It’s essential to provide specialized professional development for the teaching staff who serve our infants and toddlers. Whether you were recently awarded an Early Head Start/Child Care Partnerships grant or have had an Early Head Start program for years, providing effective training for your Early Head Start Teachers and Home Visitors is critical.
We’ve found that successful training in this area includes the following 3 points:
Offer a multitude of training topics. Best practices in serving infants and toddlers includes providing professional development opportunities for your teaching and home visiting staff on all aspects of infant and toddler development. These topics include:
- Developing language in infants and toddlers
- Supporting the individual needs of infants and toddlers
- Managing challenging behaviors in infants and toddlers
- Fostering the social/emotional development in infants and toddlers
- Facilitating learning in infants and toddlers
Consider your child care partners when planning trainings. If you have new child care partners, think about providing training such as “The ABCs of Head Start: Learning the Rules and Regulations of Head Start.” It’s important that your child care partners know what is expected of them. Provide training to your staff on program monitoring. Conducting ongoing monitoring activities to child care partners is a key piece to the success of your program.
Utilize a “learning by doing” training model. Provide training that is highly interactive and engaging. Include a lot of small group activities, role plays, question and answer sessions and interactive exercises. Design training that is based on the principles of adult learning. This will result in high impact learning in which training participants can take back the information that they learned and implement it immediately.
Looking for highly interactive training for your Early Head Start teaching and home visiting staff? Give us a call at (704) 451-3255 or email us at kristinecortina@hsessentials.com.
