Using Developmentally Appropriate Practices to Teach the Common Core

Grades PreK–3

Lisa S. Goldstein

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781138015777
• eBook ISBN: 9781317743620
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Early Childhood Education

Using Developmentally Appropriate Practices to Teach the Common Core: Grades PreK–3 provides current and prospective primary grade teachers with an understanding of the CCSS-ELA and CCSS-M that highlights their compatibility with developmentally appropriate practices (DAP), the instructional approach generally preferred by teachers of young children.

The book begins by framing the CCSS as a distinct improvement over lengthy lists of academic content standards and as a carefully conceptualized and DAP-friendly set of curriculum guidelines. Next, the CCSS-ELA and CCSS-M for Grades K–3 are unpacked, analyzed, synthesized, and cross-referenced to key features of DAP. Finally, several "hot topic" issues—differentiating instruction to meet the needs of all learners, ensuring equitable access to the curriculum for English Language Learners, addressing assessment and accountability expectations, and educating parents and families about the CCSS and DAP—are prioritized and examined in depth. Using Developmentally Appropriate Practices to Teach the Common Core: Grades PreK–3 is a highly useful guide for both pre-service and in-service early childhood education teachers.

Part I
Foundations

Introduction to Part I

Although teaching is a career with a cyclical rhythm that repeats year after year in a regular, predictable pattern, education—as a state and national enterprise—is continually changing. Observers of preK–12 education in the United States frequently liken the changes in education to the swing of a pendulum, claiming that priorities and values shift from one extreme to the other. For example, “back to basics” may be the emphasis in education today, but fast-forward a few years and you can be sure that “child-centered education” will be on the rise and back to basics will be fading into the background.

The CCSS Determine the Content to Be Mastered

Currently, the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) are the new emphasis in American education. Rigorous and complex, the CCSS emphasize critical thinking, language development, deep conceptual understanding, and reliance on evidence pulled from textual sources, even for the youngest learners. Teachers of young children often gasp in surprise when they look at the CCSS’ academic expectations for children aged 5 to 8 years old. For example, Reading Standards: Foundational Skill #2 for kindergarten states (CCSS-ELA, p. 15):

Figure Part 1.1 Kindergarten Reading Standards: Foundational Skill #2

Mastery of these skills is the expectation for the end of kindergarten. Nevertheless, these skills may seem to be beyond the reach of many typically developing five-year-olds.

Teachers Determine the Most Effective Instructional Methods

The authors of both the CCSS-ELA and the CCSS-M make it clear that the standards specify only the knowledge and skills to be mastered at a given grade level. Decisions regarding the ways in which the content should be taught are left entirely in the hands of teachers. I find this acknowledgement of teachers’ professional capacity and responsibility to make instructional decision very refreshing. Although it sounds almost ridiculous, teachers’ well-developed expertise in instructional decision-making is rarely recognized: encouraging teachers to use the instructional methods they believe will be most effective with the specific students in their classes seems like the most obvious solution imaginable.

When early childhood educators are permitted to choose the most effective instructional methods for their students—in preschool, perhaps, or in transitional kindergarten programs—they often return to the tried-and-true activities and experiences that support their knowledge and beliefs about how young children learn. Their students can be found playing freely outdoors and indoors, working with magnets, building with blocks, sculpting play-dough, digging in deep containers of sand, rice, or corn meal and engaging in other hands-on/minds-on experiences. I contend that these developmentally appropriate experiences can and should be used to engage young students in mastering the content in the CCSS.

The three chapters in this part present the key issues and elements that form the foundation of my argument: the relationship between the CCSS and developmentally appropriate practice (DAP), the notion of “rigor” in early learning environments, and the importance of teachers making sustained efforts to know and understand their young students.

A Final Note

In accordance with the laws related to public license, the NGA Center for Best Practices (NGA Center) and the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO) have granted “a limited, non-exclusive, royalty-free license to copy, publish, distribute, and display the Common Core State Standards for purposes that support the Common Core State Standards Initiative. These uses may involve the Common Core State Standards as a whole or selected excerpts or portions” (NGA Center & CCSSO, n.d.). I am grateful that the NGA Center and the CCSSO permit educators and other CCSS advocates to access and use their various materials without charge.

The CCSS documents will be referenced continuously throughout this book. To keep the text reader-friendly, I have chosen to modify the format for in-text citations of the CCSS documents. References to the CCSS-English Language Arts will be formatted like this: (CCSS-ELA, p. X). References to the CCSS-Mathematics will be formatted like this: (CCSS-M, p. X). This format will make it easier for interested readers to go back into the documents to find specific information. The full citation for the Common Core State Standards documents is:

National Governors Association Center for Best Practices, Council of Chief State School Officers. (2010). Common Core State Standards. Washington, D.C.: National Governors Association Center for Best Practices, Council of Chief State School Officers.

Reference

National Governors Association Center for Best Practices, Council of Chief State School Officers. (n.d.). License grant. Retrieved from http://www.corestandards.org/public-license/

1
Teaching the Common Core in Developmentally Appropriate Ways

Young Children: Born to Learn

Young children—from birth through age 8—are focused on a single, unwavering goal: to understand their world. Their curiosity about everything around them seems insatiable, and they are always ready to learn something new. Young children spend most of their waking hours each day thinking, exploring, asking questions, and learning as much as they possibly can.

