The National Association for the Education of Young Children recently revised its Developmentally Appropriate Practice (DAP), the standard for early childhood care and education. Josh Thompson and Zlata Stankovic-Ramirez explore how DAP has evolved over time and what guidance it provides early childhood educators regarding the interaction between…

Effective educators value young adolescents, are prepared to teach them, and are knowledgeable about this age group. Middle level educators' understanding of adolescent brain development and developmentally responsive teaching strategies can help to support all adolescents' cognitive and social-emotional development in school. This article…

Rigorous DAP (developmentally appropriate practices) is a set of 11 principles of instruction intended to help close early childhood learning gaps. Academically rigorous learning environments create the conditions for children to learn at high levels. While academic rigor focuses on one dimension of education--academic--DAP considers the whole…

This paper outlines a STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) learning experience for children in the early years of school. It builds on STEM education in early childhood with a shared purpose, "to help children to explore and make sense of their world using childrelevant and appropriate contexts" (Preston, 2018 p. 137).…

Recent Illinois legislation requires school principals in the state to be qualified to provide school leadership for children from preschool to grade twelve instead of kindergarten to grade twelve. Illinois is the first state to make such a change and may well serve as a model for change in school leadership preparation on a national level. The…

Adolescence is a developmental stage characterized by rapid and complex changes. Adolescents experiencing psychological concerns commonly benefit from participating in counseling. The authors present a model that is an integrated strengths-based approach in which the adolescent actively identifies his or her personal strengths.

This article discusses how amusing mistakes can make for serious language instruction. The notion that close analysis of language errors can yield insight into how one thinks and learns seems fundamentally obvious. Yet until relatively recently, language errors were primarily treated as indicators of learner deficiency rather than opportunities to…

Appropriate design and redesign of programs, responses to accreditation agencies, and internal academic legitimacy concerns are critical challenges in education in general and in leadership education in particular. "Guiding Questions: Guidelines for Leadership Education Programs (Guiding Questions)," a member initiated project sponsored…