122 Future Forwards: Exploring Frontiers in Education
be observational in nature and a collection of data that points to which
developmental stage students are at. At the American School of Bombay,
our EC philosophy statement guides our early childhood educators. We
are a play based program, intentional and focused in character, and one
that greatly values child-initiated inquiry.
In our early childhood setting we have a team of highly capable and
trained educators, who spend up to seven hours with many of our
youngest students everyday. Formally and informally, they have infinite
amounts of information about their students. Three years ago, the
question that was raised by our faculty and leadership was to look for an
efficient way for our EC team of educators to document their
observations, look more deeply at what we were doing with that
information, and in the process individualize our program while
honouring developmentally appropriate practice.
After a period of research into available options, it was decided that
assessment in our early childhood division would be done using a web 2.0
tool. We chose the Teaching Strategies GOLD tool. The one aspect of this
particular tool that really set it apart from other options was that it was
based around the four key areas of learning and development in children
aged 0-8. These include cognitive development, the development of
language, social and emotional development, and physical development.
In addition to these are also objectives related to emergent literacy and
numeracy skills.
The tool breaks each big area of focus into developmentally appropriate
progressions or markers, if you like, of where children should be by a
particular stage in their development. For example, under social and
emotional development, a learning objective under the umbrella of
‘Regulates own emotions and behaviors’ is ‘manages feelings’ (Teaching
Strategies, GOLD, 2010). It would be fair to expect that a 3 or 4 year old
may be able to comfort themselves by seeking out a special object or
person, but that by age 5 and 6, the child is being able to delay
gratification (Refer to Picture 1A). As we know with early childhood
development, children never develop in a predictable pattern. The tool
