Applying DAP is an ongoing process and an evolving approach to teaching. Learning about DAP is an ongoing process. This means embracing continuous professional development through discussions with other professionals, professional reading, and attending professional development opportunities.
It also requires time spent reviewing curriculum, activities, and environments — all programming — to assess whether or not what was offered truly is DAP.
For DAP, the five key areas of early learning practices are often shown as a star, with each point representing one key area. All areas are interrelated and all are important in helping children learn and develop successfully.
As an early childhood professional, making decisions about each aspect is a major responsibility. To make effective decisions regarding practices for each area, practitioners need to be reflective and intentional. Take time to reflect on the children, your teaching, and your interactions. Be intentional in your planning for children, in developing policies and procedures, in designing the environment, and in your approach. Think about why you do what you do, keeping your vision and goals for children in mind.
Effective decision-making will guide you in choosing the best strategies for meeting the needs of the children and families. Better Kid Care. Learn More Upcoming Events. Sign In for Online Courses. Required Health and Safety Online Courses. Contact Us. Subscribe to our Newsletters. Applying developmentally appropriate practice. What can you expect a child to do? Know individual children. In that sense, documenting really is more simple than you think, and Ofsted understands this.
Note down the spark, teachable moment and any next steps you might want to add. You can find plenty of good templates for this online, but remember not to overcomplicate it. It really should just be an accurate record of the interaction that took place between you and the child.
So consider drawing up a document to note down the changes in the environment, along with the interests that influenced the change. Bear in mind, it is less like planning and more like enhancement. What you are doing is looking over current interests and planning an environment that is an interesting, intriguing and evolving place for children to develop.
The core provisions you have should be engaging and stimulating, so that children can approach things themselves and allow the child-led learning to take place.
Variation is also key. You also need to rethink the way you make environmental changes and whether to add or remove certain provisions. The review process is all about how the environment is engaging your children. Take into account how their interests are changing, and how the environment has affected this. Take the time to look back and constantly revise to make sure you have an environment that works for the children.
Guidance from the Danish Health Ministry, translated in full to English. The full recommendations from a working group of over 70 nursery chains in the UK. Matt Arnerich is Famly's Head of Content, in charge of telling stories to more than 1M readers to make outstanding early years care achievable for everyone. Find out below how Famly saved Paula and the team at West Street Nursery time, and see what we can do for you in a personal demo.
Improve your early years practice Every week, we'll send you expert early years insights , resources, tips and inspiration straight to your inbox. Login Get a demo. Why Famly? Nursery groups Easy-to-use software to make group management a breeze Larger nurseries Run your business like clockwork, and stay connected Small nurseries Bring your parent community closer, and strengthen teamwork Watch a demo Still not sure about Famly?
Take five minutes to watch our demo. Parent communication Get even closer to the people at home Invoicing and admin Run your business smarter - in a fraction of the time Observation and assessment Spend more quality time with the children Daily management All the information you need at your fingertips. The Environment. The Child. The Adult. Making child-led learning a reality. Recommendations for each theme, transcribed verbatim from the interviews, are presented in Appendix 2; we strongly recommend reading these recommendations along with the following theme summaries.
Natural resource management is fundamentally about how people interact and make decisions. This means that the most critical part of setting up a CAM effort is getting the key people and organizations working together to identify and work toward common goals.
Benson and Stone noted the potential disconnect between adaptive management theory and practice relative to legal requirements and processes in the United States, which makes it difficult to successfully implement CAM.
The authors acknowledge these constraints and believe our work indicates that design of approaches for the future may need to address these institutional and legal constraints for CAM. Attention to building trust is essential; facilitation can help with this. Theme 1 was by far the most commonly emphasized recommendation. Projects need to address real and acknowledged problems. This information is not only essential for gaining community buy-in and support for the project, it also can provide important information about critical social dynamics within the community, the knowledge of which can potentially benefit the ability of the natural resource managers to achieve their natural system goals.
Community engagement is critical to the ultimate success of a CAM project. Not only is it important for the community to buy into whatever solution strategy is selected, local knowledge about the community and about the interactions between the community and the natural resource is essential in identifying a plausible solution strategy. Collective identification of problems and potential solutions lends credibility and legitimacy to CAM efforts and can increase chances of progress, success, and development of durable solutions.
Once the problem is appropriately framed, a focus by the project on identifying practical solution strategies will foster productive community engagement. A key component of the community engagement process is building working and personal relationships and leveraging already established relationships. There are of course instances in which not all stakeholders are participating in good faith.
This can result in obfuscation and obstruction to solving the problems at hand, especially when those who want to obstruct have greater power than others in the process. Our respondents did not articulate such a problem during their interviews.
Active engagement at all levels is needed to achieve success for both agencies and communities. A robust engagement process that connects the natural resource managers and the relevant local communities should be a planning priority. An initial problem assessment is needed to identify who needs to be involved, and the assessment process needs to be vetted by the involved communities.
