Supporting Optimal Teaching and Learning Environments: CEEL Series 3

Offered through the Saul Zaentz Professional Learning Academy at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, the Certificate in Early Education Leadership (CEEL) is designed to provide leaders with the core knowledge, management skills, and tools necessary to build and advance high-quality early education across learning environments. CEEL consists of three carefully crafted series. Series 3: Supporting Optimal Teaching and Learning Environments focuses on helping leaders to understand and cultivate the competencies early educators need to be most effective in their work. Series 3 contains four Learn modules and one Plan and Apply module.

Overview

Each of the three series includes four instructional Learn modules that build participants’ core knowledge in key areas, including early learning and development, adult learning, and leadership and management. The fifth module is a Plan and Apply module designed to support participants as they map key learnings and to create and implement a plan tailored to their site and work.

Supporting Optimal Teaching and Learning Environments provides early education leaders with the knowledge, skills, and tools they need to become powerful instructional leaders. The modules in this series aim to transform how leaders support their professional staff. The four Learn modules plus the Plan and Apply module that comprise Series 3 offer insights into the core business of early education—teaching and learning.

Series 3 Learn Modules

Learn A: Cornerstone Educator Competencies
Discover how to enhance and support the four educator competencies that are the foundation of high-quality early education settings. Explore strategies for how these competencies—educators’ executive functions, emotion regulation, relational skills, and use of talk during classroom interactions—can be developed with professional supports. Learn skills and tools to create a reflective, continuously-learning workforce.

Learn B: Teaching for Cognitive Growth
Understand the relationship between early educators’ competencies and children’s cognitive growth. Learn what structures and processes can be used to both support the adults and increase the cognitive growth among all young children. Discover common barriers to cognitive growth and what skills and tools can be used to counteract these barriers, at the level of the individual setting or at-scale, across the system.

Learn C: Effective Classroom Management
Explore the relationship between early educators’ executive functions, emotion regulation, relational skills, and their effectiveness in the domain of classroom management. Explore the child behaviors that most commonly tax the early educator’s classroom management skills. Learn what structures and processes can be used to both support the adults and address these behaviors more effectively, in individual settings and across a system of early education and care. 

Learn D: Universal Design for Learning
Discover the many ways that a Universal Design for Learning (UDL) can improve child behavior and learning in early education settings, and across the system. Uncover how targeted professional supports enhance the design of early learning experiences and environments that are much more inclusive, positive, and productive than is typical. Learn concrete tools for applying the concepts of UDL in your work.

Plan and Apply
Translate the concepts acquired in the Series 3 Learn modules into an action plan. Map out key concepts derived from each Learn module and create an implementation strategy tailored to the goals and challenges specific to your own professional environment. Upon completion of all four Learn modules, if you haven’t registered for the full series, you will receive an invitation to complete this final module.

Program Details

CEEL is designed to support flexibility. The Learn modules may be taken independently or as part of the overall certificate program. You can begin with any Learn module and complete them in any order.  The online activities are asynchronous, allowing you to choose when, within a given week, you complete them. All content is self-paced, including group discussions. Facilitators moderate discussion boards throughout each of the three-week Learn modules.

Each three-week Learn module requires a total of 10 hours of work, and includes a mix of self-paced learning, group discussions, and job-embedded applications. Activities include:

• Brief video lectures from Professors Lesaux and Jones that include insights from current research in early education and related leadership strategies and practices;
• Readings;
• Self-reflection exercises;
• Online discussions;
• Animated depictions of real scenarios drawn from early education practice;
• Facilitated cohort discussions;
• Strategies for practical application; and
• Job-embedded practice where you will apply the concepts and techniques learned.

A central feature of the HGSE experience is cohort learning, and therefore the CEEL curriculum is designed to create a community of practice so that participants can learn with and from each other.

In the four-week Plan and Apply module, participants are provided with scaffolded supports as they map key learnings and create and implement a plan tailored to their own site and work. The Plan and Apply module requires a total of 15 hours of work. The fee is $245 per module; see the table below for discounts. Participants must complete all 15 modules to earn the full CEEL certificate.

Who Should Participate

CEEL is designed for early education leaders and practitioners, including:

• Directors of early education centers or programs
• Administrators, coaches, and practitioners in public school preK programs
• Leaders of early education service organizations
• State leaders and administrators
• Philanthropists, grant-makers, and advocates

About CEEL

Gain the core knowledge, management skills, and tools necessary to build and advance high-quality early education across learning environments. The CEEL content is aligned and coordinated across its three series to ensure early education leaders have access to the latest research, knowledge, and strategies.

The three series included in CEEL are:

• Series 1: Leading for Early Learning and Development
• Series 2: Rethinking Leadership in Early Education
• Series 3: Supporting Optimal Teaching and Learning Environments

CEEL takes place exclusively online and is designed to offer working professionals in early education an opportunity to deepen their core knowledge and enhance their skills through a flexible, online, and job-embedded learning experience. Materials are interactive and case-based.

Discount and Tuition Assistance

The following discounts are available for eligible individuals and groups. Please contact us to receive your discount codes. Please note that none of the discounts can be combined with another discount code. There is no tuition assistance available for this program at the moment.

*Groups for Series need to register for all five modules at once before Learn A’s registration deadline and pay for the entire amount before Learn A starts.

Fees & Policies

Upon successful completion of an individual Learn module, participants will receive documentation of completion, as well as a letter confirming 10 clock hours awarded. Upon successful completion of a Plan and Apply module, participants will receive documentation of completion, as well as a letter confirming 15 clock hours awarded.

Participants who successfully complete all three CEEL Series — Leading for Early Learning and Development, Rethinking Leadership in Early Education, and Supporting Optimal Teaching and Learning Environments — will receive the Certificate in Early Education Leadership.

Earn CEUs

Professional Education is excited to offer Continuing Education Units (CEU's) for your successful participation in this program. The Continuing Education Unit (CEU) is a nationally and internationally recognized unit of measurement for non-credit continuing education programs. As an IACET Accredited Provider, Professional Education offers IACET CEUs for its learning events that comply with the ANSI/IACET Continuing Education and Training Standard.

Requirements to be eligible to earn CEUs:

• Attend or view all program sessions.
• Complete program evaluation.
• Successfully complete all program requirements.

Upon successfully meeting all requirements outlined above, you will be notified via email that you have A) earned the certificate of completion for the program and B) are now eligible to earn CEUs. This email will contain the link to complete the required reflection assignment if you wish to receive CEUs, along with a submission deadline, and time frame for receiving your CEUs. After submitting your reflection assignment, we will notify you via email of your CEU status, and if you have met all requirements, you will be able to download and view your CEU certificate at this point in time.

• CEEL Learn modules (Learn A, B, C, D) are eligible for 1 CEU and 10 clock hours each.
• CEEL Plan and Apply modules are eligible for 1.5 CEU and 15 clock hours each.

Note: Professional Education is accredited by the International Accreditors for Continuing Education and Training (IACET) and offers IACET CEUs for its learning events that comply with the ANSI/IACET Continuing Education and Training Standard. IACET is recognized internationally as a standard development organization and accrediting body that promotes the quality of continuing education and training.