Is your college or university offering courses to prepare early educators! Collaborate with us to prepare the future early childhood educators to become effective in delivering early literacy and language learning to young children.
Early childhood educators are some of the most important figures in a child’s life and have the power to empower young minds to succeed in life. Early educators play a huge role in strengthening the pre-primary and primary years of language and literacy education, both in terms of teacher education, as well as in implementing developmentally appropriate classroom processes and practices.
Key Concern
How to train early literacy educators to become more effective?
What You Need
The shift in teacher education and how the early educators are trained
How we Help
We enhance the skill set of early language educators
A growing consensus acknowledges that early childhood teacher preparation and professional development must help all teachers gain knowledge and practice skills that contribute to the educational achievement of all children (Ladson-Billings, 1999; NAEYC, 2002; Ray, 2000).
While an extensive amount of research on teacher preparation in early childhood classrooms has focused on improving classroom instructional practices, increasing early childhood teachers’ reflective practice, reshaping content of professional development, however significantly less attention has been given to – How the developmental and educational needs of children are served?
Early educators are required to be trained so that they can plan developmentally appropriate experiences for children by taking into consideration family backgrounds, traditions, unique needs, and preferences. At the same time, involving family can help family members understand what and how their children are learning in the classroom as well as encourage them to support and promote high quality learning both at school as well as home.
Further, we know that teacher knowledge is molded by their own previous experiences and through interacting with knowledge acquired in teacher education programs and experiences in diverse contexts of teaching and learning. However, finding means and possibilities to integrate teachers interns in school settings is not always easy or even possible. How to find ways to move from traditional microteaching to more holistic practices is certainly a great challenge for many teacher educators. While the practice of telling “good strategies” to budding teachers, seems easier to disseminate through teacher education programs, however, there is no such a thing as homogenous learning and teaching conditions in real educational contexts. Therefore, this requires a shift in teacher education and how early educators are trained.
Effective teachers of tomorrow will possess knowledge of sociocultural perspective and a higher understanding of the interdependence between what is taught and how it is taught because this is crucial to both the processes of learning-to-teach as well as the development of teaching expertise”.
The importance of introducing contextually relevant and experiential content for an engaging and immersive language learning experience becomes highly relevant in the context of teaching materials. According to research, teaching materials play a central role in enhancing the teaching expertise and learning experience, and as Garton and Graves (2014, p.11) assert: “Materials are fundamental to language learning and teaching (…) but materials cannot be viewed independently of their users.” (Emphasis added). Material design should consider and try to harmonize situated possibilities with learners’ needs and wants.
Using alphaTUB during teacher internship helps budding teachers to get trained in the art of delivering blended education through a judicious mix of leveraging technology and tools for delivering a holistic early literacy and language learning experience to young children.
alphaTUB in Teacher Internship Programs further helps in training the teacher interns to learn the process of creating choosing and adapting blended learning materials. This process also helps to develop decision-making, creative thinking, social engagement skills in teacher interns due to enhanced communication with parents. These early interactions with the environment and social settings help teacher interns to learn the art of making choices, gain autonomy and also create opportunities (and the necessity) for reflection thus helping them to become effective early educators.
alphaTUB is actively collaborating with leading research institutes, universities, and colleges to enhance the skillset of early educators especially focusing on language development. We help early educators become effective.
Offerings For Universities & Colleges
alphaTUB For You
Experience the power of alphaTUB and transform early literacy and language development in young children and adults. Innovatively designed to serve a wide spectrum of diverse demography.
