Corter – working together

So how do you get kindergarten teachers and early childhood educators and parent support professionals working together? I think that there are a number of keys that we see in this project, and one key, for example, would be they have to have time to come together and plan how they’re going to make this kind of a project work. So they have to be empowered to define what this is going to mean in their daily practice despite getting guidance from others. They need to come to a realization of what it means for their individual work. The second thing is they have to find their common purpose; and they have that common purpose in wanting to support children and wanting to support parents, because if they’re supporting children in the fullest sense, they’re going to be supporting the parents too.  

And once they discover that they’re all in the same game, with the same purpose, and they have time to work on how they’re going to do it, they can solve the problems of resentment and turf and work things out. And what we’ve seen evolve over the course of this project, is that they come to overlapping roles where there may be special areas of knowledge and expertise, but areas where people still retain some particular, unique duties that is defined in their role. We find that early childhood educators are very well trained in issues of physical safety and that’s not always so true of kindergarten teachers. We find that kindergarten teachers are charged with writing a report card—that’s part of their duties by the Education Act, but they can draw on the expertise and observations of the other people in the integrated service program. So they can make use of the insights and observations of the early childhood educators.  

So there are overlapping roles. Everyone’s delivering support and nurturance for the children and learning opportunities and they’re thinking about how best to do that together, They are taking common professional development in the use of new programs that are brought in to help with issues, for example of behaviour management, or supporting literacy. So they’re taking common professional development. They’re delivering the learning environment together. So it’s been a remarkable success story going from: yes, there’s problems and resentments, and this isn’t easy politically—it’s hard work– to the point where, at the end of the project, all of the staff who responded to our survey said that, you know, “this is really good and it’s benefiting me professionally 100%”.And it’s very rare that you find 100% in any kind of data so that’s quite a remarkable accomplishment for this project.