Articulation Agreements: An Essential Component for Supporting Early Educators Along Educational and Career Pathways

Articulation Agreements: An Essential Component for Supporting Early Educators Along Educational and Career Pathways

Awuse Tama: Hello, everyone, and thank you for attending today's webinar, Articulation

Agreements: An Essential Component for Supporting Early Educators Along Educational and Career Pathways, as part of our Spotlight on Innovative Practices Webinar Series. My name is Awuse Tama, and I am your facilitator for today's session. 

So, this is the beginning of the Spotlight on Innovation Webinar Series that's running through June 2019. The other two webinars in this series will cover the topics of effective coaching in early care and school-age settings and also CCBF funding for supporting the infant/toddler workforce. So, before we begin, I'd like to go over a few housekeeping items and some of the ON24 features that we will be using during our webinar. So, at the bottom of your screen, there are some application widgets.

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If your slides are behind, pushing F5 on your keyboard will refresh the page. An on-demand version of the webcast will be available 24 hours after the webinar, and it can be accessed using a link that will be sent by e-mail. And please keep in mind that this webinar is also being transcribed, and this transcription will be posted on the ECLKC, which is the Early Childhood Learning and Knowledge Center, after the webinar. Okay. Thank you all again for joining us today. To get us started, I will now turn it over to our host and presenter Michelle Adkins, and she will introduce herself and our guest speaker: Michelle. 

Michelle Adkins: Good afternoon, everyone. It's great to be here with you. I am Michelle

Adkins. I'm a senior state T/TA specialist with the National Center on Early Childhood

Development, Teaching, and Learning, and our guest speaker today is Alison Lutton. She is a consultant of DTL, and we are pleased to have her with us today. Before we get into the meat of the webinar, would like to just sort of get a feel for who all is on the call this afternoon. So, you'll see a poll is currently up on the screen. 

So, if you could please click the button next to the role that best fits the role that you currently have and click submit, we will get some nice results to see who all is represented here. Once you have answered the poll question, if you wouldn't mind going into the chat box and entering the state that you are from, either the state that you currently represent or the state in which you work, whichever makes the most sense to you, and that will give us an idea of how well we are represented across the state. So, we're going to give you just a few more seconds to respond to the poll question, which is asking, "What is your current role?" We're looking to see sort of what kind of representation we have here in the webinar. 

And then, once again, after you have submitted your response to the poll, if you would please respond or enter into the chat box the state in which you currently live and/or work or represent, that would be great, and that will give us a really nice idea of who has joined us this afternoon on the  webinar and where they are all from. So, I think we can go ahead and see who's on the webinar today. So, we have a really nice representation. Seventeen percent are with the CCDS, or the territory administrator, state or territory administrator. We've got state and territory childcare professional development leads. 

We've got professional development staff. We have a small percentage of institute of higher education administration and instructors. We've also got almost 30 percent childcare resource and referral staff. We're so glad to have you. And almost 20 percent National Center staff, and welcome to all of you. We are so pleased to have you with us this afternoon. Awuse, can you give me a little bit of information about where the folks are from today? 

Awuse: Yes. We have a lot of people from Ohio. I see some people from Alaska, New Hampshire. We have Pennsylvania, Georgia. I see New York. 

Woman: Hawaii. 

Michelle: Excellent. Okay. Well, thank you so much. Thank you to that group in Ohio that is here, and thank you for folks in Alaska and all those far-reaching places for joining us today. We're very pleased that you are with us. I'm going to very quickly go through the objectives on our agenda today. So, our objectives are that you will be able to define articulation agreements and explain their importance, describe higher education and state system partnerships and what they might look like, explain the models of articulation and know where to access resources available, both from the Early Educator Central and the ECLKC. 

So, our agenda is we're going to do an articulation agreement overview first thing. Then we're going to look at working with stakeholders across state systems. We're going to look at types of articulation agreements. We're going to look at supporting degree attainment and quality assurances, which is sometimes a difficult thing to achieve both of those, and we're going to look at a few state examples. 

So, before we get into the real definition of articulation agreements, we'd like for you all to answer a couple of questions for us, which is what does the phrase articulation agreement mean to you in the simplest or the most effective way that you know how to explain them to someone. And why, particularly now, why do you think articulation agreements are so important right now? So, if you can take just a few moments and enter into the chat box how you would define articulation agreements and why you think they're important, and then we will talk a little bit about that. 

