Education of The Early Childhood Teacher
Early childhood teachers exhibit many different levels of educational preparation depending on their role, what type of setting in which they teach, and in which state that they teach within.
Generally early childhood teachers in the United States receive training in three ways: (1) earning an undergraduate or graduate degree in early childhood education or child development, (2) earning an associate degree in early childhood education, early child care and development, or child development, (3) developing and demonstrating competency through a competency-based assessment system such as the National Child Development Associate (CDA) program.
Most early childhood teachers in public school pre-K-Grade 3 classrooms possess state certification through an undergraduate or graduate degree from a college or university program approved by the state for training teachers. Teacher Assistants in these classrooms receive are required to obtain an associate degree (in any area, not just early childhood related areas) with some course credit in child development or early childhood education at the very least.
On the other hand, most non-public institutions offering child care and education vary in the type of education required of their teachers. Larger more commercially known, chain child care centers, for example, either align their teacher qualifications with the public school's model or offer even more intense qualifications (i.e. experience working with certain types of children, experience working with diverse types of children, specific training in Montessori or High/Scope curricula, graduate/advanced degrees). At the opposite pole of the spectrum, many day care centers focused mainly on providing supervision for working parents and less on providing a credible education program for their development employ teachers with little or no formal early childhood training. An associate's degree in a related field, CDA training, or a history with working with children of a certain age often suffices as adequate qualifications. However, many states continue to tighten and raise their standards for quality and education among early childhood programs in order to recommendations for full, state-approved licensure.
Read more about this topic: Early Childhood Educator
Famous quotes containing the words education of, education, early, childhood and/or teacher:
“Meantime the education of the general mind never stops. The reveries of the true and simple are prophetic. What the tender poetic youth dreams, and prays, and paints today, but shuns the ridicule of saying aloud, shall presently be the resolutions of public bodies, then shall be carried as grievance and bill of rights through conflict and war, and then shall be triumphant law and establishment for a hundred years, until it gives place, in turn, to new prayers and pictures.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Strange as it may seem, no amount of learning can cure stupidity, and formal education positively fortifies it.”
—Stephen Vizinczey (b. 1933)
“With boys you always know where you stand. Right in the path of a hurricane. It’s all there. The fruit flies hovering over their waste can, the hamster trying to escape to cleaner air, the bedrooms decorated in Early Bus Station Restroom.”
—Erma Bombeck (20th century)
“We find that even the parents who justify spanking to themselves are defensive and embarrassed about it....I suspect that deep in the memory of every parent are the feelings that had attended his own childhood spankings, the feelings of humiliation, of helplessness, of submission through fear. The parent who finds himself spanking his own child cannot dispel the ghosts of his own childhood.”
—Selma H. Fraiberg (20th century)
“I swear ... to hold my teacher in this art equal to my own parents; to make him partner in my livelihood; when he is in need of money to share mine with him; to consider his family as my own brothers and to teach them this art, if they want to learn it, without fee or indenture.”
—Hippocrates (c. 460–c. 370 B.C.)