Development Is a Journey, Not a Race

When we are in settings with lots of children of the same age, in a society that sees time as a precious commodity and getting ahead and being first as prime goals, it is hard not to see development as a race to achieve milestones. Taken to extremes, early childhood can feel like a sprint-first to stand, then to walk, to talk, to control bodily functions, to run, to read, to write, and on and on. But development is not a race and earlier is not better, nor is earlier generally an indicator of future development. Your child benefits from the individual, measured pacing of the journey, not from achieving developmental milestones at the earliest possible moment.

Why Track Development?

We track development to create developmentally appropriate curricula for the children in our program. We provide early care and education for children in groups. But your child is an individual, and our quality care and education stems from our ability to view the group as a collection of individuals and on that basis plan the environment, routines, activities, and projects.

We also track development to answer the question: Are we succeeding in helping each child learn? What is your child learning and to what degree? The process of tracking development focuses on the child's strengths-not on "How smart is the child?" but on the more important question, "How is the child smart?" We track development to:

Be in tune with your child so that we can construct an environment and provide the kind of interactions with others that empower the child and enhances the child's development.

Gain a picture of the child's strengths in order to understand how your child is smart, resilient, and competent.

Make sure we are aware of areas in which your child may have special needs that the program or family needs to take into consideration.

Assure that your child is gaining the appropriate skills and understandings for success in school and life.

Cautions

Tracking, or more realistically, trying to track your child's development and make decisions based on that knowledge is a process that has the power to do as much harm as good. Imagine that you are in a situation where you are being observed, tested, interviewed, and analyzed for others to make decisions about your daily life and future - what you should do or could do, where you should be, what skills you should develop, whether you are ahead or behind the curve. Imagine the information and judgment that follows you as you move throughout your life.

The main concerns about developmental assessment come from having an either incorrect or incomplete picture and using it diagnostically to structure the child experience to improve or accelerate development in a fashion that does not respect the complexity of individual development. The same picture that helps us respond to children with sensitivity can be used to typecast, to make unfair comparisons, or to adopt a narrow perspective.

The World at Their Fingertips is not a diagnostic curriculum that takes developmental information and designs a program for each child to meet expectations. The World approach assumes that an experientially rich learning environment organized for child choice and teachers who create opportunities in tune with the developmental characteristics and ideas of the child will provide the child with the nourishment in which to grow and flourish. World assumes that together parents and teachers will approach the child with respect for the strengths the child has and the rich complexity of the development journey.

The World Portfolio is an integral tool for planning curriculum, tracking development, and making learning visible so that parents and teachers will have a clear sense of what their children are learning.

What is a World Portfolio?

The World Portfolio is a collection of observations, work samples, pictures, anecdotes, recordings, and other artifacts that document your child's experience. It is a scrapbook that records experience and achievements and evokes a range of memories (proud, warm, or possibly anxious), helping you and your child's teachers capture and understand the child's experience. It is also an organized record of the observations and insights of all of the caregivers-parents and faculty-who have cared for the child during his or her journey at a Bright Horizons Family Center. Portfolios will include material that creates a picture of the child's growth and development over time in a particular skill or area of understanding. Examples might include changes in a child's drawing, writing, block creations, or language experience over a period of months; an infant's progressive ability to coordinate vision and motor coordination; or a toddler's growing vocal development.

A World Portfolio is more than just a record, however; it is an active instrument that assists in the planning process for your child and aids in the transitions children will make throughout their time at the center. It is something that teachers, parents, and children (when older) will use to reflect, set goals, and consider experiences. As a complement to the Child Observation Record, it will include observations, anecdotes, and materials that demonstrate each child's individual strengths and competencies as we answer the questions "How is your child smart?" and "How do we, parents and teachers, support your child's development?"

An Ongoing Collection

The World Portfolio begins at enrollment and continues throughout your child's experience at the center. In both the paper and the electronic versions, the Portfolio documents your child's (and family's) developmental journey and entire Bright Horizons experience. The portfolio is initially created at the enrollment conference, grows with the child's experience at the center, and is shared at subsequent conferences as your child transitions throughout the program. Periodically, you and your child's teachers will decide which items to keep in the portfolio and which to send home or discard.

Using the World Portfolio

The portfolio's value is that it is a "live" instrument to be used in planning, building the parent partnership, and helping the child to reflect and develop a sense of accomplishment.

Sharing the World Portfolio with Parents and Children

The portfolio is a parent-teacher-child vehicle, and parents and children are encouraged to view and add to the portfolio at any time. Parents (and children) are encouraged to add observations and include samples and artifacts of the child's work and play at home.

The World Portfolio is also an essential component of the parent conference, which is a time to share observations and celebrate the child's achievement. As children grow older and enter the preschool, the World Portfolio becomes important to them. It is their history, a record of their short but rich past. Children are encouraged to add to the portfolio work that they feel is meaningful or best represents their struggles. It may represent:

An extraordinary effort (a block tower, a painting, a hunt for worms)

A first time (riding a trike, writing the letter J)

Using a new medium (real clay)

A fascination or obsession (big trucks, ponies)

An event significant to the child (performing a play, my friend Emma's last day at the center)

As children include items, help them discuss and reflect on what the item represents and why it is important. Use the time as an opportunity for complex thought and language.

