pIma COUNTY - Child & Family Resources

WE HAVE GREAT EXPECTATIONS FOR
TEACHERS, CHILDREN, AND FAMILIES
By: Naomi Karp | Director, Early Childhood Professional Development | United Way of Tucson and Southern Arizona
John Wooden was the magical basketball coach
at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA).
His teams won ten national basketball championships
in 12 years! Coach Wooden always made his players
practice hard and always told them, “Failing to prepare
is preparing to fail.”
Those words are true for more than basketball.
They are particularly true in early childhood education.
Research tells us that many communities in the United
States are failing to prepare well-educated early
childhood teachers. Many states do not require people
who teach and care for young children to go to school
to build their teaching skills. They do not require all
teachers to learn how to help young children come to
kindergarten prepared to succeed. As a result, large
numbers of young children are not in high quality early
learning environments. They are
being prepared to fail when they
enter kindergarten.
In Tucson, the United
Way of Tucson and Southern
Arizona is working to build a
new early childhood professional
development system. With
funding from all five First Things
First Regional Partnership
Councils in Pima County, we
have created 10 Communities
of Practice. Each one of them is
helping to build a high quality system for teaching early
childhood teachers to be the best that they can be. We
call our new system-building work “Great Expectations
for Teachers, Children, and Families.”
The 10 Communities of Practice focus on
building a system based on:
Improving the quality of infant and toddler care
Creating high quality inclusive classrooms
Raising the quality in early childhood classrooms
Creating pathways from Associates’ degrees to
Bachelors’ degrees
Building teachers’ skills in instructional support
Creating high quality family child care homes
Increasing teachers’ knowledge of developmentally
appropriate practice
Improving tribal children’s transitions from preschool
to kindergarten
Increasing the number of University of Arizona students
who complete education degrees
Building a new professional development system
"We want to see the day
when it is the expectation
that all early childhood
teachers, who so choose,
will have the opportunities
and resources needed to
graduate from college."
All 10 Communities of Practice are based on
developmentally appropriate practice, which is a sign
of a high quality classroom. They also have these things
in common: 1) There is at least one Coordinator who
designs and schedules classes; 2) Each one has about
20-25 members, and the members are called cohorts;
3) All cohorts learn about the Arizona Early Learning
Standards and how to use them in their classrooms; 4)
They also learn about systems building and coaching to
improve their problem solving and teaching skills; and
5) They learn about how children learn and develop
higher level thinking skills.
We never talk about “trainings.” We only talk
about education opportunities. In early childhood
professional development, the word “training” usually
means a short workshop that is taken one time, and the
knowledge that might be gained
is not very deep. Thus, long-term
positive effects may not exist
and benefits probably are small.
The biggest problem is that most
trainings do not lead to a degree.
For those reasons, we
only talk about education
opportunities. The ones that we
provide for our Communities
of Practice members are
developmental, which means
that knowledge about a topic
keeps expanding by offering many opportunities to
put the knowledge into practice during the class and
in the teachers’ classrooms. We also make sure that
education opportunities are sequential. In other words,
learning new ideas and skills starts at the simplest level
and works upward to very complex ways of looking
at the same topic or topics. Learning is designed for
individuals’ interests and time commitments.
We are trying to build a culture that respects
and supports education for all. We want to see the
day when it is the expectation that all early childhood
teachers, who so choose, will have the opportunities
and resources needed to graduate from college. To
start this process, all of the Communities of Practice will
offer a college credit option when Year 2 begins on July
1, 2013. Classes for college credit are typically held at
Pima College. Some scholarships are available through
the Pathways Program.
Our funder, First Things First, requires that
we bring national early childhood experts to Tucson
www.azchildcare.org 8 1-800-308-9000