Article Link: http://exchangepress.com/article/nurturing-innovation-beyond-compliance/5021835/
“We are, at this moment in the United States, so deeply invested in the idea of psychometric and ‘scientific’ justifications for our educational practices that we seem to have forgotten that there could be any other justification paradigm. We seem to have forgotten there could be any other way to hold ourselves accountable.”Steve Seidel, 2008
I’m excited to see that policymakers, regulators, and early education professionals across the United States are expanding their thinking about what constitutes quality experiences for children in group care and early education settings. Getting beyond the idea of minimum licensing requirements is a big step. Researching, identifying, and codifying the components of best practices has been a substantial undertaking. But why has so little of that process involved the thinking of actual practicing teachers?
As a profession we are at the critical juncture where we must ask ourselves some big questions:
• How can the outside pressure for measurable outcomes support the vision and intentions we have for our early childhood programs?
• What do we want to hold ourselves accountable for?
• How can we have shared standards without standardization?
Any early childhood program with public funding is now subjected to an ever-growing number of quality rating scales ...