Parents are busy. We have jobs, homes to run, and children to take care of. 

It can be quite overwhelming to manage everything, and so it is quite natural to welcome any and all help that is offered. Either by a family member, a friend, or an organization.

In early childhood education, there is lots of help available for parents. 

In Head Start Programs in the US, preschools are free for parents. These programs take a two-generation approach which educates the child while nurturing the well-being of the parent. Greater parental involvement in these programs has proven to increase cognitive stimulation in early learners. 

There are also home-based options where visitors come once a week to the home to support parents and kids and co-develop strategies to help the child learn. 

There are also parent training programs that are designed to reduce family stress. They provide instruction in areas such as  discipline strategies, positive involvement in a child’s life, skill encouragement, and problem solving. Basically, the programs aim to cover everything that a parent should know as they raise and educate their young children. 

The Canadian Child Care Federation provides high quality resources for early learning and child care. They promote the children’s emotional, social, cognitive, ethical and creative development. They offer tips on parenting, such as strategies for dealing with challenging behaviors, enhancing self-esteem and strengthening communication skills. 

Indeed, there are many facets to learning at a young age, and greater parent involvement ensures that the whole child is being supported. Sprig Learning takes a holistic approach to learning that focuses on the mental, physical, emotional and spiritual development of the child. 

In this article, Sprig Learning covers four significant ways parents can become involved in their child’s education.

Parental Involvement or Family Engagement?

There is a difference between parental involvement and family engagement.

There is no doubt that school districts, organizations and education companies are trying to do their part in what is called family engagement. 

Start Early, an  early childhood research organization, defines family engagement as “partnering with families to build mutually respectful, goal-oriented relationships that support strong parent-child relationships, family well-being and ongoing learning and development for both parents and children.” This definition is from the perspective of institutions and how they can enhance engagement.

Parental involvement on the other hand, is defined as the “active participation of a parent or caregiver in the education of the child.” This perspective focuses on the parent initiating engagement—a regular and ongoing commitment of the parent to their children and to their school.

Help from educational institutions like daycares, preschools or school programs is available for a good reason. They help to reinforce the practice of positive parental involvement. They also create a support system for learning with facilitators and other parents.

In addition to the support from schools and other organizations, there are some absolute necessities of parental involvement, which the more parents know sooner, the better. 

If the following four categories of parental involvement are practiced in advance, then any family engagement received will bear results faster.

When family engagement from schools meets parental involvement halfway, the most impactful early learning occurs.

The 4 Categories of Parental Involvement

Based on our research, we discovered there are four categories of activities parents can engage in to better support their child’s education. Here they are along with some practical examples.

Attend Events

Parents should attend school events, whenever possible. During the pandemic, many schoolevents were either cancelled or held virtually. While text, email and other social networks can be good tools for initial communication, there is nothing like building a partnership with the school or an educator in person. 

These events can be in school, or in the community. 

Examples: Attend parent-teacher meetings, conferences or briefings. Attend other school activities such as plays, tournaments, class presentations, chaperone school field trips.

Visit Places

Visiting signifies taking the initiative to take your child somewhere, rather than just attending what someone else has organized. It’s a crucial part of home learning, where the child uses their inquisitive nature to learn about the world around them.

Examples: Plan educational trips such as to the library, museum, or neighborhood park.

Do Things At Home

“Doing” is the other half of home learning that can happen indoors, at the comfort of one’s own residence. Rather than going to a place, the parent can partake in any number of educational activities with their child inside the home. 

Sprig Learning developed Sprig Home so parents can access teacher-created activities to do at home. It helps parents to teach their kids while also familiarizing themselves with the school curriculum. It’s an app that can be downloaded and used to educate children independently of any schools as well.

During the formative years, learning never truly stops, it just takes on many forms such as play-based learning or active learning. So it’s important to extend learning outside the classroom.

It’s really important to show interest in an early learner’s school work. Whether it’s sharing excitement over successes or providing encouragement during a difficult phase in learning, being involved by doing is essential.

Examples: Do teacher-recommended activities at home. Reading with children, or reading storybooks to children, are perhaps the most famous examples to illustrate this category. 