It is hard to get collaborative adaptive management started where there is existing polarization around contentious issues, and sustainable progress cannot result from trying to avoid conflict by simply picking participants who are in favor of the project.
Projects thus can benefit from upfront inclusion in planning of social scientists and facilitators with conflict resolution experience. Communicating in a way that is understandable to and accepted by both the natural resource management and local community cultures is important in the development of an initial understanding between these groups.
An initial focus on common goals and interests can set a productive tone from the start, and early successes, even small ones, can validate the choice to participate and lead to expanded collaboration in the future.
Different types of actions are needed at different geographic scales and governance levels. This means that scale is an important consideration when planning a CAM project and should shape project design.
Collaboration and direct action are easier to achieve in small-scale efforts with a limited number of key stakeholders; smaller scale efforts need to fit within the context of the larger scale program to achieve resource-wide goals. CAM projects are more likely to succeed if they have a leader who is a strong champion of the work Howell and Higgins , Gattiker and Carter They understand that leadership largely depends on inspiring others and are able to earn the trust of the diverse participants and manage with a light touch.
They need to be good communicators. Short-term successes are critical to maintaining flows of resources and support from decision makers and funders, who typically need to show progress within temporal cycles that are short relative to rates of change in the natural resource.
Unavoidable knowledge gaps and changing conditions mean that the project needs to be structured in a way that provides long-term stability yet is nimble and flexible enough to allow the project to take advantage of identified opportunities and to quickly recognize and address developing problems. Project leaders need to communicate the concept that adaptation can be an opportunity rather than a threat.
CAM requires both organizational and cultural change in response to lessons learned: adjustments in natural resource management approaches, in the organizational cultures of natural resource management agencies, and in community expectations.
It takes time for these changes to take root and get established. This type of long-sighted strategy will be most effective if the decision process is collaboratively developed by the natural resource managers and local communities so that expectations are clear and appropriate and the process is perceived as legitimate by all participants.
Capacity building should be a primary target for CAM projects. An increase in the capacity of communities and organizations to act together in productive ways is in and of itself a positive project outcome as well as being a leading indicator of positive changes in the natural resource being managed.
Capacity has many components, including the capacity to respond nimbly when new information surfaces and adaptation is needed, to be resilient in the face of setbacks, to be able to develop problem solutions that are both creative and practical, and to have the resources needed to act and achieve goals.
Focusing from the beginning on actively engaging with and integrating communities into efforts to resolve natural resource management problems is essential to the development of practical solutions. Our interviewees articulated that investing time and resources up front can provide large payoffs down the road; in fact, such investment is critical to actually getting anything done.
We found that in our sample of 10 projects, the most effective projects emerged from up-front work in which the project team sincerely demonstrated that they care about community values and concerns, the project team found ways for the project to fit in with and build on what is going on in the community, and trust-based relationships were built.
Trust and mutual respect are critically important for successful collaboration Dale and Armitage , and it takes considerable time and focused effort to build trust-based working relationships. Our interviewees suggested that the first thing a project manager should do when starting a project is to take time to listen to and learn about the local communities. Critical information includes how the communities view the resource of interest, what they value and are concerned about, which local organizations are doing related activities and might be potential partners, and which other groups need to be involved in decision making.
They fail to recognize that such activities make it possible for a process to get to positive outcomes more quickly or at all , thus more than justifying the investment. In practice, communities tend to get only limited attention when AM projects are planned. These assumptions and priorities may be highly appropriate for an engineering project like building a bridge but are a poor fit for designing and implementing a collaborative AM effort.
The project template USACE project teams follow includes a community engagement component, but the team members rarely have the necessary skills or organizational support to implement it. Typically, they come in with little information about the relevant communities and do not spend adequate time and effort to get additional information that could serve as a guide for project planning.
As a consequence, USACE builds distrust with people in affected communities, who may engage in political end runs in an effort to be heard and resist actions by the USACE that they view as being against the community interests. This approach to project management is not unique to the USACE; many federal and state agencies exhibit similar tendencies. Our interviewees suggested that the best way to begin project planning is to quickly set up opportunities for interaction among decision makers, scientists, and communities, with each participant given opportunities to describe what they do and talk about their issues, goals, and capabilities Themes 4 and 5.
The focus in these interactions should be on listening, with every participant demonstrating an honest interest in learning about the other participants. Transparency and effective communication are important considerations in project planning. One key to long-term project success is to structure a project so as to match assigned organizational responsibilities with organizational strengths and resources.
The project team should apply what they learn about the priorities and capabilities of project partners, including engaged communities, to set up a project structure that takes advantage of the fact that each partner has things that they can do more effectively than any other group can.
