Children are already learning at birth, and they develop and learn at a rapid pace in their early years. This provides a critical foundation for lifelong progress, and the adults who provide for the care and the education of young children bear a great responsibility for their health, development, and learning. Despite the fact that they share the same objective - to nurture young children and secure their future success - the various practitioners who contribute to the care and the education of children from birth through age 8 are not acknowledged as a workforce unified by the common knowledge and competencies needed to do their jobs well. Transforming the Workforce for Children Birth Through Age 8 explores the science of child development, particularly looking at implications for the professionals who work with children. This report examines the current capacities and practices of the workforce, the settings in which they work, the policies and infrastructure that set qualifications and provide professional learning, and the government agencies and other funders who support and oversee these systems. This book then makes recommendations to improve the quality of professional practice and the practice environment for care and education professionals. These detailed recommendations create a blueprint for action that builds on a unifying foundation of child development and early learning, shared knowledge and competencies for care and education professionals, and principles for effective professional learning. Young children thrive and learn best when they have secure, positive relationships with adults who are knowledgeable about how to support their development and learning and are responsive to their individual progress. Transforming the Workforce for Children Birth Through Age 8 offers guidance on system changes to improve the quality of professional practice, specific actions to improve professional learning systems and workforce development, and research to continue to build the knowledge base in ways that will directly advance and inform future actions. The recommendations of this book provide an opportunity to improve the quality of the care and the education that children receive, and ultimately improve outcomes for children.

The authors report the results of some half dozen years of research into when and how children acquire numerical skills. They provide a new set of answers to these questions, and overturn much of the traditional wisdom on the subject. Table of Contents: 1. Focus on the Preschooler 2. Training Studies Reconsidered 3. More Capacity Than Meets the Eye: Direct Evidence 4. Number Concepts in the Preschooler? 5. What Numerosities Can the Young Child Represent? 6. How Do Young Children Obtain Their Representations of Numerosity? 7. The Counting Model 8. The Development of the How-To-Count Principles 9. The Abstraction and Order-Irrelevance Counting Principles 10. Reasoning about Number 11. Formal Arithmetic and the Young Child's Understanding of Number 12. What Develops and How Conclusions References Index Reviews of this book: The publication of this book may mark a sea change in the way that we think about cognitive development. For the past two decades, the emphasis has been on young children's limitations... Now a new trend is emerging: to challenge the original assumption of young children's cognitive incapacity. The Child's Understanding of Number represents the most original and provocative manifestation to date of this new trend. --Contemporary Psychology Reviews of this book: Here at last is the book we have been waiting for, or at any rate known we needed, on the young child and number. The authors are at once sophisticated in their own understanding of number and rich in psychological intuition. They present a wealth of good experiments to support and guide their intuitions. And all is told in so simple and unalarming a manner that even the most pusillanimous will be able to read with enjoyment. --Canadian Journal of Psychology

First published in 1997. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Ostroff highlights processes that propel learning (including play and collaboration), distilling the research into the most important ideas teachers need to design pedagogy and curriculum.

Developmental Education is an approach to education in school that aims at promoting children’s cultural development and their abilities to participate autonomously and well-informed in the cultural practices of their community. From the point of view of Cultural-historical Activity theory (CHAT), a play-based curriculum has been developed over the past decades for primary school, which presents activity contexts for pupils in the classroom that create learning and teaching opportunities for helping pupils with appropriating cultural knowledge, skills, and moral understandings in meaningful ways. The approach is implemented in numerous Dutch primary schools classrooms with the explicit intention to support the learning of both pupils and teachers. The book focuses especially on education of young children (4 – 8 years old) in primary school and presents the underpinning concepts of this approach, and chapters on examples of good practices in a variety of subject matter areas, such as literacy (vocabulary acquisition, reading, writing), mathematics, and arts. Successful implementation of Developmental Education in the classroom strongly depends on dynamic assessment and continuous observations of young pupils’ development. Strategies for implementation of both the teaching practices and assessment strategies are discussed in detail in the book.

First released in the Spring of 1999, How People Learn has been expanded to show how the theories and insights from the original book can translate into actions and practice, now making a real connection between classroom activities and learning behavior. This edition includes far-reaching suggestions for research that could increase the impact that classroom teaching has on actual learning. Like the original edition, this book offers exciting new research about the mind and the brain that provides answers to a number of compelling questions. When do infants begin to learn? How do experts learn and how is this different from non-experts? What can teachers and schools do-with curricula, classroom settings, and teaching methodsâ€"to help children learn most effectively? New evidence from many branches of science has significantly added to our understanding of what it means to know, from the neural processes that occur during learning to the influence of culture on what people see and absorb. How People Learn examines these findings and their implications for what we teach, how we teach it, and how we assess what our children learn. The book uses exemplary teaching to illustrate how approaches based on what we now know result in in-depth learning. This new knowledge calls into question concepts and practices firmly entrenched in our current education system. Topics include: How learning actually changes the physical structure of the brain. How existing knowledge affects what people notice and how they learn. What the thought processes of experts tell us about how to teach. The amazing learning potential of infants. The relationship of classroom learning and everyday settings of community and workplace. Learning needs and opportunities for teachers. A realistic look at the role of technology in education.

In this fully revised second edition of the classic Young Children Reinvent Arithmetic, Constance Kamii describes and develops an innovative program of teaching arithmetic in the early elementary grades. Kamii bases her educational strategies on renowned constructivist Jean Piaget's scientific ideas of how children develop logico-mathematical thinking. Written in collaboration with a classroom teacher, and premised upon the conviction that children are capable of much more than teachers and parents generally realize, the book provides a rich theoretical foundation and a compelling explanation of educational goals and objectives. Kamii calls attention to the ways in which traditional textbook-based teaching can be harmful to children’s development of numerical reasoning, and uses extensive research and classroom-tested studies to illuminate the efficacy of the approach. This book is full of practical suggestions and developmentally appropriate activities that can be used to stimulate numerical thinking among students of varying abilities and learning styles, both within and outside of the classroom. “In this new edition of her important book, Connie Kamii demonstrates scholarship not just in what she has written, but in her willingness to incorporate new ideas and findings. Many people update their books; few assiduously revise them, confronting what they believe to be past errors or gaps in their thinking. Such intellectual honesty, along with consistent connections between theory and practice, make this book a solid contribution to mathematics education of young children.” —Douglas Clements, State University of New York at Buffalo “The development of young children’s logico-mathematical knowledge is at the heart of this text. Similar to the first edition, this revision provides a rich theoretical foundation as well as child-centered activities and principles of teaching that support problem solving, communicating, reasoning, making connections, and representing mathematical ideas. In this great resource for preservice and in-service elementary teachers, Professor Kamii continues to help us understand the implications of Piagetian theory.” —Frances R. Curcio, New York University

Contributors -- Preface and acknowledgements -- Introduction: The importance of early childhood development, education, and intervention -- I. Assessment -- II. Preparing for school : ensuring academic success -- III. High-quality learning environments -- IV. Special populations -- V. Advocacy for early education -- Index -- About the editors.