Communicate with Educators

Communicating refers to actively corresponding with educators on what help they might need or receiving advice on how to best support the child’s needs at home. Educators have an extremely demanding job, especially when it contains administrative duties as well on top of teaching. 

When parents pitch in to help relieve the workload from educators, it allows teachers more time to personalize the  education for the children in their classes. 

Examples: Monitor homework. Discuss school days and events. Volunteer to help in school with time or resources.

Benefits of Parental Involvement

Teacher-initiated interventions lead to improved attendance, better grade-level reading proficiency and reduced behavioral problems. The same is true for parental involvement.

Greater parental involvement, by itself, or by way of greater parental engagement can lead to all of the following:

Improved Academic Achievement 

A review of 41 documents showed a significant increase in student achievement when parents were more involved. 

In particular, active forms of parental involvement, asking how the school day was, had a stronger effect on student achievement versus passive forms, such as waiting for an issue to arise. Active parental involvement is also known as parental engagement. 

Especially meaningful for early learning, it was found that the earlier on the involvement started, the more likely was the possibility of higher student achievement. 

Improved Teacher Performance

Greater parental involvement has shown to increase performance amongst teachers. Through greater communication with the parents, educators are better able to differentiate instruction for students. 

Improved Behavior

Apart from higher school attendance, higher grades and higher scores, student behavior is also improved by greater parental involvement. Classroom conduct, self-esteem and motivation are all factors that increase with more parental involvement. 

Although socio-economic background is a key part when it comes to looking at data on education inequity, it has been shown that more involvement from parents in the child’s education increases the child’s likelihood to succeed in school with fewer behavioral problems, regardless of income or background.

Positive Parental Involvement—The Right Way

The benefits listed above clearly demonstrate that parents are an important part of the early childhood learning process. That’s why Sprig considers it essential that parents are consulted when students are being assessed about their current learning situation. 

An important reminder that, when talking about parental involvement, it is positive involvement that is the focus. At the other end of the spectrum, there is such a thing as too much involvement where kids become too reliant on parents. Taking these four categories into account should help achieve an effective balance for educators, parents, and, most importantly, students.

Sprig Learning is committed to providing every child a fair shot at success. Part of that commitment lies in identifying and addressing the main challenges in early learning—those systemic challenges from which all other challenges arise. 

This is a follow up to our last post 5 key challenges faced by schools and programs in early learning where we identified the challenges. In this post, we review  one solution for each of those challenges. 

The research and real-world results unequivocally say that high-quality early learning is an exceptional investment that leads to improved learning and life outcomes. 

Despite how deep-rooted each challenge is, it’s not an insurmountable task to uproot them. What we do know is that the payoffs are worth it.

Challenge: Lack of Time for Educators

Educators often have to wear many hats. Especially in early learning, they often have to serve the role of both the teacher and caretaker. When non-classroom management administrative duties are mandated for health and safety reasons, the core teaching activities often get pushed to the periphery.

A Solution: Prioritize Planning Time Over All Else

There is only so much time in a given day, and ECE educators want to teach students more than anything else. Afterall, it is why they chose the profession in the first place.

Eileen Merritt, assistant professor at the Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College, and former elementary school teacher says “the time that I had each day for planning in my elementary classroom had a direct effect on the quality of my teaching”.

When teachers are asked what would have the greatest positive impact on their ability to help their students, more planning time during the school day is the top choice. Lack of planning time reduces educators’ ability to implement evidence-based practices, which all districts intend on using to ensure the success of every student.

In a study of large school districts in the US, over half of elementary school teachers stated they received 45 minutes per day for planning, 16 percent of the districts gave their teachers an hour, whereas 4 percent of them only gave their teachers 15 minutes. 

The fact that such discrepancy exists is troubling. When setting blocks in an educator’s daily schedule, it’s best to ensure that there is sufficient time reserved for planning. Using intuitive technology to monitor each student can save time from keeping handwritten notes or paper files. 

Planning includes both individual planning and collaborative planning with other teachers. In our Unrivaled Guide to Introducing Differentiated Instruction in Early Learning, we discuss at length on the importance of collaborative planning.

