Meeting Early Childhood Educators Where They are: Professional Development Innovations to Enhance Quality Classroom Experiences

Session Type: Paper Symposium

Abstract

Overwhelming evidence indicates that early childhood classroom interactions consistently relate to a range of young children’s developmental outcomes across diverse cultural contexts. Despite advances in understanding the critical role of quality classroom experiences, the early childhood field has made little headway in ensuring all children engage in such experiences. Targeted professional development opportunities have shown promise in improving the quality of early childhood education (Egert et al., 2018). Early childhood educators, however, report difficulty participating in typical professional development opportunities due to time, competing work/family responsibilities, and geographic limitations (Early & Winton, 2001; Shah et al., 2021). This panel explores three new approaches to bring transformative professional development to early childhood educators. The panel will consist of three presentations and a discussant. The first paper examines early educators’ engagement in, satisfaction with and resulting change in knowledge and practices through participating in an online micro-course on supporting positive classroom behavior. The second paper investigates the development of and preliminary results from a hybrid mentoring program for Mexican public childcare educators focused on classroom interactions. The final paper examines results from a brief, self-paced training to increase conversational discourse in early childhood classrooms. The discussant will reflect on emerging lessons learned regarding professional development opportunities that meet early educators where they are. Insights gained can point to concrete strategies to better engage and support the early childhood field. Time will be provided for questions and discussion with the audience to further explore how to increase quality early childhood experiences across contexts.

Sub Unit

• Education, Schooling

Chair

• Jennifer Locasale-Crouch, Virginia Commonwealth University

Discussant

• Jennifer Locasale-Crouch, Virginia Commonwealth University

Individual Presentations

• A Pilot Study of a Micro-Course to Improve Social and Emotional Teaching Practices in Early Childhood - Presenting Author: Kelsey Ann Clayback, University of Virginia - Charlottesville; Jennifer Locasale-Crouch, Virginia Commonwealth University; Pilar Alamos, University of Virginia - Charlottesville

• Piloting a Hybrid Mentoring Program for Mexican Public Childcare Centers - Presenting Author: Erika Dunkelberg; Vesta Richardson; Aurora Bautista; Marta Rubio-Codina, Inter-American Development Bank (IDB); Silvana Freire

• “Saying What You Think:” An Online Conversation-based Professional Development Intervention in Urban Head Start Programs - Presenting Author: Johana Chaparro-Moreno, Boston University; Stephanie Michelle Curenton, Boston University; Jacqueline P. Sims, Boston University; Niya Adlersberg; Sabrina Huang