The early years of schooling are the building base or foundation for future success. In the first few years of a child’s life, they are much more absorbent and responsive to new information or knowledge than at any other stage of life. Children must receive quality education within their early years.
In the recent years, Tennessee has made a historic academic accomplishment with high and improved academic standards resulting in increased growth in student’s progress. However, the academic scores of lower grades, especially those in Third grade are yet to improve. The evident reason for it would be the lack of proper and quality learning in early childhood.
What is Tennessee’s early-stage learning Standards?
TQEE is one of the bipartisan coalitions initiated by Tennesseans to ensure quality education for their children. They prioritize the empowerment and engagement of parents to provide affordable child care in their policy. They emphasize increasing the quality of Tennessee Early Learning Standards that has a strong accountability system to secure the children’s future success.
Tennessee is capable of making an impact by focusing more on policies to maintain early childhood learning standards. The policy should motivate the parents to be children’s primary teachers as education begins from home. Access to proper childcare or preschool should be granted to all. The system should have an all-rounded curriculum for early learners.
Principles and guidelines for creating developmental standards
- The developmental standards should be applied to all children of the targeted region irrespective of their diverse culture, gender, ethnicity, linguistic, language, etc. All children have the right and capabilities to have access to equal resources and education.
- It should consider the fact that every child has unique abilities and acquire knowledge at a different rate. Therefore, curriculum should be customized accordingly.
- The curriculum should be multidimensional. It should not only focus on academics but also on the cognitive development of children.
- The family should be highly motivated to participate in the child’s learning process. More than classrooms, children learn abundantly from their parents and home.
- Children learn not just through the designed curriculum but also through the interactions and relationships they come across in their day to day life with their family members, peers, caregivers, etc.
What should these standards cover?
These standards should have a variety of developmental areas that would be suitable to be absorbed by the tender minds of young learners. They should help children establish the base for literacy, speech and language, Mathematics, physical development, creative arts and skills, social developments, etc.
These all-rounded developmental areas provide children the opportunity to try their hands on all the different fields and finally explore a particular area of their interest which they can pursue in the future.
Conclusion
The initiatives for such developmental associations should come from the civic sense itself instead of being dependent on state or local government for coming up with new developmental policies. Such developmental standard increases the achievements of the region and benefits the entire community in the long-run.