this support. • Understand family and community support for pedagogy. Given that the key principles in this chapter may be unfamiliar ways of teaching for communities and families, it would be good to understand attitudes and knowledge around the key principles. In particular, it would be good to understand what families think about play and its role both in and out of school. For example, one study shows the importance of parental attitudes toward play in Ghanaian preschools (Kabay, Wolf, and Yoshikawa 2017).

Key Takeaway

• When diagnosing conditions on the ground, key aspects to consider include understanding teacher knowledge, observing classroom instruction, knowing what materials are available, reviewing curriculum documents, understanding the level of classroom and school-level support available to teachers and parents, and community views of and support for pedagogy.

Plan for Implementation

To plan for implementation, it is important to identify the necessary conditions for implementation and to devise a sequence for these conditions and what potential constraints to anticipate. In addition, these steps could also be used for continual adaptation of an existing program. 1. Understand how to contextualize for the elements of pedagogy. Together with experts and policy makers in the country, there should be discussion about how to design an intervention, including curriculum materials that respect important elements of pedagogy but also respect and reflect cultural ways of teaching and interacting, materials availability, and teacher knowledge. Important considerations include the following: – Playful, active learning and communicating meaning. In some cultures, playfulness is encouraged, both inside and outside of schooling.

In others, play is something that occurs outside of school only. Play may be acceptable between adults and children in some places, but acceptable only among children in other places. These types of

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cultural norms should be taken into account when designing and adapting key pedagogical principles. That is not to say that play should not be encouraged, but rather that the implementers will need to understand cultural perceptions and attitudes toward play and work to create pedagogy that fits within classroom norms. For example, in South Africa, implementers developed a “pedagogy of play” that is particular to that context, and describe playful classroom activities that fit within this pedagogy (Solis et al. 2019).

These activities may look different than in Western contexts, but they are still based on the same foundations of “playful learning” described in the first part of this chapter. – Oral language development and support. An understanding of how oral language development occurs, and in which language, should be developed. Are the children learning a second language in preschool settings or is it the same language they are learning at home? What is the language policy of the country? These are all important factors that will affect how oral language is supported. – Self-regulation. With an understanding of what types of self-regulatory behaviors may already exist in a certain context, it is important to think about the end goals of this principle, and not simply copy the pathways to the end goals that are used in high-income countries. – Availability of materials and resources. Many contexts with few commercial resources have abundant natural resources (for example, sticks or small pebbles for counting, leaves and sand for artwork) and recycled materials (such as bottle tops to use as counters, jugs, jars, and other household items for dramatic play areas). Procuring, organizing, and building materials is also a good way for the community to be involved in preschool schooling. See photograph 2.1.

Despite the availability of natural and recycled resources, it is important to understand that teachers have a role in curating these environments, and that they need training and experience to do so. Teachers should not be expected to know how to create these environments with available natural resources. In addition, there are some materials, such as books and puzzles, that are not easily created in local environments. The need for these additional resources points to the sustained need for investments in early childhood across the globe. 2. Prioritize domains of knowledge, building from developmental progressions and based on country standards documents. In the preschool years, the focus of instruction for key domains such as preliteracy, numeracy, physical health, creative arts, and social-emotional learning should be based on research about how children learn. At this point, it may be important