Early Childhood Education Distance Learning For Teachers Adds A New Dimension by Michael DeCourcy Hinds New ways for teachers to learn may add up to better education for young children.

Once upon a time, children had to be six years old before they started school. Younger children had to pass their time in “child-care centers” with “caregivers.” Back then, people thought the centers were just for baby-sitting and didn’t need much money. But that meant nice caregivers were always leaving for better-paid jobs. It also meant that most centers didn’t have enough fun stuff like paper and paint, books, games and computers. Imagine what it was like for children, especially poor children who didn’t have much fun stuff at home, either. Then, all of a sudden, things began to change. Grown-ups discovered that babies are eager to learn language and toddlers think reading, math and science are really neat. Around that time, child-care centers became “care-and-education centers” that encouraged all children to learn amazing things while they play. That was also when people discovered that caregivers were really teachers who needed to be trained like teachers and paid like teachers so they can stay with the children. Everyone, especially children from poor families, lived more happily ever after.

Apart from the fairy-tale ending, this is the unfolding story of America’s revolution in early education and its nascent preschool reform movement. As a nation, we are still in the olden days. Only since the 1990s have Americans begun to appreciate young children’s phenomenal, and largely untapped, capacity to learn. In fact, it is still news to most Americans that infants and toddlers are budding linguists, scientists and mathematicians. The research is both exciting and unsettling as it starkly reveals the vast gulf between the kind of early care and education that promotes love of learning and success in school and life—and the way America warehouses most children in mediocre centers.

Growing awareness of the research, though, has begun to build momentum for preschool reform. The term refers to substantial improvements in the care and education of millions of preschoolers as well as the expansion of quality programs to millions of other poor and under-served children. Universal preschool, say some, is as inevitable as its timing is uncertain. Today, the greatest part of the educational challenge is bringing caregivers into the teaching profession.
Never mind the costs for now, the logistics alone are daunting: Three million caregivers and preschool teachers need training in child development and the latest research-based methods for nurturing young children’s intellectual growth. But few community colleges or university-based schools of education are sufficiently up to speed on the recent research to have incorporated it in their courses. Short workshops and conferences that are typically used for professional development cannot do justice to the material. And, because the research is so new and preschool budgets are so small, educational publishers have not rushed to develop comprehensive curricula that would give preschool teachers a step-by-step guide.

A Pioneering Effort Suggests the Scope of the Challenge

The revolution in early education presents quite a challenge for Head Start, the federal preschool program that has a staff of 180,000 in 18,200 centers for approximately 860,000 children around the country. But Head Start has long been a leader in teacher training, largely because of its policy of recruiting one-in-three staff members from its own community of parents with low-incomes and limited education. The program consistently allocates two percent of its budget for teacher training and technical assistance; that works out to be $130 million of the $6.2 billion budget for 2001.

As a result of its policies and tuition assistance programs over the years, 90 percent of its staff have degrees in early childhood education or have obtained a Child Development Associate credential or a state certificate to teach in a preschool classroom; 41 percent of its head teachers have an associate’s or a bachelor’s degree in early childhood development or a related field. In 1998, Congress recognized the need for better educated preschool teachers and mandated that at least 50 percent of Head Start teachers must have a two- or four-year degree by 2003. All Head Start teachers also need training in the new research-based teaching methods, but most will have to wait for schools of education to catch up, says Tom Schultz, director of Head Start’s Program Support Division. “We are in the middle of a sea change in the early education field,” he says. “As the new research is absorbed in colleges and universities, Head Start programs can take advantage of it.”

To accelerate this process, the National Head Start Association, an independent organization that works to improve Head Start, came up with a high-tech plan—one that might serve as a model for providing professional development training not only for preschool teachers but for those teaching K-12 grades, as well.

The plan: Have scholars share their research and new teaching techniques directly with the nation’s caregivers and preschool teachers using satellite television, the Internet and locally trained facilitators. In other words, provide pre-K teachers with a distance-learning curriculum. The program starts with a 44-hour course on new research on literacy and teaching strategies to develop children’s language and pre-literacy skills. In subsequent years, the distance-learning program—called the HeadsUp! Network—can offer similar courses in teaching preschool math, science and other topics such as nurturing preschoolers’ social and emotional development and teaching young children with disabilities.

“We set up the network to provide unified training to a national audience so that everybody would get the same information,” says Sarah M. Greene, the association’s president and chief executive officer. Support for the distance-learning project has come from a growing number of states and foundations, including The Heinz Endowments, The KnowledgeWorks Foundation, AT&T and Carnegie Corporation of New York. Foundations are particularly interested in the HeadsUp! Network as a promising model for strengthening professional development programs for all teachers, from pre-K through 12th grade, says Michael H. Levine, executive director of the I Am Your Child Foundation and, until earlier this year, deputy chair and senior program officer in the Corporation’s Education Division. “The potential reach and cost effectiveness of this type of program is very significant,” he says.

