PHQP_0019 Programming Consistency delves into the value of consistent early learning programs. Jeff outlines a six-tier hierarchy—vision, mission, philosophy, policies, procedures, and practices—to ensure clarity and alignment for staff, kids, and parents.

Watch Now: PHQP_0019 Programming Consistency

Welcome to the Playvolution HQ podcast. I’m Jeff Johnson. Thanks for pushing play on the show.

So, I’ve got a new scary thing I’ve started working on. I did the 50 mile walk and now I needed something new so I’ve decided I’m gonna learn guitar. Now, I have no sense of rhythm.

I have no musical sense. I have very, it appears, uncoordinated fingers but I decided this would be a great old guy thing. I can practice a little bit at a time.

It’s gonna build my proprioception. It’s apparently good for the old brain to learn new habits like this and it’s gonna be fun. So, stay tuned for updates on my progression.

I ordered the car, I can barely say guitar, ordered the guitar the other day. It arrived, the amp hasn’t shown up yet. It’s a nice little Squier Stratocaster.

I’ve decided, I’ve made sure Tasha, my wife, knows already that I’m not gonna get real good at playing this guitar because I don’t wanna have to buy leather pants and deal with groupies and have a heroin addiction. But I should learn to play a song or two. It’s gonna be fun.

So, let’s move on into things. Topic one, the one and only topic for this week, program consistency. So, let’s dig into it.

I meet a lot of confused caregivers. So, picture somebody working in a toddler room with a co-worker, maybe they’re the lead teacher, maybe they’re not and they wanna make a change but they don’t have their co-worker on board and so they struggle or they struggle because things are done one way in the toddler room and a different way in the preschool room and then a third way in the school age room. And not just age-based differences but really philosophical differences for the way kids are dealt with.

Or maybe somebody is a member of a professional organization that says one thing in their shiny, glossy, three-fold handout and does other things in practice. It’s really hard to know where you stand in a lot of these situations. And one thing having a consistent program, one thing program consistency does is it lets everybody know where they stand and that can be valuable.

So, what am I talking about? I’m talking about continuity and predictability for programs. And we’re gonna get into this in a minute but ideally, an early learning program and we’ll focus on child serving programs, programs providing child care right now. These programs want to be consistent.

They want to be predictable. They want parents to have a unified vision of what their philosophy and mission is because then everybody’s on the same page. Everybody is trying to work towards the same thing.

Everybody knows what they’re supposed to be doing. But when programs lack that, when one room does things one way because that’s the way Ms. Kim has done things for 35 years and somebody new comes into the classroom next door and wants to try things differently and that’s okay too because hey, we got people to show up for the job so just having warm bodies here might be enough. It can get really confusing for kids, parents, and staff.

And so continuity and predictability come from having that program consistency that I’m talking about. So here, a little over a year ago, I put together a six-tier hierarchy of I think about what we need structurally in programs to have this consistency. So let’s kind of go through those.

So starting out, we got a vision, a vision statement. And this is how we want the world to be. And this can be broad.

This can be beyond your program. I envision a world where all children have joyful, happy childhoods, something like that, something broad-based, something aspirational, an aspiration for the future. And that becomes a guide for everything that follows on this hierarchy I put together.

And so first you build a vision. I’ve got links, I think I’ve got it in the show note for this episode about building vision statements. And each one of these six things, we’ll come back to them and do individual resources and know there’s already some resources about them on the Playvolution HQ site.

So next is mission. This is the statement about why we are here in terms of your program. And so your mission statement is really, really a statement of the organization’s purpose.

So maybe your mission is, our mission is to support children in their self-directed playful learning. And it can be something as simple as that. In fact, in my review of program handbooks, what I’ve seen is that mission statements often get long and convoluted and sound like they were written by a committee.

And that makes it really hard for them to be useful in terms of consistency because they try to cover so much ground. So a mission should be very short, very simple, very to the point, and state why we are here as an organization. And again, we can come back to this in more detail in a future episode.

Next is philosophy. So this is what we believe. This is the core values and principles of the program.

I think the best way to write this up is as a bulleted list of what we believe. We believe children learn through self-directed play. We believe children need large blocks of time for self-directed play and exploration, whatever it is.

And you can name check Piaget and Peter Gray and Angela Hanscom and whoever else your philosophy is based on in your philosophy statement. That philosophy statement is, again, what we believe and our core values and principles. And these philosophy grows from the mission, which grows from the vision.

It’s kind of an inverse pyramid we’re kind of building here. And so next up is, I gotta find the right place to click, sorry. There we go, I got lost for a minute.

So next up is policies. And you can think of your policies as what we say we do here. And these are clear statements of position on given subjects.

Now, I say what we say we do here because there’s often conflict between what we say we do here and what we do here. You can think about policies as what we intend to do here. And this is clear statements of positions on a given subject.

