An innovative self-improvement approach for the professional development of early educators

Context/background of the projectThe SIA-ProD project aspires to develop an alternative approach for the training and professional development of early educators. The SIA-ProD project aims to provide to practitioners the methodology and the instruments for self-evaluation and self-improvement with a low-cost way. To achieve this goal, the project will implement an innovative technique named Discrete Choice Modeling (DCM) that gave to Dan McFadden who introduced it, a Nobel Prize in 2000 in Economic Sciences. DCM is widely used in marketing, biostatistics and other scientific areas, while its use in education is still very sparse. The usefulness of the discrete choice models is that it reveals the real and actual preferences of the decision makers, by extracting their representations about a topic. By implementing the DCM method, SIA-ProD project will develop a self-assessment tool and a self-improvement educational package to support the way early childhood educators teach physical activities. Physical activities in ECE were selected as the domain for which the Self-Improvement Educational Package (SIEP) will be initially developed, because of the integral part physical activity has in the development and learning of young children.ObjectivesThe 3 specific objectives were: 1. To develop new evaluation methods, which support the improvement of pedagogical approaches2. To promote early educator’s self-improvement to support the development of teaching skills.3. To enhance the quality and European dimension of in-service teacher training,Number & profile of participating organisationsIn total a number of 7 organisations participated in the consortium.From Greece, participants were University of Crete, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki and the School/Educational Institute Ellinogermantiki Agogi.From Cyprus, participants were the University of Cyprus and CARDET institute.From Germany, participants were the University of Bielefeld and the South Westphalia University.From Italy, participating organisation was the Sweden Emilia-Romagna Network Association.Main activitiesDue to the world limitation, we will present a categorization of the main activities, which will be described in more details in following sections. So, the project has completed the following categories of activities: -7 transnational meetings (as originally planned).-Development of the Teacher Self-Assessment Assistant (TSAA).-Self-assessment phase I: Pilot testing of TSAA (more than 60 educators participated)-Self-assessment phase II: Main study implementation (more than 200 educators participated)- Development of the Self-Improvement Educational Package (SIEP).-Self-improvement phase activities (approximately 50 educators participated)-Numerous dissemination activities at a local, regional, European and international level.-Development of a free acces on-line platform that provides to all early educators the opportunity to complete the SIA-ProD’s outputs.Results & impact The SIA-ProD project reports positive results and important impact attained at various levels: -Regarding the project’s outcomes, all the developed intellectual outputs were of the highest quality and translated to four languages. -The comparison of the initial and final measures of the project revealed a significant impact to the professional development and the self-assessment skills of the more than 300 participating educators. -The initially designed dissemination activities were not only met, but were expanded significantly, reaching large numbers of members of the international educational and academic community.-The SIA-ProD project feels that the successful development and implementation of an innovative approach for a low-cost anonymous self-assessment and self-improvement of in-service early educators constitutes a very promising result with great perspectives for wider expansion. -In addition, the project has exceeded the initial design of the proposal and developed (as mentioned earlier) a free acces on-line platform that provides to all early educators in the world the opportunity to complete the SIA-ProD’s outputs, receive instant individualized feedback and have the analogous supporting education materials at their disposal for their zero-cost anonymous professional development.Longer-term benefitsSIA-ProD aiming at empowering the longer-term benefits for the early education community, went one step further, from the initial proposal design, and developed (as mentioned earlier) a free acces on-line platform that provides to early educators the opportunity to complete the SIA-ProD’s outputs, receive instant individualized feedback and have the analogous supporting education materials at their disposal with no cost at all. Such an opportunity can facilitate the sustainability of the project’s outputs long after its completion, and also encourage the expansion of this approach to additional educational fields.