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Elements of a Professional Development System for Early Care and Education: A Simplified Framework and Definitions

FUNDING

  • Scholarships for professional development, courses, degrees
  • Compensation/retention initiatives: Strategies for increasing compensation to retain qualified personnel and linking increases in qualifications to increases in compensation.
  • Program quality awards
    Tiered reimbursement: increased payment rates based on quality in the State's child care subsidy system.
    Tiered quality rewards: direct payments based on quality not tied to State child care subsidies.

CORE PROFESSIONAL KNOWLEDGE

  • Core body of knowledge/core competencies: The range of knowledge and observable skills that adults working with young children need to facilitate child learning and development, linked to early learning guidelines.
  • Career Lattice: Levels of mastery connected to a progression of direct service roles in the field (Teachers, directors and administrators, family child care providers and operators).

QUALIFICATIONS AND CREDENTIALS

Preservice requirements: Minimum qualifications that staff are required to have prior to assuming their position.

  1. Child care licensing regulations
    Family child care, center staff, administrators
  2. Public School regulations
    Teacher certification, administrator certification
  3. Head Start Performance Standards regarding staff
    Teaching staff, component coordinators, directors

Continuing education requirements: Ongoing training staff are required to obtain to remain in their position.

  1. Child care
  2. Public prekindergarten
  3. Head start

Credentials: A credential is a document certifying that an individual has met a defined set of requirements set forth by the grantor of the credential, usually related to skills and knowledge and may include demonstrations of competence.

  1. Director credentials
  2. Infant-toddler credentials
  3. School-Age credentials
  4. Family child care credentials
  5. Certification by National Board for Professional Teaching Standards

Pathways leading to qualifications, degrees, and credentials

  1. Articulation agreements among levels of higher education: Written agreements among institutions of higher education to accept credit for courses taken at those institutions. Some agreements set up jointly developed and delivered degree programs, e.g., between one or more community colleges and one or more four-year colleges.
  2. Training Registries
  3. Credit-bearing workshops and training series (CEUs and college credit)
  4. Credit for prior learning: Systems used by most institutions of higher education for granting credit for learning acquired through life and/or work experiences.

QUALITY ASSURANCES

  • Trainer approval (standards and registries): Set of standards and qualifications for individuals who offer training; registries: database of trainers and their qualifications and standards met.
  • Training approval: Set of standards that training must meet, usually linked to core knowledge and to principles of adult learning.
  • Evaluation Processes: Built into each element and/or component; an iterative process. Evaluations benefit from beginning analysis to provide ongoing benchmarks for outcome assessment.

ACCESS AND OUTREACH

Online database of training and education opportunities

  1. Training calendars: Published lists of trainings for personnel, which generally include short descriptions, locations, dates, and times of training sessions.
  2. Directory of college degree programs
  3. Training registries: A database that tracks all completed personnel training.

Career development advising: Process of informing individuals about entry and continuing education requirements for professional roles in the ECE field and supporting the individual to assess current qualifications, identify education resources, and plan his/her own career advancement with attention to population's cultural and linguistic frameworks.

Multiple professional development delivery methods

  1. Distance learning
  2. Courses as modularized workshops: credit-bearing courses that are deconstructed into a set of related workshops.

Professional Development System

Image of Professional Development Tree, click image for explanation