Challenge: Lack of Pay in Early Childhood Education

The lack of pay in ECE stalls career progression, where educators can lack motivation to continue in the midst of facing all other challenges. There is also a scarcity of institutions which offer affordable high quality programs for professionalization. But things are slowly changing.

A Solution: Use Quality as a Driver For Pay

Thankfully, wage increases for early childhood educators are on the radar of policy makers. The Government of Saskatchewan in Canada recently announced a $3 per hour wage increase for early childhood educators. In British Columbia, front-line ECEs working in licensed child care facilities will receive a wage increase of $4 per hour.

In the US, the Build Back Better framework proposes increasing wages and creating a salary ladder for early educators across the board. 

Trying to address something like a lack of pay is challenging. Devoting more funds in one area often means cutting costs in another, which can reduce the overall quality of the early learning program. 

It could also mean passing the cost down to the end beneficiary, which is the child’s parents in this case. But affordability of early education is an important issue in its own right.

Thus, the only way to ensure staff are compensated adequately is to increase the size of the overall budget. From the examples cited before, it’s good to see that more funding is being earmarked for developing a high-earning and happy ECE workforce.

But one thing that’s true for both public and private schools is that the quality of early learning cannot be sacrificed, which would make it even more difficult to justify any sort of rise in budget, and thus a pay rise. We’ve covered what a high-quality early learning program looks like in a previous post.

There are new early learning centers, and community colleges who offer specialized programs for those who want to have a career in ECE. This has the potential to increase the qualification for those joining the workforce, and also upskill incumbents who are in the workforce. But schools can join the effort too.

Superintendent Jerry Weast of Montgomery County Public Schools in Maryland, formed an early-learning-focused collaborative involving the district, county agencies, nonprofits, and businesses. It’s purpose was to reinforce the district’s comprehensive professional development system. 

It’s important to brainstorm with all institutions in the community as to how quality can be ensured and maintained in a certain district.

Challenge: Lack of Professional Development and Training

This is potentially the most pressing issue in early learning. Professional development (PD) needs to be ongoing and educators feel they could be better supported in their time at schools. Even if they had more time, and were paid better, educators would ultimately need the right support to deliver the best learning experience to young students.

Solution: Have An Alignment Plan Between Early and Primary Learning

Having a plan for the youngest learners, how their learning transfers over to elementary school, and from there to secondary school, is of the utmost importance. 

Grier Park Elementary School in Lansing, MI used several strategies to ensure integration between their preK classroom and the rest of the primary school to create a preK-3 structure that was optimized for early learning.

They used professional learning communities to create opportunities for educators across grade levels, provided strong PD for preK teachers to match that of K-3 teachers, and planned for the preK to kindergarten transition during staff meetings. 

SchoolFirst, an initiative of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, favors a consolidated curricular approach for students in preK-3. The approach is said to provide a seamless brand of education and best supports early learners as they gain foundational knowledge in literacy, math and other areas. The consolidation of preK-3 into one school building is not necessary, but the integration between the two grade configurations is vital. 

A frequent challenge to preK–3 alignment is the disconnection of preK from primary grades due to its curricular materials and processes. But when you have a uniform plan in place that connects the two, there is better PD due to the increased degree of collaboration between teachers in planning and reviewing different instructional strategies.

In Nooksack Valley School District, Superintendent Mark Johnson brought together preK and elementary school teachers to collaborate on the district’s instructional core. They focused on the key interactions between the teacher, student, and content that form daily instructional routines.

There is plenty of evidence to suggest that coordinating preK–3 standards, curricula, instructional practices, assessments, and teacher PD is more likely to set young students on a positive development path. 

Certain technologies can ensure that the students’ learning profiles are carried over from preK to kindergarten, so their learning gaps can be identified and addressed at the right time.

Challenge: Battling the Early Learning Slide

In the early formative years, particularly from birth to age 8, learning is gained through achieving certain age appropriate milestones. There are many theories on the best way to achieve this, but if such milestones are not met, then progress in future years is impeded.

Solution: Have Achievement Indicators at Each Grade Level

As literacy is the building block of so many crucial academic milestones, it’s important to use measurements of key literacy skills when setting the district’s preK-3 goals. 