So your policy might be, we engage in messy play. And we are closed these days out of the year for holidays. And this is our operating hours.

And here’s how we deal with injuries. And here’s what we do if there’s a tornado warning and those kinds of things. So your policies, again, what we say we do here.

And they grow from your philosophy, which grows from the mission, which grows from the vision. And so next we have, I don’t know why I forget where to click, procedures. And procedures are how we say we do the things here.

How we say we do things here, excuse me. And so you can think of if policies are what we do, you can think about procedures as how we do those things. Policies should be, these are how our policies should be implemented.

These are how we go about making our policies actionable. This is how we go about making our policies real for those around us. So if our policy is that we close on these particular days, procedure for closing on those days is, okay, we give parents a reminder a week ahead of time and we make sure those days are all listed in the parent handbook.

And when parents are walking out the door the day before a holiday, we make sure that they know, hey, remember, we’re closed Monday. Those kind of things. And that’s what our procedures are.

Our procedures for dealing with injuries might be one group of statements. And our procedures for dealing with medication administration, for example, might be a little bit more precise in detail because there’s not a lot of flexibility in those things. Whereas our procedures for muddy play, our policy might be we engage in muddy play on a regular basis and how we go about it might be open to interpretation by the staff so they’ve got a little bit more flexibility.

So procedures, sometimes they’re very rigid and controlled. Sometimes they’ve got more flexibility. And again, we can get into those in future episodes in some more depth.

And then next up, finally, is our practices. And you can think about practices as what really happens here. All the real world choices made through the course of a day.

And if your program is consistent, every one of the daily practices that staff engage in is based on a procedure or a policy or the philosophy or the mission or the vision and the vision of the program. They all lead back to that vision. And if you can build this through thread through all six levels of this hierarchy, then you’re probably gonna have a fairly predictable, fairly consistent program where children know what to expect where parents know what to expect.

And that’s a good thing. Because we’re living in a world where there are a lot of early learning staff people that are just kind of muddling through because they don’t know what’s expected of them. It’s to the point where I’ve met lots of early learning people who’ve never seen their programs, policies and procedures.

They don’t know what they are. They have no idea what their program’s mission or philosophy or vision is. And that might be because the program doesn’t have any of those things, or it might be because they’re not shared with those staff people.

And that can be a struggle for those staff people. So not only should programs have a vision, a mission, a philosophy, policies, procedures, and then pay attention to their daily practices, they should have all that stuff in writing and it should be shared with staff during the onboarding process. And all those things should be shared with parents during the onboarding process because that’s what builds a cohesive, consistent program.

And that, again, that consistency benefits staff, kids and parents. There is a handout I put together on the Playvolution HQ website called the 60-Year Programming Consistency Hierarchy. And I, of course, have linked to it in the episode notes for this year episode if you wanna get deeper.

And again, I think we’re gonna dig deeper into each one of those different layers of that hierarchy in future episodes because I think there’s a lot more we can get into on those things. Moving on, or wrapping up, I’ve gotta get to guitar practice. Policies and procedures.

I’ve got a whole section on policies and procedures, which is really what we’ve been talking about here for the last couple of minutes. It’s all based on the Playvolution HQ website. I’m putting together sample policies.

There’s a bunch of articles that either I put together, some contributors have put together, or we’ve linked to on policy and procedures. And I try to grow that at a fairly regular pace. The articles are tedious, put up it together for that section so it doesn’t maybe grow quite as fast as I’d like it to, but I’m planning on working on that more in the coming year.

So check that out. Amazon idea for this month. I really like this one.

I was looking through some of the things that people have used my Amazon link to purchase in the last month or so, and somebody bought these coin collection album pages, 20 pocket pages, clear pages for their three-ring binder coin collection, I guess. I guess you could use these to collect other things, but I think that’s kind of neat. I didn’t even know people collected coins anymore, so I kind of thought that was cool to see.

You can buy coin collecting pockets or just about anything else over there on the Amazon. And if you use my Amazon portal link to get to the site, it just supports Playvolution HQ website and this podcast, and it’s much appreciated. Next up, always every week, I like to say it, share it if you like it.

If you find anything here valuable, share it. If you find any of the links in the episode notes valuable, share them. That’s how we grow.

Next week, we’re gonna dig into schema play, just kind of the basics of schema play, and then we’ll go into detail of some different play schema in future episodes beyond that. And then to wrap up, dad joke of the week. Ready for this? Why don’t eggs tell each other jokes? Why don’t eggs tell each other jokes? Because they might crack up.

This has been the Playvolution HQ podcast. I’m Jeff Johnson. Back soon with an episode.

Thanks for listening. Bye-bye. This has been an Explorations Early Learning Upstairs Studio production.

I’m Jeff Johnson. I’ll see you next time.

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