The Child Observation Record (COR) creates a child development profile that is a key component of the World Child's Portfolio, used to systematically chronicle the developmental journey for parents and faculty to provide children the care and education they deserve. The COR is designed to help answer the questions:

• What can the child do?
• What has the child learned in past months?
• Which developmental milestones and challenges lie ahead?
• What can we - parents and faculty - do to support and promote the developmental journey?

Note: There are a number of child observation records and profiles in use at Bright Horizons Family Centers. However at this writing, we are working with the High Scope Foundation and are in the process of developing the Bright Horizons Child Observation Record for use in all centers, available in 2001. There will be a CD ROM/ paper version and an online version.

How the Child Observation Record Process Works

The process begins with parents and teachers sharing observations using the Child Observation Record at the enrollment conference or the first parent-teacher conference. On a quarterly basis until age 2 and semi-annual basis thereafter, parents meet with their child's primary caregiver/teacher to complete a Child Observation Record on paper or online. By completing this questionnaire together, parents and Bright Horizons faculty are in a unique position to create a picture of the child's experience across the child's world. The Child Observation Record considers a child's interests and abilities across different critical areas of development. After the record is complete, parents and faculty will have a comprehensive profile of the child to add to the child's portfolio.

The Infant Toddler Child Observation Record and the Preschool/Kindergarten Observation Record cover the following areas:

Sense of Self (Infant/Toddler) - Initiative (Preschool/Kindergarten)

Social Relations

Creative Representation

Movement (Infant/Toddler) - Music and Movement (Preschool/Kindergarten)

Communication and Language (Infant/Toddler) - Language and Literacy (Preschool/Kindergarten)

Exploration and Logic (Infant/Toddler) - Logic and Mathematics (Preschool/Kindergarten)

Together these areas encompass the skills and understandings that children need to be successful in school and life.

Sense of Self (Infant/Toddler) - Initiative (Preschool/Kindergarten)

Through their actions with objects and interactions with trusted caregivers, infants and toddlers gradually begin to understand that they themselves exist as separate and individual beings. As children develop, they construct an image of themselves as distinct and capable people who can both influence and respond to their immediate world. Initiative is the child's ability to begin and follow through on tasks. It is the power to make and carry out choices and decisions. As children develop, they initiate and carry out activities of increasing complexity, solving problems and coordinating their activities and ideas with others.

Social Relations

Children's social interactions begin as soon as they discover the presence of others in their world. Infants and toddlers learn about how human beings act and treat one another through their day-to-day interactions with parents, family members, caregivers, peers, and other adults. These early social relationships influence their lifelong approach to people, the manner in which they develop attachments, become empathetic, make friends, work cooperatively, lead and follow, work through conflict, and express feelings naturally and appropriately.

Creative Representation

Representation is the process by which children depict objects and experiences through imitation, pretending, building, artwork, and written language. Infants and toddlers build a critical body of direct experience from their ongoing sensory-motor explorations. They learn to imitate the actions of others, interpret pictures and photographs of actions and objects they have experienced, and begin to use actions and materials to show or represent something they know about their world. Gradually, with repeated experiences, they begin to form mental images of the object or person. This process is the beginning of representation - the ability to internalize or mentally picture an absent person, object, or action.

Representing is important developmentally because it indicates that young children, who tend to see things in very concrete terms, are moving toward a more abstract understanding of their world - from the world that they only understand though their senses to the world that they understand through symbolic thought. This area tracks how children represent their thoughts and feelings.

Movement (Infant /Toddler) - Music and Movement (Preschool/Kindergarten)

Motor activities are important to all areas of child development, including, but not limited to, physical development. For infants and toddlers developing sensory-motor skills, movement plays a major role in all learning. Their emerging sense of themselves as doers and people of action is strongly connected to their developing ability to control their motions, communicate through the language of gesture and action, handle objects with ease, and move at will from place to place. Children explore and represent themselves and the world around them through movement. They develop important physical abilities by becoming aware of what their bodies can do when they move with and without objects. As they move, they acquire an understanding of the concepts and language that are connected to actions, positions, and space. This area also tracks their ability to respond to music.

Communication and Language (Infant/Toddler) - Language and Literacy (Preschool/Kindergarten)

The development of communication and language abilities - listening, speaking, reading, writing - is critical to a child's success in school and life. This area tracks children through their earliest communication efforts in speaking and listening, in how they show interest in the spoken and printed word and stories, following directions, vocabulary, and beginning to read and write.

Exploration and Logic (Infant/Toddler) - Logic and Mathematics (Preschool/Kindergarten)

From infancy children explore the properties of things, relationships, and concepts of number, space, and time. They are observers by nature; much of what they learn, right from the beginning, results from keen observation and from their natural inclination to learn through sensory exploration and physical manipulation of objects. As they develop, they begin to order and classify the elements in their world. They construct their own understanding of concepts in logic and mathematics as they work with materials, people, events, and ideas. They learn the language of the basic concepts of logic and mathematics from the people in their lives.