Teachstone has long been an advocate of using CLASS in a variety of educational settings. We're proud to have two case studies about family child care (FCC) settings!
Family child care often presents different challenges for teachers, observers, and admins/directors. FCC providers usually have mixed-age groups, they might involve multiple adults being present in the same room, and they sometimes serve lower numbers of children. A few years ago we published a white paper on FCC homes, Using the CLASS Measure in Family Child Care Homes. In it, we discussed these unique challenges that observers face and recommendations for addressing them.
Our Ventura County Case Study and First 5 Santa Clara County Case Study both discuss how myTeachstone was used in FCC settings to support teachers in their classrooms and to improve teacher-child interactions. myTeachstone is especially effective as it allows coaches to give personalized professional development recommendations to teachers. Teachers are able to learn based on their own individual needs and they get to see what effective teacher-child interactions look like in action.
Our coaches carry a very heavy load. myTeachstone has been a great tool because you can reach a lot of teachers
-Sloane Burt, Operations Specialist, Early Childhood Programs, Ventura County Office of Education
Both counties have had promising outcomes after implementing program such as myTeachstone, CLASS Group Coaching, and A CLASS Primer for Teachers. Specifically, in Ventura County, 97% of the FCC providers said that the myTeachstone work, “influenced their teaching practices and interactions with children, providing new ideas and strategies to implement." Not to mention, the county's CLASS tool scores beat national averages in every domain!
If you run a family child care center and want to learn how CLASS can help your teachers and students, shoot us an email. We love talking to different programs and helping them figure out how they can improve teacher-student interactions and student outcomes!
Do you have fond childhood memories of sitting with a special adult and listening to them read one of your favorite stories? I vividly remember my dad reading The Elephant’s Child by Rudyard Kipling to me and how we laughed together at the funny voices he used. As an educator, you know how important those moments are for building warm connections, enjoying time together, and learning about many things. So, even if you missed out on those moments as a child, you want to create those moments for the children in your classroom. With careful planning, you can be confident that your read-alouds will be exciting, effective learning opportunities.
As part of our Teacher Spotlight series, we recently asked the CLASS Community to nominate a teacher whose high-quality classroom interactions are making a difference for their dual language learners. Our winner, Kim Schoell, has been teaching for 20 years and is currently a Pre-K teacher in Frederick County, VA. 67% of her students are Hispanic and many of the children are dual language learners.
We were really happy to receive an article examining the use of CLASS in American Indian and Alaska Native Head Start Programs. And we were equally happy when lead author, Jessica Barnes-Najor, a researcher at Michigan State University, agreed to speak with us. In conjunction with her work at MSU, Jessica is a co-investigator for The Tribal Early Childhood Research Center (TRC). Read below to learn more about this important research.
The following is a highlight of the discussion from a recent webinar on trauma-informed strategies. You can watch the entire webinar, Interactions at the Heart of Healing – CLASS-based Strategies for Supporting Teachers and Children, which is part of our free Trauma-informed care webinar series.