Professional Presentation

Your task is to create a developmentally appropriate classroom management plan for a selected age level within the PK-3 classroom. Your plan should reflect your individual personality, teaching style, and philosophy of education. It should also define your goals as an early childhood educator and reflect your ability to synthesize the knowledge and insights gained from the readings, research, and discussions.

Your paper will be eight to ten pages in length, not including title and reference pages, and formatted according to APA style as outlined in the Ashford Writing Center. You will need to include at least four scholarly sources, including your course text. Additional style expectations are included below, after the description of the sections for your paper.

Content Expectations
 
Your philosophy regarding children and learning. The foundation for everything you do as an early childhood educator is your philosophy about children and how they learn. It informs both your vision and daily decisions. In this section

Describe your philosophy (e.g., values, goals, and beliefs) about children and how they learn. Be sure to include an explanation of how your philosophy connects to the one or more theories regarding learning and development that you most favor.
Your room design. Your room design is a key component in whether you will be successful in implementing and brining to life your philosophy. In this section

Describe the climate you intend to create and your plan for managing logistics and transitions through the effective use of space, focusing only on one age/stage (infants; toddlers; preschoolers; kindergarteners; grades 1-3).

Create a classroom map that is appropriate for the age/stage you will be working with.

Explain your rationale for furniture arrangement, use of wall space, shelving and materials, and control of environmental factors, etc.

Discuss how this room design is congruent with your philosophy.

Your plan to ensure physical and psychological safety. As you have learned, creating ground rules and expectations that ensure physical and psychological safety is a primary duty of early care and education teachers. In this section

Justify your classroom expectations by relating them to children's cognitive, physical, and emotional development.

Devise a behavior and guidance plan with at least three specific behavior and guidance strategies you expect to implement.

Describe how you will share your behavior and guidance plan, including strategies, to parents and assistant teachers.

Your approach to curriculum planning. Your curriculum must also be congruent with your values and goals as a teacher. It includes both the content and sequence of that content that we teach, and may vary from teaching academic content, to teaching the wonder of life, to teaching an infant that his or her needs will be met. In this section

Describe a curriculum model or approach you plan to use, including three relevant examples of the typical content and interest areas for this model.

Relate your approach to curriculum planning to the values and goals expressed in your philosophy and room design.
Your Teaching Strategies and Procedures. Teaching strategies and procedures are the tools we use to bring the curriculum (the content we teach) to life. Along with the content we choose to teach and the values we impart through the way we design our rooms and how we choose to guide children's behavior, our teaching strategies provide the means by which to bring our vision and philosophy to life in just the right way for each and every child. In this section

Construct a statement and rationale for the main pedagogical strategies you plan to use to bring your curriculum to life.

Describe at least five examples of specific teaching strategies and connect them to the values and goals expressed in your philosophy.

Your plan for meeting the needs of diverse children. You will teach or work with a diverse group of children in your career as an early childhood educator. The children you teach may come from cultures that are not reflected in mainstream education and/or they may be developing and growing in ways that are atypical for their same-age peers. As early childhood educators, your goal is to create an inclusive environment that meets the needs of each and every child in your care. In this section

Create a plan to take into account considerations of culture inclusivity for each and every child in your program.