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Teaching Practices

Effective, nurturing, and responsive teaching practices and interactions are key for all learning in early childhood settings. They foster trust and emotional security; are communication and language rich; and promote critical thinking and problem-solving. They also support social, emotional, behavioral, and language development; provide supportive feedback for learning; and motivate continued effort. Teaching practices and interactions are responsive to and build on each child’s pattern of development and learning. They can be measured by the Classroom Assessment Scoring System (CLASS®) and other adult-child interaction tools. These observations may then be used to support professional development. Teaching practices also include how schedules and routines are carried out, how settings are managed, and how children’s challenging behaviors are addressed.

Creating Classroom Rules

This in-service suite describes five steps teachers can follow to generate meaningful classroom rules and teach them to children.

Providing Feedback

Explore this in-service suite to learn how to provide feedback to children that supports them. Teacher feedback can help children’s learning and encourage effort.

Thick and Thin Conversations

"Thick" conversations are the extended back-and-forth exchanges between a teacher and a child. This in-service suite describes teaching practices to engage children in "thick" conversations.

Asking Questions

Learn the strategies in this in-service suite for using questions to extend conversations with children.

Expansions

Expansions are ways to expand on what a child says or does during a conversation. This in-service suite describes how to use expansions to extend conversations with children to promote their language development.