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Archive for the ‘Professional development & preparation’ Category

Professional Development Event Attracts SRO Audience

Posted in Professional development & preparation, Reading proficiency on March 6, 2013 | Leave a Comment »

From left to right: Janet McKeon, Patricia Padilla, Barbara Steckel, Julie Russ Harris, Doug McNally

It was standing room only at the second event in our Leading the Conversation series on implementing the recommendations in “Turning the Page: Refocusing Massachusetts for Reading Success,” the report we commissioned in 2010 from Nonie Lesaux, Ph.D., a literacy expert at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. The February 28 event at The College of the Holy Cross in Worcester focused on designing and implementing professional development programs that support the language and literacy development of children from birth to age 9. The message was clear: Professional development should be ongoing, student-focused, data-driven and linked to practice. (See: Leading the Conversation: Professional development.)

Julie Russ Harris, research manager at HGSE’s Language Diversity and Literacy Development Research Group, opened the morning by noting that too often professional development has been delivered in off-site workshops. She recommended expanding professional development to include early educators, paraprofessionals and health care professionals. She recommended fostering instructional leadership and site-level professional development that aims for continuous improvement. “We need to encourage depth of learning with professional development that is ongoing and intensive,” she said. “It needs to be embedded in a long-term plan.”

A panel of four educators shared their experiences. (more…)

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Memos: Professional Development for Literacy

Posted in Professional development & preparation, Reading proficiency on January 31, 2013 | Leave a Comment »

Photo: Kate Samp for Strategies for Children

Two memos from Harvard’s Lead for Literacy series offer suggestions for making professional development more effective in promoting young children’s development as readers.

“While most educators receive professional development (PD) focused on literacy skills and strategies, at scale current efforts aren’t working to improve children’s literacy,” one of the memos states. “If we are serious about training educators to deliver instruction that will boost literacy rates, then we need to make PD for educators more directly connected to children’s needs and more intensive.” (See “Designing Professional Development for Instructional Change.”)

The key, the memo notes, is to use data to design professional development that targets children’s needs. In addition, professional development must be ongoing – rather than one-time workshops – and tied to a long-term plan for improvement. (more…)

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Community College Lab School Trains Early Educators

Posted in Assessments, Early educators, Pre-kindergarten, Professional development & preparation, Standards and curriculum on November 26, 2012 | 1 Comment »

Charlene Mara

WORCESTER – It’s hokey pokey time at the Children’s School in  Quinsigamond Community College’s Child Study Center. Twenty preschoolers stand in a circle and put their right hands in and shake them all about. The adults in the room include three classroom teachers and four college students of early education. The students’ professor is observing through a window in the corridor when Charlene Mara, faculty coordinator of Quinsigamond’s early childhood program, and I stop by to watch.

The Quinsigamond program is a lab school, where students apply what they learn in their college classroom upstairs to the early education classroom downstairs. For one semester, they observe veteran early educators, who serve as mentors and model the best practices that the college students studied. In the second semester, students practice what they learned. At day’s end, the early educators join the students and faculty to discuss how they applied theories of child development and classroom management to their practice. The program, Mara tells me, is one of the few associate degree lab school programs, intertwining the academic with experience-based practice. It is also accredited by the National Association for the Education of Young Children.

On the day that I visit, the topic is group time. How did the early educators successfully transition children to circle time? How did they use strategic positioning? How did they introduce a new topic? What were children learning in circle time? How did the early educators guide the children from sitting to standing for hokey pokey? How does the hokey pokey meet the pre-kindergarten curriculum standards that Massachusetts aligned with the Common Core State Standards?

“This is the glue,” Mara says. “When we’re working on something with the students upstairs in the college classroom, that’s what the focus is down here in the Children’s School. (more…)

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At the October EEC Board Meeting

Posted in Dept. of Early Education and Care, Early educators, MA state budget, Professional development & preparation on October 22, 2012 | Leave a Comment »

Early education and care providers testifying at the October meeting of the Massachusetts Board of Early Education and Care  set the stage for the presentation of Commissioner Sherri Killins’s proposed  $50 million increase for FY14. The department’s FY13 budget is $488.1 million. Public funding of early education in Massachusetts has decreased $82 million since FY09.

One after another, six providers lauded the department for its efforts to increase quality – through such things as the Quality Rating and Improvement System (QRIS), support for early educators earning college degrees and assessments. One after another, they detailed their need for more funding to keep pace with the increased demands.

