Learning Outcomes for Issues and Trends in Early Childhood Education

From the past seven weeks of blog assignments, I have learned a lot from my international contact and the website that I chose to study.
 I have gained  that no matter it is a developed or developing country, there exist concerning issues and trends in the early childhood field, such as poverty, diversity, inequity in care and education for children and families. In order to better improve the quality of early childhood care and education all over the world, one should make full use of resources and learn from others' advanced ideas as long as those ideas are for the good of children and families.
 I learned from my international contacts' ideas about excellence and equity of care and education for children and families is that high-quality programs definitely relate to supports from government, schools with resources available and accessible and with adequate funds, well-trained teachers, educated parents and family involvement. 
 I also learn from the websites is that I should stay informed of the new issues and trends of early care and education by keeping reading the website resources that this course has offered and collecting appropriate practices and methods that can be applied to our curriculum.
This course inspires me a lot and encourages me to set up a goal: to be an advocate for children and families. I will pay more attention to my community and focus on more related issues.
Thank you again for those who share their ideas, read my posts and comment on my posts. I hope we can learn more from each other in the following courses.

Getting to Know My International Contacts—Part 3

 Lisa Zhang  is my international contact. She shared her concern regarding quality and early childhood professionals: in China the importance of early childhood Education has not caught the full attention of society because of financial and geographic barrier. Especially in rural area, lack of awareness and the uncertainty of parents of the influence of ECE on the school readiness of their children lead many parents to place ECE far from the top of the education priority list. In urban area, the parents are more focus on the academic parts of learning in the ECE and rush children in their growing up process.
The professional goal that she shared with is to educate parents not to rush children in their growing-up process so that children enjoy their real childhood and learn what are meaningful in their life. Her professional dreams—to call for more people to advocate for early childhood education so that people understand what early childhood educators really do and show support and respect to our job. She also hopes for a more equal environment for children and that all children have their rights to live and learn. 

Sharing Web Resource

I searched some resource on National Institute for Early Education Research, and found that there are some related to excellence and equity in early care and education.

Expanding access to Quality Pre-K is sound Public Public Policy(Brarnett, W.S, 2003) advocate for children in low-income families and the necessity of expanding access to quality Pre-K. Brarnett (2003) state that the good Pre-K prepares children to start off well. It does not guarantee that nothing later on will interfere with their progress. We should not conclude from this that pre-K does not matter. Schools spend a lot of time and money helping children who are behind catch up at least part way, and reducing the need for this spending is part of what good Pre-K is all about. The author suggest that invest to enable all children, especially those in low-income families to access to quality Pre-K.

Reference:

Barnett, W. Steven. (2013). Expanding Access to Quality Pre-K is Sound Public Policy.Retrieved from http://nieer.org/publications/nieer-working-papers/expanding-access-quality-pre-k-sound-public-policy.

Getting to Know Your International Contacts-Part 2

This week Lisa Zhang shared her experience and knowledge about Excellence and Equity of Care and Education for Children and Families.

In China, Majority of children in the city go to Kindergarten. Children go to elementary school at 6 years old. Kindergarten serves children from 3-6 years old. It has three levels: Junior (3-year-old), middle (4-year-old), and senior (5-year-old). Kindergarten is a full day program, children go to school around 7:30 am and go home around 4:30 pm. Children have two meal and snacks and 2 hours nap in the school. Around 32-40 children and 3 teacher in one class. Teachers are looping every year so that children will have same teachers for 3 three years. Two teachers are co-teaching in the classroom. Another one only take care children's daily life in school and tidy up classroom.
     Early childhood education prescribed curriculum includes language, math, art, music, physical education and general knowledge, which is a combination of science and social studies.Children seldom work independently or in small groups on self-selected tasks. Instead, the emphasis is upon teacher-directed, total group instruction. All children are expected to do the same thing at the same time. Each section of lessons is around 20 to 30 minutes, which depend on children's age groups. For example, in a typical art lesson the teacher demonstrates how to fold tissue paper into butterflies. She then gives guidance to those children doing it incorrectly before proceeding to the next step. Drawing lessons often consist of children copying an object drawn by the teacher. The curriculum is provide by each province's Bureau of Education.
      Early childhood education in China currently faces external challenges increased influence of foreign ideas and values. As China becomes more open to outside contact and influence, traditional teaching comes into conflict with Western ideas about "developmentally appropriate practices" and goals of creativity, autonomy and critical thinking. Some kindergarten start to change the curriculum in the school. They set up the classroom in different areas and have certain time when allow children to have free choice to works with and teacher going to do the observation. It also more focus on children creativity and start to spend more hour to learning English.

In my opinion, the excellence and equity of care and educational for children and families rely on factors such as the supports of government, well-trained teachers, philosophy of early childhood education. If all these facts are taken account when we provide children with care and education, that is what we are called high-quality progrom.

Sharing Web Resources 2

This week, I continue to share web resources—National Institute for Early Education Research/NIEER (http://nieer.org/).

