Page 45 - Gateways for Early Educators

Gateways for Early Educators
2016
Educational Achievements in Gateways
“A success in this program was the ability to return to school and earn confidence to stay and finish with my education.”
“I am in college and have my teaching assistant permit. I am about to finish my educational classes and to have 25 units to be a social studies teacher thanks to my coach. Too bad this program is about to end as well as the Vistas program that were a great support in my education. Thank you very much!”
“I have started to think again about going back to college to complete my educational career in teaching special needs children and I feel much more confident in working with children and their parents.”
Research Question 9: How do quality improvement strategies (Coaching and Training) improve knowledge and practice?
Gateways’ administrative data, focus group participants’ feedback and co-enrollment analyses conducted by LAUP indicate that there is a percentage of participants who are enrolled in multiple programs of the Consortium (e.g. Gateways, Vistas, ASPIRE). Administrative data from Gateways also indicates participants engage in additional programs outside of the consortium (e.g. CCIP). Past evaluations of the Gateways Program have found that the number of programs in which core members participate (ASPIRE, CCIP, Gateways Coaching, Gateways Passport, RTT, STEP, Vistas, and other) was correlated with the knowledge and practice items from the annual survey. Many of these programs are aligned and intended to work together to improve quality. However, is there an optimal number of programs to facilitate increases in quality and is there a number that results in feelings of being overwhelmed? Research that some early childhood educators opt to not join quality improvement programs because they were not aligned with one another, resulting in multiple coaches providing differing information and this resulted in a lack of participation and learning on the part of the participants.xlv Research conducted by the CCRC Research Department found that many of the Gateways participants are engaged in multiple programs. To explore this, the correlations between number of programs in which providers engage and knowledge/practice change is presented below in Table 18.
Also of interest is whether a greater amount of training is linked to knowledge and practice change. The amount of training was correlated with the knowledge and practice items on the annual survey and is presented in Table 18. The Gateways Passport program offers a diverse set of training sessions that are intended to increase the knowledge base of early childhood educators across multiple domains. We would expect that the greater the amount of training, the greater the impact on knowledge and practice.
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