This Is What Professional Development Looks Like: A Preliminary Sketch of a Dialogic Approach

• In Event: 16.057 - Roundtable Session 5
  In Roundtable Session: 16.057-23 - Challenging Professional Identities in Early Childhood

Abstract

This paper illustrates the possibility for critical dialogue to exist within a more traditional, outcomes-focused evaluation design. We discuss an approach that involves classroom teaching teams responding to both “quantitative” and “qualitative” evaluation data as discussion prompts and in this example explore a disagreement over culturally responsive practice in a toddler classroom. We argue that this process is a means for engaging with the too often unspoken, undiscussed, and uncritiqued assumptions in the field’s received knowledge and “objective” standards of best practice and that fostering dialogue among stakeholders in educational evaluations is both a promising professional development approach and a tactic to address socially reproductive practices that occur in classrooms, including those that serve very young children.

Authors

• Pam Costakis, Educare of West DuPage

• Alana Ferry, Educare of West DuPage

• Jessica Ruiz, Erikson Institute

• Mark Nagasawa, Erikson Institute