Centers of Excellence Professional Development Systems Project
Assistance in Creating an Integrated and Coordinated Statewide System of Professional Development for Practitioners Working with Young Children with Disabilities and their Families (B-5) and Program Administrators
CEED, the University of Minnesota-Duluth (UMD) and the Center for Inclusive Child Care (CICC) at Concordia University, are collaborating to assist the Minnesota Department of Education to build a comprehensive, accessible, evidence-based professional development (PD) system for Minnesota. This project is a compliment to the Early Childhood Special Education-Professional Development through the Higher Education Consortium Project (i.e., Minnesota Early Intervention Summer Institute) coordinated by CEED and supported with funding by the Minnesota Department of Education.
Through this project, the partnership of CEED, UMD and CICC has the following goals:
- Gain an understanding of national and state models for professional development, technical assistance and compliance systems (e.g. NPDCI, CONNECT, ECO, NECTAC, NECTC, TACSEI, etc.). This will allow Minnesota to take advantage of previous experiences by touching on strengths and challenges within other systems and what worked for other states. This knowledge will also increase the likelihood of creating a model that is most effective and can be a guide for other states’ progress.
- Improve the capacity for communication within and among regions and local entities (Interagency Early Intervention Committees [IEICs], community colleges and licensure programs). We will build capacity by providing guidance and resources to the PD facilitators to effectively evaluate practitioners’ needs and provide regional PD facilitators within the newly established regional Centers of Excellence with knowledge of and resources for learners—what they need, and how to deliver it (Who, What, How; NPDCI, 2007). This step will be facilitated by engaging institutions of higher education in mentoring PD facilitators on leadership and effective strategies of resource administration. An additional task for accomplishing enhanced communication is the development and maintenance of an online Community of Practice in which PD facilitators can discuss PD needs, what works for their region and share information on monitoring and improvement activities.
- Engage learners and make professional development opportunities accessible for all practitioners. Minnesota, like other states, has a disproportionate amount of PD opportunities in more densely populated regions with rural areas suffering because of low accessibility to high quality PD. In the proposed project, we have purposely partnered with institutions which have a focus on education outside of the Twin Cities metro area and have strong reputations with providing high quality services and outreach to greater Minnesota.
This project is both much needed and timely. Recent statewide training initiatives such as TACSEI, RBI and the push toward “scaling up” of evidence-based practices, along with similar statewide efforts to coordinate PD in other systems (as exemplified by the Minnesota Center for Professional Development at Metropolitan State University) provide further impetus to organize our PD activities in a manner that supports high quality, consistent, comprehensive, cross-agency PD in Minnesota.
Project Staff
Christopher Watson, Principal Investigator
Megan Cox, Coordinator
Shannon Rader