New Brief Offers Insights Into Online Professional Development for Early Childhood Educators in Ukraine
A new brief authored by Childhood Education International’s Center for Professional Learning (CPL) highlights the importance of contextualized, co-created digital professional development materials for teachers in Ukraine and offers recommendations on course design in education in emergency contexts.
The brief, available in both English and Ukrainian, provides a comprehensive overview of the objectives and key learnings from a project creating and disseminating professional development courses for early childhood educators in Ukraine. It also points to potential future directions.
Contextualized, Co-created Courses
To develop the courses, ten project fellows, along with the support of Senior Consultant Zlata Gromova and CPL staff, authored and piloted four courses for early childhood educators in Ukraine.
The courses are free and available online. Access the free online courses for early childhood educators in Ukraine.
Significant Learnings from the Project
The brief outlines several significant learnings from the project. It emphasizes the necessity of creating culturally relevant and adaptable courses that cater to the diverse needs of early childhood educators in Ukraine and worldwide.
Additionally, it highlights the importance of collaboration among educators, stakeholders, and experts in developing effective educational materials. It also underscores the role of incorporating modern pedagogical strategies and digital tools to enhance the online learning experience.
Key Takeaways
Key takeaways include:
- There is interest across Ukraine in courses supporting teacher professional development, particularly those focused on MHPSS/SEL.
- Quality, deep contextualization is an intense, co-creative, and detail-oriented process.
- Ensuring open digital access to courses (and other digital teacher professional development) is critical for teachers working in displacement and emergency contexts.
- It is ideal to design online courses with modularity and portability — and thus adaptability — in mind, especially in education in emergency and displacement contexts.
- Volatility in education in emergency, displacement, and conflict-affected contexts will affect the speed and flow of collaborative work.
- Elevating practitioners’ voices and celebrating their resilience and expertise is vital to ensuring a sustainable educator workforce.
- Professional learning is a lifelong process that benefits from living, evolving courses and OERs.
Courses for Early Childhood Educators
The four courses developed through this project offer a wide range of valuable content for Ukrainian early childhood educators or for anyone working with or interacting with children. Responses from educators accessing the courses have been overwhelmingly positive.
One learner commented, “I gained knowledge about the possibility of overcoming trauma,” while another wrote that “even those who already have a certain idea about mental health [and] support and are trauma-informed find something for themselves in these courses.”
The courses cover essential topics such as early childhood development, child wellbeing and protection, and trauma-informed practices. Each course is designed to provide both practical training and theoretical knowledge, equipping educators with the necessary skills to create supportive and effective learning environments for young children.
Looking Ahead
The brief discusses potential future directions for similar projects, stressing the importance of continued community-building, especially for teachers working in displacement contexts.
The Center for Professional Learning is continuing its work in Ukraine through another initiative, the Enabling and Enacting Holistic Language Pedagogies Project. This project aims to connect secondary and tertiary level educators in Ukraine and the United States and to introduce them to holistic pedagogies in a supportive, virtual community of practice.