Teachstone's guest bloggers come from many backgrounds including teaching, education policy, and research. If you are interested in writing a post please fill out the form on our guest blog application page.
A recently published issue brief by the Learning Policy Institute examines exactly what it would take to create cooperative early childhood education (ECE) policy change in California. The issue brief presents recommendations to California policymakers on how to improve early childhood education for all children. These recommendations are based on a previous report: Understanding California’s Early Care and Education System.
This post was originally published by the McCormick Center for Early Childhood Leadership.
I often think about my time working as a director in a child care program and wonder how different things would have been if I had known then, what I know now. As time passes and I gain new experiences and insights on leadership in early childhood education, I frequently ask myself what I would do differently if I could relive that period of time. In my reflection, I have realized that my conclusions are from my point of view. Recognizing that the experience I had as a program administrator affected so many, I thought it would be interesting to learn what my team would like for me to have known.
CLASS is a research based tool that measures teacher-child interactions in Pre-K-12 classrooms and in settings that serve infants and toddlers. I'm one of the biggest cheerleaders of this tool. I believe if I had had this professional development tool while I was a teacher it would have impacted my teaching implementations and positively affected my students’ learning outcomes.
In this day and age, the likelihood of finding an opinion or theory that everyone agrees on seems impossible. The world of early education is no different. Though most educators and parents agree that Pre-K serves as the foundation for increasing the likelihood of a child’s success later in life, there is still dissent surrounding how Pre-K programs should be managed to maximize this success.
This weekend the city that Teachstone calls home was taken over by hatred. Some of us witnessed the violence first hand. Others watched from afar through social media and television willing that our friends and coworkers would be safe.
Teacher professional development (PD) is often defined as, “structured professional learning that results in changes to teacher knowledge and practices, and improvements in student learning outcomes" (Darling-Hammond, Hyler & Gardner). Research has illustrated that teacher competency and skill is directly correlated to student achievement. Policy makers, educators, parents, and students alike, all have a vested interest in identifying the central aspects of effective teacher PD to enhance student outcomes.
Social and Emotional Learning (SEL) is having its moment in education. SEL and CLASS program developers and practitioners would be well-served to better understand how SEL and CLASS initiatives are intricately intertwined, and how they can help drive positive outcomes in each area.
In preparing summer professional development for teachers, my district knew we wanted CLASS to play a larger role in our trainings. But how were we going to do that?
Once we began writing our training on centers we decided to videotape some of our model teachers to highlight interactions in each specific center—in essence, we wanted to create our own internal version of the CLASS Video Library.
Research has long examined the different ways in which students gain from early childhood education, but two new studies from Tulsa have shown some new areas of gains in Head Start Programs, as well as school readiness gains being closely predicted by the CLASS tool. While variation between classes and schools continue to be a problem in early childhood education outcomes, CLASS is driving schools towards greater success.
As anyone who has been to a CLASS training can attest, we are all about incremental growth, resisting the urge to promise a “quick-fix.” But, it can be hard to resist the urge to promise overnight changes, even though many indications point to slow, steady improvement being more likely to lead to lasting change.