So, what is an articulation agreement? How would you define it? You can take just a few minutes and enter those into the chat box. And/or why are they important? What is it that you are hoping to learn today about articulation agreements? Okay. So, Judith says conferring credit for course and content completion, absolutely. An agreement, let's see, an agreement to accept coursework between higher education institutions, excellent. An agreement to transfer college credit between institutions, absolutely. Language to grant college credit for coursework that transfers across colleges and universities. Yes, you've got it. 

Awuse: We have agreement between community college and university. 

Michelle: Mm-hmm. Formalized or structured agreements to support professionals in transferring credit, yes. That formalized piece is important, yes. Agreements between institutions of higher ed to recognize each other's courses. These are important so that students are not taking courses that do not transfer, especially between community colleges and 4-year colleges. It could represent a waste of time and money. And if you do have any others that you'd like to add—

Awuse: I see they are important in supporting a workforce pipeline. A student obtains credentials and completes programs. And then process by which some informal credits might transfer to for a credit degree program. And then Katie says it's important because students do not always have a single straight path to degree attainment, so transfers help them to be successful in a non-traditional path. 

Michelle: Absolutely. That's great. Thank you so much for joining in the conversation. We appreciate that. You guys have it exactly right. Articulation is a core component of a career pathway, right? So, these are written agreements between entities that award a degree or other credential. The primary stakeholders are the entities that will sign and be held accountable for those agreements. 

They begin with the transition from high school to college and continue on through graduate school. If you've ever wondered where the word or the use of articulation comes from, it actually uses the metaphor of articulated joints, implying that articulation is more than separate PD programs doing their own thing and then seeing what transfers. Articulation can be designed into the pathway by the appropriate partners. 

Some of you may be familiar with the Power to the Profession Task Force, and that is an effort on the part of 15 national organizations with members in the early education profession to define a shared framework for professional birth through 8 competencies, qualifications and pathways to those qualifications. So, we may see some changes coming up in some of the content in the competencies, and then we'll do this alignment all over again, right, Alison? 

Alison Lutton: Could be. 

Michelle: Yes. It is my great pleasure to introduce to you all Alison Lutton. She is not only a fantastic consultant here for us at DTL, but she is also very well equipped and informed in terms of working with institutes of higher education and aligning all that coursework and working with articulation agreements. So, Alison, so happy that you could be here with us, and I'm going to turn it over to you. 

Alison: Okay. Thank you, Michelle. And thank you, everybody who's on the line. This is really great to know how many people have joined us today. Where we'll go next in this conversation is to start with a focus on who the stakeholders are in articulation agreements, and this is really the critical first step when really trying to do real work around articulation. 

So, let's start by thinking about the primary stakeholders and then additional people who need to be involved. And I guess I'll start with this sort of joke that I often share. I get a lot of questions around, you know, how to build higher-ed partnerships, and, too often, the way that conversation goes is there's a group of people in a state who have spent a lot of time working on a plan for their professional development system, their career lattice. They know that they need articulation between the steps in their career lattice, and after that's all sketched out, and they have their vision, they say, "Now, how do I get higher ed to the table? How do I get higher ed partnerships in this work?

" So, the first message, I think, that I want to get across and that, you know, we can all talk about some throughout this webinar, is in building a partnership, you don't build a partnership at the end of a project. You build a partnership at the beginning of a project. So, with articulation, it is really important to pause and say, "Who really are the primary stakeholders?" And, as we said, Michelle said just a minute ago, the primary stakeholders in any articulation agreement are the agencies that are expected to sign and implement the agreement, so if, by articulation, we mean associate degree to bachelor's degree, from the beginning, the most important people to be at the table are people who represent the associate-degree programs and people who represent the bachelor's-degree programs. It can't wait until the end. I'm also going to encourage you throughout this hour to think big about articulation.

It isn't just associate degree to bachelor's degree. It's one training program to another training program. It's training to community college. It's high school to community college, and there are articulation agreements, although they're not always called that, there really are, between states. Just about every state has credential reciprocity agreements for teacher licensure, and I think that's something that, in our birth-to-5 part of the early childhood world, we're all doing more thinking about. So, you start by, what are the things you want to articulate? And then who needs to develop agreements, often sign a legally binding agreement and implement it. Those are the primary stakeholders. 

