Feeds:
Posts
Comments

Archive for the ‘Professional development & preparation’ Category

Leading the Way: Sarah Mills — from preschool teacher to legislative aide

Posted in Child care, Cost and affordability, COVID-19, Diversity equity and inclusion, Early educators, Family engagement, Infants and toddlers, Pre-kindergarten, Professional development & preparation on January 8, 2021| Leave a Comment »

Sarah Mills

How do you go from being a preschool teacher to working as a legislative aide in the Massachusetts State House? 

For Sarah Mills, it’s all about loving the work of interacting with young children. 

In elementary and middle school, Mills enjoyed helping out with infants and toddlers who were enrolled in her public school’s preschool program. 

As a Syracuse University college student, Mills got a work-study job at her campus’ early education center. 

And when she came to Boston to attend graduate school at Simmons University, she needed to work full-time, so she found a job at KinderCare in downtown Boston where she spent half her time working with infants and half her time working in the afterschool program. 

“When I was younger, I just loved kids; they were so much fun to hang out with,” Mills recalls. “It’s really exciting being with kids who are ages zero to five because you get to watch them go through so many significant milestones, whether it’s their first steps or their first words. Being with kids at this age is truly joyful.” 

“Another wonderful thing is that you get to know the families. I had a lot of families with first-time babies, and so I had the responsibility of helping to educate them and helping them to feel comfortable, because it’s scary to drop your child off for the first time with people you’ve just met. And I was working before the paid family leave law. So I saw parents who had no choice but to bring children who were six weeks or 12 weeks old to our program.”  (more…)

Read Full Post »

Celebrating a champion for early education and care – a guest post by JD Chesloff

Posted in Business and economy, Child care, COVID-19, Early educators, Guest Blog, MA Legislature, Pre-kindergarten, Professional development & preparation, Strategies for Children on December 30, 2020| 1 Comment »

House Speaker Robert DeLeo. Photo: Alyssa Haywoode for Strategies for Children

 

In my nearly 30 years in and around state government, and currently as the Executive Director of the Massachusetts Business Roundtable, I’ve learned that three elements are necessary to move a policy agenda: unassailable data and research; a robust grassroots field operation; and a champion… someone who makes the issue their top priority. For years – since I worked for the Early Education for All Campaign and long before – Strategies for Children has produced great data and organized and energized the field. And for years, Speaker Bob DeLeo has been the champion.

As the Speaker ends an extraordinary career in public service, I’ve been reflecting on his determined and effective leadership in early education and care. It’s an issue that is a perennial priority for the Roundtable and one that has afforded me the opportunity to work closely with DeLeo. Early on, he understood the connection between high quality early education and economic growth. In a seminal speech before the Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce in March of 2015, the Speaker noted the innate connection between economic growth and education, calling early childhood “game changing” and urging the business community to take a leadership role in advancing public policy in this area. (more…)

Read Full Post »

Early childhood workforce challenges before — and after — the pandemic

Posted in Child care, COVID-19, Dept. of Early Education and Care, Diversity equity and inclusion, Early educators, Federal, Massachusetts Cities and Towns, Pre-kindergarten, Professional development & preparation, Research on December 10, 2020| Leave a Comment »

 

A few months before the pandemic hit, the University of Massachusetts Boston conducted a survey of the early education and care workforce.

The survey results are a pre-pandemic snapshot of a shaky situation that policymakers can use to understand the toll that the pandemic has taken on providers.

“The COVID-19 pandemic has demonstrated that early care and education is a key piece of infrastructure for the economy,” Anne Douglass, the executive director of UMass Boston’s Institute for Early Education Leadership and Innovation, says in a blog post. “Parents need early care and education options that are high quality and affordable because when child care isn’t available, parents can’t work.”

The institute released a report on the survey results along with UMass Boston’s Center for Women in Politics and Public Policy and its Center for Social Policy. The survey was commissioned by the Department of Early Education and Care.

One important lesson from the survey, Douglass says, is that “returning to pre-pandemic ways of doing business is not an option.” (more…)

Read Full Post »

An app helps adults share rich language with children

Posted in Family engagement, Language development, Literacy, Professional development & preparation, Reading proficiency, Strategies for Children on December 1, 2020| Leave a Comment »

 

“What we know from the research on reading – and what was just confirmed by the national Reading for Understanding Initiative – is that kids need more language. They need more knowledge. And they need foundational mechanical skills to be able to read individual words automatically,” Joan Kelley says.