Since I work at an internationl school,  I always want to learn how to support those dual language learners in my class. Therefore, I found a poster from this website titled Impacts of a Science and Math Professional Development Project for Pre-K Teachers of Dual-Language Learners (Lange & Brenneman, 2013). They discusses "the SciMath-DLL project designed to develop, and carry out preliminary testing of a pre-K professional development approach that integrates high-quality math and science instructional offerings with supports for dual language learners.”   (Lange & Brenneman, 2013)   I learnt that challenges educators face to implement this high-quality professional development, such as limited time; understanding teaching early math and science in a new way by letting children explore, think, and solve problems on their own; and choosing an appropriate amount of lesson content, using more high quality math and science talk (Lange & Brenneman, 2013).

 I had a understanding that the importance of science, math and dual-language learning assist children’s later school success and in longer-term development. In other hand, the viral role of play and creativity in children’s physical, cognitive, social and emotional development is also essential. This balance between academic achievement and play, is always a topic that relevant professionals are trying to work on. 

Reference

Lange, Alissa., & Brenneman, Kimberly. (2013). Impacts of a Science and Math Professional Development Project for Pre-K Teachers of Dual-Language Learners. Retrieved from http://nieer.org/sites/nieer/files/AERA%20conf%20poster%20SciMath-DLL.pdf

Getting to Know My International Contacts—Part 1: Poverty

Lisa Zhang, from China, working in local pre-school for children aged 3 to 6 years old. She shared her professional experience and insights on poverty.

Poverty can mean many things. It can mean multiple people and families living in small houses so children do not get quality sleep at night. Lack on income can also mean unhealthy food during the day so children are also prone to getting sick.  Often bad, unhealthy food is cheaper then healthy food. This all affects brain function, growth, focus in class, health etc. This often is linked with poverty as families are over stressed from lack of money, tired from maybe working multiple jobs, been brought up around lack of attention from parents in their childhood etc. 

Due to these surrounds, etc. children can display aggression, behaviour problems, withdrawal, lack of concentration, learning difficulties, etc. Even more then other children, these children need teachers and schools to build strong relationships with them and provide a safe environment as often this can be the only place they feel that way.” (Lisa Zhang, personal conversation, Jan. 22, 2015).

From the communication, I learn that we should pay more attention to the emotions of children in development and try to build up positive relationships with children and their families so that we can. search some related information for families and support them in a timely way.

Web Resource 1

        I have chosen  the website— National Institute for Early Education Research/NIEER (http://nieer.org/) as my web resource. This website focuses on offering research-based advice and technical assistance to policymakers, journalists, researchers and educators, to support high quality, effective early childhood education for all young children. (Retrieved 16th Jan., 2015 from http://nieer.org/about/vision)
       I have not received a newsletter from this website yet so I looked up  on the website. I'm interested in one issue of the research topics - English Language Learner where gather information on what is know on English Language Learner in preschool. It caught my eye because of half children in my class are ELL and most of those parents are worried about their child's English learning.  This issue is a focus for my classroom. 
          According to the article Preparing Young Hispanic Dual Language Learners for a Knowledge Economy,   I'm going to share the the best practices for young DLLs (Dual-language learner) (Figueras-Daniel and Barnett, 2013):
Know what language and countries children and their families consider most important to their cultural heritage and create a classroom environment that respects and reflects the languages and cultures of the children in an accurate way.
Keep the classroom organized and clearly labeled utilizing both pictures and words.
Keep a consistent and predictable sequence of daily events.
Build on what children know, their strengths and their interests. Use children's home language to give the instruction when it is possible or use a combination of gestures, real-life objects and pictures to support children's understanding. In addition, to encourage children to share words or phrases in their home language during individual and group setting to build up their confidence in the class.
Teach new words and concepts around thematic units accompanied by so- phisticated picture books.
Provide explicit vocabulary instruction in English, repeating new vocabulary words often and in context.
Encourage all children to work together to accomplish a task.



Reference:
Figueras-Daniel, AAlexandra and Barnett, W. Steven. (2013). Preparing Young Hispanic Dual Language Learners for a Knowledge Economy.  Retrieved from http://nieer.org/publications/policy-matters-policy-briefs/policy-brief-preparing-young-hispanic-dual-language
National Institute for Early Education Research (NIEER). (2014). Guide to research topics. Retrieved from http://nieer.org/

Professional Contacts and Expanding Resources

     This week I need to establish contact with two early childhood professionals outside the United States. Since I had a difficult time e-mailing the professionals from resources given to me by the course, I chose to contacted my ex-colleagues who are teaching preschool children in China. They are willing to share trends and issues in early childhood.

           After I looked at different early childhood websites which are provided on my course's resource page, I decided to follow both Zero To Three: National Center for Infants and National Institute for Early Education Research as my expanding Resources. Both websites appealed to me and will expand my understanding and knowledge about the whole child from through preschool aged. I am looking forward to learn more from them.