Blue Mountain Early Learning Hub (Northeast Oregon)

The Blue Mountain Early Learning Hub covers an area of rural northeast Oregon that is approximately 7,300 square miles in size. The hub consists of 23 separate communities and 18 school districts. Its mission is to ensure collaboration and coordination between early learning and early childhood programs in the area to promote kindergarten readiness and overall well-being for the 10,000 children in the region. Of those 10,000 children, only about 60 percent receive some kind of early childhood service prior to kindergarten.¹

Since 2014, the hub has used money from the state’s Kindergarten Readiness Partnership and Innovation funding stream to implement professional learning teams (PLTs) across the three rural counties that make up the hub. The PLTs include staff from Head Start programs, community child care programs, and K-third grade teachers. Initial meetings consisted of relationship-building among staff and then evolved into monthly shared professional learning sessions focused on implementing the Conscious Discipline model for supporting self-regulation and social-emotional development across early education settings.

The main goals of the PLTs are to (1) support the use of the Conscious Discipline model for behavior management; (2) provide professional development and support to both early learning providers and elementary school teachers; and (3) increase the alignment of pre-K and kindergarten practices to support continuity in learning for young children. While the use of a shared behavior management model across ages has been the main focus of the PLTs, one of the major goals of the PLTs is to improve alignment between the grades in a variety of areas.²

Portland State University studied the PLTs and found that both early learning providers and kindergarten teachers who participated felt that children in their classrooms improved in several areas as a result of what was learned in the PLTs, with the greatest improvement evident in social-emotional areas of development. Early learning providers described developing a greater understanding of kindergarten expectations and have altered their own teaching to better prepare students for kindergarten. One early learning provider spoke of the benefit of talking with kindergarten teachers about expectations for students: “I remember they brought posters in that had a list of…what kindergarteners need. It was helpful to see…It was so simple, but now we have a focus. A lot of them are definitely doable; it’s just nice to know.” And a kindergarten teacher spoke of the benefit of hearing from early learning providers: “The early childhood people have asked how we teach numbers, handwriting; we’ve provided them with some things that we’re using and vice versa.”³

Facilitating cross-grade professional development in a large, rural region comes with a unique set of challenges. The PLTs need to be located so educators are able to attend. “We have mountains in between communities and sometimes have a lot of snowfall so things get cancelled. The distance and mileage can be long for teachers to get to the meetings,” said Hub Operations Coordinator Amy Hoffert. Hub staff attempts to overcome this obstacle by strategically placing the PLTs in communities across the region so educators are more easily able to attend. Staff members also use Zoom or Skype conferencing when necessary to help overcome the geographic difficulties and ensure more educators are able to attend the PLTs.

Priorities Addressed by Blue Mountain Early Learning Hub: Professional Development