Preschool Teachers’ Shared Beliefs About Appropriate Pedagogy for 4-Year-Olds

Abstract

The 18 preschool teachers in the study tended to agree that preschool education for 4-yearolds should foremost be fun and engaging, not stressful. Teachers should develop curricula based on childrenÕs interests and everyday lives, and allow children to choose their activities and to direct their own play and exploration at their own pace. The goal of preschool education should be to promote childrenÕs social, emotional, and physical well-being, and not focus so much on academic learning.

Nalanda ‘School of Joy’: Teaching Learning Strategies and Support System, for Implementing Child Friendly Education in Bangladesh

“…Staff members are friendly and welcoming to children and attend to all their health and safety needs" (Young, 2002, p. 18) Another author said, classroom is not simply a place in which student learn academic lessons rather through this social context students learn social lessons such as friendship, cooperation and appropriate behavior. All this takes places provided a teacher has the capacity to attract the students by demonstrating care and making the classroom fun for young children (Lee, 2006).…”

Understanding American Preschool Teachers’ Teaching Beliefs About Literacy Instruction

“…They also tend to agree that academic learning is not so important. Since "most children will eventually become literate", they claim there's no need to push children to learn literacy skills in preschool [11]. In another study done by Lee and Ginsburg [4] on 60 preschool teachers in New York City, teachers' beliefs are reported to differ by students' socioeconomic status.…”

“…Systematic research on the relationship between teaching beliefs and teaching practice is limited [12]. Among those limited studies, more are concerned about k-12 education, while preschool education is inadequately studied [11]. Qualitative studies are even fewer to closely listen to preschool teachers' voices [11].…”

“…Among those limited studies, more are concerned about k-12 education, while preschool education is inadequately studied [11]. Qualitative studies are even fewer to closely listen to preschool teachers' voices [11]. This study hopes to enrich the understandings about preschool teachers' teaching beliefs and their practice as well as the professional support they need, which may be meaningful to educators and policymakers.…”

Conceptions of Finnish and Estonian Pre-school Teachers' Goals in Their Pedagogical Work

“…A brief consideration of recent research literature shows that educational issues, such as goals, have been considered from the point of view of educational philosophy, or school didactics, or teachers' development and professionalism. These things have rarely been approached from the pre-school teachers' point of view or attended to the voices of early childhood educators to understand their thinking (Lee, 2006). In the considerations there has been a little comparative inquiry between pre-school teachers in different countries.…”