Higher Education

A Roadmap to Student Success For the Early Childhood Education Workforce

To continue our longstanding efforts in addressing higher education barriers for the Early Childhood Education workforce, the T.E.A.C.H. Early Childhood® National Center has published, A Roadmap to Student Success for the Early Childhood Education Workforce. The document explores barriers and strategies to address higher education faculty development, increase faculty and higher education institution capacity to support early childhood workforce students’ success, and create a career pathway to support  early childhood classroom educators whose goal is to move beyond the classroom into faculty and other leadership roles in the field, all toward building a more robust and responsive ECE higher education system for our workforce. 

A workgroup made up of higher education faculty, higher education liaisons and state administrators of T.E.A.C.H. Early Childhood® Programs contributed their time and expertise to accomplish this effort. We extend our thanks and appreciation to them.

Identifying and Addressing Barriers in Higher Education for Early Childhood Educators

Thirty years of experience has provided licensed T.E.A.C.H. states and the T.E.A.C.H. Early Childhood® National Center (National Center) with firsthand knowledge of the kinds of barriers that create college completion obstacles for the early childhood workforce.

In 2019, the National Center gave T.E.A.C.H. Scholarship recipients, T.E.A.C.H. counselors and higher education faculty the opportunity to further identify and weigh barriers from their various perspectives. Consistently, issues of juggling work and family life with student roles, access to courses at workable times, access to support for developmental work (particularly math) and PRAXIS exams and student teaching restrictions surfaced. Adult students with language barriers faced these problems and many more.

To achieve our vision “…Every early childhood teacher has access to an affordable college education…”, the National Center has posted various reports and factsheets from the study as well as Issue Briefs and Resource lists on those barriers that were seen as really difficult and promising strategies that are being used around the country to try to address these.

Over the past several years, the National Center has worked with a few states to convene diverse and robust teams of higher education faculty, advocates, early childhood educators and others to identify strategies to leverage their T.E.A.C.H. dollars to address some of the identified barriers in their states.

“The goals of the Higher Education Barriers (HEB) Project were to identify barriers to higher education access and degree completion in each state’s system and develop and implement strategies that leverage the investments of T.E.A.C.H. scholarships to facilitate solutions to the identified barriers.”

The completed work from these states, Year One Project Report and Summary of Results – Year Two, have been posted on this site in our ongoing efforts to reduce, and eventually, eliminate barriers to college completion for our workforce.

Study Brief

Issue Briefs

Resource Lists

Fact Sheets

Addressing Barriers in Higher Education – A State Team Approach

Virtual Summit Workshops

Webinars

National Surveys on Undergraduate and Faculty During the COVID-19 Pandemic

Suddenly Online: A National Survey of Undergraduates During the COVID-19 Pandemic

Between May 13 and June 1, 2020, Digital Promise administered a survey “to a random sample of undergraduates, age 18 and older, who were taking college courses for credit that included in-person class sessions when the COVID-19 pandemic hit and had to finish the course by learning at a distance. The sample included 717 students attending four-year colleges and 271 students attending two-year colleges. Results have a margin of sampling error of 3.6 points for the full sample.”

“The survey explores the nature of college courses as they were taught during the COVID-19 outbreak, the pervasiveness of various challenges undergraduates faced after the transition to remote instruction and course features associated with higher levels of student satisfaction.” (Means, B., and Neisler, J., with Langer Research Associates. (2020). Suddenly Online: A National Survey of Undergraduates During the COVID-19 Pandemic. San Mateo, CA: Digital Promise.)

Time for Class – COVID-19 Edition: Part 1: A National Survey of Faculty During COVID-19

This report presents the first results from an ongoing series of surveys and focus groups with faculty designed to understand the ongoing impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on teaching and learning in higher education. More than 4,000 faculty at more than 1,500 higher education institutions nationwide have thoughtfully shared their experiences.