So, if it's high school to college, the primary stakeholders are the high-school representative and the college representative. If it's one state to a state next door, the primary stakeholders are the two  agencies, the agency in each state that will need to actually make the agreement and be held accountable for implementing it. That's sort of obvious, but it's often surprising to me how far we can all go down the road of dreaming up our career lattice without  making sure we have the right people at the table from the beginning. Then we want to think about nextlevel stakeholders. 

Who are the other people who really need to be involved from the beginning? That can be experts related to the goals of your work. So, if you're particularly focused on infant/toddler credentials, then it would be experts in infant/toddler development. If you're really focused on getting into pre-K-to-early-grade licensure, it might be experts related to developmentally appropriate practice in early grades. If you're really looking at some special area like BLL, then you need those experts at the table. The other people you need are the people, the agencies that oversee and support the entities that have to make the agreement. So, in every state, and often we have to dig in and do some learning about this in our states, in every state, there's an agency that funds and oversees public higher education. They need to be involved. Maybe not at every meeting, but they need to be involved because they regulate what higher education is allowed and not allowed to do. 

Similarly, if we're looking at teacher education and licensure, every state has an agency that sets the rules around that. Just like, in our world, most likely, the childcare agency is at the table. But we need to think about all of these other agencies as well so that we don't run into glitches at the end that could have been addressed in the beginning. 

Other experts that need to be there are the relevant professional associations and the accreditors of the agencies who are being asked to make an articulation agreement. So, obviously, early childhood professional associations, and there may be others based on the particular articulation focus. And all of higher education, all higher-ed institutions that are eligible for federal grants, for example must be accredited and they have a set of rules, limits, guidelines that come from their accreditors. So, that would include their accreditor of the institution as a whole, what we usually call the regional accreditors, but also there are accreditors for each profession, so the nursing school is accredited by the ANA, and the early childhood programs may be accredited by NAEYC. 

So, these experts might not need to participate constantly, but we need their buy-in. We will need information from them. They'll know some things about state contacts, opportunities, constraints that will be critical for the success of the articulation work overall. And then, lastly, we've got to build cross-agency partnerships. So, within the state, do different agencies need to be talking to each other and engaged at the appropriate time, providing the appropriate information as well as the partnerships that have to happen between higher-ed institutions? 

Then one other thing that I just want to say at this point as we look at partnerships between people in the higher-ed world and people in our childcare Head Start, early childhood world, it's really important, I think, to start in with the understanding that there are good people everywhere trying to do good work, but we may all come to the table bringing somewhat different goals, different ideas, different understandings of where there are opportunities and where there are barriers, and we all come in with our own alphabet soup of acronyms and jargon. We're all irritated with everybody else's, but we all come in with our own. And, as one example, "compentency-based training or education," we tend to use in a fairly free and loose way in the childcare Head Start birth-to-5 world, and we just mean there should be alignment with competencies typically.

In high education and the Federal Higher Education Act, competency-based education has a very specific legal definition. So, that's just one example of a phrase that we might toss around and have to slow down and say, "Here's what I mean by that," and the main idea here being it's important to take the time to do that. Ask other people what they mean and be prepared to explain what we mean and don't assume that our jargon is shared in the higher-ed world and in our childcare Head Start world. So, next, I want to just talk really briefly here about the types of articulation agreements from, you know, a somewhat simplistic point of view. But it's good going into these discussions to know at least about these three ways that, in higher ed, we talk about articulation agreements. 

So, the sort of old-fashioned maybe, traditional agreements were often faculty to faculty. What that means is that the articulation agreement was based on trust between individuals, so I trust that the community college program that's run by my friend who I know well, I know she knows her stuff, I know she's trustworthy, on that basis, I decide and I go to the president of my university, and I say, "We really need to bring that associate degree forward and have it count towards our bachelor's degree." 

Similarly, a community college might say, "You know, we should really give credit for that CBA training because I know the person who wrote the training, so it must be good." That's really another example of faculty to faculty. So, that model is based on, "I know this person. They're good. I know this agency. They're good. It's good training. It's a good associate degree program. It should transfer." The problem with that, obviously, is when those people move around, go to a new job or retire, the agreement can fall apart. The second type of articulation model that people are probably pretty familiar with is course to course, so individual courses transfer based on matching another individual course.