Young children strive continually to develop new skills, explore different possibilities, challenge themselves (and others), and figure things out. They wonder out loud about how things work, what words mean, why grass is green, and why they have to take a nap when they are definitely not tired. They learn new information eagerly, and create wonderful, unexpected connections between the newly learned information and their existing knowledge base. The opportunity to feed young children’s hunger for knowledge and to support them in their tireless pursuit of new skills is what drew many of us into the teaching profession and what keeps us there still.

Policy Impacts PreK–3 Teaching Practices

Young children, their developmental patterns, and their learning trajectories have not changed. However, the policies, expectations, and preferred practices that shape teaching and learning in Grades preK–3 change continually.

The implementation of No Child Left Behind (2001) brought significant changes to the preK–3 world. This federal legislation led states to establish rigid accountability policies that placed a high premium on academic success for all students and imposed penalties on schools that did not meet their government-determined growth targets.

In an effort to address NCLB’s accountability pressures, most school districts in most states chose to push academic expectations down into the earlier grades. Presently, many children are expected to begin kindergarten with mastery of skills that were previously associated with the start of first grade. And, in many parts of the U.S., it has become difficult for preK and kindergarten teachers to justify teaching young children using developmentally appropriate practice.

Arrival of the Common Core State Standards

Coming right on the heels of NCLB, the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) have been viewed with some suspicion and concern by teachers of children in Grades preK–3. These early childhood educators fear the full implementation of the Common Core State Standards (National Governors Association Center for Best Practices, Council of Chief State School Officers, 2010) will have a negative impact on young children. Because of the CCSS’ emphasis on rigor, academic language, and critical thinking, some early childhood teachers worry the CCSS will further constrain their ability to provide their students with the engaging, developmentally appropriate learning experiences that form the strongest foundation for academic learning in the upper grades.

Preschool and primary grade teachers must accommodate the decisions and demands of their school administrators, yet they also must provide rich and engaging learning experiences for their young students. This tension between ensuring student mastery of the mandated academic standards and providing opportunities for meaningful learning across the cognitive, social, emotional, and physical developmental domains has become a defining feature of teaching in Grades preK–3.

New Opportunities and Possibilities

The implementation of the Common Core State Standards is in its early stages, and has just begun to impact the education of young learners. At this point in the process, teachers in Grades preK–3 still have opportunities to impact the ways in which the CCSS will be implemented in preK–3. There is a very real possibility of establishing developmentally appropriate practice as the principal instructional method for teaching the content specified in the CCSS to young learners.

In this chapter, you will find background information on the foundational elements necessary for implementing the CCSS using developmentally appropriate practices in early learning environments. First I provide a brief, general overview of the CCSS. This is followed by a discussion of key features of developmentally appropriate practice. The chapter concludes with consideration of the ways in which the CCSS and DAP are complementary—the CCSS specify what to teach and DAP provides evidence-based guidance on how to teach—and can be brought together to have a powerful impact on young students’ learning.

The Common Core State Standards

The Common Core State Standards include two separate documents, each containing K–12 academic content standards: “Common Core State Standards for English Language Arts and Literacy in History/Social Science, Science and Technical Subjects” (which I will refer to as the CCSS-ELA) and “Common Core State Standards for Mathematics” (which I will refer to as the CCSS-M). The decision to adopt the CCSS was voluntary and was made on a state-by-state basis. Forty-four states are implementing the CCSS, as are the District of Columbia, Guam, American Samoa, Northern Mariana Islands, U.S. Virgin Islands, and the U.S. Department of Defense schools. (Alaska, Indiana, Nebraska, Oklahoma, Texas, and Virginia did not adopt the CCSS. Minnesota adopted the CCSS-ELA, but not the CCSS-M. For more information, see http://www.corestandards.org/standards-in-your-state/.)

The CCSS were expressly designed to develop the knowledge and skills that young adults will need for successful entry into college and/or careers at the end of Grade 12. Further, the CCSS were benchmarked internationally to be commensurate with the content, rigor, and organization of the academic content standards used in the highest-performing nations. This will ensure that graduates of U.S. schools will be prepared to succeed in a global economy and society (Common Core State Standards Initiative Standards-Setting Considerations, n.d.).

Table 1.1 Shifts That Accompany the Implementation of the Common Core State Standards

The CCSS-English Language Artsrequire teachers to …	The CCSS-Mathematicsrequire teachers to …
• Provide students with regular practice reading and writing complex text and using academic language.	• Emphasize the key knowledge, skills, and practices specified for their grade level.
• Expect students to support their ideas and assertions using evidence drawn from literary and informational text.	• Create coherence by linking major topics within a grade level and by recognizing the progression of mathematical knowledge that builds across the grade levels.
• Use the reading and writing of content-rich nonfiction to build students’ academic knowledge base.	• Attend to students’ conceptual understanding, procedural skill and fluency, and application with equal intensity.

Like the standards that were adopted before, or in response to, No Child Left Behind, the CCSS are academic content standards: They provide a detailed description of the knowledge and skills students are expected to learn at each grade level—from kindergarten through 12—in English Language Arts and Mathematics. However, the CCSS are unlike the previous state content standards in a variety of significant ways. These departures from the old, NCLB-stylestandards are what open the CCSS to alignment with developmentally appropriate practice.

The authors of the CCSS identified three significa...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• CONTENTS
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• PART I Foundations
• PART II Spotlight Skills for Teaching the Common Core State Standards: Using Developmentally Appropriate Practices
• PART III Understanding the Common Core State Standards Documents
• PART IV Using DAP to Teach the Common Core in Early Childhood Settings, Grade by Grade
• Index