An often ignored concept is the key to successful programming
Best practice to a youth librarian is using lots of songs in storytimes for babies and repeating them each week. Best practice is choosing books about trucks and teddy bears for two-year-olds. The early childhood educators among us would be more precise: they would call these strategies developmentally appropriate practice.
One of the most important ingredients of successful library programming for young children has not been discussed thoroughly in library literature. The concept of developmentally appropriate practice (DAP) originated with early childhood educators. It was developed by the National Association for the Education of Young Children (NAEYC) in 1986 and presented in a position statement that became a bible of sorts for early childhood professionals. The position statement was revised in 1997, and the latest version is due this month. (To download a copy, visit NAEYC’s Web site at www.naeyc.org.)
Essentially, DAP is a “framework for best practice” in early childhood programs serving children from birth through age eight. As the position statement says, DAP is “grounded both in the research on child development and learning and in the knowledge base regarding educational effectiveness.” Although the position paper is intended for early educators, it has much to offer anyone who works with young children. We regard it as an important element in the development of all library services to the early childhood community.
In our library’s basic storytime training classes for staff, we present DAP as the one concept that informs everything we do in storytime—from how we structure our program for different age groups to the stories, rhymes, songs, and activities we choose to share to the way we manage a group.
A developmentally appropriate program incorporates age appropriateness and individual appropriateness. A developmentally appropriate program is planned and conducted with the understanding that all children experience predictable sequences of growth from birth through age eight, and the understanding that each child is a unique individual who will develop on his or her own schedule. When we host a group of three-year-olds from a child-care center, we plan a storytime that will be appropriate for three-year-olds in general—and we prepare ourselves to adjust the stories, activities, and program time to work for the individually unique children who arrive on our doorstep that morning. If they turn out to be young threes, we may choose shorter stories and include more movement activities than we had originally planned. If they’re all experienced listeners who are familiar with Caps for Sale (Scott, 1940) and Llama, Llama Red Pajama (Viking, 2005), we can pull out some of our newer, longer gems. Flexibility is the key to a good storytime, and that’s essentially what DAP is all about—informed flexibility. It starts with a solid knowledge base in child development: we need to know what to expect, in general, from one-year-olds, from two-year-olds, from three-year-olds, and so on. To this, we add our knowledge of specific titles, songs, rhymes, and activities to match those general characteristics. Our flexibility flows from there.
Librarians should also be aware of another NAEYC “core consideration” of DAP: the awareness that all children come to the various group settings they encounter in early childhood with a set of “rules” based on the broader social and cultural community with which they are familiar. This affects their behavior—the way they interact with others, how they use personal space, how they show respect, etc. With the broadly changing demographics across the country, this awareness is more and more important as we practice in developmentally appropriate ways.
We encourage you to plumb the riches of NAEYC’s new position statement. It’s full of information that will help library professionals grow along with our early childhood colleagues as productive members of what NAEYC calls the “community of learners” that supports all children in the all-important early years.