Educational Tenets of the Highscope Curriculum

Abstract

The HighScope Curriculum and Assessment System is the integrated set of educational practices, content, and assessment procedures developed, disseminated, and supported by the HighScope Educational Research Foundation. While some educators use the word “curriculum” to refer to a particular content area such as reading or science, HighScope uses the term to describe all the components of a comprehensive and integrated early development program. Curriculum thus entails a set of teaching practices for adults, learning goals for children, a professional development model for practitioners, and assessment tools to monitor program quality and children’s progress. A HighScope learning environment is quite different from that in the typical classroom. It is made by recognizable activity areas, where different purposes are identified (such as the areas for reading, making artwork, and playing with blocks). The central educational tenet of this curriculum is active participatory learning. That means through this curriculum young children are able to actively participate in their knowledge generation by means of their interactions with the HighScope learning environment. This will be specifically illustrated in this chapter.