Evidence – The Facts of Child Development and Early Learning

Over the years I have spent observing in preschool and day care classrooms

I’ve heard many teachers say, “I don’t care what Piaget, Dewey, and Gesell said about child development! MY three-year-olds can sit quietly in chapel without wiggling, listen to me in Circle Time for 25 minutes and ALL my boys are potty trained!” Riiight.

Then I spend a day with the children under the reign of these queens of early education and I learn that their classrooms are not fun places to be. They often turn out to be sit-and-listen, sit-and-listen, sit-and-listen, time-out-for-not-listening, wiggle-and-whine and stampede-for-the-playground-like-an Orange is the New Black-prison-escape.

A good preschool teacher knows and believes the facts of child development. “She” (because let’s face it, we are a workforce of women) familiarizes herself with the expectations for what her children will be able to do, what they will understand, and how they will behave in her classroom and she uses that knowledge to plan and react appropriately.

In your vast amounts of spare time, I urge you to do some research on child development and familiarize yourself with the theories of Ames and Ilg with the Gesell Institute, Brofenbrenner, Erickson, Freud (meh), Maslow, Piaget, and Vygotsky.

Most of the best theorists agree there are three areas of development: body, mind, and spirit (some theorists divide spirit into social and emotional) and that the evidence shows the patterns and influences of development are:

• Development begins with the child’s interest and focus on himself and moves outward to family, friends, other persons, other things, other concepts in the environment.                                              
• Physical development proceeds from general to specific movement, from head to toe, and from the center of the body out to the arms, legs, fingers, and toes                                            
• Development is continuous and interrelated
• Development seems to occur in predictable stages and usually each child moves through these stages in the same sequence, but at individualized rates   
• Each developmental stage has its place and purpose and usually a child must go through each of them in order to reach the next one.                                                                                                        
• The influences on development are: heredity, environment, birth order, general and specific health and social conditions.
• By far, the persons who have the most influence on a child’s development are his parents.

By the Way – It has also been theorized and proven that race and ethnicity alone do not cause developmental differences. As I can personally and genetically attest, the Irish are not always drunk, the Scotch are not always tight with their money, and people from Poland have no problem with lightbulbs!

Next Blog: Believe It or Leave It – Part 2