Week of the Young Child (WOYC) – Tuesday: Strength-based Model or Practice

 

The strength-based model or practice embodies a student-centered practice of education primarily with the transformative goal of building student’s confident, providing successful opportunities with intentional results towards becoming lifelong learners with a sense of purpose being productive citizens in adulthood.  Early childhood educators who are working towards implementing the strength-based model or practices will focus on the Black student’s strengths along with interests and needs s/he brings into the community learning environment which includes their micro level (family, community) than adapt instructional approaches from their individualization goal plan, small group and large group learning experiences towards motivating student becoming productive member of the community learning environment.  Black student’s family members need to be engaged in the process of defining the student’s strengths, interests, and needs to move forward in facilitating domain skills through scaffolded expectations set for success with a degree of challenge, too. 

 

It is important to bring family members into the planning process showing early childhood educators are reinforcing the use of the whole-child approach and not seeing Black student only from his/her demographic characteristics such as low socioeconomic status, high crime neighborhood, imprisoned family members and others factors not controlled by Black student.  While engaging in the two-way positive communication system all are discussing student’s strengths and areas of growth reinforcing the African proverb “it takes a village to raise (educate) a child” to build this strength-based model or practices motivating families to reinforce school activities at home and other surrounding environments for him/her to achieve domain skillset and not as a disciplinary issue without success of individualized goals set. Early childhood educators must be mindful of Black student’s strengths, interests and needs while building relationships of trust, support and authenticity of caring showing wanting the best of the best from the student in conjunction with family members. 

 

Yes, the strength-based model or practice philosophy explores ways to empower students (Black) to flourish in the community learning environment building on their strengths in conjunction to learning behaviors in social situations.  Early childhood educators must frame the strength-based model or practices as part of the developmental process that required intentionality building upon strengths, interests and needs of the Black students towards becoming productive citizens into adulthood and not becoming a statistic being suspended and/or expelled on the downward spiral of cradle to prison pipeline demise of livelihood.