Mission
The mission of the Wyoming Early Childhood Professional Learning Collaborative is to elevate the early childhood field in Wyoming by providing high impact professional learning opportunities to educators working with young children and families.
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Guiding Principles
The work of the Wyoming Early Childhood Professional Learning Collaborative is guided by the following principles, which are based on a solid body of evidence regarding the successful implementation of high-impact professional learning systems.
- Positive learning outcomes for children in early care and education settings, including those essential for success in school, are closely linked to the dispositions, knowledge, and practice of their teachers.
- Learning in early childhood must be grounded in a strong image of children, families, teachers, and leaders.
- Early childhood educators grow as they engage in relevant and meaningful learning experiences, collaborate with other professionals, reflect on their work, and connect their learning to classroom practice.
- Early childhood educators need learning opportunities that are intentional, connected, ongoing, and aligned with standards and competencies for their profession.
- Advancing the early childhood education field requires a commitment to support the professional learning of early childhood leaders, who then become influencers in local programs and communities.
- Professional learning efforts must acknowledge and respond to the landscape in which early childhood educators work, and must address challenges with fragmentation, isolation, inequity, and compensation.
Goals and Objectives
The goals of the Wyoming Early Childhood Professional Learning Collaborative have been identified in response to the unique early childhood landscape in Wyoming regarding funding, systems, and governance, and are focused on those actions that can have the most significant impact on the professional learning of the early childhood workforce.
Wyoming Early Childhood Professional Learning Collaborative Goals
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- Align all Professional Learning Collaborative activities with nationally recognized standards for the profession, including credentialing and pathways to higher education, program quality standards, and early childhood educator professional standards and competencies.
- Develop a competency framework focused on teacher dispositions, knowledge, and practice, and provide an implementation timeline to guide the roll-out of professional learning opportunities that build upon one another and increase in complexity over time.
- Design differentiated professional learning opportunities that address the diverse early childhood workforce, and attend to important differences in levels of experience, education, training, and job responsibilities.
- Increase opportunities for distance, close-to-home, and site-based individualized professional learning.
- Target underserved populations including family-home childcare providers and infant/toddler educators.
- Support the establishment and maintenance of community provider groups.
- Utilize innovative distance learning and social media technologies to connect educators from across the state in communities of practice.
- Apply principles of adult learning in the development of professional learning opportunities.
- Link professional learning opportunities to classroom practice using mentoring, coaching, performance feedback, and ongoing support.
- Design professional learning experiences that focus on teachers’ thinking, and include opportunities for self-reflection and collaboration.
- Embrace a strength-based approach to professional learning, grounded in a strong image of teachers, which builds upon individual knowledge and experience.
- Provide early childhood leaders tailored professional learning opportunities aligned with national leadership competencies and outcomes.
- Build early childhood leaders’ capacity to provide on-site mentoring, coaching and pedagogical leadership to support the professional learning of the educators they supervise.
- Increase early childhood leader and program capacity to provide outreach and advocacy in their local community.
- Bring professional learning opportunities to promising early childhood programs to elevate quality and develop programs of excellence in communities across the state.
- Apply key concepts from implementation science to evaluate and strengthen programs and community initiatives at the systems level.
- Identify and build upon program and community strengths and collaborative partnerships to increase local impact.