Research and Practice Partnerships for Professional Development in Early Childhood: Lessons From ExCELL-e

Abstract

This article describes how a research-practice partnership has informed the iterative development of a web-mediated early childhood language and literacy professional development (PD) intervention. Funded through the Investing in Innovation (i3) program, this new PD model is based on an effective in-situ intervention. As we translated the face-to-face model into a largely web-mediated approach, we partnered with educators to ensure that the resulting intervention was feasible and effective in real-world classrooms serving children at risk. Specifically, an educator advisory board provided ongoing input about the PD. Further, pilot teachers completed the training and provided feedback through a survey about the usability and effectiveness of the training modules, coaching, and instructional strategies in classroom settings. Findings suggest that research-practice partnerships that gather teachers' situated, comprehensive, and insightful perspectives can be invaluable in developing PD interventions. Collaboration between school districts and university researchers is essential in this iterative development process.Professional development (PD) is critical for teachers to learn new skills and implement the most current, research-based strategies in their classrooms (Tout, Zaslow, & Berry, 2006). This is especially true for early childhood teachers trying to learn specific techniques to encourage vocabulary and language development. However, to be effective and sustainable, PD must reflect both the empirical evidence regarding what helps children learn and the practical affordances and constraints of real-world classroom settings. This article examines one approach to integrating researcher and practitioner expertise in the collaborative development of a web-mediated PD intervention for teachers in early childhood (i.e., preschool through first grade) serving children in poverty.

Enhancing the Impact of Professional Development in the Context of Preschool Expansion

“…Other reviews have cited elements such as the inclusion of collaborative teacher teams (Zaslow et al, 2010) and the provision of active learning opportunities for teachers, rather than more passive PD programs in which teachers simply receive information (Desimone & Garet, 2015). Increasingly, many effective PD models have teachers actively analyzing videos of their own or others’ teaching practice as a way to help them really understand what good teaching looks like (Chen & McCray, 2012; Hindman et al, 2015), and there is evidence that teachers who watch more of these types of videos do change their practice more (Pianta et al, 2014).…”

“…Unlike curricula, which can be sold to publishers for broad dissemination, scaling PD requires developing the capacity to train and support large numbers of PD providers and coaches, and there are not many organizations that have taken this on as an explicit focus of their work. There are a number of other evidence-based PD models in the early childhood space working on scaling, some with federal i3 funding (i.e., Investing in Innovation Fund)—such as ExCELL-e, focused on language and literacy PD and coaching (Hindman et al, 2015), and Erikson’s Early Math Collaborative (Chen & McCray, 2012). As these efforts move forward, it will be important to use the well-developed implementation science literature to help assess and refine the success of these scaling efforts.…”

A Model of Co-Construction for Curriculum and Professional Development in Head Start: The Readiness through Integrative Science and Engineering (RISE) Approach

“…Over the last decade, increasing attention has been paid to the importance of PD support for early childhood educators commensurate with increasing accountability mandates in the field of early childhood education and in the K-12 public education system (Harding et al, 2019;Zaslow et al, 2010). This research has emphasized the importance of partnering with teachers to inform the development of effective PD approaches, to ensure their ecological validity, and, ultimately, to sustain teachers' change in practice as a result of these efforts (Chen & McCray, 2012;Hindman et al, 2015). This process of partnering is often referred to as co-construction by education leaders (Chen & McCray, 2012).…”

“…Therefore, in addition to the structural aspects of PD posited to be effective (e.g., ongoing PD, peer support, and coaching), more and more, researchers are emphasizing the importance of collaboration, or "joint-ness," with teachers in which goals for improving practice are jointly set and planned for by the provider of the PD and the early childhood educator (Zaslow, 2009). Hindman et al (2015), for example, documented a community-based research approach, through a comprehensive literacy curriculum and PD project, that included both formative and summative feedback from teachers on the iteratively developed Exceptional Coaching for Early Language and Literacy (ExCELL-e), Web-mediated PD for literacy and language instruction. The main features of their approach included creation of an educator advisory board, obtaining ongoing input from this board, and piloting and assessment of procedures using teachers' situated feedback.…”

Coaching for continuous improvement in collaborative, interdisciplinary early childhood teams

“…Coaching is widely acknowledged within the research literature as a form or component of professional learning that supports improved teaching practice and child learning outcomes (Domitrovich, Gest, Jones, Gill, & DeRousie, 2010; Hindman, Snell, Wasik, Lewis, Hammer, & Iannone-Campbell 2015; Kraft, Blazar, & Hogan, 2018). Coaching has specifically been noted as an effective strategy for supporting educators in early childhood settings over time to learn, adapt and align their pedagogical practices with the expectations and accountabilities outlined in key documents that make up the national quality agenda; for example, the EYLF (DEEWR, 2009) and the NQF (ACECQA, 2009; Page & Tayler, 2016; Twigg et al, 2013).…”