High Quality Pre-K Starts with Supported Teachers: Understanding Parent Expectations of Pre-K Curricula

In my second year of teaching pre-K, our school started conducting home visits at each student’s home. During these visits, usually conducted near the beginning of the school year, I would travel along with another teacher to visit with each student’s family to learn about their hopes and dreams for the school year. The kids, of course, were usually very excited to have their teacher at their home, but the main purpose of the visits was to hear from the parents.

Conducting these visits helped me learn a lot about the families in my classroom that year, including that many parents were entering pre-K with a wide range of expectations when it came to the ideal curricular focus for the school year. When asked about their goals for the year, about half of the parents would focus on their child making friends, having fun through playful learning, and generally enjoying their first school experience. Other parents would emphasize more academically focused goals, like counting to 100 or identifying all 26 letters of the alphabet.

For many of the parents of my English learner students, there was one clear goal for their child that was more important than all others: to understand and speak English fluently. In recent interviews with pre-K teachers for this blog series, a former pre-K teacher in a District of Columbia charter school also noticed these differing expectations: “Some parents were very focused on how their child was progressing throughout the year on the PPVT [an assessment of vocabulary] and even worried about it, while others seemed confident their kid was doing fine regardless of test results.”

The debate about whether pre-K curricula should be more focused on play or academics, a tension the NASEM report calls “perhaps the most unfortunate” false dichotomy in early education, is not a new one. Back in 2009, experts worried that play was “under siege” in pre-K and encouraged a balance of hands-on, play-based learning alongside developmentally appropriate instruction of academic skills. A 2011 article in Scientific American expressed worries that play-based curricula in pre-K were being replaced by “traditional classroom activities such as lecture, flash cards and tests.” And, in 2016, a much-publicized study of kindergarten classrooms concluded that more time was being devoted to literacy and math instruction at the expense of centers, such as dramatic play areas and water and sand tables. The same study found that the increased focus on academic instruction was particularly notable in schools serving the most children from families with low incomes.

The NASEM report does not endorse specific pre-K curricula, but the authors repeatedly emphasize that a developmentally appropriate curriculum serves to make academic content engaging and meaningful for young children. In one of the report’s conclusions, the authors note that, “[c]hildren learn in a multiplicity of ways, including child-initiated and teacher-guided play, exploration, observation, social engagement, intentional teaching in small and large groups, individual hands-on experiences, and other pedagogy that is responsive to their strengths and interests.” Earlier research has confirmed the validity of this approach to early education curricula, finding that young children need unstructured free time as well as playful learning under the guidance of a trained adult. Curricula that emphasize playful learning, meaning play that is guided by an adult with a clear learning goal in mind, seem to be particularly important for helping children learn math skills, with a greater positive effect than direct instruction on early math learning.

When it comes to differing parental perceptions, the report notes that disagreements about the proper role of play in pre-K curricula can partly be explained by cultural and socioeconomic differences in how play is valued and practiced. A 2023 study examined about 1,200 parents’ attitudes toward playful learning and found that parents with higher levels of formal education were more likely to endorse free play and play guided by a teacher compared to their peers with lower levels of education who were more likely to favor direct instruction from a teacher. Overall, however, the study found that most American parents preferred some sort of play - whether guided by a teacher or the child - over direct instruction, leading the authors to conclude that the research on the learning benefits of play is increasingly resonating with parents. When speaking with pre-K teachers recently, this sentiment was echoed by an educator who now teaches first grade in a North Carolina public school: “I think parents understand more now that play is really important for helping young kids learn and that’s a big part of what they should be doing in a preschool classroom. I’m not sure that would have been the case as much 20 years ago or so.”

For pre-K teachers trying to bring more developmentally appropriate practices into their classrooms, explaining the importance of play-based learning to parents is an essential part of the job. In my own experience, many times this meant reassuring parents that their child was developing normally and doing well even if she couldn’t yet count to 50 like the child sitting next to her. It also means taking the time during home visits or Back-to-School Night to help parents understand that play has a purpose and is the best way for young children to learn. “Once parents understand that kids learn through play and that each classroom center has a purpose, a lot of things you do throughout the year starts to make a lot more sense to them,” said the North Carolina teacher. When teachers are able to guide parents to see the value of a play-based curriculum, parents become allies in reinforcing play-based learning and fostering each child’s growth.