Distance learning has been around in one form or another since the late 1800s when students at the University of Wisconsin were allowed to take history courses by corresponding with a professor. Today, more than 1,600 institutions offer more than 54,000 courses that rely, wholly or in part, on the Internet, according to the United States Distance Learning Association, a trade group in an industry that is estimated to reach $12 billion in annual sales by 2003. Corporations have made the most use of distance learning, with companies like Anderson, an international consulting firm, using “e-learning” for the periodic training of its 77,000 employees in 83 countries.

Distance learning has also made major inroads in the K-12 grades, both for teachers’ professional development and for use in their classrooms. Since 1991, the Annenberg/CPB Channel has been offering professional development workshops in most academic subjects; some of the support materials are now available on its web site (www.learner.org). Designed to improve K-12 teaching, the distance education project grew out of a college-level distance learning television program that was started in 1981 by the philanthropist Walter H. Annenberg and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. In 1988, the U.S. Department of Education began supporting distance learning programs for K-12 students in rural schools. The program, called Star Schools, now provides instructional programming in dozens of subjects, ranging from algebra to Swahili, and it reaches 1.6 million students a year in all 50 states.

Research indicates that student achievement is essentially the same in both distance learning courses and traditional classroom courses. The one significant difference is that more students drop out of distance learning programs than traditional courses. Those who complete the courses tend to like the high-tech format, but those who quit cite feelings of isolation and complain about the faster pace of online courses and, of course, technical difficulties. A 1999 study at an Illinois community college illustrates the attrition problem. It found that 64 percent of the students completed distance education courses compared with 83 percent who completed traditional classroom courses.

When the HeadsUp! Network began offering its professional development program in literacy last year, it became one of the country’s largest distance learning programs. It reached up to 6,000 caregivers and teachers at 2,000 centers. In addition, more than 70 colleges offer the program for credit towards an associate’s or bachelor’s degree in early childhood development or education. Any organization—be it a child-care center or children’s library—can receive the distance learning program and share it with teachers, librarians, parents and anyone else interested in children’s education. Participating organizations must pay a monthly subscription fee of $75, install a $250 satellite dish to receive the televised program and have access to the Internet to follow the course on line.

Four states—Ohio, Pennsylvania, California and Nebraska—initially signed on as network sponsors and two others—Illinois and Missouri—joined this year; more are expected to join. By this fall, there could be up to 3,000 participating organizations. “At that point, we would have enough subscribers to be financially viable,” says Libby Doggett, a HeadsUp! Reading project manager. She says the program should reach 12,000 child-care workers in 2001-2002, and 20,000 in 2002-2003.

Every Wednesday night during school year 2000-2001, a satellite orbiting more than 22,000 miles above the Equator sent the network’s first professional development course, called HeadsUp! Reading, to child-care workers in public and private child-care centers and in colleges around the country. The two-hour program, which will be refined and offered again this year, has a breezy talk-show format with literacy experts presenting the latest research and showing video clips from classrooms to illustrate strategies for applying the research. And unlike many distance-learning programs, which involve individual students sitting in front of their home computers, the HeadsUp! Network sends its live broadcasts to groups of child-care workers and students gathered at child-care centers and in college classrooms. Viewers can call in questions during part of the program and a trained facilitator, usually a local college professor, leads discussions at each site before and after the program and during several breaks.

Formal evaluations are underway, but a preliminary snapshot of the program’s impact, conducted by the Center for the Improvement of Early Reading Achievement, reported that the program produced significant knowledge and performance gains among teachers in early literacy education. Even before those results were announced, in southern Ohio, in the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains, HeadsUp! Reading was already a big hit according to the reviews of many Head Start teachers and the program’s local facilitator, Barbara Trube. An educator with much experience in Head Start programs and elementary school, Trube is an assistant professor in the Department of Education at Shawnee State University in Portsmouth. “The teachers are so excited about what they are doing in HeadsUp! Reading, especially when they see that the children are learning more,” says Trube, who also incorporates the program into her education courses.

A few minutes before 7 p.m. on a Wednesday last spring, Trube began ushering a dozen veteran preschool teachers and a few college students into two conference rooms—one for “talkers” who like to share ideas during the telecast and one for “writers” who like to take notes and follow the TV program in silence. “We try to accommodate everyone’s learning style,” explains Trube, who popped back and forth between the rooms, discussing homework assignments and technical problems (handouts for that night’s program weren’t available because the HeadsUp! Reading web site, www.huronline.org, had been down all day).

Then it was showtime, as “Class 19: Third Session on Reading,” came alive on a large, wall-mounted television set. “Hello everyone and welcome to HeadsUp! Reading,” said Mike Rutherford, the program’s host. He introduced that night’s two faculty members: Jerlean E. Daniel, associate professor in the School of Education at the University of Pittsburgh and a past president of the National Association for the Education of Young Children, and Toni S. Walters, professor in reading and language arts at the School of Education at Oakland University in Michigan and the author of several books on teaching reading.

Next page:Because of the wide differences in the educational backgrounds of child-care workers and preschool teachers, HeadsUp!

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