“The problems that are hardest to address later on are the language and knowledge gaps. Kids need high dosages of rich language, which is a 24/7, 365-days-a-year job for families and educators. But no one tells families what their specific role is or how to get this job done.”

So Kelley came up with an app for that.

An alumna of Harvard’s Graduate School of Education, Kelley has seen children struggle with reading for years – and so has the rest of the country. As we’ve blogged before, even in Massachusetts, a state known for educational excellence, third grade reading levels have lagged, especially for children from disadvantaged backgrounds. We highlighted this in our 2010 report, “Turning the Page: Refocusing Massachusetts for Reading Success,” which Kelley contributed to.

The COVID-19 pandemic has made educational gaps worse by forcing districts to close schools and erode children’s learning opportunities. A study published by the American Educational Research Association says that students experienced a “COVID slide,” a more stark version of the “summer slide” learning loss that normally occurs when schools let out in June. The study estimates that because COVID-19 “abbreviated the 2019-2020 school year,” students would lose “roughly 63% to 68% of the learning gains in reading,” so only about two-thirds of what they would have learned if the pandemic had not occurred. (more…)

Read Full Post »

Leading the Way: Tracey Williams teaches early educators about their professional history

Posted in Early educators, Higher Education, Play, Professional development & preparation on October 9, 2020| Leave a Comment »

“The most important part is to have the students become more aware of the profession that they’ve chosen,” Tracey Williams says of teaching Introduction to Early Childhood Education at Cambridge College. Williams, a Boston Public School special education teacher, is one of Cambridge College’s senior professors.

“A lot of my students have early childcare positions and jobs where they get a lot of practice, but they don’t know the theory behind what they’re doing.”

So Williams, who has had a long career in early education and K-12 special education, teaches her students about Jean Piaget, the Swiss psychologist, and Lev Vygotsky, the Russian psychologist, both of whom studied child development as well as about Maria Montessori, an Italian physician and educator.

“We talk about the importance of play. We talk about the history of Head Start, NAEYC and how state standards evolved. We talk about family engagement, inclusion, and working with kids who have disabilities. We talk about how early education started, and we look at the impact of the industrial revolution and John Dewey,” an education reformer. 

“Because we talk so much about the early history of child care, I wanted to bring students forward into the present, so I asked them to research early educators of color.

“At Cambridge College our students are very diverse, and I want them to understand that theory doesn’t just stop. Theories evolve and education evolves, and both spread into new areas of education. Also, we had discussed a lot of people who were not of color, and I wanted them to learn about people who were.” (more…)

Read Full Post »

Beyond the pandemic: an early education and care roadmap

Posted in Child care, Cost and affordability, COVID-19, Early educators, Facilities, Federal, Funding, National, Professional development & preparation, Strategies for Children on September 24, 2020| 2 Comments »

Right after the COVID-19 pandemic hit the United States, early childhood education (ECE) advocates were dealing with the immediate crisis and, simultaneously, talking about what the global health crisis would mean for the future.

“We wanted to create a space for that conversation,” Albert Wat, a senior policy director at the Alliance for Early Success, said on a recent Strategies for Children Zoom call.

“We met almost weekly for four months,” Wat says of the 13 states and eight national organizations who joined the conversation. Strategies for Children, an Alliance grantee, represented Massachusetts. “We didn’t want to limit ourselves to current fiscal and policy constraints.”

Instead the group talked about a “North star,” an untethered vision of what the country could do to rebuild child care.

“We wanted to be bold, but we also wanted to be pragmatic,” Wat said.

The result is “Build Stronger: A Child Care Policy Roadmap for Transforming Our Nation’s Child Care System.” (more…)

Read Full Post »

Creating equity for children

Posted in Achievement gap, COVID-19, Demographics, English language learners, Funding, National, Pre-K to 3, Professional development & preparation, Research on July 24, 2020| 3 Comments »

Report screenshot

 

Even before they are born children face systemic inequalities.

