The COVID-19 pandemic jolted teachers to the front line of complex, under resourced negotiation of quality distance learning, whilst also being key communicators with students and families about how to be COVID safe. Media reports debated preschool and school closures and child safety, but scarcely considered teachers. Motivated by the silencing…

Leadership competencies in early childhood (EC) education present an intricate policy and practice landscape. This article provides insights into these complexities and shares a novel survey evaluation tool that can be used in services for identifying leadership competencies and gaps for ongoing professional development. The research employed a…

Internationally, professionalization has become a key policy strategy targeting quality improvement in early childhood education and care (ECEC), utilizing top-down managerial strategies including implementation of quality standards and increased workforce qualifications. Set against this backdrop, this study explored educators' accounts of their…

Background: This article comes in response to two gaps within the research use literature: a lack of work on quality of use as distinct from quality of evidence, and a lack of research use models based on practitioner, as opposed to researcher, perspectives. Aims and objectives: The study probes into the views of education practitioners about…

High-quality early childhood education and care is of critical importance to children's optimal development and wellbeing, and to a nation's social and economic capital. Consequently, assessing and monitoring quality through regulatory mechanisms has become increasingly significant across the world. Yet, literature pertaining to the impact of…

There is increasing pressure on Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC) settings to align their practices and values to that of schools, with the notion that a quality education in ECEC consists of providing care whilst also ensuring strong learning outcomes. This paper employs the constructs of structural and process quality to theorise the…

Little is known about children's participation in early childhood education (ECE) in regional and remote areas in Australia. This research addresses this gap by investigating the perspectives of early childhood centre directors and educators who work directly in ECE services in these areas. The study used a two-stage mixed methodology, including…

This article discusses infant-toddler educators' perspectives of using the Observe, Reflect, Improve Children's Learning tool (ORICL) in practice. ORICL is a new tool informed by implementation science and co-designed with Australian early childhood education and care policy-makers, practitioners, and service providers. It aims to support…

Cooperative learning (CL) is a teaching and learning pedagogy that has been used widely in school but there is limited information on instructors' perceptions of CL nor observations of how CL is implemented in higher education settings. In this study, we used an interpretative-qualitative approach to investigate the advantages and challenges of…

Despite the acknowledged complexity and time pressures of early childhood educators' work, very few studies have examined the nature of this work, minute-by-minute, over the working day. This paper reports on data gathered through 10,155 time-use diary (TUD) records provided by 321 educators participating in the Exemplary Early Childhood Educators…

While the impact of the global COVID-19 pandemic upon higher education institutions has been well documented, less is known about how academics themselves responded to these rapid changes. This paper analyses the experiences of teacher education academics from Australia and New Zealand (n = 13) who were interviewed during lengthy pandemic…

This paper reports the findings of a meta-synthesis of studies which investigated the ways in which teachers described their pedagogical practices in three different contexts: the Maldives, Australia and Nepal. Each of the studies was focused on making teachers' classroom practices visible in an effort to establish a shared language and…

High-quality early childhood education and care (ECEC) has a robust and long-term impact on the development of children's skills and abilities, including self-regulation. While the importance of early self-regulation is acknowledged in national curricular frameworks (Australian Early Years Learning Framework), little is known about practices…

Consensus moderation, where collaboration and discussion take place to reach an agreement on mark allocation, is a frequently used approach to quality assurance in higher education. Unit coordinators play a vital role in facilitating consensus moderation, yet limited research has focused on their role in moderation practices. This study explored…

The participation of educators in research contributes to understanding and developing high-quality early childhood education. Consequently, increasing educator participation in research is beneficial. To increase educator research participation, it is important to understand educators' experiences of research. This article draws on findings from…