Partnerships between those who care for young children and SMT educators are also becoming more feasible because the two groups share many goals and views about what constitutes developmentally appropriate practices. To wit, each is committed to creating learning environments that foster young children who are curious, eager, questioning, and intent on finding out about the world through observations and experiments. Partnerships between early childhood educators and SMT educators seem most likely to develop because the emphasis on SMT is integral to the definition of high-quality early childhood education. The lack of a single system, however, arguably provides an opportunity to create a rich array of supports through partnerships within a community. These partnerships can create a more intense, varied, and diverse set of learning opportunities for young children.
Most communities now have some sort of formal or informal early childhood coordinating group.
The challenge for national, state, and local professional groups interested in early childhood and SMT education is to identify and work with the coordinating group and get its help in enlisting other relevant groups in a communitywide effort. These types of community agencies and groups create a learning environment for young children. Their involvement, or lack thereof, will influence the intensity, creativity, reach, comprehensiveness, and effectiveness of any SMT education effort. In a community-based effort, such groups and institutions can come together to create SMT education programs and to share materials and resources. Lessons from Community-Based Initiatives for Parent Education and Family Support Research shows that young children learn more from opportunities to experience, shape, and understand their environment than they do from their efforts to master discrete facts or skills.