A new report digs into this national problem.

“More than half of the 74 million children in the United States are children of color, and they are served by learning systems that are gravely inequitable. The COVID-19 pandemic and its effects on the health, economic wellbeing, and education of young children, only exacerbate existing inequalities,” according to the report, “Start with Equity: From the Early Years to the Early Grades.”

Released by The Children’s Equity Project, at Arizona State University, and the Bipartisan Policy Center, the report is, according to its website, “an actionable policy roadmap for states and the federal government—as well as for candidates at all levels of government vying for office—to take meaningful steps to remedy these inequities in early learning and education systems.”

These themes are also explored in a related webinar series. Links to recordings of the first two webinars, which took place earlier this month, are available on the report website. The next two webinars will be on Tuesday, July 28, 2020, and Thursday, August 6, 2020.

The report and webinars draw on two meetings of “more than 70 experts from universities, think tanks and organizations.” These experts focused on three policy areas where inequities persist: (more…)

Read Full Post »

Shining a spotlight on mental health

Posted in Child care, COVID-19, Family engagement, Health, MA Legislature, Pre-kindergarten, Professional development & preparation, Social-emotional development, Strategies for Children on July 8, 2020| Leave a Comment »

Photo: Kate Samp for Strategies for Children

 

Here at Strategies for Children, COVID-19 has kept our advocacy focus on funding, health, and safety. Now that early childhood programs are reopening, we want to shine a spotlight on mental health.

As children, parents, and staff members continue to navigate life during a pandemic, they may need help managing mental health challenges.

Young children face a particularly high risk of being negatively impacted by the pandemic, Aditi Subramaniam said during a Strategies for Children Zoom call. She is the Early Childhood Mental Health Partnership Manager at the Massachusetts Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children.

Children may experience intense feelings or regress developmentally, and it may be emotionally tough for them to engage in social distancing, Subramaniam added. Fortunately, this risk can be mitigated by ensuring that children receive nurturing, responsive, and consistent care from caregivers and providers.

To help children, caregivers and providers can draw on several resources. (more…)

Read Full Post »

Early education’s tangled knot

Posted in Early educators, National, Professional development & preparation on March 17, 2020| Leave a Comment »

Strategies for Children is working with the early education community to share urgent needs and advocacy strategies to mitigate the effects of the coronavirus. If you are a parent or early educator and would like more information at this time, please contact Amy O’Leary at aoleary@strategiesforchildren.org.

 

 

 

The Washington, D.C.-based think tank New America is pointing to a tough knot that’s challenging the field of early education – and New America is proposing ways to untangle this knot.

This “long-standing thorny knot,” New America says, is composed of three of the field’s “most challenging issues: preparation and education, compensation and status, and diversity and inclusivity.”

These issues are addressed in “Moving Beyond False Choices for Early Childhood Educators—A Compendium,” which is “the culmination of an 18-month blog series that engaged diverse viewpoints.” These viewpoints agree in some areas and dissent in others.

Last week, New America hosted a related event (recorded in the YouTube video above) to discuss these issues.

Among those trying to untie early education’s knot is Albert Wat, a senior policy director at the Alliance for Early Success.

How, Wat asks in the opening essay of the compendium, can the field ask early educators to earn higher education degrees and simultaneously preserve diversity? And, “How do we acknowledge the competencies and diversity of the field’s incumbent workforce and at the same time, build an even stronger profession for the future?” (more…)

Read Full Post »

Advocacy Day Recap

Posted in Dept. of Early Education and Care, Early educators, Funding, Head Start, MA Legislature, MA state budget, Pre-kindergarten, Professional development & preparation on March 10, 2020| 1 Comment »

 

Last week, 350 people (many of them strategically wearing red) came to the Massachusetts State House for Advocacy Day for Early Education & Care and School Age Programs.

 

Caitlin Jones and Leishla Diaz of The Guild of St. Agnes in Worcester

 

The morning started with speeches from legislators and the commissioner of Early Education and Care – as well as remarks from a parent and from another parent who became an early educator.

 

 

Afterwards, attendees went to meet with the legislators. Here’s a recap of what the speakers said. (more…)

Read Full Post »

Older Posts »

%d bloggers like this: