Today’s Early Educator: Challenges, Competencies, and Professional Supports
The early educator is the cornerstone of the learning environment. Educators in this field experience a unique combination of demands that involve daily physical, emotional, and mental labor. In order to cultivate and sustain a high-quality environment, early educators need skills and strategies to enact activities and tasks that build children’s social-emotional skills, content knowledge and language skills—all the while managing challenging behaviors and responding to unpredictability that comes with a classroom of young children.
Today’s Early Educator, a two-week online program, focused on the various challenges early educators face, provided training on several critical competencies needed to support a high-quality learning environment, and introduced an array of professional supports that educators need in order to create optimal early learning environments and experiences for children.
By the end of this online course, participants:
- Understood the latest research regarding the socio-demographics and needs of today’s early learners and resulting implications for early educators.
- Explored the roles of Talk for Learning, Executive Function Skills and Emotion Regulation as key competencies needed for creating and maintaining a high-quality early learning environment.
- Learned about actionable planning tools that support the implementation of practices that enhance these competencies as well as tools that highlight central features of key professional supports.
