Pedagogical Strategies for Developmental Activities in Early Childhood Education: A Systematic Review of Teacher Roles, Child Agency, and Holistic Developmental Outcomes

Abstract

Developmental activity strategies in early childhood education (ECE) encompass diverse approaches, including guided play, pretend and role play, interactive storytelling, inquiry, project-based learning, STEAM, learning centers, and nature-based learning. Although each approach has been widely investigated, existing literature commonly evaluates single strategies in isolation and therefore provides limited cross-strategy understanding of how teacher roles and child agency shape learning experiences. This review maps pedagogical strategies used in ECE, examines teachers’ roles and levels of child agency across strategies, identifies reported developmental outcomes, and formulates design principles for holistic developmental activities. The study is designed as a systematic literature review reported with reference to PRISMA 2020. The preliminary search covers empirical journal articles published in Indonesian and English from 2020 to 28 August 2026 using Google Scholar, ERIC, Garuda, and DOI cross-searching. The preliminary synthesis matrix contains 21 empirical reports representing guided play and play-responsive teaching, storytelling and pretend/role play, inquiry and inquiry-project approaches, project-based learning, STEAM/makerspaces, learning centers, and nature-based learning. Initial synthesis indicates that developmental outcomes depend not merely on the strategy label but on the pedagogical interaction structure: goal clarity, meaningful child choice, teacher responsiveness to initiatives, scaffolding, dialogic quality, flexible materials and environments, and ongoing assessment. Strategies balancing intentional teaching with child agency were reported to support engagement, language, early numeracy, problem solving, critical thinking, creativity, collaboration, socio-emotional development, and autonomy. The review proposes the ECE Strategy–Agency Continuum (SA-ECE), positioning developmental activities across teacher-directed, guided/shared, and child-initiated modes and linking these modes to teacher roles, child agency, learning environments, assessment, and developmental outcomes