Professional standards and competencies for teachers who teach young children provide them with a core body of knowledge, values, skills, and dispositions that are essential to enhance the quality of education and care provided to infants and toddlers during their pre-schooling. For this, early childhood educators must have higher education and the necessary skills to effectively promote the learning, development, and well-being of young children. Therefore, getting higher education is a way to ensure that educators are qualified and skilled to nurture children at a crucial phase of their development because low-quality pre-schooling can hurt more than anything else. Building on this, the paper reviews an article on the effectiveness of preparing early childhood educators through higher education, how the author has made insightful observations to support the claim, and what are the overall contributions and effectiveness of the article to the field of early childhood teaching and education.
The article selected to be reviewed in this paper is “Preparing the Workforce: Early Childhood Teacher Preparation at 2- and 4-Year Institutions of Higher Education” written by Pamela J. Winton and Diane M. Early examines the state of early childhood teachers through higher education programs in the various states of the United States. The article presents the claim that the importance of quality higher education for early childhood teachers is widely recognized across the United States because there is a variety of majors in higher education that are related to infant-toddler education and care, each with a different curriculum and educational experiences. Moreover, the article presents the data from a survey of program directors and chairs focusing on the ‘birth to five’ movement division for different age groups. The data also focuses on the faculty characteristics and course requirements for higher education and training of educators for young children with a program focused on educating early childhood teachers for children aged three to five “affiliated with higher elementary systems” while those educators for children from zero to 3 years of age where educators are often seen as “serving parents” rather than teachers (Early and Winton).
The article finds out that there is a lack of specific content for infant-toddler education, care, and development which are often embedded in higher education for early elementary training. The authors in the article do well in making insightful observations about the implications of the current structure and practices of early childhood teacher preparation while presenting clear and detailed information on the higher education and training programs surveyed for the research. The article contributes to the field of early childhood teaching and education by raising awareness of the gaps in educational programs and the need for higher education. It also contributes to support the research claim, particularly on the need for more focused higher education and training related to infant-toddler or young children education and care. Moreover, the author presents empirical data on the current state of educational programs for the preparation of early childhood educators for practice and policy across the United States.
In sum, the article is a significant contribution to the field of preparing early childhood educators through higher education and training and the discussions on how to improve the preparation of early childhood educators, especially in discussing and addressing the needs of “early childhood” teachers and their youngest learners. It emphasizes that early childhood educators who teach young children should be eager to advance their knowledge and skills so that they can become more effective instructors. On the other hand, the article also focuses on the children’s outcomes as preparing early childhood educators would be a positive step to take in order to strengthen quality teaching as well as quality learning so that every young child will have the best ability and opportunity to succeed in their future life. Overall, the research article is a significant contribution to building the relationship between the higher education of educators who teach young children in their early childhood and the quality of children’s outcomes that determine that education causes differences for good.
Works Cited
Early, Diane M., and Pamela J. Winton. “Preparing the Workforce: Early Childhood Teacher Preparation at 2- and 4-Year Institutions of Higher Education.” Early Childhood Research Quarterly, vol. 16, no. 3, Sept. 2001, pp. 285–306. ScienceDirect, https://doi.org/10.1016/S0885-2006(01)00106-5.
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