RIGOROUS DAP in the Early Years: From Theory to Practice provides teachers with a roadmap for teaching that helps children meet academic expectations and maintains focus on the appropriate development of the whole child. A construct of eleven practices, RIGOROUS DAP supplies teachers with strategies for 1) making instructional decisions that meet the needs of the individual child; 2) sustaining culturally relevant practices; 3) engaging stakeholders in conversations about educating young children for school success through practices that attend to their individual, sociocultural, and developmental needs; and 4) ensuring all children experience high-level learning and succeed in school.

The eleven practices comprising the construct are:

1. Reaching all children
2. Integrating content areas
3. Growing as a community
4. Offering choices
5. Revisiting new content
6. Offering challenges
7. Understanding each learner
8. Seeing the whole child
9. Differentiating instruction
10. Assessing constantly
11. Pushing every child forward

An academically rigorous learning environment allows all children to learn at high levels through hands-on learning experiences that address the whole child and connect to the child's world in and out of school. A developmentally appropriate learning environment considers the children's developmental, cognitive, social, emotional, linguistic, and physical development, as well as the sociocultural worlds in which they live.