Early Childhood Field Experience: Learning to Teach Well

For Student Teaching/Practicum courses in Early Childhood Education.

This lively practicum guidebook, with its accessible prose and interactive approach, weaves the experiences, the curriculum, and key information with reflective aspects, to best prepare and support student teachers as they enter the real world of educating young children.

Featuring an interactive approach to meet the needs of instructors who prefer a textbook and students who want a more active and concise guide, this textgives students and instructors an accessible, lively introduction to field experiences with practical applications to student teaching. The text introduces pre-service teachers to both fundamentals of teaching and also to team-teaching, working with families, and how to handle diversity-related issues. Chapters with real-life situations and boxed features that illustrate teaching practices help students connect the theory and knowledge they learn in the classroom with fieldwork experiences. To reinforce reflective teaching, and to give instructors multiple ways to interact with their students and placements, each chapter contains several features such as journaling, notes from student experiences, and lessons from current Mentor Teachers. This updated edition covers teacher preparation in regards to professionalism and ethics, curriculum, observation and assessment, and diversity. Throughout the text, additional material on infant-toddler care, a growing trend in the field, is adequately addressed.

Kathryn Williams Browne is an Early Childhood Specialist who has been working in the early care and education field for more than 30 years. She graduated with honors from Stanford University earning a BA in Psychology/Child Development, and later received an MA degree in Early Childhood Education from the University of Michigan. Her teaching experiences include: preschool, parent-cooperative, full-day childcare, kindergarten, first grade, bilingual nursery school, and 15 years at Stanford’s Bing Nursery School. At the college-level, she has taught a wide-range of Early Childhood Education and Psychology courses at Stanford University, De Anza and Canada Colleges, and is currently a tenured professor leading the Early Childhood Education Department at Skyline College in San Bruno, CA.

Together with Ann Gordon, she has co-authored four additional textbooks: Beginnings and Beyond: Foundations in ECE, Eighth Edition (Cengage) and Early Childhood Learning Experience: Learning to Teach Well, 2e (Pearson), and Beginning Essentials, Second Edition (Wadsworth, 2011) and Guiding Young children in a Diverse Society (Allyn & Bacon).

Wearing many hats, Browne is currently involved in a myriad of Early Childhood Education related roles. Currently, she is the Coordinator of the Early Childhood Education Department at Skyline College and the San Mateo Region ECE Mentor Program; serves as the State Secretary of the California Community College Early Childhood Education Faculty Association (CCCECE); and is on the Steering Committee of CA Department of Education’s Competencies Integration Project (CIP).

Ann Miles Gordon has been an early childhood professional for more than 40 years, teaching young children, parents, and college students. She has taught in laboratory schools, church-related centers, private and public preschool and kindergarten  programs. She taught at the Bing Nursery School, the laboratory school for Stanford University’s Department of Psychology where she was a head teacher and lecturer in the Psychology Department. Gordon also served as an adjunct faculty member at several community colleges, teaching the full gamut of early childhood courses. For 14 years, she was the Executive Director of the National Association of Episcopal Schools, where more than 1,100 early childhood programs were a part of her network. Semi-retired, Gordon is a hands-on grandmother of two.