This course focuses the organizational factors in administering and supervising programs for young children and their families. It examines key concepts and practices of leadership and management.

It reviews components of educational programming, including planning and implementing a child-centered curriculum, promoting the inclusion of children and families with developmental differences and/or other special needs, and implementing assessment procedures.

This course also provides an overview of personnel policies and best human resources practices. Ethical and legal considerations and practical implications are addressed throughout the course.

Teacher candidates examine a network of key concepts in the disciplines of the sciences, mathematics, humanities, and social sciences. This course provides a framework for understanding the concepts, habits of mind, and skills characteristic of professionals in each of the disciplines.

The goal of the course is to prepare teachers to 1) recognize important “big ideas” in the disciplines, 2) become effective in facilitating children’s emerging understandings and skills in the various domains of thinking as these understandings are cultivated in classroom life, and 3) design learning experiences that are responsive to the learning needs of children from diverse cultural and language backgrounds as well as representing a range of special needs.

This course models the dynamics of a diverse and inclusive learning community using a mixture of presentation of ideas, concepts, and skills followed by discussion, activities, hands-on investigations, and demonstrations of games, materials, and technology supports for children’s learning: normally developing, special needs, and English language learners

This course prepares teacher candidates to guide young children from diverse family and cultural backgrounds in learning to read and write.

Teacher candidates learn to recognize and describe developmental stages in learning to read and write for 4- to 8-year-olds, describe and identify different factors that influence the learning process, and design curricula for reading and writing that meet the Illinois Learning Outcomes and Illinois Early Childhood Education Standards. Teacher candidates develop a framework for building a classroom library of fiction and nonfiction reading materials that reflect the literary traditions and points of view of a diverse multicultural society.

Methods of teaching reading and writing use this broad base of literature to facilitate the integration of reading and writing with mathematics, science, social studies, and the arts.