PDC Review - Winter 2006

Minnesota Professional Development Council

Online newsletter

A collaboration of organizations and individuals supporting professionals who educate, care and advocate for children, youth and families

I really enjoyed seeing so many of you at the SuperConference.  It was a great time to renew old relationships, build new ones and get re-energized for the coming year. 

I was excited to see so many workshop sessions related to early childhood and school aged professional development.  There was mentor training for family child care providers, a DHS childcare professional development system update, a session on coaching  and a session on creating more language immersion systems among many others.  It’s great to see how many of us are involved with creating strong professional development opportunities in our field. 

It was also exciting to have the workgroups of the professional development council so involved in creating learning opportunities at the SuperConference.  The articulation workgroup worked hard to create a session that could help practitioners who were interested in getting and expanding on college credits learn about all of their options.  Participants learned about credit for prior learning, teach scholarships and how you get them, and what you need to understand if you want to use credit from a CDA towards a two year degree or credits from your two year degree towards a four year degree.  This workgroup also created a great new brochure explaining articulation and listing current articulation agreements.  If you’d like an electronic copy of this brochure e-mail us at professionaldevelopment@mnaeyc.org and we’ll send you one. 

The core competencies workgroup created a session on the Core Competencies and how they are being used.  We heard from several participants in this session that people find the core competencies to be an interesting and useful tool, but are confused about what the applications of the document.  Clearly there is a need to create more training and train more trainers on this tool.  The core competencies workgroup will be following up on this. 

The practitioner professional development and delivery workgroup led two dialogues on “Moving Towards Excellence in Training”.  The dialogues were animated and very interesting as participants discussed the components of a training system that would create skilled, culturally proficient teachers and caregivers across our field.  It will take the group some time to collate and digest all the data from these dialogues.  Watch this space for more information about what we learned and what we consider to be the next steps in this dialogue.