In Bremerton School District, the short-term goals included raising the percentage of entering kindergarteners who could identify all the letters of the alphabet. Superintendent Bette Hyde oversaw an increase of 62 percentage points in eight years, of kindergartners who knew their letters upon admission. 

In Montgomery Public Schools, a combination of a state kindergarten-readiness assessment and its own standards-based literacy assessment was used. With over 141,000 students, Montgomery County Public Schools boosted 90 percent of existing kindergartners ready to learn and 89 percent of third graders reading proficiently.

Montgomery County’s key objective was that 80 percent of its students leave high school college-ready. The district connected this end outcome to evidence-based indicators at each grade level all the way back to preK!

Whenever there are measurable outcomes in place, the superintendent can show community partners the value of preK-3 efforts in preventing any learning slides. Be it the summer learning slide, a pandemic induced learning slide, or any other form of learning slide.

Challenge: Lack of Resources

As the population grows, and inflation rises, funding for public early learning schools and programs can be difficult to acquire, unless there is some strategic bottom-down planning. 

There are always grants available which makes it possible to acquire the necessary resources. But it’s not just about adequate funds. It’s also about spending it in a way that ensures a sustainable long-term advantage and reduces dependency on funding policies that could change in the future.

A Solution: Attract Residents to Your Community

When early learning is not well integrated into the overall educational framework of the district, it provides an additional headache for parents. Whether the districts are funded on a per-pupil formula or through different taxes in that community such as property taxes, both are dependent on people wanting to move into the neighborhood. It requires a certain upkeep of reputation. 

A study in California showed that 17 of 25 school districts are involved in some type of preK-3 alignment work. But this work was on a single dimension of alignment such as curriculum, standards, assessment or PD. Clearly, there is much room for improvement when it comes to incorporating early learning into the primary school system. 

There is a strong case to be made about having the right vision and commitment to that vision. Districts that engaged in alignment work gave interviews that suggested a stronger belief in the value of PreK compared to districts who did not. The latter interviews suggest that they saw PreK as something totally different from the elementary level.

The PreK director, or other relevant early learning role placed in the district’s administrative structure, is indicative of the seriousness of commitment. 

Only 3 of 25 preK directors in districts studied were part of the superintendent’s cabinet. The remainder attended district leadership meetings but were not involved in the district’s central decision-making structure. 

The needs of the youngest learners in the community will receive its fair share of attention, when the right people are involved. It will strengthen the community’s desirability in the mind of potential residents.

Overcoming Early Learning Challenges with Solutions

The solutions presented in this article are not exhaustive. But they are specific and have proven to deliver results. It’s possible that taking a systematic approach to implementing some of these solutions could have surplus benefits addressing any unmentioned challenges. Thus, each solution’s importance cannot be overstated. 

Sprig Learning works with educators, school leaders and parents to design holistic early learning programs that consider a wide range of factors. If you need help on any particular challenge, we are here to help.

Early learning is not the same as secondary learning or post-secondary learning. Pre-K to grade 3 is a unique period in the lives of students during which there is the greatest impact on a child’s development

Most brain development happens during this formative stage of life, as well as life changing experiences that can psychologically influence a child’s personality. Both of these things can determine the future academic and social success of a child. 

Given its importance, it’s essential to look at the major challenges faced by schools during early childhood education.

Education is one of those areas where all the major environmental forces play a role in shaping discourse. The political, economic, societal and technological climate all influence what we know as early childhood education.

Sprig Learning is committed to educational equity and ensuring every child has a fair shot at success. Part of upholding such a commitment involves looking at the current early learning landscape and identifying its biggest challenges. 

In order to bring equity to education, these systemic challenges, for  early learning in schools and programs, need to be examined.

What is Early Learning Anyway?

The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization defines early learning as the period between birth and eight years of age. Both formal and information education provided to children during this period is referred to as early childhood education. The National Association for the Education of Young Children agrees with this definition, and promotes high-quality early learning during this stage of life. 

There are government preschool programs like Head Start and other private nurseries that are entrusted to prepare children for school. Once in kindergarten, early education continues up to grade 3, which roughly corresponds to age eight for most children.

