NAEYC Guidelines: Enhancing Professionalism in Teaching

Chapter 5 in the class text gives imperative information about professionalism. Teachers always have to present themselves as professionals in a crucial field. In addition, there are guidelines set by the NAEYC in which teachers should follow. These guidelines include seven standards which are promote child development and learning, build family and community relationships, observe, document, and assess to support young children and families, use developmentally effective approaches to connect with children and families, use content knowledge to build meaningful curriculum, becoming a professional, practicum or field experience (Gordon & Williams-Browne, 2015). These guidelines help a teacher know what to expect when becoming a teacher and as

In my experience, my first observation was difficult to perform because it is hard to focus on the surroundings and one can get easily distracted. The second observation was still sort of difficult because I have reflected on my first experience as an observer. As I gain more experience as an educator observing should become like a natural thing like breathing. In addition, there are personal challenges teachers need to overcome such as, personal biases that could come in the way of an observation. The goal is to be conscious of the bias we bring to our work and to be open to multiple interpretations of observed behavior (Gordon & Williams-Browne, 2015). People are not immune to personal biases, this is why teachers need to be conscious of how they observe. Furthermore, there are several techniques that teachers utilize to make observations. This includes narratives, event sampling, and time sampling to perform an observation. Narrative have been used throughout the history of early childhood education. The class book describes that “Narratives are the oldest and often most informative kind of report.” (Gordon & Williams-Browne, 2015) Event sampling makes it easier to observe, a teacher prepares for an event to happen and then the teacher notes what happen during the event. “As soon as it does, the recorder moves into action. Thus, the behavior is recorded as

Guidance is utilized by educators to help students develop problem solving skills. In addition, teachers need to know that diverse cultures have different customs when it comes to discipline and methods to teach problem solving skills Children from the young age are influenced by the teachings of their cultures through their parents and immediate family. This can be a conflict at school when children are raised from a different culture. When guiding children to become problem solvers, teachers can use methods to appropriately guide children. One of the techniques used by teachers are natural consequences to teach children real life situations. For example, the authors of the class text give an example of natural consequence, is if you don’t eat your lunch, you may be hungry later (Gordon & Williams-Browne, 2015). This explains how a teacher uses natural consequences to explain to the student the consequence of not eating will be hunger. Techniques like this help teachers create a positive environment for their students. Moreover, to successfully have positive results for children’s growth teachers need to distinguish between punishment and discipline. The problem with adults, parents or teachers, is that most of the time they mistakenly confuse punishment for discipline. The class text presents the outcomes for punishment. Some of the results of punishment is