Early Childhood Education Commons^™

Developing Social and Emotional Skills in Early Childhood Instruction: A Delphi Study

Purpose: The purpose of this Delphi study was to explore social and emotional learning in early childhood instruction with an emphasis on identifying the methods expert early childhood teachers use to support and promote the development of empathy and emotion regulation, to have the teachers rate the impact of these methods, and to identify the specific activities used to implement the six most highly rated methods.  

The early skills of Emergent Literacy include the knowledge and abilities related to the alphabet, phonological awareness, symbolic representation, and communication. However, existing models of emergent literacy focus on discrete skills and miss the perspective of the surrounding environment. Early literacy skills, including their relationship to one another, and the substantial impact of the setting and context, are critical in ensuring that children gain all of the preliminary skills and awareness they will need to become successful readers and writers. Research findings over the last few decades have led to a fuller understanding of all that emergent literacy includes, resulting …

Although the successes of some research-based educational practices have been documented, equally recognized is the “deep, systemic incapacity of U.S. schools, and the practitioners who work in them, to develop, incorporate, and extend new ideas about teaching and learning in anything but a small fraction of schools and classrooms” (see also Berends, Kirby, Naftel, & McKelvey, 2001; Cuban, 2001; Elmore, 1996, p. 1; Tyack & Tobin, 1992). There may be no more challenging educational and theoretical issue than scaling up educational programs across a large number of diverse populations and contexts in the early childhood system in the U.S., avoiding …