Implementing an Early Childhood Professional Development Course Across 10 Sites and 15 Sections: Lessons Learned

In this article we describe the design and implementation of the National Center for Research on Early Childhood Education's (NCRECE's) college-level course and its delivery to teachers across 10 settings and 15 instructional sections. This professional development intervention, found effective in changing teachers’ beliefs, knowledge, and actual classroom practices (Hamre, et al., in press), has the potential to be scalable through existing delivery systems for teacher preparation (i.e., higher education) and may also address a critical gap created by policies requiring early childhood educators to earn a college degree. Specifically, we describe challenges associated with conducting an experiment of this kind, strategies and supports necessary to implement the NCRECE course well across multiple settings, and evidence regarding course instructors’ implementation of the course as intended.