Early Childhood Education

Children at the Center provides a closely observed account of a decade-long effort to reshape the scope, direction, and quality of the Boston Public Schools' early childhood programs. Drawing on multiple perspectives and voices from the field, the authors highlight the reflective, collaborative, inquiry-driven approach undertaken by the program and share lessons learned.   Boston Public Schools are recognized for embedding high-quality, public preK programs in their system and achieving exceptional results. In this book, the authors outline the core principles that underlie the district's early childhood programs and explore the role of curriculum, professional development, coaching, and data use in supporting these new initiatives. They show how the Boston Public Schools Department of Early Childhood was able to work with and against the constraints of the current accountability system to create a holistic, child-centered, play-based program that has had a significant impact in narrowing income-based learning gaps.   Written in collaboration with the Department of Early Childhood Education, this account of creating successful preK programs in a diverse urban district will provide a valuable resource for practitioners engaged in similar work across the country.

Synthesizing cutting-edge research from multiple disciplines, this book explores how young children acquire knowledge in the "real world" and describes practical applications for early childhood classrooms. The breadth and depth of a child's knowledge base are important predictors of later literacy development and academic achievement. Leading scholars describe the processes by which preschoolers and primary-grade students acquire knowledge through firsthand experiences, play, interactions with parents and teachers, storybooks, and a range of media. Chapters on exemplary instructional strategies vividly show what teachers can do to build children's content knowledge while also promoting core literacy skills.

Developmental theorists have long speculated that emotion and cognition are inseparable components of the developmental process. Some even suggest that the two components are fully integrated by school age. Yet, despite considerable theoretical work describing this interaction, relatively little empirical work has been conducted on the subject. This volume addresses the codevelopment of emotional and cognitive processes by integrating theoretical and empirical work on these processes. The first part of the book demonstrates the codependence of emotional and cognitive processes, noting that both processes are clearly necessary for successful regulation of thought and behavior and that children with early adjustment difficulties often have deficits in both types of processing. The second part considers possible neurological and genetic mechanisms for the emotion-cognition link. Finally, the last part explores implications for clinical and educational research, highlighting atypical emotional and cognitive processing and its effect on adjustment in academic and social settings.

In a time of pressures, challenges, and threats to public education, teacher preparation, and funding for educational research, the fifth volume of the Handbook of Reading Research takes a hard look at why we undertake reading research, how school structures, contexts and policies shape students' learning, and, most importantly, how we can realize greater impact from the research conducted. A comprehensive volume, with a "gaps and game changers" frame, this handbook not only synthesizes current reading research literature, but also informs promising directions for research, pushing readers to address problems and challenges in research design or method. Bringing the field authoritatively and comprehensively up-to-date since the publication of the Handbook of Reading Research, Volume IV, this volume presents multiple perspectives that will facilitate new research development, tackling topics including: Diverse student populations and sociocultural perspectives on reading development Digital innovation, literacies, and platforms Conceptions of teachers, reading, readers, and texts, and the role of affect, cognition, and social-emotional learning in the reading process New methods for researching reading instruction, with attention to equity, inclusion, and education policies Language development and reading comprehension Instructional practices to promote reading development and comprehension for diverse groups of readers Each volume of this handbook has come to define the field for the period of time it covers, and this volume is no exception, providing a definitive compilation of current reading research. This is a must-have resource for all students, teachers, reading specialists, and researchers focused on and interested in reading and literacy research, and improving both instruction and programs to cultivate strong readers and teachers.

In an era in which environmental education has been described as one of the most pressing educational concerns of our time, further insights are needed to understand how best to approach the learning and teaching of environmental education in early childhood education. In this book we address this concern by identifying two principles for using play-based learning early childhood environmental education. The principles we identify are the result of research conducted with teachers and children using different types of play-based learning whilst engaged in environmental education. Such play-types connect with the historical use of play-based learning in early childhood education as a basis for pedagogy.nbsp; In the book 'Beyond Quality in ECE and Care' authors Dahlberg, Moss and Pence implore readers to ask critical questions about commonly held images of how young children come to construct themselves within social institutions. In similar fashion, this little book problematizes the taken-for-grantedness of the childhood development project in service to the certain cultural narratives. Cutter-Mackenzie, Edwards, Moore and Boyd challenge traditional conceptions of play-based learning through the medium of environmental education. This book signals a turning point in social thought grounded in a relational view of (environmental) education as experiential, intergenerational, interspecies, embodied learning in the third space. As Barad says, such work is based in inter-actions that can account for the tangled spaces of agencies. Through the deceptive simplicity of children's play, the book stimulates deliberation of the real purposes of pedagogy and of schooling. Paul Hart, University of Regina, Canada