“The reality is as much as we support these innovative programs, additional investment is needed,” Sharon Thompson of Community Day Care of Lawrence told the board. She is losing staff to the public schools, which pay $13 an hour for paraprofessionals. “We can’t compete,” she said. (A little quick arithmetic: Someone working fulltime year-round for $13 an hour earns about $27,000 a year.) “Many of our staff,” Thompson added, “can’t afford health care even though we cover two-thirds of the cost.”

Dean Solomon of the Council of Social Concern in Woburn told the board that 20% of his early education and care staff use his agency’s food pantry. “There’s no money to give them the increase they deserve. When we can it’s very small,” he said. “I’m looking for someone with a degree. They don’t want to come.”

Amy O’Leary, director of our Early Education for All Campaign, also testified. “We know what the research tells us” about the benefits of high-quality early education, O’Leary said. “If we are serious about closing the achievement gap, we have to just as serious about funding.”

In the budget discussion, (more…)

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Focusing on Teacher Behavior Helps Change Attitudes

Posted in Professional development & preparation on October 3, 2012 | 1 Comment »

Photo: Kate Samp for Strategies for Children

Researchers have long known that students respond to teachers’ expectations of them. Now, according to a recent story on National Public Radio, Robert Pianta of the Curry School of Education at the University of Virginia, is examining whether focusing on teacher behavior, rather than simple verbal instruction to change teachers’ attitudes, yields better results. Pianta’s work builds on a 1964 experiment, in which Robert Rosenthal of Harvard administered an IQ test to children and told teachers that it predicted that several children, chosen at random, were poised to take big intellectual leaps.

“As he followed the children over the next two years, Rosenthal discovered that the teachers’ expectations of these kids really did affect the students. ‘If teachers had been led to expect greater gains in IQ, then increasingly, those kids gained more IQ,’ he says,” NPR reports. “But just how do expectations influence IQ? As Rosenthal did more research, he found that expectations affect teachers’ moment-to-moment interactions with the children they teach in a thousand almost invisible ways. Teachers give the students that they expect to succeed more time to answer questions, more specific feedback, and more approval: They consistently touch, nod and smile at those kids more. ‘It’s not magic, it’s not mental telepathy,’ Rosenthal says. ‘It’s very likely these thousands of different ways of treating people in small ways every day.’”

Pianta gives an example of how teachers’ attitudes affect their behavior. Take, for instance, a teacher who believes boys are disruptive. (more…)

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More than 1,000 MA Early Educator Scholarships in FY12

Posted in Early educators, Professional development & preparation on August 6, 2012 | Leave a Comment »

The Massachusetts Early Childhood Educators Scholarship program continues to be a critical source of financial support for working early educators returning to school to earn college degrees. In the fiscal year that just ended, 1,004 scholarships were awarded. (See our brief on the scholarship.) Recipients used their scholarships to attend 48 public and private community colleges, colleges and universities across the commonwealth, with 59% attending public institutions and 41% attending private ones.

Established by the state Legislature in fiscal year 2006, the scholarship program is designed to increase the number of early educators with college degrees and, thus, to increase the quality of early education and care programs in the state. Research shows that teachers’ training, education and compensation levels are the main determinants of the quality of early education and care programs. The most effective preschool teachers, research suggests, have bachelors’ degrees and training in early childhood education or child development.

(In the video above, Doreen Anzalone, who used the scholarship to return to school, talks about how earning a B.A. has made her a better teacher.)

The Early Childhood Educators Scholarship is part of a larger scholarship program administered by the Massachusetts Department of Higher Education. In its first year of funding, more than 1,000 educators applied for the $1 million available, and 614 scholarships were awarded. Recognizing this strong demand, the state tripled funding in FY07 and awarded 743 grants. Despite a challenging fiscal climate, the state awarded $3.2 million in FY 10, FY11 and FY12 – and preserves this funding level in FY13, which began July 1. To date, Massachusetts has allocated $24.8 million in cumulative funding on the scholarship program and awarded more than 5,000 scholarships.

Here is more information on FY12 scholarship recipients from the updated brief: (more…)

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In Quotes

Posted in Early educators, K-12, Pre-K to 3, Professional development & preparation, Quotes on June 15, 2012 | Leave a Comment »

“At least some of the answers to turning around our nation’s struggling K-12 public schools can be found at the nearest preschool….  At a time of considerable urgency and demand for improvements in our nation’s schools, particularly when it comes to evaluating the effectiveness of teachers, there is no need to reinvent the wheel. Instead of looking to the development and implementation of new educational models and methodologies, K-12 educators would do well to learn from the lessons and experience accrued by their counterparts in the early childhood sector, specifically when it comes to teacher performance evaluation.”

