Article Link: http://exchangepress.com/article/ideas-for-training-staff-viewing-professional-development-with-a-wider-lens/5014527/
Are we, in the early childhood world, too narrow in how we think about professional development? Some years ago I heard Barbara Bowman at an NAEYC conference suggest that we need to be drawing on the scholarship of a number of fields and this comes to me each time I hear directors longing for a full-time social worker, nurse, or therapist as part of their staff. On other occasions, I see how much our field needs the expertise of business management, information technology, mediation, family systems, ecology, landscaping, and interior design. It goes without saying that in today's world, working in programs with young children and their families requires a complex mix of knowledge, experience, skill, and courage.The longer my tenure in this field, the more I seek knowledge from outside child development and early childhood education to inform my work. For instance, in the years leading up to writing The Visionary Director, I devoted myself to reading a range of popular corporate management books I discovered as I traveled through airport bookstores. I would also eavesdrop on the guys (yes, men, rarely women) with their laptops and cell phones sitting next to me, trying to understand their thinking about successful ...