CEED Professional Development
The knowledge and skills of staff, and their relationships with children and their families, form the foundation of high quality early childhood care and education programs (Shonkoff & Phillips, 2000). CEED offers early childhood professionals and array of enriching and intellectually challenging professional development activities focused on the goal of improving services to young children and their families.
The National Professional Development Center on Inclusion (NPDCI) defines professional development in the following way:
Professional development is facilitated teaching and learning experiences that are transactional and designed to support the acquisition of professional knowledge, skills, and dispositions as well as the application of this knowledge in practice.
CEED professional development activities and resources have evolved over time in response to changing needs within the field of early childhood. Both our in-person and online training provide active learning experiences focused on theoretical foundations, current research, and critical skills. Whenever possible, CEED has adopted methods based on national professional development models that utilize sequential, series-based face-to-face training and simultaneous coaching/consultation. Many of our programs include an emphasis on reflection and exploration of one’s prior learning, assumptions, attitudes, and beliefs.
We are employing new forms of professional development, such as Online Learning Communities and Communities of Practice to extend and deepen distance education experiences. Our goal is to adopt new technologies and adapt pedagogy to meet the needs of our diverse early childhood workforce.
At CEED we believe that professional development, as Gusky (2000, p. 38) asserts, “is not an event that is separate from one’s day-to-day professional responsibilities. Rather, professional development is an ongoing activity woven into the fabric of every educator’s professional life.” We seek to support the myriad ways in which early childhood professionals improve their critical thinking skills, knowledge and practice with young children and their families.
Ongoing research continues to deepen and refine our understanding of the characteristics of effective professional development. We strive to maintain a high standard of rigorous training, relationship-based consultation and up-to-date resources that are relevant for professionals working within a variety of early childhood systems and settings.
References
- Gusky, T. (2000). Evaluating professional development. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press, Inc.
- National Professional Development Center
on Inclusion. (2008).
What do we mean by professional development
in the early childhood field? - Shonkoff, J.P. & Phillips, D.A. (Eds.)(2000). From Neurons to Neighborhoods: The Science of Early Childhood Development. Washington, D.C.: National Academy Press.
Additional Resources
- National Infant & Toddler Child Care
Initiative (2010).
Professional Development for the
Infant/Toddler Early Care and Education
Workforce.
- Zaslow, M., Tout, K., Halle, T.,
Whittaker, J.V., & Lavelle, B. (2010).
Toward the identification of features of
effective professional development for early
childhood educators.