Early Childhood Standards of Quality for ... - State of Michigan

Glossary [LRCCC-R400.5101]Administrative/Supervisory Personnel:Personnel at the program and/or localdistrict level (e.g., program directors,specialists, and school district levelor building principals/administrators/supervisors) who are responsible foradministering, supervising, and leadingearly childhood education programservices, activities, and instructional staff.Advisory Council: A volunteer groupconvened to advise the program leadersregarding planning, development,implementation, and evaluation of theearly childhood program. The advisorycouncil is typically comprised of parentsand interested community members.Advisory councils may be established asa requirement of the sponsoring agencyor legislation and within the framework ofpolicies and practices as established by thecouncil and the program’s governing body.Age Appropriate: Experiences and alearning environment that are designedto match predictable stages of children’sgrowth and development across alldomains (social, emotional, intellectual,language, creative, and physical).Assessment: A systematic procedure forobtaining information from observation,interviews, portfolios, projects, tests,and other sources that can be used tomake judgments about characteristics ofchildren or programs.Assistive Technology: Any item,piece of equipment, product or system,whether acquired commercially off theshelf, modified, or customized, that isused to increase, maintain, or improvethe functional capabilities of anyone withdisabilities.Auxiliary Staff: Personnel who areresponsible for delivering support servicesoffered by the program and/or required byfederal or state regulations (e.g., nurses,Title I staff, special education consultants,speech/language therapists, schoolpsychologists, social workers).Child Development AssociateCredential (CDA): Nationally recognizedperformance-based credential awardedthrough the Council for Early ChildhoodProfessional Recognition, an independentsubsidiary of the National Association forthe Education of Young Children. A CDAcredential is awarded for competencein working with children birth to fiveyears of age and is roughly equivalent tocompleting one year of college level workin early childhood.Child-initiated: Experiences which offerchildren a wide range of opportunitiesto directly experience and manipulatenew ideas and objects (e.g., choosingfrom a variety of activities throughoutthe day; creating their own ideas for artprojects, block constructions, or danceimprovisations; creative play materialswhich encourage children to question,experiment, and pretend).Collaboration: Initiatives which involvepeople from different agencies/programsjoining together to work toward a commongoal. The result is a shared endeavorwith members eventually committingthemselves as much to the commongoal as to the interests of participatingagencies. Agency autonomy is thereforelimited, and the effort involves highcontact (including the potential for highconflict) and is usually quite conspicuousto the outside world. An example wouldbe the decision to build and jointlyoperate a community center that housesschool, recreational, and social servicecomponents.Community Collaborative Council:An organized group representative ofthe community and its family- and childservingprograms. Such a council typicallyserves as a communication link amongprograms and provides direction inplanning, developing, implementing, andreviewing the early childhood educationinitiatives within the community.Early Childhood Standards of Quality for Prekindergarten 139