Article Link: http://exchangepress.com/article/how-are-our-teachers-learning/5020818/
“Having a degree in early childhood education can be a factor in a teacher’s effectiveness, but a degree alone does not guarantee teacher competence. The quality of the higher education program �" that is, how well it prepares new teachers, for example, by grounding them in knowledge of child development and academic subject areas and providing opportunities to practice new teaching skills �" may be a more critical factor in a teacher’s ability to influence children’s development and learning in a positive way than having a degree, per se.”Marilou Hyson, et al.
Though I don’t move in the academic research world, I try to stay informed about research on how to improve teacher understanding and performance in early childhood settings. Research in the 1990s told us that teachers with a college degree led to improved quality in early childhood programs. Research in the last decade is calling that finding into question, suggesting quality is far more complicated than that. Teacher preparation is quite uneven as Marilou Hyson and her colleagues outline for us in their 2001 research report (2009). Factors contributing to this variability, especially at the two-year college level, include:
• an inadequately-prepared and under-resourced faculty to support a wide range of ...