Meeting & Agendas

Announcements Megan Burk announced that TAEYC was working with Houston-Tillotson on an alternative education certification for PreK teachers. AISD and Workforce are also part of the collaboration. Meeting Goals

Stacey gave an overview of the Child Care and Development department’s current degree plans, departmental demographic data, and results from a student survey regarding barriers to student success. Seven courses are offered as both DIL and F2F. A total of 27 child development courses offered in the program. Stacey expressed that hopefully more courses will be offered as DIL in response to the transportation needs/barriers of students who live or work away from EVC. TECA courses will need to be removed from certificate degree plans because of TSI requirements for TECA courses. TECA courses are ‘transfer’ courses. Stacey shared that due to the need for all courses within a degree plan to be eligible to receive financial aid, the department is proposing a change in the Associate degree plan to add CDEC 1341 (CDA prep course) as a specialization course for associate students seeking a CDA. Currently students may take Admin I OR School-age Child. The CDA prep course would be added as a specialization option along with the other two courses and allow for students who started the associate program to be prepared for obtaining a national CDA. This would require changing CDEC 1241, a two hour course to a three hour credit (CDEC 1341) in order for the AAS to remain at 60 credits. The change would impact the CDA Preparation Certificate by changing CDEC 1241 to CDEC 1341 making it a 19 hour award (rather than 18 hours). The committee voted to approve these changes. Student reported barriers were reviewed and discussed. Students’ lack of access to technology was noted as a barrier. It was noted by Sandra that students can now check out an iPad from the library for up to two weeks. They can be rechecked. Next, Stacey shared the department’s NAEYC accreditation must be renewed Fall 2018. As a first step to the renewal process the department faculty and staff are looking at their mission statement and conceptual framework. Input from the Advisory Committee is requested to ensure the program is responsive to the community needs. Community stakeholders were identified as students, child care programs, and community organizations and agencies and community at large.

Mission statement: The advisory committee was asked to think about the department’s mission in small groups. The prompt for discussion was “What should be our mission be within community?” Each group was asked to discuss the department’s role and impact on preparation, community, quality, standards and the workforce and capture each idea using post it notes. Notes from large group discussion: Returning to the larger group, each table called out ideas discussed. Gale – “Reach out to community to recruit and bring information to broader community”; Larry – “Thought leader” in community; Gale – “advocates (clarifying statement)”; Denise – “research based” ; Nancy – “Enhancing knowledge and skills, advancement of knowledge”. Results of categorizing stickie ideas from mission discussion: Next the post-it notes were gathered and organized into categories. The categories reflect the Advisory Committee’s response to our mission/purpose within the community. The categories and specific wording are below: Quality: improve child outcome; prepare early childhood development and teachers/staff to lead to success in EC Community: helping field of early childhood develop and inspire others; educate community about early childhood; advocate for children, families and teachers; make sure department is meeting early childhood needs of community; build community of learners; support partnerships between centers-schools-community Preparation: quality instructors/instruction that meet needs of diverse learners; support student needs with technology, funding, and advising; offer variety of educational pathways that support students where they are; student preparation for teaching and working with families; create pathway for furthering education including four year degree; ensure research-based quality child development in ACC District; act as hub for quality preparation; provide opportunities to put theory into practice Quality: model best practice; drive standards; raise level of quality care; enhance skills; increase knowledge; be catalyst to ensure community has high quality child care options for families of all SES levels - birth to kindergarten; bring knowledge of high quality child care and development practice to greater community (for example a child development focused day or event); support quality improvement in community through education and experience; to prepare individuals with basic understanding of what promotes high quality early childhood education; provide quality early education training for practicing and upcoming child care providers Workforce: empower workers; prepare students to be excellent teachers and early childhood professionals; well prepared teachers who can provide high quality care and education; recruitment into the field; provide early care and learning professional development that is current and relevant to today’s workforce; inspire students to become quality teachers with continuous focused improvement; well prepared teachers who can provide high quality care and experience. Conceptual Framework: Next the small groups looked at sections of the department Conceptual Framework. The question prompt to lead the review and discussion about the Conceptual Framework was “What values should drive what we’re doing?” Gale included “what is our role in the community too?” The committee was then divided into table groups to look at assigned sections of the conceptual framework. General comments reported from small groups back to large group included both ideas during the discussion and written comments turned in the end of the meeting: Comments regarding Mission Statement: • Look at ACC mission as a model for the department’s mission statement. It is succinct, clear, and to the point. The Child Development mission statement is too long and important concepts get lost. Perhaps bullet it like the ACC version. • Mission statement and conceptual framework too wordy and long, but it needs to include certain components to meet NAEYC/ECADA standards. It may need an executive summary cheat sheet for others to understand, a “Cliff note version”. • Need to hit idea of “leadership” harder (the department’s role as a leader in the community). Educators: • Under ‘practice as educators’, consider adding diversity of theories and theorists to explore different approaches in order for students to be able to compare and contrast, as well as articulate a variety of theories. • “Theorists include, but are not limited to…” • Consider eliminating names of important theorists and focusing more on approaches, theories and models. There are too many important theorist to mention by name. • Include developmental neuro-science and research like Dan Segal. • Instead of “best practice” use “research based” regarding instruction. • Change sentence to “Prepares students through the use of a comprehensive curriculum using NAEYC standards as the foundation to work effectively (change to responsibly) in diverse, inclusive early childhood settings.” • Quality of department instructors, both educationally and instructionally participating in research based professional development, ongoing research and learning in field. • In this segment, but also in others, when bulleting ideas, the sentence structure needs to be consistent (start with a verb, etc) Colleagues: • Add with regional and university under collaboration (last bullet) to include collegial colleagues in the area and not necessarily at ACC or around the state. • Include that faculty maintains professional development and understanding of research within the field

• Third bullet …leadership, service, and advocacy • “This requires our department to be responsive, adapting the program and services to mirror the needs of the community”. • Instead of responding to changes in the community, identify and be more proactive in effecting the change • Program serves and prepares students to meet the needs of community • Look at bigger picture of early childhood in community, not just partnerships with specific organizations; greater community role; thought leader for advocacy The meeting adjourned with Stacey announcing Sandra Hamilton’s retirement from ACC after 42 years in the department. Gale shared some stories of Sandra’s work in the department over the years.