Developmentally Appropriate Practices

Prepared by Joseph McNair 2003

While usually thought of as belonging exclusively in the context of early childhood education, Developmentally Appropriate Practices (DAP) as a strategy for teaching and learning has applications even in higher education. The development continuum does not stop at age twelve or fourteen (the beginning of Piaget’s formal operations period) but continues throughout the lifetime. As such even in higher education the following teaching strategies usually associate with early childhood education can find appropriate venues and applications::

• Active Learning Experiences. Developmentally appropriate teaching strategies promote active exploration of the environment. The student is able to manipulate real or virtual objects and learn through hands-on, direct or virtual experiences. The curriculum provides opportunities for the student to explore, reflect, interact, and communicate with other students, scholars and professionals. Learning communities are one means of providing active learning experiences. (National Association for the Education of Young Children, 1996).
• Varied Instructional Strategies. Developmentally appropriate practice encourages the use of varied instructional strategies to meet the learning needs of students. Such approaches may include process writing, skill instruction, guided reading, modeled writing, cooperative learning, independent learning activities, peer tutoring, teacher-led instruction, thematic instruction, projects, learning communities, problem-based learning, and literature-based instruction By providing a wide variety of ways to learn, students with various learning styles are able to develop their capabilities. Teaching in this way also provides for multiple intelligences, and enables children to view learning in new ways. (adapted from Privett, 1996; Stone, 1995; American Association of School Administrators, 1992).
• Balance Between Teacher-Directed and Student-Directed Activities. Developmentally appropriate practice encourages a mixture of teacher-directed and student-directed activities. Teacher-directed learning involves the teacher as a facilitator who models learning strategies and gives guided instruction. Student-directed learning allows the student to assume direct responsibility for learning goals.
• Integrated Curriculum. An integrated curriculum is one that connects diverse areas of study by cutting across subject-matter lines and emphasizing unifying concepts. It combines many subject areas into a cohesive unit of study that is meaningful to students. An integrated curriculum often relates learning to real life. It also recognizes the importance of basic skills and the "inclination to use them"

• Learning Communities. Learning community is a group of students and faculty collaboratively studying a theme or body of knowledge unified by an area of common interest or career goal and and intentionally designed to restructure the students' time, credit and learning experiences to foster more explicit intellectual and emotional connections between students, between students and their faculty, and between disciplines. Learning Communities provide students with opportunities for hands-on learning, cooperative learning, social interaction, real-life problem solving, autonomous learning, and open-ended activities. http://www.clccn.org/basics/index.html