The 5 Major Challenges in Early Learning

The criteria for picking five challenges strictly came down to the ubiquity of their existence. Often, they are root causes for all other challenges. Before addressing anything else, it’s important to recognize the issues that are an impediment to the advancement of accessible high-quality early childhood education.

Only by acknowledging the existence of these 5 challenges, will it be possible to think of innovative solutions that deal with them in the short term, and develop the necessary acumen to deal with them in the long term.

Lack of Time

Teachers in preschools, kindergarten and the earlier elementary grades have some of the most strenuous jobs. This is especially the case in preschools, where they are tasked with teaching concepts and skills that are brand new to children. Furthermore, many children have not yet learned the necessary social skills to cooperate with other young learners. 

It’s possible to identify the critical goals for childhood development in certain educational areas. But given the state of affairs, more often than not, such goals take a back seat to more immediate health, well-being and safety concerns.

Consider the Greater East Texas Community Action Program (GETCAP) Head Start program in Nacogdoches, Texas. Rosa Gonzales, a teacher working in the program, talks about the mandate of disinfecting all playing areas and the designation of children into smaller groups for safety during the pandemic. With programs such as Head Start tending to children, cleanliness is as big a priority, the responsibility of which is passed down to the educators.

Smaller groups also make it more difficult to tend to the needs of every child. Educators feel overworked in being burdened with more administrative duties, such as cleaning and management. Not being able to devote as much time as they wanted to teaching, they can get disheartened, leading to burnout in the long run.

Weldon Bread, the director of the GETCAP Head Start program, describes how they have invested in a contact tracing program to keep track of those going in and out of the classrooms. It’s again a case of doing absolutely whatever it takes to keep everyone healthy and safe. 

As important as operational investments are, it’s reported that there are little to no virtual learning devices in Head Start programs. Educators who feel overburdened with administrative duties could make use of more education related resources that would optimize their schedules. Greater priority on educational investments would allow educators to devote more time to teaching.

Lack of Pay

EdSurge conducted many interviews with early childhood educators and found that the lower pay grade in comparison to k-12 educators (already considered an underpaid group), had many adverse effects. It contributed to lack of well-being, reduced longevity in the profession, and lowered the educational quality offered in courses for ECE careers. 

Cindy Decker of Tulsa Educare was stumped by the low staff-to-child ratio, which prevented the program from committing to any new strategic decisions. Most of the energy and focus was spent on ensuring the functioning of the day-to-day operations. 

It’s a vicious cycle, where the lack of pay discourages people from entering the ECE sector. Fewer personnel leads to more work for those who do join. This is a major hurdle, especially considering the lack of paid planning time, where teachers have to work outside of school hours to plan lessons. 

Noticing such undesirable working conditions, even fewer people are motivated to join the early learning workforce. This in turn does not create any pressure to increase pay because no one lobbies for the profession. Thus the cycle continues.

Lack of Professional Development and Training

The lack of professionalization and affordable higher education options for educators is a big reason why there is a teacher shortage. As with any other professions, educators want adequate qualifications to enter the workforce and progress in their careers.

There aren’t enough educators who attend university courses related to teaching, present at workshops or make observational visits. For early childhood educators, the absence of such activities is even more pronounced as it doesn’t require the same level of qualification as a k-12 teaching job. 

For example, some states in the US require you to have an associate degree to teach a preschool, but many others require no training at all.

It’s the school districts that often have to cover the gaps when it comes to insufficient pre-service training. But even in schools, educators entering the workforce do not always feel that they have an established career path.

A significant share of teachers report not receiving key support in their first year such as “regular supportive communication with principals and others”, “observation and feedback on their teaching”, “seminars for beginning teachers”, “common planning time”, etc. In high-poverty schools, it’s a higher share of teachers who report not receiving such support.

Schools and postsecondary ECE programs have to work together to establish ongoing training for educators, where there is ample opportunity for them to improve their craft, and advance their careers.

Battling The Early Learning Slide

There are concerns that there are unmet learning milestones due to lengthy school closures caused by the pandemic. However, all hope is not lost. There is an opportunity to identify student learning gaps and rectify them early in a child’s learning journey. 

Whether there is a “learning loss”, or missed “learning opportunities”, it’s possible to unblock the learning pathways. It’s possible to begin the road to recovery using the level of learning that was previously retained as a starting point. 

