In early childhood classrooms, increased pressures to prioritize literacy acquisition skills have shifted learning environments from more open-ended and exploratory to regulatory in nature particularly in the field of literacy. Despite that research suggests the important role of exploratory and agentic literacy practices, the field is…

Metacognition is the process of thinking about one's own thinking, learning, and problem-solving strategies. It involves being aware of one's own cognitive processes and knowing how to regulate and monitor them. Sustainability, instead, refers to the ability to maintain or preserve resources and ecosystems for future generations. Here, we draw…

Japanese early childhood teachers use the "mimamoru" approach, in which teachers let children develop their sense of right and wrong in a group-oriented environment where they are accountable to others. Cultural in nature, the "mimamoru" approach is based on teachers' beliefs that children are truly autonomous beings who can…

As has been pointed out in previous research, teacher-led learning plays an important role in developing preschool children's technological skills and technological self-esteem. What is missing in research are more detailed analysis of how the children's and teachers' actions and interactions shape the learning process. In order to study this…

If the future of preK-12 education is going to be better than the past, then we need to rethink our fundamental assumptions about what we want from our schools and what we expect those schools to look like. Educators should embrace three core commitments in particular: 1) to treat students as learners whose agency is respected, whose diversity is…

We explored how teacher and child talk-turns were related to children's subsequent comprehension responses during read-alouds. Data included three kindergarten teachers' interactive read-alouds (736 talk-turns across six video-recorded and transcribed sessions). Talk-turns were coded using a priori and emergent codes. Statistical discourse…

Children with special needs may have less access to play due to the nature of their developmental delay or disability or their lack of experience with typically developing peers. Many preschools and kindergartens have reduced play in their daily schedules and elementary schools have reduced or eliminated recess (Jarrett et al., 2015; Zigler &…

Child-centred and teacher-directed curricula have long been presented as mutually exclusive approaches to early education. Interestingly, recent research suggests a 'balance' of the two yields the best child outcomes, yet how this balance is struck varies considerably across contexts and even studies. In this paper, we use the writings of Russian…

Quality, teaching and assessment in early childhood are often steeped in developmental logic and narrow understandings of teaching and learning. Pedagogy situated in agency and complexity disrupts these taken-for-granted narratives and offers multiple ways of teaching, learning and doing. In this article, the authors offer an example of these…

This article highlights the "Picturebooks for Social Justice" approach which the author developed within her preschool program. "Picturebooks for Social Justice" was born of 2-year design-based qualitative research study exploring the intentional use of interactive read-alouds in early childhood education. This was not a…

In an increasingly individualistic society in which the economic forecast has been uncertain for the past several years, independent schools have struggled to understand donors' motivations for giving. In addition, schools continually examine the way their annual giving campaigns articulate how donors' gifts align with the schools' missions and…

This study evaluated the relationship among use defending behaviors, gender, and self-esteem among students trained in a brief, bystander bullying intervention (N = 93). Students were taught four specific strategies to use to defend targets of bullying. We used hierarchical regression analyses to test a moderator model in which we hypothesized…

In this article, we explore the concept of "mimamori" and its impact on early childhood education and care (ECEC) in Norway and Japan. "Mimamori" is a teaching method whereby teachers refrain from giving children direct instructions, which is in line with the Froebelian approach to pedagogy. It is interesting to investigate how…

Non-digital games are a tool that can help children to build and improve problem solving skills in early mathematics learning. Teachers need to design a learning activity using non-digital games taken account problem solving skills in the learning activities. However, the application of problemsolving skills in early mathematics learning…

Montessori learning environments, described as prepared environment, allow children to choose their work freely and construct their own learning. Because the child is in the center and the roles of the teacher differ from the roles of the teachers in traditional schools, the direction of the communication and collaboration between the child and…