This article proposes a reconceptualization of the relationship between two early childhood professional standards, the "Professional Standards and Competencies for Early Childhood Educators" (NAEYC, 2019) and the "Practice-Based Professional Preparation Standards for Early Interventionists/Early Childhood Special Educators"…

Young children's communication is dependent upon caregivers' responsiveness to their behaviors; however, little is known about the responsiveness of toddler teachers to children in their classrooms. To increase teachers' responsiveness to children's behavior, a peer-coaching model was implemented in three Early Head Start classrooms. The…

In the past decade, there has been a significant increase in the number of dual-language learning (DLL) preschool children. Guided by the literatures on home-school partnership and caregiver ethnotheories, the present study explored parents' and teachers' understandings of natural learning opportunities in DLL children's homes and surrounding…

This study addresses the dearth of research on preparing pre-service early childhood educators to support young children's language development. Taking a design-based approach to an undergraduate course for early childhood majors, qualitative data analysis examined the seven participating pre-service teachers' knowledge of, perspectives on, and…

This paper reports on a small-scale research project that aimed to examine the impact of assessment changes to a second-year course called Tuhura Nga Toi Ahuatanga: Exploring the Role of the Expressive Arts in Education. This 30-credit course is part of a Bachelor of Education (Early childhood teaching) at a pre-service education provider in…

The instructional congruence framework has been used to enhance congruence between students' non-dominant backgrounds and science instruction in upper grades. The purpose of this paper is to propose and model the use of the framework to address two key areas of concern in the field of early childhood teacher education: family engagement and the…

Traditionally, various meanings of "10" are systematically ignored in early childhood curriculum and children's understanding of numbers is restricted within the solitary mapping between the symbol "10" and quantity concept of "ten." This may be problematic for other ways that mathematics is used, both in modern life…

Even with increasing calls for both researchers and educators to attend to the "E" in STEM from within the larger field of STEM education, little is known about the practices that serve to support early educators' pedagogy and related content knowledge of engineering design. Using multiple methods in a revelatory, embedded, single-case…

Policymakers' demands for standardization and increased academic achievement have led various stakeholder groups to call for more professional development (PD) in early childhood education and care (ECEC) settings. Federal initiatives and state agencies' quality improvement initiatives also position PD as a key component to improve access to…

Two instructors collaborated across programs in a School of Education to bring mixed reality simulation to preservice early childhood educators in an effort to utilize content knowledge to practice challenging conversations. The scenario chosen was a parent-teacher conference focused on supporting a child with disabilities in an inclusive early…

The study aims to reveal preschool teacher candidates' online practicum experiences during the pandemic -- the teacher candidates connected to preschool classes online while the children were face-to-face with their class teachers. The participants of this phenomenological study were 18 preschool teacher candidates studying at a public university…

Coaching has received attention in early childhood education, early intervention, and family science. In the home visiting field, coaching is a distinct professional development tool to improve home visitor effectiveness in meeting the complex needs of families, improve child development outcomes, and meet home visiting field priorities (e.g.,…

This qualitative study examines the professional development of early education preservice teachers and the initiatives behind the formation of a professional identity in the early stages of their studies. Professional identity is examined through the motivational factors that guide students to a minor in early education. The theoretical framework…

In this study, the environmental education (EE) component of the pre- school teacher training programs at six (6) universities in Vietnam were examined to identify the challenges of implementing EE in these programs. The framework for the pre-school teacher training program at these universities were analyzed and 18 students in their final year of…

Situated within the theoretical framework of reflective practice, this phenomenological study investigated how early childhood teachers reflected on the ways in which they were able or unable to engage in developmentally appropriate practices during the first four months of the 2020-2021 school year in the context of COVID-19-induced remote…