One Child at a Time

The need for high-quality early childhood education has never been greater. Increasingly, children are growing up in families where all available parents are working. In addition, research continues to affirm the short and long-term benefits for children who participate in high-quality early learning programs.  The key to a high-quality program happens inside the classroom or family child care home, namely the interactions between the teacher and child. In a high-quality program, teachers engage children with learning strategies tailored to the child’s age and use an appropriate curriculum to structure the learning experience. A variety of supports are needed to facilitate these interactions so that high-quality teaching and learning can occur. As such, the quality of an early childhood program is dependent on many important factors. One such factor is a Program support structure. The discussion among staff members and colleagues has centered around this (administration support), which

    The current issue of the newsletter from NIEER centered on Child Care Deserts : An Analysis of Child Care Centers by ZIP Code in 8 States , authored by Rasheed Malik, Katie Hamm, Maryam Adamu, and Taryn Morrissey. Much well-deserved attention has been focused on how cost can inhibit access to quality early childhood education. But a new report by the Center for American Progress demonstrates that a family’s zip code can also be a hurdle. Looking at eight states comprising twenty percent of United States children under five years old, Child Care Deserts: An Analysis of Child Care Centers by ZIP Code in 8 States identifies “deserts” areas with either no child care centers or so few that children under five outnumber spaces by more than three to one–and the consequences for families living there. While higher-income areas are associated with higher availability of center-based child care, the study states that a local shortage of quality center-based care in struggling communit

                                         Takes a Big Heart to Help Shape Little Minds Schools have always been interested in fostering diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI). DEI has taken on renewed meaning as student populations become more diverse in every way regarding race, ethnicity, socioeconomic status, language, religion, sexual orientation, gender identity, special needs, and more. Research shows that children and adults alike thrive in diverse, equitable environments. In this episode of Grow Kinder®, host Dr. Tia Kim speaks with clinical psychologist and social-emotional learning researcher Dr. Mylien Duong. Dr. Duong speaks about the importance of building educators’ self-awareness in equity work and how educators can use perspective-taking and equity audits to help improve DEI in education. She describes how she applies David Foster Wallace’s idea of “seeing the water” to these practices. Some fish don’t know they are in the water(systemic barrier)- the most obvious or imp

This week, searching NIEER’s website, I focused my attention on two key areas- The newsletter and the news section.       The newsletter of interest from NIEER this week is titled “Early Childhood Educators’ Wellbeing During the COVID-19 Pandemic.” This survey was conducted during the COVID-19 pandemic in Australia through the Research Network of EC Professionals.  The survey found that strong professional wellbeing was associated with both lower risk of staff turnover and less conflict in educator-child relationships. Of the 232 early childhood educators surveyed, the majority were from a city in Australia called Victoria, where lockdowns were most severe. According to the researchers, educators indicated they could sustain strong relationships with children despite the negative impact they perceived the pandemic as having on their wellbeing. An analysis of the responses found educators’ wellbeing was relatively high, they noted. “Supportive organizational structures and culture can a