Norma Fregoso-Graciano, HS Child Development & Education Consultant, shows teaching staff how to help children use language to express thoughts and ideas by comparing different buildings.
The benefits of being organized range from reducing stress to making us happier. For LACOE Head Start teaching staff, classroom organization helps children learn and become ready for school. That’s why LACOE has adopted it as a goal for a series of interactive simulated professional development (SPD) trainings.
This one-day training is one of six strategies designed to strengthen LACOE’s adoption of the CLASS structure to improve child outcomes.
Each training is divided into two parts. First, all participants are in a “general session” that provides information about classroom organization and addresses agency-specific needs. Then the interactive fun begins. Teachers are immersed in a simulated classroom experience. Using the Creative Curriculum as a guide, LACOE staff rotates participants through a daily classroom schedule, encompassing mealtime, whole group, small group, and free choice activities.
LACOE staff designed the training to focus on the key elements of the CLASS Classroom Organization domain, including behavior management, productivity, and instructional learning formats. These dimensions focus on the organization and management of students’ behavior, time and attention.
The experience is getting positive reviews from teachers. One teacher stated the course successfully taught her “to provide expectations for each activity that children do throughout the day and help them to summarize what they learned.”
LACOE’s team designs each session to meet each agency’s needs, which is rewarding not only for teachers, but the trainers as well. HS Child Development & Education Consultant Norma Fregoso-Graciano is one of the instructors. She says, “The beauty of SPD is to see how teachers make the connection between CLASS and Creative Curriculum. They’re excited to try the new hands-on strategies they learned. They often share that they have never been to a training like SPD that provides them with specific tools to use throughout the day.”
