Article Link: http://stage.exchangepress.com/article/drive-through-training/5019461/
During a recent conversation, Harvest Resources associate Wendy Cividanes coined the term “drive-through training.” We were exploring the best way to spend the precious professional development dollars available to programs. I recalled my early days as a director when I invented ‘training in the stalls,’ a weekly posting of quick tips for my teachers as they used the restroom in our center.I look back on those days with mild embarrassment. My intentions were good, but my professional development system and pedagogy fell short. I struggled with how to help my teachers improve their interactions with children, how to plan more meaningful curriculum activities, and how to find more resources that would help me help them. Finding the work of Lilian Katz and later, Elizabeth Jones, was like winning the lottery, filling me with excitement, and ultimately keeping me in the early childhood field with a career as a teacher educator.
Several decades later the work of an early childhood director has become decidedly more complex. As Wendy and I talked we acknowledged there are ever-more professional resources these days, but they are accompanied by increased requirements and mandated outcomes. If only directors had more financial resources and more time, perhaps ...