Have you ever wondered how CLASS fits the culture of your program? There are three areas that will support your quest of ensuring that your program is taking full advantage of CLASS in your classrooms to support child outcomes and enhance effective teaching practices.
On a hot summer day in July 2016, I had the good fortune of being the one not on vacation on our small policy and research team. Instead, I went to DC to serve as Teachstone’s representative for a convening of policymakers, researchers, and ECE practitioners. They were gathering to discuss if and how exemplary Head Start grantees might be identified for Leading by Exemplar, an initiative funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and led by Bellwether Education Partners.
Decades of evidence indicate that high-quality early childhood education positively affects children. Yet studies reveal that too few programs implement high-quality programming. To date, improvement efforts have primarily focused on what occurs within the classroom. The Ounce of Prevention Fund (Ounce), in partnership with the University of Chicago Consortium on School Research (UChicago Consortium), strives to broaden the focus of improvement efforts beyond the classroom to organizationalconditions that support teachers and the relationships among staff, children, and families.
If you’ve been following the news lately, a lot is going on in North Carolina for young children and families! Leaders across the state—from businesses to state government to county municipalities—are leveraging partnerships that use research-based assessment and professional development models (like CLASS) to guarantee more of the state’s youngest residents have access to the high quality care they need and deserve.
I have a confession to make—I'm a social media junkie. I had to go through a 12-step program to cure my Facebook habit. I had a short relapse, but I was able to kick it again. I tried Twitter years ago, but that just wasn't for me. Pinterest is just straight up evil. I've planned two weddings, a total remodel of a home, and a trip to Hawaii.None of these things is ever going to happen, but Pinterest has robbed me of about 400 hours of time that I put into these nonexistent projects.Instagram is one of those things that I can take or leave.
Education is certainly my calling. When choosing my path as a teacher, the Montessori philosophy captivated me more than most. It was peaceful, harmonious, respectful to the child, reflexive, and intentional.
Tweaking titles, choosing CLASS-themed swag, supporting presenters … it’s just another day at Teachstone with the 4th Annual InterAct CLASS Summit just six short weeks away!
We’ve written before about the discipline disparities between children of color and their white peers. (Since that post was published last year, the Department of Education has released updated - but not improved - statistics on the topic.) But discipline is not the only school arena where children from different backgrounds have different experiences. There’s also evidence that racial bias affects teachers’ academic and behavioral expectations, even in early childhood.
We’ve been talking about the achievement gap for an awfully long time. We’re all familiar with the term; it’s the disparity in academic achievement between different groups of students. We tend to hear about in relation to white students and students of color, but it can also be used to describe the difference between low-income students and their more advantaged peers.
Recently, Teachstone partnered with the National Head Start Association to talk about Why Coaching Matters in a one hour webinar. If you were not able to join us, here are some highlights.