Smaller, more local organizations and local governments can contribute nuanced knowledge about the specific social-ecological systems of interest as well as local experts and volunteers who are passionate about the resource and can get things done on the ground.
These groups have an intimate understanding of local conditions and opportunities and can act in ways that can alter local attitudes and behaviors to effect real and positive improvements in the resource conditions of concern.
Larger organizations such as federal and state agencies and national non-governmental organizations can provide general scientific knowledge and analysis capabilities, managerial experience, and relatively stable resources. This type of structure applied to a multi-organizational collaborative context puts the larger organizations in a more facilitative or supportive role than in a dominant actor role. This is different from the way projects have tended to be organized and may require a real change in organizational cultures.
A particular place dealing with a specific problem may not be ready for a full CAM process. However, resource managers who think strategically and long-term can take advantage of opportunities to move things forward by making incremental progress in a productive direction Theme Such people are important for project sustainability because they will stick with the project for the long haul and will not let the project die when setbacks are encountered.
We found this to be true for multiple projects in this study. Such people provide leadership in developing a shared vision and build motivation to achieve that vision. In addition to being important in getting a project off the ground, champions are essential for keeping projects going over the long term. Among the core behaviors of champions summarized from the literature by Shaw et al. Different champion roles come into play at different project governance levels Taylor et al.
Our interviewees indicated that one of the important tasks for champions is to gain and maintain the strong organizational support required for a CAM project to succeed over the long term, e. The main limitation of this qualitative pilot study is the small number of interviews conducted.
Many more interviews would be desirable, along with inclusion of multiple people from each project where possible. Caution is therefore advised in generalizing these findings. Ten interviews were sufficient for us to see repetition of several main points, which lends credibility to the observations; however, each interview produced useful insights so more interviews would have added richness and worthwhile recommendations.
A second limitation is that all the interviewees are from the United States and discussed natural resource management projects conducted in the United States. Their insights and recommendations may be largely transferable to other contexts, but that still needs to be demonstrated.
The interviewees emphasized that spending significant time and resources at the very start of a project to really listen to the community and build trust-based relationships can pay big dividends in real and positive outcomes over the life of the project. Affected communities need to be active participants for natural resource management problem-solving efforts to be successful. For this to happen, those communities need to view the project as being consistent with community values and bringing benefit to those communities as informed and integrated with scientific evidenced-based information.
The project management team must understand what those values are and what is important to the community in order to do effective project planning, and this requires a sincere commitment to building connections with the community and really paying attention to their concerns and interests. Another recommended method is for the project manager and core team to look for small-scale, local groups that are actively addressing related issues within the project area.
Groups focusing on natural resource management issues are obvious targets, but groups addressing other issues such as public health, community development, and social justice, as well as community members who work on or with the resource, e.
The critical importance of relationship building early in a CAM process means that the project manager should immediately recruit someone with excellent social and communication skills and who is or could be respected by all to help get things off to a good start. The focus of scientific and engineering education and training is not communities. Thus, others with those skills and training should be a part of the team, professional facilitators, on equal footing.
A particular situation may not be a good candidate for a full CAM process, perhaps on account of already established controversies. However, increases in trust and cooperation among project participants in problem solving can help a project be more successful even if it does not achieve full collaboration and one or more completed AM cycles.
Thus, even when conditions are not in place for full-blown AM or CAM, relationship-building and capacity-building efforts that can be useful as an initial basis and foundation for key actors to develop working relationships for the time when AM or CAM is ready to launch. Different governance levels are best suited to different types of actions, all of which are important to long-term project success. Effective and timely actions can be achieved most easily at smaller scale, but these small-scale actions need to be coordinated within context of larger issues.
The project team should pay explicit attention to which group or individual is best suited for each task. We suggest that CAM researchers would benefit from studying smaller-scale local projects, most of which do not self-identify as CAM projects. We have found that these can be an excellent and under-valued source of how-to information about successful multi-party management and problem solving. The impetus for a local project may be requirements imposed by higher level government agencies for example, water quality targets developed by state agencies in response to national-level clean water regulations , but it is up to the local authorities to develop a strategy for meeting the target in a local context of conflicting views, competing needs, and limited public sector resources.
Insufficient institutional capacity typically is more of an issue for such projects than is scientific uncertainty, and cross-sector partnerships are required for success.
We conclude by encouraging others to interview a wide range of natural resource management practitioners to capture and share as much valuable experiential knowledge as possible. I had the great joy and privilege to co-author this paper with my friend and colleague, Kathi Beratan. She was supremely wise and intelligent about the technical and human worlds and how they interrelated.
Thank you Kathi. We would like to thank our 10 anonymous interviewees for generously sharing their time and expertise with us. Our particular thanks to Jennifer Pratt Miles from the Meridian Institute, both for her long leadership of CAMNet and for her encouragement and assistance when we began this project.
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