Mentoring/ TA Quality Circle pow wow Friday March 2 in Durham

A chance to get into the same room finally!  trade information, share questions.  hear the results of the survey red broom did on mentoring systems (still time to respond:  http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/ZHL8WCP.

Friday March 2, 2012

10:00 am-12:30pm

Jim and Carolyn Hunt building

1201 South Briggs, Durham, NC 27703

upstairs conference room

Day 28 – does this jibe with your experience?

This is a great blog entry from a colleague in San Francisco

Day 28 – does this jibe with your experience?.

thinking the next step might be ….

might be to “unpack” those ingredients a little bit.  What would be helpful analysis?  How about a listing of each ingredient (Marcy may kill me) asking:

• is there research to guide us?
• who is doing it well?
• what elements need to be part of it so that it is effective? (e.g. caseloads, intensity and dosage)?
• what are barriers or challenges?

What are some other things to know about?  C’mon all of you smart people!

also, go to survey!  http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/ZHL8WCP  she asked, nicely.

revised draft

Recipe for quality early childhood experiences by Kate Thegen, Red Broom is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
Based on a work at redbroom.org.

quality circle pow wow in Durham on Fri March 2

Open invitation to anyone who wants to come talk about mentoring, coaching and TA issues.  Informal and friendly as always!  check out the details on our Big Tent public page:  http://www.bigtent.com/groups/qcircle

testing a “recipe” for quality

Marcy Whitebook at Center for the Study of Child Care Employment  http://www.irle.berkeley.edu/cscce/    has a project called No Single Ingredient.  Based on that suggested metaphor, I have tried to visually represent the collection of considerations that go into supporting/improving quality child care experiences.  I want to get a “systems” image that many of us can relate to so that we have the beginning for the systems-building we are undertaking with the addition of mentoring and coaching.  I would really appreciate your comments!

ready for school in Norfolk!

looks like I get to go talk to more preschool and kindergarten teachers in Virgina! been to Suffolk, Chesapeake and now Norfolk on March 30th! these are always such a learning experience for me…

American children in poverty – good short from CNN

gps-witw-romney-poor.cnn

Fareed Zacharia did a succinct and powerful few minutes on American poverty and children. Even in our own field we forget this!

time to stop tinkering. just an opinion

For 15 years, we have done our very best to improve the quality of NC child care and we have learned a great deal. In fact, “ the percentage of high-quality centers (i.e., 4- and 5-star rated) has increased from 10% in
2000 to 51% in 2011. The percentage of high-quality family child care homes (i.e., four- and
five-star rated) has increased from 2% in 2000 to 32% in 2011”. (Race to The Top, NC  Early Learning Challenge grant application, pg 138)

Because scoring well on ERS  (environmental rating scales) + number of teachers attending credit-bearing classes = higher stars.  No doubt about it.  But we also know -though we don’t like to say it -that we are very far from done. On the one hand, we want to be able to say we are making good progress but we also have to be honest and courageous enough to say that we haven’t figured it all out yet.  It is time to insist on adequate funding and attention to work even harder on it.

This is so much simpler if we just effected new teachers.  If we were starting from scratch, we would have one strategy.  But we have to take what we would have done if we were starting from scratch and somehow cajole, inspire and inform an existing workforce to change their practices, their well-heeled styles and to adopt new ways.

For example:  many early childhood teachers are teachers because they loved their own teachers as young children.  But they most likely loved their second grade teacher who pointed at the calendar and played flash cards that we loved and taught us musical chairs.  None of which are developmentally appropriate for preschoolers but it is often what early childhood teachers thought they were signing  up for.   What a disillusion!  And now we have to replace those assumptions with new information, new motivation and new rewards.  (Our terrific second grade teachers make $10.000 more than we make!    child care workers: $17,440;    kindergarten teachers $28,170, BLS Occupational Employment Statistics, May 2008.)

So quality is improving, but too slowly and too superficially.   We have begun, but have not arrived.  I would say we have done a good job of packing our bags for the journey, telling everyone we are going.  But the map is not clear, not everyone wants to go, not everyone knows where we are going.   Time to get serious, I say. 

new short video on brain building

Great video – should be seen by every early childhood teacher! And parents! And directors! Oh, and policy makers!