Reflection post for 6162

It is a pleasant and fast journey to learn from peers who are from different parts of the world. Both Kate and Rose inspires me a lot for continuing exploring the EC filed. I am so grateful for their sharing about their profession. I am still not a EC practitioner, but from learning from them, I gained a lot.

For example, every EC practitioner is for the well-being of the children, no matter where they are from. Second, love and caring are the first for being with children, I can see it from them. Third, there are so many challenges for the EC practitioners. We hope all the society can understand and support us for it. 

Poverty is one of the international awareness of the issues and trends, we should work together for solving the problem for the children, our future!

The dream as EC professionals

The following are the responses from Kate Turner. For professional growth, she let me feel once we have an aim, looking for fulfill the task will be alright. Thanks so much for the dream sharing, she inspires me to think about my dream and goals more clearly and let me move forward.

• What issues regarding quality and early childhood professionals are being discussed where you live and work?

                  There are many issues regarding quality where I live and work.  We do not have many highly qualified applicants for a special needs preschool position when needed, as it requires an additional endorsement and more classwork.  This limits the amount of highly qualified preschool teachers when they are hired, which then requires the new teachers to return to school to achieve the additional endorsement and lessen their focus to the classroom.  We also have had some teachers who were highly qualified to begin with, and who were terrible once in the classroom.  We have once had a teacher (for only a year) who would state that she didn't like kids or anything about kids.  She wouldn't touch or go near children with snotty noses or help with rest-rooming the children.  It was sad.

• What opportunities and/or requirements for professional development exist?

               Because I teach in a public school setting and am hired by a public school district to teach preschool, we have multiple opportunities to professional development.  However, it is whatever the school sees fit for the building of preK-5 teachers so it is not often very applicable to my own needs for professional development.  Typically, our special education director (who oversees all special education teachers preK-grade 12) will approve many free professional development courses through our local support team that is about an hour away.  She doesn't always approve ones that will cost additional funds.  Our program requires us to have so many hours per year (I am unable to recall the exact amount), and to continue renewing our licenses through the state, we have to show a certain amount of hours spent in professional development.

• What are some of your professional goals?

                I would love to one day become more active in my role as a leader in the preschool program.  While I currently am a teacher, I would love to be able to be a program director or administrator so that I could help support teachers from a more knowledgeable viewpoint.  I become frustrated with how preschool is not always held so highly when compared to the rest of the grade levels when it is the foundation, so one of my goals would be to educate others as to the importance of preschool education.

• What are some of your professional hopes, dreams, and challenges?

              Same as above!  :)  My dreams were once to open my own preschool and run it the way I believe it should; with teachers who are highly qualified and highly valued by administrators and children who love to learn and need help.  My challenges are the constraints I feel currently by administration, I hate jumping through all of the hoops to prove a child needs help when it is so clear from the beginning.  Another challenge is funds--we could do so much more with more funding to our program.  Everything we ask to do always comes down to how much it will cost the program.  It would be a dream to not have to worry about that at all!  :)

Below is from another colleague Rose.

• What are some of your professional hopes, dreams, and challenges?

My professional hopes and dreams are that I would like to run my own preschool and learning center. I enjoy working in the classroom currently because it gives me the chance to learn more about how the children grow and learn. I feel we can learn so much more from the children than just reading a book. I know this will be challenging because working as a director of a center can be very stressful. I think the biggest challenge would be finding good and reliable teachers for the three age groups, infants, toddlers, and preschool. At this moment i just hope to grow as a teacher and be successful in my classroom. I want to be sure the children in my class get all the chances to grow and learn as possible each and every day.

education equity in research

I tried to find out researches in early childhood field in China from internet, but I found very little web site providing research results, but some commercial organizations using some overseas research to advocate for their caring programs. So I checked NIEER(http://nieer.org/) this week to understand the recent researches especially equity in United States. I found out what they research are quite through, they provide researches in “Access, assessment, quality and curriculum, special education, economics and finance, state pre-k evaluations, English language learners…”, it is quite interesting to look at the information, and reflect about why I can not find anything like this in China.

When I read the news 10-Year National Preschool Study Finds Decreased Support for Quality and Greater Disparities in Access, I found out some similar situations like what happened in China, for example:

• “Enrollment increased dramatically for 4-year-olds over the decade, but funding did not keep pace. The recession led many states to limit funding, intensifying a long-term trend in the wrong direction.  State expenditure per child fell by more than $1,100, adjusting for inflation.
• Access to quality preschool education heavily depends on where a child lives. Ten states do not fund pre-K. Among those that do fund pre-K, enrollment, standards, and funding differ in the extreme. Without federal action these interstate inequalities are likely to persist.
• States have far less data available to inform policy regarding their preschool programs and the children they serve than they do for K-12 education. For example, many states cannot report enrollment for children by ethnic background, home language, or family income.”

It gives me a broader viewpoints to check the quality in early childhood field from different aspects. Things are interconnections with each other, when we talking about EC field, we need to check economics, politics, and other different kinds of aspects to thoroughly understand it.

Exploring 3 things in Harvard University Early Childhood Development initials

I choose to explore something from Harvard University Early Childhood Development Center.

They have a program in Brazil to help the community there to use scientific knowledge to children build up a strong foundation for lifelong healthy.

Another program,Saving Brains, "The Saving Brains portfolio of activities is designed to develop and broaden the reach of products, services, and policies that protect and nurture early brain development. Its activities work to support the lifelong health of children and provide selected countries with a strategy to help break the cycle of poverty.  "

Third, "The Global Children's Initiative (GCI) provides support to research activities led by affiliated faculty members of the Center who work closely with researchers and institutions in low- and middle-income countries around the world. Each project has fostered interdisciplinary collaboration to generate new evidence and insights about how child development unfolds in diverse cultural contexts."

It is quite exciting to know that one of the best universities in the world not only doing research but have practical programs in early childhood areas.