Professional Learning

Administrative policies acknowledge that effective professional learning (PL) can improve the instructional coherence among subrecipients and improve the quality of learning opportunities for young children. The planning of PL opportunities is data-driven, ongoing, and part of a long‐term continuous improvement plan.

The ECC strengthens local administrative quality by arranging PL for elementary principals, directors of child care organizations, municipalities with early learning initiatives, extended-learning programs, and other community-based organizations (CBOs). This group is poised for relationship-building and to learn best practices for prekindergarten.

The ECC and the ECS support meaningful PL for teaching teams. The ECS is critical to PreK quality and supports GSRP teaching teams throughout the academic year with expertise in the ECSQ, and status as a reliable assessor/certified observer in the applicable program evaluation tool. Refer to the Early Childhood Specialist section of this manual for more information on the ECS position. The ECC will demonstrate innovative efforts to create and standardize time for school- and community-based GSRP teaching teams to work together across different daily, weekly, quarterly, and school year calendars.

ECS need time to reflect on what makes their own professional learning work strong, and what hinders it. The ECC engages and supports ECS teamwork by gathering the ECS as a community of learners more than once per year to reflect on the ECS role and responsibilities. The ECC also ensures that the ECS is able to attend professional learning events, such as curriculum/child assessment training, state sponsored professional learning events, such as GSRP specific training, the Michigan Division of Exceptional Children (DEC) conference, Essential Literacy Practices TOT, LETRS , or national training opportunities through the National Center for Pyramid Model Innovations, NAEYC, etc.