The High/Scope educational approach is an open framework of educational ideas and practices based on the principles of child development. The High/Scope approach was developed by David Weikart during the 1960's for use in the Perry Preschool program. Now known as the High/Scope Educational Research Foundation, these ideas and practices continue to be developed and refined through work with children, training of teachers, and research.

Based on the work of Jean Piaget, the High/Scope educational approach views children as active learners, who learn best from activities they plan, carry out, and reflect upon. The role of the adult in the High/Scope approach is to plan activities based on the children's interest, facilitate learning through encouragement, and engage in positive adult-child interaction strategies. The concept of active learning comes from the belief that children learn from personal interaction with ideas, direct experiences with physical objects, and application of logical thinking to these experiences.

The components of active learning are, manipulation, choice, language from the children, and support from the adults. The materials typically found in a High/Scope preschool are manipulated by children in a "hands on approach," not teacher directed approach. As children are actively involved with materials, support from the adults helps children to express what they are doing and further develop and refine their language and cognition skills. The High/Scope educational approach supports active learning through a daily routine largely made up of plan-do-review, in addition to other activities described. During the planning process children use language to make a choice about the materials they are going to work with, which provides for a consistent time to express their choice, build on their own interests, and recognize themselves as individuals who act on decisions. Work time allows the children to carry out those plans with the support of the adults to encourage, extend those ideas and provide opportunities to solve problems. Clean-up time is naturally integrated into the plan-do-review cycle at the end of work time. At this time children return materials to their labeled places on open shelves. The other elements of the High/Scope daily routine are small group time and circle time. Small group may be used to develop closer relationships between teacher and children in which the teacher plans the materials for small group and begins the session, but leaves the remainder of the time to the children to explore the materials in an open-ended fashion. During circle time, the whole group meets together with an adult for 10-15 minutes to play games, sing songs, or do basic movement activities.

The framework or curriculum piece to the High/Scope approach is based on the key experiences which guide the teacher in supporting and extending the child's development. Such key experiences include creative representation, language and literacy, social relations and initiative, movement, music, classification, seriation, number, space, and time.

Visit a program using this curriculum:

• Barkley Preschool

Resources:

Web site:

High/Scope Educational Research Foundation

Books:

Title: Educating Young Children: Active Learning Practices for Preschool and Child Care Programs
Author: M. Hohmann & D.P. Weikart
Date: 1995
ISBN: 0-929816-91-9
Binding: Paperback
Pages: 560