Erikson Institute is excited to announce that we are enhancing our long-standing tradition of providing impactful professional development by combining technology enabled learning with Erikson’s subject matter expertise in early mathematics, home-based childcare, technology in early childhood, social and emotional learning, infant and early childhood mental health, multilingual learners, leadership development and more.
This shift allows Erikson to build highly effective, comprehensive, learner-centered and competency based professional development programs, that support Erikson’s strategic goals of strengthening the early childhood workforce and sustaining our work into the future.
Using our deep knowledge of adult learners—what they need and how they behave—Erikson is creating online professional development products for use in a “facilitated cohort” model where students engage with live and recorded digital content, guided by skilled adult learning coaches who can build community among virtual learners. There will be opportunities for in-person learning, but to maximize Erikson’s reach most content will be delivered virtually.
An example of this partnership was seen in our Summer Institutes 2023, a highly successful event with attendees from around the nation participating in virtual and in-person sessions. One track was a three-day series on Facilitating Attuned Interactions (FAN) and the power of relationships, featuring Erikson’s Dr. Linda Gilkerson and her team.
Building on the success of this in-person summer series, the professional development team worked with the FAN team to develop an asynchronous learning module that will be released in the next few months for Illinois providers on Illinois’s Gateways to Opportunity professional development online system. This module will build on the foundations of FAN training and provide practitioners with a deeper understanding of implementing FAN practices in group consultation settings.
Another example was the summer sessions in early math, which are described in an article by the Hetchinger Report that can be found here. Based on learnings from the summer series, the professional development team is working with Erikson’s early math experts to begin building our first micro-course on early mathematics. We are excited to deliver this first micro-course to the Idaho Association for the Education of Young Children (AEYC), which contracted with Erikson to develop and deliver the course.
Want to learn more about professional development at Erikson? Visit our webpage
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