Supporting the inclusion of young children in childcare settings through professional development: perceptions of educators and managers
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Background Inclusion in early childhood contributes to building equitable and diverse educational settings, fostering societal acceptance to differences. Nevertheless, obstacles remain to implementing inclusive practices from an early age. Professional development, particularly through coaching, is seen as a factor facilitating quality early childhood education practices. As part of an action-research project, therefore, this study aims to document the perceptions of educators and managers after 1 year of professional development based on the use of a curriculum-based assessment and embedded intervention/instruction in inclusive childcare settings. Method This article describes a qualitative study aimed at documenting the perceptions of educators and managers as regards changes perceived following the professional development received. The perceptions of 14 educators and 6 managers are analyzed using semi-structured interviews. Results Results suggest that professional development helps support quality inclusive educational practices. Participants address certain aspects of their educational practices, such as observation and intervention planning, to fine-tune the learning opportunities offered consistent with children’s development. They report that coaching is an opportunity to examine their practice, which fosters their sense of competence. Results also underline the importance of the leadership role of childcare managers in supporting educational staff. Discussion The perceptions of educators and managers highlight the value of coaching in supporting educational practices in inclusive childcare settings. Improved individualization of educational practices based on the developmental needs of each and every child enhances environments’ capacity for quality intervention for all children.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.008 | 0.013 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".