Teaching students how to read, write, add and subtract are some of the fundamental blocks of early learning. These are absolutely essential skills that serve any student for their remaining school years.

Thus, it’s important that the teaching strategy not only focus on completing a particular curriculum, but rather emphasize the assessment of young learners to discover the above unmet learning needs.

Lack of Resources

The US public school system was reported to have a funding gap of $150 billion annually. School districts with a higher percentage of low-income and minority populations often bear the brunt of this underfunding. 

Things are slowly changing. The Build Back Better Act, passed earlier this November,  is a legislative package aimed at expanding preschool access across the US, among many other things. Over the first three years, $18 billion will be available to states that want to establish or expand their pre-kindergarten offerings for 4 and 5-year-olds who are not yet enrolled in kindergarten. This means that 20 million underprivileged children, who would otherwise be left out of the system, would now be privy to a high-quality education.

But providing access  is only half the battle. Ensuring high-quality learning requires making strategic investments in resources, people, processes and technology.  

There is unprecedented funding available to invest in such resources, but it’s important that early learning schools and programs strategically evaluate their needs to choose the resources that maximize support for their educators and student body.

The Solutions To These 5 Challenges

The challenges presented are systemic. Two of them deal with the needs of educators, all of them deal with the needs of children, and one of them deals with needs of education programs. 

In the next blog post, Sprig Learning will do a deep dive on each challenge, and the solutions available to address them. By identifying the biggest challenges, it’s possible to set the vision to address them.

Sprig takes a holistic approach to early childhood education. This approach considers all places where a child learns, including school, at home and in the community. It considers the viewpoints of everyone who adopts a teaching role for the child.

Holistic assessments are one part of the holistic approach. They help uncover the unique needs, strengths and challenges of each student.

Holistic learning is extremely conducive to assessing early literacy. In the course of this article, we explain why.

Significance of Early Literacy

Early literacy has a strong claim to being the silver bullet when it comes to academic and non-academic achievements.

Being able to read and write is a remarkable predictor of success later on in life. Just look at these emphatic early learning numbers that corroborate the value of early literacy. 

There are five major early literacy practices suggested to educators and parents. These are singing, talking, reading, writing and playing. 

Early literacy is also broken down into its component skills. There are many versions of this, but they all touch on oral language, phonological awareness, letter knowledge, vocabulary, fluency and comprehension.

But beyond skills and practices at a granular level, are there other immediate things that can be done to help influence change?  Some advice to act on, as a matter of strategy?

Early Literacy Recommendations

For both recommendations below, holistic learning is suitable as it focuses on the coordination and collaboration of all to provide the best learning experience for the early learner.

Need for Greater Parental and Community Involvement

For preschool children, increased exposure to listening to stories and reading at home is positively associated with boosting semantic language processing. 

It is clear that kids at an early stage of development have to be exposed to oral and written words in school, and at home as well. It’s why holistic learning emphasizes participation of parents and the larger community in teaching the child. 

Holistic approaches not only achieve a more comprehensive and accurate assessment of the child, which is absolutely essential, but the active inclusion of both parental and community involvement can accelerate student literacy skills. 

Parent involvement is crucial for early learning.  Children whose mothers speak more frequently to them learn close to three hundred more words than children whose mothers rarely speak to them.

Holistic learning not only focuses on academic (cognitive) development, but also on mental, physical and spiritual development. The greater community is a big aspect of early literacy as well. Children learn grammatical syntax and social nuances of communication in their community.

By interacting with people, inside and outside the classroom, children have the ability to enhance their literacy skills as well as other social-emotional skills.

Learning is not so compartmentalized at a young age, making different types of skills work in tandem with each other and bolster each other. For example, motor skills help develop speech and thus oral language skills. Oral language in turn fast tracks the path to strong reading and writing behaviours. Total vocabulary size and lexical composition at age 2 is a significant predictor of later language literacy skills from ages 3 to 11.

Need for More Reading Practice

Before actually starting to read books, it is still important to be familiarized with books to develop print awareness. In a study of almost 100,000 schoolchildren in the US, access to printed materials was found to be the single most important predictor of reading acquisition. 

