COMMUNICATION AND COLLABORATIVE PRACTICES
I have been part of a collaborative teaching team over the past 10 years as an RECE in an Early Learning Kindergarten Program, in Wellington County. I have had the opportunity to be part of a Collaborative Learning Community (CLC) with the Kindergarten teams at my site in 2015. We worked on a project that involved investigating if allowing children to document their own learning would increase the student engagement in the classroom. The group sat down to discuss possible inquiry methods and models and an evaluation and assessment criteria to determine the project's effectiviness. I have more recently been involved in the delivery of the IB World School, International Baccalaureate Primary Years Program development, through the early stages, with a school in Wellington County. This work has included collaboration of a six member kindergarten team over the development, implementation and designed plan of an early learning program that incorporates both the Ontario Kindergarten Program and the IB PYP curricula design, into engaging philosopy based programming. Over the summer months of 2019, I have completed a field placement component of the Early Learning Resource Consulting program through a Conestoga/Seneca College partnership program. I have had the priveledged experience to work with KW Habilitation Services in Kitchener-Waterloo Region. During this placement, I contributed to an Early Learning Service Plan, worked along side parents and professionals to collaboratively contribute to the inclusion of children with diverse abilities. I sat on transdiciplinary team meetings and contributed to the support plans for children. I used an Inclusion Index to observe an early learning environment to provide feedback and enhancements to support the team and inclusive practices of the centre in which it was applied. I have included some examples of my work in the RC role so far.
Professional Communication and Consultation
During my time in field placement this term, I had a very different experience with the communication and consultation methods and processes. The Pandemic protocols put in place due to the Covid-19 outbreak have created a new focus on virtual meeting platforms as the new standard. I have experienced this as both a benefit and a drawback to communication.
The addition of the virtual meeting has eliminated some previous barriers to communication for families and professionals. The schedule conflicts that occurred in the past for families and teams are easier to manage by eliminating the need to travel, and meetings can take place in any space available. I completed an ELSP (Early Learning Support Plan) meeting with a parent, over my term, and they were able to join us in the interview and create the plan on their lunch break at work and made it more convenient for the parent to attend. I was able to attend and take notes on a Transition to School meeting and the Resource Consultant commented on the effectiveness of the meeting and how the school had been able to have most of the team participating in the meeting. It seemed to be much more helpful to the team. With the new virtual meeting platform, the scheduling barriers of the past can now be somewhat eliminated, if the families have access to technology and adequate internet access. This was very helpful in the interviews of family and professionals in the ELSP collaborative process.
During my last term placement in the summer of 2019, the meetings had been difficult to schedule and I was only able to participate in two meetings. There were many challenges to meet like, transportation of families, childcare and work schedules of all parties involved and other barriers that had to be met before being able to consult and learn more about supporting the child and family in a purposeful way.
The challenge I encountered this term was the limited contact and in person time I was able to have with my supervising RC. We were only able to access one day together in the office. I made sure to use this day to the best and had many questions and processes discussed with them on that day. We were able to meet at the childcare centre and have brief discussions about my observations and ideas for the Educators, room and children I was supporting. Due to this limitation I did feel a little unprepared in my work, but it was easily lifted once I was able to connect through an email, text or virtual meet. I would have felt more at ease if we had the old processes of meeting again in the office each day after we had visited the centres. It did help me to get out of my comfort zone and just push forward in my work, which was a great strengthening of skill for me.
Something that hinders the collaboration and communication needed in order to implement the plan is the limited availability of Childcare Centres to provide time during the workday for the meetings or even provide, undistracted, in centre time for the Educators. Having time to sit down and understand Educators strengths and teaching methods is very important when trying to create manageable and effective strategies in the classroom. This is still a big barrier to effective support and centres need to provide Educators time away from the classroom to share their own thoughts and insights into the children and the program. This is something that I notice happens in schools as well. The people who know and support the children daily usually have little input into support plans. This seems to occur mainly due to funding models and limits. This needs to be addressed. Oftentimes we miss the best ways to support families, programs and children due to the missed opportunity to include those professionals on the frontlines into important discussions. These are the people who have the best ideas of how to create change and can be left feeling undervalued and unimportant because of these funding barriers. This is something that needs to be looked into in the future.
