The following excerpt from the Principles of Early Childhood Education appeared as a two-part series in the Instructional Leader, July and September 2002 issues, Vol. XV, Numbers 4 and 5.

Supporting children’s development during the early years of their life is harder and more complex than most people believe. However, many of the principles applying to early childhood education are relevant to all education and teaching. Some pertain to curriculum design while others concern development more than teaching.

Principle 4 – The principle of optimal effects.

Principle 5 – What is optimal for one child may not be for another!

Principle 6 – Judgments of what is optimal depend on careful and frequent observation.

Principle 7 – Help children learn to cope with setbacks, reversals and obstacles.

Principle 8 - A developmentally appropriate curriculum is one designed on the basis of what children should learn and the means or methods by which they are most likely to learn it.  

Principle 9 – Development has two equally important dimensions: Normative and Dynamic Development. Both of these change with students’ age and the experience that comes with age.

Principle 10 – All curricula should address at least four different kinds of Learning Goals. i.e.,  knowledge, skills, dispositions and feelings.

Principle 11 - A developmental approach to curriculum and teaching practices takes into account both the normative and dynamic dimensions of development, in that what young children should do and should learn is determined on the basis of what is best for their development in the long term (that is, the dynamic consequences of early experience) rather than on simply what “works” in the short term. 

Principle 12  - When young children are introduced to formal instruction too early, too intensely, and too abstractly, they may learn the knowledge and skills offered, but they may do so at the expense of the disposition to use them.

Principle 13 - Learning, especially in the early years, generally proceeds from behavioral knowledge to representational (or symbolic) knowledge.

Principle 14 - When young children are frequently coerced into behaving as though they understand something well, when they really do not (e.g., premature instruction in the calendar or in formal arithmetic), confidence in their own intellects, observations, hypotheses, and questions may be undermined, and in some cases may be abandoned.

Principle 15 - For young children, investigation and observation are ways of learning that are just as natural as play.

Principle 16 - The goal of all education is to engage the mind of the learner in its fullest sense, including its aesthetic, moral, social, and spiritual sensibilities.

Principal 17 - Children’s dispositions to be interested, engaged, absorbed, and involved in intellectual effort are strengthened when they have ample opportunity to work on a topic or investigation over extended periods of time.

Principle 18 - Desirable dispositions are not likely to be learned from instruction; rather, they are learned from being around significant others who exhibit, exemplify, and model them.

Principle 19 - The younger the learners, the more important is the goal to strengthen their disposition to look more closely at phenomena and events in their own environments worth learning more about.

Principle 20  - The younger the learners, the more they learn through interactive rather than reactive and receptive experiences, through direct and first-hand experiences rather than indirect and second-hand experiences, and through active rather than passive experiences.

Principle 21 - The younger the learners, the more important it is that they have ample opportunity to interact with real objects and real environments.

Principle 22  - During the early years, teaching methods and curriculum should emphasize children’s intellectual rather than academic goals. Or perhaps a better way to state this principle is that all young children have lively minds.

Principle 23 - It is useful to distinguish between intellectual and academic goals. 

Principle 24 - The most important intellectual dispositions are inborn and must be strengthened and supported rather than undermined by premature academic pressures. 

Principle 25 - If these dispositions are not supported, strengthened and appreciated, or are otherwise undermined, they are very difficult to replace later in life.

Lilian Katz, Ph.D. is Professor Emerita of Early Childhood Education at the University of Illinois (Urbana-Champaign) and co-director of the ERIC Clearinghouse on Elementary and Early Childhood Education. She has lectured in all 50 states and more than 40 countries.