Early Childhood Preliminary Proposal

Pending Identification of Funding Entity

To address early development in science understanding the Texas Regional Collaboratives (TRC) proposes a five year statewide program of professional development for early childhood teachers and caregivers utilizing noted early childhood experts in both pedagogy and content who along with TRC staff will develop and deliver an effective program to hundreds of early childhood educators using the TRC model of teachers mentoring teachers.

• Fifteen TRC collaboratives (60 Instructional Team Members) will receive professional development training in Austin. Those 15 ITM teams will return to their respective collaboratives to train a minimum of 40 early childhood teachers each to be known as Science Teacher Mentors.
• The 600 STMs will mentor an average of two other teachers or childcare workers from school districts, Head Start programs, and day care facilities by working in teams to conduct two, three or six hour workshops.
• A total of 1800 early childhood teachers and childcare providers will receive high quality professional development.
• The resulting network of early childhood teacher leaders will receive the continued support of the Texas Regional Collaboratives with a strategy in place to solicit local business support to sustain the program.
• The budget for the proposed program also includes "kits" for ITMs and STMs at an estimated cost of $1000 per kit. Kits will contain an assortment of science materials, big books, and teacher materials and will be assembled by the collaboratives to maximize cost efficiency.