With access to storybooks, the challenge from there on is to read frequently. Children who are read to at least three or more times a week double their chances of scoring in the top 25th percentile. 

Encouragement and demonstration is required both in the school at the home. Without special help, students experiencing reading difficulties at the end of grade 1 find it extremely difficult to gain average reading proficiency by the end of elementary school. It’s helpful for any child if their parents, other family members, and caregivers all read to the child.

How Holistic Learning Imbibes Early Literacy Assessments

Beyond the collaboration aspect of holistic learning, the holistic approach is also a good fit for different types of early literacy assessments.

Curriculum-Based Assessment—Also known as Curriculum-Based Measurement (CBM). CBM directly assesses targeted reading skills over a period of time. In this time, reading fluency and comprehension are assessed repeatedly. 

Similarly, holistic learning does not replace the existing school curriculum, it only supplements it with personalized activities that are meant to develop and assess reading fluency and comprehension, among other things. 

There are annual holistic assessment screens that collect data to initiate and personalize the student’s learning journey. These are followed by more regular formative assessments. 

Portfolio Assessment—Portfolio assessment is a running record of all behaviors, activities and tasks that help us understand how much the child knows and understands about the process of reading. It’s a case of formative assessment, which happens on an ongoing basis.

It’s important to keep track of all formative assessments, and a portfolio dashboard of all activities provide educators a platform where they can monitor their students to see if they are progressing based on the specific recommendations from the holistic assessment. 

Concepts of Print—This is a very particular type of assessment that captures knowledge about how books and print work. It assesses concepts of how letters and words portray ideas, and how illustrations correspond to those ideas. 

Holistic learning includes learning resources such as storybooks. Yes, there are many classroom activities designed to enhance early literacy concepts, but storybooks are a mainstay feature of any holistic education program, given their enormous impact on early literacy development. 

Jennifer Serravallo, the author of The Reading Strategies Book, states that students are at their peak level of engagement during independent reading, and allowing them the freedom to choose what they read boosts engagement. 

But she forewarns that children are not good at monitoring their own reading comprehension. This is where the CBM and portfolio assessment of holistic learning comes into play. They help educators to understand when and how true proficiency has been gained.

Holistic Learning Matches Early Literacy General Assessment Guidelines

Holistic learning follows the general guidelines recommended for implementing assessment into any early learning program. 

1. It aligns well with instructional goals and approaches. As it includes everyone as a part of the holistic assessment process, the viewpoints of educators are also required. 

Sprig Learning’s AI engine recommends the best learning activities based on information provided by all parties, including the teachers. These activities change and grow with the child as learning continues throughout the school year.

2. The teachers familiarize the child with the concept of assessment and conduct the assessment themselves. This builds trust. It is highly recommended that the educators have some degree of involvement in the assessment process. 

With the Sprig Language program, teachers do the assessments themselves. Furthermore, the  assessment is conducted in the child’s usual environment so the setting and context is familiar for the child. 

3. The assessment is a cycle, not a summation. 

Indeed the annual holistic event is not a one time event at Sprig Learning. It builds on information from grade to grade, so any prior learning gaps can be addressed which could be holding back certain students from progressing. New information is also pumped into the engine, which provides a more accurate assessment.

Assessing for Literacy Becomes Fun with Holistic Learning

Literacy assessment does not always mean a high-stakes standardized test that is used for screening purposes. But some form of assessment is necessary. Without it, there is a risk of children progressing without a strong understanding of certain concepts. In Canada, one in four schoolchildren who enter grade 1 are poorly prepared to learn in comparison with their peers or are reading below their grade level. 

With holistic learning, early literacy assessments help teachers assess a student’s progress. It helps them understand how to best support every  student in their classroom. It doesn’t feel like a chore to administer them as can be the case with standardized tests. They are formative in nature, align with the daily routines of the classroom and are seamlessly  integrated into the daily lesson plans.

From the student’s perspective, this removes anxiety and the fear  of taking assessments. It is woven into the system as a means for educators to offer differentiated instruction, and not focussed on comparing students with their peers. 

With greater personalized support, students can advance quickly and not be penalized at a stage of development where every day counts!

To learn more about the holistic approach that can be used to assess students, contact us.