Heard In the Forum: Positive Environments, Indoors and Out

Following the Early Education Initiative’s “Before Birth and Up Through Third Grade” policy forum on March 2, we launched an online discussion space to continue the rich conversations that began that day.

This week in that space, Sharon Ritchie, the director of First School, shares a resource for creating positive learning environments for young children and their families and poses a question about what teachers need to know to work with children PreK-3^rd grade.

We encourage you to log on and respond to Ritchie’s posts or to respond to one of the questions posed by individuals during the live forum:

• How do we create governance structures to support birth-through-age-8 services?
• What is the operational cost of blending and braiding funding to sustain programs?
• What needs to be done to drive funding to these younger age groups?
• What resources are needed to support quality in educational standards and curricula?
• How do we make quality systemic?
• What are the skills and competencies that the workforce needs at each of these levels (working with infants and toddlers, pre-kindergartners, kindergartners, and children in the first, second and third grades)?
• How might we build a system of diverse pathways toward advancement in careers in teaching and leading?
• What incentives are out there to recruit and retain specialization in early childhood?
• How do we assess and document quality?

You can also start your own discussion.

The online forum is organized around topics like funding, teacher quality, family engagement, and more. Early Ed Watch hopes it can become a useful resource and gathering spot for interested parties at the local, state and federal level. We invite you to join the discussion. You can do so by creating a login at http://earlyedforum.newamerica.net/forum.

Hope to see you online!