Students
High Scope encourages student initiative by providing children with materials,
equipment, and time to pursue activities they choose
Learning
A. Approaches to Learning
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Initiative: Children demonstrate initiative as they explore their world.
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Planning: Children make plans and follow through on their intentions.
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Engagement: Children focus on activities that interest them.
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Problem solving: Children solve problems encountered in play.
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Use of resources: Children gather information and formulate ideas about their world.
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Reflection: Children reflect on their experiences
Roles of Students and Teachers
Control
Actively Learning
Children are in control of child-sized decisions such as where to play, how to play, and whom to play with..
Active learning means students have direct, hands-on experiences with people, objects, events, and ideas. Children’s interests and choices are at the heart of High/Scope programs. They construct their own knowledge through interactions with the world and the people around them.
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To learn through active involvement with people, materials, events, and ideas
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To become independent, responsible, and confident — ready for school and ready for life
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To learn to plan many of their own activities, carry them out, and talk with others about what they have done and what they have learned
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To gain knowledge and skills in important academic, social, and physical areas
Decision Making
Children take the first step in the learning process by making choices and following through on their plans and decisions. Teachers, caregivers, and parents offer physical, emotional, and intellectual support. In active learning settings, adults expand children’s thinking with diverse materials and nurturing interactions.
Teachers
As a teacher, your influence on children is significant. The experiences children have in their first classroom setting can shape their attitude about learning for the rest of their lives. That's why we have created resources and training that help support you so you can see the children you serve blossom and grow, and be excited about learning.
The HighScope Curriculum was designed as a result of extensive research that supports our belief that children learn best when they participate actively in the learning process. They discover things through direct experience with people, objects, events, and ideas.
HighScope teachers are as active and involved as children in the classroom. They thoughtfully provide materials, plan activities, and talk with children in ways that both support and challenge what children are observing and thinking. Activities are both child-initiated — built upon children’s natural curiosity — and developmentally appropriate, that is, matched to children’s current and emerging abilities. We call this approach active participatory learning — a process in which teachers and students are partners in shaping the learning experience.
In the High/Scope curriculum the role of the teacher is to support and extend the children’s learning by observing and listening, asking appropriate question and by scaffolding learning experiences.
Roles
Active Learning
Classroom Arrangment
Daily Schedule
Assessment
Key Experiences
Adult-Child Interactions
Teachers create the context for learning in the High/Scope approach by implementing and supporting five essential elements: active learning, classroom arrangement, the daily schedule, assessment, and the curriculum (content)
Teachers support children’s active learning by providing a variety of materials, making plans and reviewing activities with children, interacting with and carefully observing individual children, and leading small- and large-group active learning activities
Interaction Strategies that Promote Active Learning
Some of the most important adult-child interaction strategies used in HighScope programs are listed below. Details on how to apply these strategies, as well as many other adult-child strategies for specific areas of learning, are given in HighScope's training and publications.
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Adults participate in children's play. Adults look for natural openings in children's play and then join the child or children at their physical level. As a pretend play partners, adults take roles assigned by children and stay within the play scenario the children have created.
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Adults converse as partners with children. Adults look for opportunities for conversations with children about the activities children are engaged in. Adults make comments about the child's activities that allow the conversation to continue without pressuring the child for a response.
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Adults use encouragement instead of praise. Rather than statements that evaluate or judge, adults make objective, specific comments that encourage children to expand their descriptive language and think about what they are doing.
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Adults encourage children’s problem solving. Whenever possible, adults encourage children to solve problems for themselves. While adults could often solve the problem more easily by taking over, the goal is for children to develop their own problem-solving abilities through trial and error.
The classroom arrangement invites children to engage in personal, meaningful, educational experiences. In addition, the classroom contains three or more interest areas that encourage choice.
The classroom organization of materials and equipment supports the daily routine—children know where to find materials and what materials they can use. This encourages development of self-direction and independence.
The teacher selects the centers and activities to use in the classroom based on several considerations:
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Interests of the children (e.g., kindergarten children are interested in blocks, housekeeping, and art)
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Opportunities for facilitating active involvement in seriation, number, time relations, classification, spatial relations, and language development
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Opportunities for reinforcing needed skills and concepts and functional use of those skills and concepts
The schedule considers developmental levels of children, incorporates a sixty- to seventy-minute plan-do-review process, provides for content areas, is as consistent throughout the day as possible, and contains a minimum number of transitions.
The plan-do-review process is an important part of the High/Scope approach and is one worthy of your particular attention. The plan-do-review is a sequence in which children, with the help of the teacher, initiate plans for projects or activities; work in learning centers to implement their plans; and then review what they have done with the teacher and their fellow classmates.
Teachers keep notes about significant behaviors, changes, statements, and things that help them better understand a child’s way of thinking and learning. Teachers use two mechanisms to help them collect data: the key experiences note form and a portfolio. The High/Scope Child Observation Record is also used to assess children’s development. ---High/Scope teachers rely on teamwork, modelling cooperative interaction. Teachers regularly take anecdotal notes on children’s daily activities. This documentation is used to create plans to extend the children’s learning, as well as to involve parents in providing continuity between home and school. From the daily notes a record is generated to assess children’s long-term progress.
Curriculum
The High/Scope curriculum comes from two sources: children’s interests and the key experiences, which are lists of observable learning behaviors. Basing a curriculum in part on children’s interests is very constructivist and implements the philosophies of Dewey, Piaget, and Vygotsky.
Teachers continually encourage and support children’s interests and involvement in activities that occur within an organized environment and a consistent routine. Teachers plan for key experiences that may broaden and strengthen children’s emerging abilities. Children generate many of these experiences on their own; others require teacher guidance. Many key experiences are natural extensions of children’s projects and interests.
Adult-child interaction is the process of working alongside children and communicating with them both verbally and nonverbally to encourage learning. A key strategy for adult-child interaction is sharing control with children. Additional strategies include supporting children's play, using encouragement instead of praise, and taking a problem-solving approach to conflict.This teacher-student interaction—teachers helping students achieve developmentally sequenced goals while also encouraging them to set many of their own goals—uniquely distinguishes the High/Scope Curriculum from direct-instruction and child-centered curricula (High/Scope Educational Research Foundation, 1989).
