Early Childhood Educator Professional Development Program

The purpose of this program is to promote school readiness and improved learning outcomes for young children from low-income families who live in impoverished communities.  The program does this by providing high quality professional development programs to improve the knowledge and skills of early childhood educators and caregivers who work in communities with high concentrations of children living in poverty.

Types of Projects

The professional development programs must provide research-based training to improve early childhood pedagogy and improve the children’s language and literacy skills.  Projects focus on early reading and cognitive development for both the professional development activities and early childhood curricula.

Additional Information

The program authorizes project partnerships that include an entity with demonstrated experience in providing training to educators in early childhood education programs on:

• identifying and preventing behavior problems, or
• working with children identified as or suspected to be victims of abuse.

Allowable activities include, among others, professional development:

• to familiarize early childhood educators with the application of recent research on child language and literary development, and
• on working with children who have special needs (e.g., children who are limited English proficient).