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Facilitated Work Group: Professional Development

Session I
Facilitator: Sue Bredekamp, Director of Research, Council for Professional Recognition
Group Scribe: Barbara Scott, State Technical Assistance Specialist, Region 2, National Child Care Information Center
Note Taker: Dianne Stetson, State Technical Assistance Specialist, Region 1, National Child Care Information Center

Session II
Facilitator: Dorothy Strickland, Professor of Reading, Rutgers University
Group Scribe: Susan Rohrbough, State Technical Assistance Specialist, Region 5, National Child Care Information Center
Note Taker: Tracy Dry, Information Services Coordinator, National Child Care Information Center

KEY ISSUES AND CHALLENGES

The Need for Professional Development
The work group participants identified several key issues and challenges with regard to early literacy and professional development. One of the main messages is that professional development is an on-going, continual process, and for it to have intrinsic value requires time and support for reflection. This facilitates internalization of the learning rather than solely the development of skills, and is the difference between transferring a set of procedures and embracing a philosophy. Professional development needs to help staff become consciously competent, help staff themselves as educators, and help them translate the early literacy principles and practice to parents.

Supports and Challenges
Ongoing professional development needs to be supported by articulation agreements around training that link to a defined educational outcome, such as a credential, CEUs, BA or MA. Coordination of training efforts among agencies also needs to occur. Educators and agencies need to know which training is valuable; so much training is available but not much data exists on what works. It can be difficult to decide what to spend training money on, and researching the options takes time and energy. An additional challenge is the time spent repeating training due to staff turnover. How do we get beyond this? Real professional development takes time, but you can't build on learning when there is a 40 percent staff turnover rate.

We also need to partner around funding and regulations, similar to what occurs in partnerships among Head Start, child care, prekindergarten, and family child care. Coordination of funding will impact cross-training among these groups.

The Need for Appropriate Training
What does early literacy really mean? How do you appropriately train people to teach/facilitate early literacy with young children? A child developing literacy skills is not just learning literacy, but is also developing a sense of culture and identity and place in the world. We need to ensure that early literacy does not become teachers drilling young children with a series of ditto sheets and flash cards. In the educator's professional development, teacher training needs to be appropriate to children's ages, individual developmental levels, and cultures.

We know that not only the content of professional development, but also the delivery, needs to be developmentally appropriate. Certain skills are needed by those facilitating and teaching literacy development courses. Trainers need to have leadership skills, knowledge of professional ethics, and the ability to anticipate the issues that participants need to address to implement a practice in the classroom. In addition, professional development programs need to be cost effective. There are very few resources to support training needs.

Training for Staff with Low Literacy Levels
Another issue in early literacy and professional development is the education level of the early education workforce. In rural areas in particular, some child care providers are barely literate. This provides a unique challenge to the goal of promoting literacy in young children—how do you reach these providers?

The success of a literacy program can be negatively impacted when staff have low levels of literacy and a child goes home to a family that provides little support for literacy development. We need to incorporate a curriculum in our program that not only reaches a child in the classroom, but also works with and engages parents and staff.

It is a challenge to get people to realize that they need training and then to provide it in a way that is supportive and doesn't require too much change. Distance- learning and "face to face" professional development need to incorporate teacher support to transfer learning into the classroom. Coaching is an innovative practice. But it may not be necessary for everybody, and the cost may be prohibitive. The logistics of training also is an issue—people must be able to access the training.

Link to Research
When we adopt innovative practice, it needs to be done with high fidelity and evaluated for that setting. It may not work in all settings and for all populations. The field needs to make sure innovative practice is based on valid scientific research for the age-appropriate population, not just school-age children. Technical assistance papers can help the field adopt innovative practice and collaborate and articulate across systems.

Literacy Initiatives
Participants identified the following programs and approaches:

  • HeadsUp! Reading is a distance-learning strategy that provides parents and early childhood educators with frontline training and professional development. The course is targeted at an Associate-level degree audience. Students receive a total of 20 two-hour live broadcast sessions via satellite to agencies that subscribe to HeadsUp! Each State has a site; seven States have funded the initiative, and one uses it as its major early literacy initiative. Approximately 90 colleges are offering the course for credit. The entire course is translated in Spanish. All handouts are on the Web. Programs are televised, increasing accessibility. Additional information is available on the Web at http://www.heads-up.org.
  • RIFNet, RIF's (Reading is Fundamental) distance-learning initiative, delivers literacy-based programming to educators, librarians, and parents nationwide via satellite television, videotape, CD-ROM, and the Internet. Programming is distributed through the direct broadcast satellite (The Dish Network), local cable companies, distance-learning networks, and public television. Videotapes may be purchased for viewing in areas not served by the network.

Both HeadsUp! Reading and RIFNet have reached out to include family child care providers, and RIFNet has also done this with kith and kin caregivers, which is particularly noteworthy since it is difficult to get funding for work with unregulated providers.

HIGHLIGHT OF KEY RECOMMENDATIONS

  • Promote understanding of the need for professional development in the early care and education field.
  • Integrate social and emotional development, early literacy, early numeracy, and school readiness in educational discussions at every opportunity. Identify effective models of integrated curriculum.
  • Provide quality dollars for literacy and professional development money for literacy through CCDBG reauthorization.
  • Fund evaluation of professional development.
  • Provide professional development for trainers. Target development of additional and existing upper level (Masters and Ph.D.) early care and education faculty and include a strong focus on early literacy development knowledge.
  • Examine the use of mentors. Look at models working on-site for individual teachers, such as Dr. Landry's CIRCLE model and the Department of Labor (DOL) apprenticeship models.
  • Support the professional development staff who are mentoring, coaching, and/or training others working with children.
  • Strengthen the work on articulation and training that carries into a defined educational outcome, whether is it a credential, CEUs, BA, or MA.
  • Build incentives from various sources into professional development initiatives.
  • Improve the ability to translate research into practice, addressing standards as well as funding, so that programs can better act on existing research, such as information from the From Neurons to Neighborhoods report.
  • Employ distance-learning and other technology as delivery methods.

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