Robert Pianta, Curry School of Education, University of Virginia, “Implementing Observation Protocols: Lessons for K-12 Education from the Field of Early Childhood,” May 2012

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K-12 Can Learn from Early Education

Posted in Early educators, K-12, Pre-K to 3, Professional development & preparation on June 13, 2012 | 2 Comments »

Photo: Kate Samp for Strategies for Children

“At least some of the answers to turning around our nation’s struggling K-12 public schools can be found at the nearest preschool.”

With this admittedly “counterintuitive” statement, Robert Pianta, dean of the Curry School of Education at the University of Virginia, begins his recent report on teacher observation, published by the Center for American Progress. Citing “decades of experience using observation in early childhood education,” Pianta contends that two major observation systems contain important lessons for efforts to reform teacher evaluations used in K-12 settings.

“At a time of considerable urgency and demand for improvements in our nation’s schools, particularly when it comes to evaluating the effectiveness of teachers, there is no need to reinvent the wheel. Instead of looking to the development and implementation of new educational models and methodologies, K-12 educators would do well to learn from the lessons and experience accrued by their counterparts in the early childhood sector, specifically when it comes to teacher performance evaluation,” Pianta writes in “Implementing Observation Protocols: Lessons for K-12 Education from the Field of Early Childhood.” (Full report  /   Introduction and summary)

“Early childhood education has long embraced the value of observing classrooms and teacher-child interactions. In early childhood education the features of the settings in which children are served are the hallmarks of quality. These features can include health and safety considerations, the materials and physical layout of the space, and the interactions that take place between adults and children — such as conversations, emotional tone, or physical proximity. Standardized observations of these early childhood education features in turn yield metrics that are used in state and federal policy, program improvement investments, and the credentialing of professionals — all uses that K-12 education is now considering.” (more…)

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“Creating a Culture of Quality” for Early Education

Posted in Dept. of Early Education and Care, Early educators, Early Learning Challenge, Head Start, NAEYC, Professional development & preparation, QRIS on February 28, 2012 | Leave a Comment »

Amy O'Leary visits Boston preschool (Photo: Kate Samp for Strategies for Children)

My colleague Amy O’Leary, director of our Early Education for All Campaign, tells a story that illustrates how far the field of early education and care has come over the past several years.

Amy has been going to meetings of the Boston Alliance for Early Education  since she was a preschool director in Boston’s South End neighborhood in the 1990s. “It was originally designed as a support group for directors,” Amy recalls. “The conversation often focused on overflowing toilets and the day-to-day logistical challenges of running a center.”

Much has changed since then, not the least of which came in December 2011 when Massachusetts was named one of only nine states awarded a federal Race to the Top – Early Learning Challenge grant. Back in 2005, Massachusetts merged its child care and early education agencies to create the nation’s first consolidated Department of Early Education and Care. The same year it established the Early Childhood Educators Scholarship. In 2006, the state created the Universal Pre-Kindergarten grant program to support and sustain quality. Head Start and the National Association for the Education of Young Children, an accrediting body, started to phase in bachelor degree requirements for early educators. In 2011, Massachusetts launched an evidence-based Quality Rating and Improvement System, which defines tiers of quality that include teacher education and training, curriculum, and assessment.

With these changes, the conversations have changed, too. (more…)

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MA Seeks Early Education College Completion Specialist

Posted in Dept. of Early Education and Care, Early educators, Professional development & preparation on January 12, 2012 | 1 Comment »

Photo: Michele McDonald for Strategies for Children

The Massachusetts Department of Higher Education and the Department of Early Education and Care are in the process of hiring a part-time “early education and out-of-school-time college completion specialist,” who will be housed at the Department of Higher Education.

This is welcome news at a time of increased efforts to improve the education, training and compensation of the early education workforce. The Quality Rating and Improvement System includes the education of early educators and administrators as a key factor in determining quality. Both Head Start and the National Association for the Education of Young Children (a major accrediting body) are phasing in BA requirements. The state’s Early Childhood Scholarship provides $3.4 million for early educators returning to school to earn college degrees.

According to the job description, (more…)

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