Best Practices

Chapter 2 of "The Intentional Teacher" outlines what is called best practices-approaches used to "foster children development and produce real and lasting learning." (Epstein, 2007). The author briefly but thoroughly covers the physical learning environment, scheduling, interacting with the children and building relationships with families. There is an especially useful insert provided gleaned from a High Scope article regarding children with special needs. This includes a great group of suggestions for seven types of categories from Learning Disabilities to Emotional Disturbances.

New Focus: The Intentional Teacher by Ann Epstein

In Chapter 1 of Epstein's book she walks us through the terms she uses throughout her book and which are used in the new Developmentally Appropriate practice edition. She clearly defines and describes child-guided experience, adult-guided experience, intentional teaching and content.

Outlining and defining these terms can help assure that we are all talking about, visualizing and carrying out the same approaches. The author also brings up the need for a term that describes the need for balance in educational programs for children and lack of an adquete term to describe this. We balance age appropriate, individually appropriate and appropriateness for language and culture. We balance the many educational philosophies. We balance vertical and horizontal learning. We balance child and adult guided experiences. The list goes on and on.