Visible Learning in Early Childhood

This book will establish a common vision for teaching with clarity in early childhood and a common language for talking about what the Visible Learning research looks like and sounds like in practice. The work of our youngest students is play. Play is creative, innovative, and filled with productive struggle and joyful engagement. In the early years, play lays the groundwork for making learning visible. Purposeful play makes children's learning explicit. As they engage in it, children know intuitively what they are trying and testing and what it will look like when they are successful. Through interactions and language, this intuitive knowledge becomes explicit: Young children can describe what they are learning, why they are learning it, and how they will know when they are successful. Aligned with what we know from the Visible Learning research, young children's learning moves through three phases: surface, deep, and transfer. In both play and non-play-based learning, early childhood educators can support children's movement through these phases of learning by selecting the right strategy at the right time. Through authentic examples that depict early childhood settings in three countries, this book will walk readers through experiences and teaching practices in the areas of math, literacy, art and music, and social and emotional learning--