For more than two decades EDC has led efforts to improve the quality and availability of child care by supporting the professionals who care for young children. For a profession that is historically underpaid and undervalued, we develop programs that enhance the stature, improve the professional opportunities, and raise the expectations of those who care for the very young. Partnering with local, regional, and national child care providers, we develop resource centers, design professional development courses, offer on-site consultation, and conduct research in such areas as curriculum and materials development, literacy enhancement, special education, parent involvement, performance assessment, and management and supervision.
A project in West Virginia helps preschool teachers improve how they teach language and literacy.
For more than 40 years, Ingrid Chalufour has reached out to young
children and their families in a variety of early childhood settings.
New tools from EDC help Head Start programs across the country meet staff development needs.
In an effort to improve early childhood development programs, EDC and Save the Children are bringing interactive radio instruction (IRI) to community child-care centers in Malawi.
CC&F/EDC is collaborating with Early Childhood Associates, Inc., and RISE Learning Solutions to develop a four-unit, multimedia training package for Head Start mentor-coaches. The Head Start mentor-coach instructional design will prepare mentor-coaches to guide teachers in adopting research-based practices that foster young children’s language and literacy development. The instructional design’s distributed learning model will include tutored video instruction and Web-based learning.
The Connecticut Pre-K Assessment Pilot is a grant-funded project from the Nellie Mae Education Foundation that will test the efficacy of a technology-based early childhood assessment platform. The pilot program will evaluate the usefulness of a handheld assessment device to generate data that is instructionally beneficial to pre-K teachers and can be aggregated for different stakeholders to examine the overall effectiveness of literacy based programmatic investments.
At this three-day institute teachers will learn about the science of building structures, how materials and design influence structural stability, and what young children might learn about building strong stable structures. Through hands-on exploration, discussion, and video analysis they will gain new understanding of how to set-up the block area for science learning and how to support children’s scientific inquiry. Participants will all receive Building Structures with Young Children, a guide developed at EDC, to teaching science through block play.
The success of the Teacher Quality Research Project in West Virginia led to this new project. The state Department of Education has contracted with us for LEEP to be taught eight times in parts of the state that have not had the benefit of the Teacher Quality grant. This year EDC’s Ingrid Chalufour will teach LEEP in Wyoming and McDowell counties in southern West Virginia, working with a co-instructor from the WV Department of Education.
Project LEADER is an Early Reading First grant from the U.S. Department of Education. This three-year project will provide an intensive professional development program in early childhood literacy for staff in Lowell’s Community Teamwork Inc. program. The program includes credit-bearing courses in language and literacy, use of formative assessments to inform instruction and science; in addition, teachers will receive instructional coaching throughout the program.
