Understanding the HighScope Approach: Early Years Education in Practice

Review: In my view, this text is likely to be of most value to UK undergraduates seeking an understanding of the HighScope approach, the tutors who prepare their teaching materials and early childhood practitioners looking to develop their setting’s provision along constructivist lines. Monica Wiltshire’s aim is to ‘... provide an accurate factual overview of HighScope and thereby present its strengths, correct myths and address criticisms’ (2). This reveals a partisan perspective and readers might have found it helpful had the author provided a more overt acknowledgement of her positioning and substantiated it with reasoned argument. An aspect of the book that will appeal to busy practitioners and undergraduates is its clear structure. Following an initial context chapter focused on HighScope’s history and research to date, each of the subsequent chapters addresses an aspect of the approach. While this model lends a rather descriptive quality, it results in an accessible reference text. In common with other texts in Pat Brunton and Linda Thornton’s Understanding the...Approach series highlighted features include 'key principles’ and ‘key ideas’, which may prove valuable to busy readers, alongside the ‘points for reflection’. Numerous images and case studies exemplify HighScope practice and in doing so ease the reader’s path to correlating the approach with their own practice.