Is my DAP the same as your DAP?

Please follow Somerville Early Education by entering your email in the box to the right of the current post. Then you will automatically receive the blog.

In the last few months I have traveled conferences giving me the chance to interact with early childhood educators from across the country.  As folks describe their early childhood initiatives almost everyone uses the words "developmentally appropriate practice"(DAP) to describe what they are doing.   (The terms "child centered" and "whole child" are also front runners.) For more on the core principles of DAP from the National Association for the Education of Young Children click here.

However, as I listened to people describe what they are doing I began to wonder:

Is my DAP the same as your DAP?

Of course practices will look different from school to school, center to center, depending on population served, educational approach, teacher knowledge, and policy initiatives.  But I am finding that when I talk to people about play-based learning or inquiry-based curriculum I find that the play is happening for 30 minutes on a Friday afternoon after all the "real" work has been completed, or that the inquiry was actually a thematic unit that only lasted a week and wasn't linked to children's interests or experiences. So the academic work takes precedence but is seen as separate from "that DAP stuff" like play.

This separation causes problems for teachers as they struggle to "fit it all in" in an increasingly demanding school day.  Trying to maintain fidelity to all the initiatives and curriculum is a challenge - and developmentally appropriate practices that put play and curriculum based on children's interests are under fire.

Of late, there is another word that has begun to accompany developmentally appropriate practice:  "rigor".  This is an attempt to justify and validate practices that we know are good for children.

Chris Brown and Brian Mowry recently published a Rigorous DAP acronym conceptualizing a set of principles that are equated with best practices. 

(“Close Early Learning Gaps with Rigorous DAP” by Christopher Brown and Brian Mowry inPhi Delta Kappan, April 2015 (Vol. 96, #7, p. 53-57), www.kappanmagazine.org.)  

Here is an abbreviated version of their work.
• Reaching all children – Providing activities that will pique children’s interest and increase their participation in academic content. 

• Integrating content – Teachers need to blend literacy, math, science, and other areas and take full advantage of the interconnectedness of learning. 

• Growing as a community – Circle times are opportunities to draw on students’ prior knowledge and get them sharing insights and questions.

• Offering choices – Students should have the chance to shape part of their daily experience as they move among whole-group, small-group, center-based, child-initiated, play-based, indoor and outdoor, and loud and quiet learning experiences.

• Revisiting new content – Not all students will understand and remember the first time around, so spiraling the curriculum is essential.

• Offering challenges – It’s sometimes helpful to stretch content, vocabulary, and skills to what students will learn in later grades – for example, a teacher asked about the differences between what robins, squirrels, raccoons, and humans need to live.

• Understanding each learner – Effective teachers learn about their students in multiple ways – being available to parents at the beginning and end of each day, making home visits, connecting with children’s diverse personal, cultural, and linguistic backgrounds, sending home a weekly newsletter, and getting parents’ responses to content-specific 
• Seeing the whole child – Growth in one domain – physical, conceptual, emotional, and social – depends on and influences growth in others.

• Differentiating instruction – Classroom activities should have built-in variability so students can engage in different ways and the teacher can adjust support depending on how students are doing.

• Assessing constantly – This includes anecdotal records, work samples, digital photographs, and videos going into portfolios to give the teacher a sense of how students are progressing and how instruction needs to be tweaked.

• Pushing forward – Teachers maximize each child’s learning through all of the above, keeping in mind the end goals of the content that needs to be learned, a classroom that’s a great place to be, and students growing and being successful in all areas.

It's a good list. But a couple of things made me ask again: Do we mean the same thing when we talk about DAP? 

For example this one:

 • Offering choices – Students should have the chance to shape part of their daily experience as they move among whole-group, small-group, center-based, child-initiated, play-based, indoor and outdoor, and loud and quiet learning experiences.

Do we have agreement in the field about what this looks like?  In some classrooms it means the teacher tells children when to move and the day is shaped solely by the teacher. But in other classrooms it means children choose their activities during a choice time with opportunities for small group, individual work, and play experiences.  Of course this will look different depending on class make up, but what are the key words here?:  I think they are "students should have the chance to shape part of their daily experience".  That seems like the DAP criteria we should measure ourselves against. 

Here is another one:

• Assessing constantly – This includes anecdotal records, work samples, digital photographs, and videos going into portfolios to give the teacher a sense of how students are progressing and how instruction needs to be tweaked.

A couple of issues here: 

Online data tracking systems and online portfolios are being billed as developmentally appropriate and the objectives may represent DAP. However, the entering of data diverts attention from other more family and child-centered formative assessment practices such as documentation of children's learning via actual photos and displays that make learning visible to the public, not a state tracking system. A portfolio that can be shared with families and children seems more developmentally appropriate than an online portfolio that is largely invisible.

Key DAP idea:  "instruction needs to be tweaked" - and this doesn't just mean reteaching, pulling groups to do remediation - but also thinking about teaching "moves" and curriculum planning that address children's needs and interests. 

I struggle with the "rigorous" part of Brown and Mowry's list, but maybe we need it there for now to remind us of what DAP can be. Developmentally appropriate practice means that young children can grapple with challenging and interesting content. However, we need a larger conversation about what DAP looks like in practice and how to balance children's need for inquiry-based curriculum that they participate in and the many constraints under which teachers do their work.