 So, my Intro to Early Childhood at my community college transfers to Intro to Early Childhood at the BA program down the road. Often, there, the discussion around what makes something transfer-worthy is about the course numbers, the course titles, looking at the content of the syllabus, and that can be, and in many states,  that is the foundation for statewide articulation agreements. It's easy in that it's just based on a somewhat objective but also maybe superficial things, course titles and numbers, what textbook do you use. It's difficult because if one program changes a course, adds a new course, and there's no match, then there's no transfer. That can be a barrier to some of the things that we want to accomplish as part of the larger goals that lead us to want articulation, like we want courses offered in Spanish, or we want an infant/toddler course that's really geared towards and meaningful for family childcare providers, but now, if it doesn't have a match in those course-to-course agreements, that becomes a glitch. 

So, the most recent type of articulation agreement that's kind of been gaining steam in the higher-ed literature and then, you know, a number of states is program to program. With program-to-program agreements, the agreement is based on the student completing the entire training program or degree. It isn't based on individual courses transferring, and, in fact, maybe individual courses don't transfer, but the student is encouraged to finish the training program or finish the associate's degree, and then the whole thing moves into the next-level program. In that model, there doesn't have to be a course-to-course match because what's being matched are the competencies, the outcomes for the program as a whole by the time the student completes. This gives lots more flexibility in terms of developing courses, tweaking courses, moving cohorts through courses that may have been developed especially for them, for example, offered in Spanish. 

Both Pennsylvania and Indiana, in the last five, ten years, have developed program-to-program statewide articulation agreements, and I think we can expect to see more and more of them moving forward. This strategy was also highlighted in the link that you see at the bottom of this slide. So, I'm going to encourage you to look at Early Educator Central, the ACF website there. There are a number of things on that website, but one is this article that you see here, and then there's another article you'll see later that has really highlighted program-to-program models as an approach that we want states to look at more closely. And, again, one of the big reasons for that is that encourages completion of the credential before transfer, which really will help in terms of the kind of career pathway and meaningful entrance and exit points on a career pathway that we're trying to build. And it shifts attention to stackable credentials, not simply, "Take this course. Transfer this course. Collect a bag of courses." 

In thinking about what works best for you, really, you want to know what your goals are. So, like thinking about the stakeholders early on, this all makes the most sense if you start with a clear idea of what your goals are. Why do you want articulation agreements? At what point in your career pathway do you really need articulation agreements? What's the big picture that you're aiming to? Because that will help you focus in the right place, and it will help you make judgments about whether draft articulation agreements are going to get you where you're trying to go. So, again, everybody is going to have their own ideas about, you know, what their goals are, everybody at the table, but these kinds of questions on this slide are probably ones that are worth talking through, and then people at your table may come up with some other ones, some additional ones so that you're not just saying, "Good. This course will transfer for that course," but, "Good. We're building a career pathway that will work for us and will accomplish what we need in our state."

So, just briefly here as an example, what are the credentials that you're trying to stack? Are you trying to move with a real focus on high school to associate degree to bachelor's degree? That would be that first bullet point. Pretty much everybody is doing that, but sometimes we don't pay enough attention to the high school point of that agreement. Are we trying to build a progression that moves from initial entry levels of competency or standards through advanced, and then, thinking about advanced, do we need to be thinking about preparing the trainers and the faculty for our program so that they will have the early childhood background that we really want? Are we thinking about credit for training? I know a lot of you mentioned that in the beginning when Michelle talked about that, you know, slide, what does articulation mean for you? So, can we be doing the articulation agreement in a way that it starts to set state guidelines for any training organization that seeks to develop training eligible for college credit? 

So, that might imply, rather than just say, "This will work for these two organizations right now," thinking about, "Are we writing this in a way that could be generalized and replicated with other training organizations?" Are we trying to support equitable access to higher education for specific current or future members of the workforce? That might mean thinking about articulation agreements, again, program to program might work well for this, that will give each training agency or high ed institution some freedom to do some innovative different things for specific cohorts. That might be first-generation college students, might be Englishlanguage learners, might be apprenticeship programs for students who are working adults. Apprenticeship programs are a great example here. In apprenticeship programs, often, the student doesn't actually take the course.

 They get credits for courses based on competencies demonstrated on the job. So, if that's part of your goal, again, the program-to-program approach might work better. And then, as the last bullet point here but a really critical one—I also do independent consulting with states, and I think every state I'm working with right now is really thinking hard not just about degree-level in their career pathway but the quality of the PD that's happening at every step so that there can be some confidence that competencies are really being gained. So, that can be built into articulation agreements. Articulation agreements actually are always somehow using some quality marker so that, if the BA program says, "We'll take this associate-degree program," there's always some quality marker that the BA program has in mind. If the associate degree says, "We'll accept this training as equivalent to a couple of our courses," there's always some quality measurement in mind. So, it's really important from the beginning to be thinking about that and to be talking about what those quality measures might look like. 

