Family Engagement and DAP in Early Childhood Education

Family Engagement in Early Childhood Settings

The Watertown (MA) Family Network creates a community for mothers who may not have anyone to ask questions about their infants and toddlers. As the video's narrator stated, "There are no roadmaps to raising children." The Network is free and provides resources such as a new-mom support group, ensuring parents do not need to feel alone in the rewarding but challenging job of raising a child.

Family engagement is widely recognized as a cornerstone of quality early childhood programs. Epstein (2009) suggests there are five types of family engagement: childrearing, communicating, volunteering, learning at home, and representing other families. A comprehensive family involvement plan can be developed by thoughtfully selecting and combining several of these types.

Applying Epstein's Types of Family Involvement

In the church-based childcare center where I worked — as with the Watertown Network — staff helped parents who had questions about what they should do at home. This center was located in a military community where many young mothers were far from their own mothers and extended families and felt they had no one to consult. It was sometimes apparent that mothers did not know how to play with their young children. They knew they should not place children in front of the television all day, but they did not know what else to do. We invited mothers to observe the games and activities their children enjoyed at the center and showed them how to adapt those same activities at home.

To communicate with parents, we took several approaches. We created a weekly newsletter that provided information about the theme and the activities for the week. On the back of each newsletter, we suggested activities parents could do at home — for example, a simple recipe for homemade Play-Doh that mothers could make with their children. We also created a Facebook page so parents could view photographs and videos of their children throughout the day. This was especially appreciated by parents who were deployed overseas, as they felt they were not missing as much in the daily lives of their young children.

We welcomed parent volunteers at the center as well. It is always beneficial to have extra hands when little ones are involved. Volunteering showed mothers — and, on occasion, fathers — the kinds of activities and learning that take place on a typical day, giving them ideas they could replicate at home. It also gave them concrete topics to discuss with their children. Rather than asking an open-ended question such as "What did you do at school today?" — which young children often struggle to answer — parents could ask something more specific: "Tell me what you liked about working in the garden today."

Authentic Assessment in Early Childhood Education

Authentic assessments ask children to perform real-world tasks that demonstrate meaningful application of essential knowledge and skills (Mueller, 2011). Also called performance assessments, authentic assessments provide an objective look at what a child can do. Greater use of authentic assessment is needed in the early childhood classroom because it supports developmentally appropriate educational practices: children can demonstrate the skills they have actually mastered in order to progress to the next level, rather than being moved forward based on age alone.

Children develop at different rates; two children of the same age may not be equally ready to move from the three-year-old to the four-year-old class. Developmentally appropriate practices (DAP) were created to address three important early childhood issues: the lack of universal high-quality early education programs, curricula that are inappropriate for young children, and growing concerns over achievement lags among certain groups of children (Kostelnik, Soderman, and Whiren, 2011, p. 18). It does not make sense to push children forward before they are ready, regardless of what the calendar says about their ages. Children can only build on their learning if a solid foundation has first been established.

Developmentally Appropriate Practice and Individual Readiness

Practitioners who use DAP make decisions about the education and well-being of young children based on what they know about how children develop and learn. They also consider the strengths, needs, and interests of individual children, and take into account the social and cultural contexts in which children live. Developmentally appropriate education is therefore both age-appropriate and appropriate for the individual child given that child's social and cultural context (Kostelnik et al., p. 20).