Education Commons^™

Redefining Quality To Center The Capabilities Of Young Children, Soyoung Park, Sunmin Lee, Nnenna Odim, Jennifer K. Adair

Occasional Paper Series

In this article, we offer a justice-centered approach to measuring and documenting instructional quality that counters traditional teacher evaluations models commonly used in states' Quality Rating Improvement Systems (QRIS). We tell the story of two early care and education practitioners - one teacher and one school leader - who participated in a professional development that focused on learning to observe young children in agentic contexts and finding more ways for young children to showcase, demonstrate, strengthen, or contribute their capabilities. Through these stories, we show how focusing on children's capabilities served to counter the reductionist, hierarchical, and dehumanizing approaches of …