So, that moves us into this idea of, "How do we support both degree attainment and quality assurances simultaneously?" There are a number of different ways that people can do this. I think all states are looking for strategies that are going to help them lead to degree attainment. All states are talking about,  "How do we ensure consistent content How do we ensure consistent quality? How do we sustain the agreements over time?" And everyone should be thinking, "How do we sustain the degree programs or the training programs over time, as well?" But as you think about those goals, that might lead you to think about which strategies are going to work best for your state. 

So, here are three that could work. These three, again, are suggested in that paper that's on the

ACF Early Educator Central site. This is a—There's another paper called "Getting Started with Articulation" that I'm going to encourage all of you to take a look at. But this first one is, in thinking about how to support the quality or ensure, really, the quality of the programs that are being built into your career pathway, what every other profession does and, my guess is, early childhood education will keep moving in this direction, but we're fairly young as a profession, what every profession in the US does is say that the degree programs that lead to licenses to practice in that profession should be, often they say must be, accredited by the national accrediting body for that profession. 

So, if you want to be a doctor, you go to a medical school that's accredited by the AMA. It would be almost impossible in the United States to become a doctor if you didn't attend an AMA-accredited medical school. Nursing, you probably attend an ANA-accredited nursing school, on and on. You know, that's the basic way, in the United States, that we ensure the quality of degree programs for specific professions. And you all probably know that NAEYC has partnered, since the early 1980s, with NCATE, now CAEP, NCATE and now CAEP accredit schools of education in the United States, and then they work with each professional association for each certification area to accredit that particular degree program. But, recently, NCATE transitioned to CAEP. They seem more—There's a lot of confusion maybe, but a lot of states that used to require CAEP accreditation no longer do, and NAEYC has really expanded its scope in part in response to that.

So, now NAEYC credits associate degrees and bachelor's degrees. Another strategy here is to embed competencies and coursework that are included in articulation agreements into other state PD requirements, and I'm going to suggest thinking about it in that order. I think, more often, we start with, "We have our state CKCs, and we have our QRS requirements. We want them embedded into the higher-ed degree programs." That's a good and fine thing, but the thing to understand is the higher ed, all teacher ed programs, must meet their professional standards, for us that would be NAEYC. They also have to meet national standards called InTASC, the Interstate Teacher Assessment something, something. They also have to align with the national board for professional teacher standards. They also have to align with their state department of ed teacher licensure standards and program approval of degree programs leading to teacher licensure.

So, from the higher-ed perspective, they have at least five of these things that they're expected to embed in and align with for their programs, and I'm going to suggest that if we all think about alignment to national professional standards as the core, the center of all of that, we could move a lot farther a lot faster. So, think about embedding the aligned competencies and coursework, which will almost always be the NAEYC standards in a higher-ed program, how those can embed our PD system requirements. And then think about focusing on meaningful credentials. So, I think, for a lot of states, this has been a big shift over the last few years, that, for a while, we really focused on the ladder and steps in the ladder and registries that could give certificates saying, "You're now at step five. You're now at step seven."

I think the next stage that a lot of states are thinking about is those steps should meaningful credentials. Each one of those steps should be a meaningful credential that has value in the job market rather than focusing on having a lot of steps that don't necessarily lead to any real career progression in terms of being qualified for new positions that might offer higher levels of compensation and new career opportunities. New career opportunities are a good thing, not a bad thing, not a scary thing that we're trying to block our teachers from being able to access. And then, as you do that, the discussions, I think, will pretty naturally include, "How do we support students in terms of college recruitment, retention, scholarships, addressing equity issues that you've identified in your own state as important ones?" and addressing them with supports that really target the issues that are particular for your state or community. 

So, that will involve, for example, that will always be offer courses in Spanish. It might be something else. It might be three different things. And the big idea here is to use the national standards of the profession as the unifying framework for all of the competency standards, training approval systems across all of the settings, sectors, state agencies that the early childhood professional development system depends upon. And in thinking about this too, the more everything fits together and is unified, the more it makes sense to students, the more there can be a single early childhood associate degree or early childhood bachelor's degree that can meet multiple needs or provide the foundation for multiple needs, and this helps to sustain the degree programs.

