Research shows that process quality in early childhood education (ECE) programs--specifically teacher-child interactions--is the strongest predictor of children's gains in learning and development. Due to a number of factors associated with the city's early childhood infrastructure and the budgets of the current Head Start grants, it has been…

The issue of continuing professional learning for educators in the early childhood education and care sector is in the spotlight in Australia due to the government's reform agenda, which seeks to professionalize the workforce. In an effort to ensure quality programmes are on offer for all children, educators are expected to upskill. The assumption…

As colonial legacies, racial dynamics, lingering discrimination, and even violence against Indigenous people and children, especially the Mapuche people (the focus of this study and the largest Indigenous group in the country), continue in Chilean society, research on how their teachers learn and how they perceive their learning has become even…

Every culture has developed some version of performance art. Children especially appreciate performance; their innate openness, forgiveness, and self-love make them delightful performers and audience members. Every time they engage with performance art, children are learning about storytelling, history, sociability, artistry, and physicality.…

Knowledge and skills regarding policy and advocacy are important expectations for today's early childhood workforce, yet policy and advocacy content and processes have not traditionally been emphasized in teacher preparation programmes. This article describes an innovative undergraduate course that goes beyond traditional foci on developmental…

Early years education in Europe and elsewhere around the world is currently in the spotlight due to political and economical changes and subsequent promises of effective investment into its provision. In this article we analyse everyday preschool practices in Slovakia in terms of tensions between policies, the teachers workforce and the concept of…

The aim of this paper is to report on barriers to ICT integration in teaching practices from the perspective of early childhood teachers. Six early childhood teachers from a combined private school in Queensland participated in this study. Individual interviews explored the ICT tools used in early childhood programs and the barriers to integration…

The purpose of this study is to describe Finnish and Estonian preschool teachers' thoughts on the problems they encounter in their pedagogical work in the preschool context. The study involved interviews with 80 preschool teachers (40 in each country). The theoretical framework of the study is based on quality as a pedagogical phenomenon, whereby…

This paper aims to describe and analyse a case study on professional development that was centred on the "Effective Early Learning (EEL) Programme". This process was a part of a larger dissemination project of the EEL programme nationwide, designed to train specialised facilitators at a local level who could, in turn, support the…

The contribution of music education to the holistic development of the young learner is uncontested. However, in South Africa, the vast majority of Reception Year (Grade R) teachers do not have the required competences to teach music in ways that optimally enhance the holistic growth of their learners, as this aspect has been largely neglected…

Peer coaching provides an attractive alternative to traditional professional development for promoting classroom quality in a sustainable, cost-effective manner by creating a collaborative teaching community. This exploratory study describes the development and evaluation of the Colleague Observation And CoacHing (COACH) program, a peer coaching…

Although scalable programs, such as online courses, have the potential to reach broad audiences, they may pose challenges to evaluating learners' knowledge and skills. Automated scoring offers a possible solution. In the current paper, we describe the process of creating and testing an automated means of scoring a validated measure of teachers'…

The paper presents a part of the findings of an evaluation study which is experimental in character and in which the experiment with one group was used as a method. The subject and problem relate to the observation of the effects of the project "Smart Children Network-SMART", code: 1286, which is based on the NTC learning system with the…

Educators interact with more than 4 million infants and toddlers each week in the United States and can provide positive, nurturing experiences that enhance development. Tragically, the infant-toddler workforce in the United States often lacks the support and resources necessary to support their work. These urgent needs require comprehensive…

In this paper, we present a professional development/upgrading programme in science for early-years teachers and investigate its impact on the teachers' competencies in relation to their knowledge and teaching of science. The basic idea of the programme was to motivate the teachers by making them members of an action research group aimed at…