RIGOROUS DAP in the Early Years: From Theory to Practice provides teachers with a roadmap for teaching that helps children meet academic expectations and maintains focus on the appropriate development of the whole child. A construct of eleven practices, RIGOROUS DAP supplies teachers with strategies for 1) making instructional decisions that meet the needs of the individual child; 2) sustaining culturally relevant practices; 3) engaging stakeholders in conversations about educating young children for school success through practices that attend to their individual, sociocultural, and developmental needs; and 4) ensuring all children experience high-level learning and succeed in school.
The eleven practices comprising the construct are:
- Reaching all children
- Integrating content areas
- Growing as a community
- Offering choices
- Revisiting new content
- Offering challenges
- Understanding each learner
- Seeing the whole child
- Differentiating instruction
- Assessing constantly
- Pushing every child forward
An academically rigorous learning environment allows all children to learn at high levels through hands-on learning experiences that address the whole child and connect to the child's world in and out of school. A developmentally appropriate learning environment considers the children's developmental, cognitive, social, emotional, linguistic, and physical development, as well as the sociocultural worlds in which they live.
Brian Nelson Mowry is a doctoral candidate at the University of Texas at Austin. He has 25 years of service as a teacher and teacher educator in the Austin Independent School District. He currently serves as a district-level instructional specialist developing curriculum as well as supporting and providing professional development for 700 preschool and kindergarten classroom teachers. Before this, he worked as a district-level mathematics specialist for grades K through 5 and spent 11 years as a bilingual preschool and kindergarten teacher in the Austin public schools.
Christopher Pierce Brown, PhD---a former preschool, kindergarten, and first-grade teacher---is a professor of curriculum and instruction in early childhood education at the University of Texas at Austin and a fellow of the Priscilla Pond Flawn Regents Professorship in Early Childhood Education. He earned a BA in philosophy from the University of the South, an MA in curriculum and instruction from New Mexico State University, and a PhD in curriculum and instruction from the University of Wisconsin. Among other awards, he was given the Outstanding Early Childhood Teacher Educator Award from NAEYC in 2014 and the Regents' Outstanding Teacher Award from the University of Texas in 2013.
Beth Smith Feger, PhD, is a clinical assistant professor of early childhood education in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction at the University of Texas at Austin. She serves as a cohort coordinator for preservice teachers seeking early childhood through sixth grade certification. She also works directly with preservice and in-service teachers, supervising the fieldwork component of the students' professional development over the course of three semesters. She has her PhD in early childhood education from the University of Texas at Austin and is a former special education and elementary teacher.
