Sharing Web Resources

The organization I am researching and learning more about is Head Start. I chose Head Start, because I know somethings about it, but I have never worked as a teacher in Head Start. I found it interesting, that now as I am learning about Head Start, I am beginning to meet teachers and directors who work with Head Start. I am also learning about my career and Head Start go hand-in-hand.

I am a National Trainer for an organization called Teachstone. Teachstone development a teacher-child interaction assessment tool, name CLASS that measures the quality and effectiveness of teacher-child interactions. This past week, I learned that Head Start uses our assessments to measure teacher-child interactions, and that I will be receiving a lot of trainees from the organization. So I feel like I am now meeting people who can tell me more about Head Start.

When I visit the website this week: www.nhsa.org, I realized that nothing had been updated since last Saturday. I decided to search a topic that I would like to know more information about, which is attachment. I know the basics of attachment, but I just wanted to know more information about attachment, since I will be giving my first infant training in September. I was very disappointed when I discovered that the website didn't have any resources or blogs on attachment, so I decided to see what resources they did have, and I came across an article, which is titled, Poverty's Effect on Child Development. I decided to read the article because I wanted to see if it tied in to what I have been researching all week about economist investing in high-quality child-care programs.

The article Poverty's Effect on Child Development, was about a research study to see how poverty affect the total volume of gray and white matter in children's brain (National Head Start, 2014). The results where that children who are poverty have less gray and white matter in their brains, and less likely to have supportive caregivers and will endure more stressful life events (National Head Start,2014).  After reading this information, I begin to think about everything that has to be done in the field of EC, and how to begin that process. I have taken the stance in training principals, directors and teachers on how to provide and measure quality interactions with children, but there is still so much to do.

The article did make a link about the importance of high-quality programs such as Head Start and enrolling children in them (National Head Start, 2014). This week I have been learning how economist believe they should invest in high-quality child care programs in order to see their investments come back to them. So there is an emphasis on high-quality programs from different points of views.

I will be checking next week to see what Head Start has in store for me!

Cierra



References:

National Head Start Association (2014). "Poverty's Effect on Child Development."Research Blast (n.d.): n. pag. National Head Start Association,