Most people caring for young children ages to 6 cannot afford to attend a tertiary education due to tuition, transportation, and lost wages. Provisions for young children world-wide lack resources to enable staff to be educated on-site. Moreover, current externally-imposed requirements for education lack evidence in improved performance or satisfaction. We needed something that works here and now.
Those working with young children in homes, care settings, and programs meet once a week for 45 minutes, discuss their research with others and draw their own conclusions. They practice new skills in their time with children. At the end of 6 investigations they undertake a self-designed project to prove to others that they have changed the lives of a child or children using what they learned through a two-part Performance of Understanding. A Project documents in photographs or video the objective, intervention, and resulting change. An Expression conveys in whatever manner they wish the impact of this work upon themselves. Connecting to Children consists of guides for a local leader with assignment materials and forms for four 10-week modules. Module D1 studies expressing warmth and positivity. Module D2 studies being responsively playful. Module D3 studies leadership through being informative. Module D4 studies initiative, cooperation, and perseverance and creates a Learning Story.
It has not been spreading.
It was a required course in our early childhood program with hundreds of students proving their lives and children's lives changed. A few years after I retired in 2010 the course was removed because it didn't meet the State requirements for transferability under the new common course numbering system. In other words, it lacked uniformity.
It cannot spread, because no system rewards locally administered, cooperative education outside of credit programs. Child care exists at the margins of society and lacks resources for wages under external, unfunded mandates that do not have to prove a benefit. Connecting to Children develops a portfolio proving that it works authentically.
Funding is necessary to employ the Guide with stipends for completion. That's it.
I have tried it. It exists in the Public Domain.
Needs 3 years of support for a site anywhere plus funding for a professional video program is needed to begin. You want innovation? Here it is. You can look for yourself. It proves itself with documentation and the transformation of its participants.
https://tomdrummond.com/helping-other-adults/connecting-to-children/