 Probably most of you understand that it's one thing to say the higher-ed institution should have this course, should have this cohort model, should have a degree that goes ABC, but it won't live unless the student enrollments are strong enough, and the more we divide with very  specialized courses and degree programs, sometimes the more we undermine the ability for any of those to survive over time. So, think about the quality assurance that matters to you. Think about strategies to get there, and really think about this, I think, since the IOM report, a lot of us have been thinking about the  unified birth-through-8 workforce and how do we build more unified PD systems that can support that workforce across age groups, across settings, across state agencies and across state lines as well. 

So, state examples and resources. In terms of some states who have been able to make some progress, there are many more than these, but here are a few that I'll highlight because I'm familiar with them, and some of you in the group here may be familiar with them as well. So, as I said, program-to-program agreements, Indiana and Pennsylvania are states to look at if you're interested in that, and on Early Educator Central, there are links to those agreements. They're both program to program statewide, organized around the NAEYC standards as the core competencies.

Thinking about, "What are the goals and principles for our higher education pathway?" Virginia did some interesting work recently along those lines, working with the school readiness committee in their state legislature as well as teams of higher-ed associate and university-level folks and department representatives in their state, and then from those principles, they've been developing their articulation agreements. The Washington Early Childhood Education Workforce Council has pulled together a similar kind of  broadly represented consortium that's taking a hard look at their career lattice and their goals and articulation agreements in that context. And Philadelphia developed an apprenticeship project that's an apprenticeship that's embedded in the community college of Philadelphia's associate degree program, so it just transfers forward with the associate degree program into the BA programs that already have articulation agreements, and Pennsylvania is now looking at ways to replicate and expand that model across the state. So, those are just four examples that we know of. I'm sure there are more. And from here, Michelle, do you want to take it from here, and let's just see what's on people's minds, if there are areas people want to go in more deeply, questions, thoughts on what we've shared so far? 

Michelle: Absolutely. So, first, Alison, I want to thank you for that great presentation and all of those very thought-provoking thoughts and things that we need to think about in terms of articulation agreements. I think it can get complex very quickly, and I think you did a great job of sort of streamlining the most important or the key aspects of articulation agreements. So, we do have a little bit of time for questions.

If any of you have a question for Alison around articulation agreements or anything that she presented that you'd like some additional information on, now is the time to ask that. You can put it either in the Q&A widget or in the group chat, and either way would be fine. So, if you have questions now, take a few minutes and write them in chat. 

The other thing that I thought might be interesting is, if you don't have a question, if you have either a reflection or something you heard that really sort of stuck out to you or that really resonated with you, something you heard Alison say that sort of got you thinking about articulation agreements in a different way than you were approaching them before you listened to her comments, just sort of throw some key words or some interesting thoughts or something that provoked you to think differently in the chat box. We'd like to sort of hear what you're thinking about. 

Awuse: Michelle, there is one question. 

Michelle: Great. 

Awuse: For Michelle, and it's saying, "Over the years, Early Head Start requires CDA credentials and then degrees. Are there any lessons to be learned from Early Head Start with regards to articulation agreements? 

Alison: Mmm, good one. I can't say that I really can answer from the perspective of a national view of Early Head Start, and maybe there's some others on the call who might want to add to this, but I'll say I think a lot of people are looking again at where the CDA credential fits into their career pathway, maybe giving new focus to helping people earn a CDA while in high school. Often, high schools have an early childhood course and an opportunity to do field work and are transferring that course forward into an associate degree, so I've been hearing more talk about how to try to get a CDA built into that high-school course so that the student begins the associate degree with the CDA. On the other hand, I think there's more understanding that it's kind of simplistic to say, "Everybody get a CDA, then everybody get an associate's degree, then everybody get a BA." We have multiple pathways that will work for different people. 

So, not everyone will start with a CDA, and not everyone will start with an associate's degree, so we really need to think about how to make sure the quality of each of those is strong and that there are pathways for people to move through in the order or jumping ahead as far as they can as best they can. I worked recently with a group in Texas who chose, for example, rather than emphasizing that everybody get a CDA and then a CDA transfer, they really focused on associate-to-bachelor-degree transfer and that the associate degree awards—It's at least one course to every student who comes in with a CDA. 

Awuse: There's another question from Shauna, and she's asking, "Has any state successfully identified PD trainings that have articulated to some credit within a two or four-year college?"  Alison: PD trainers or training? 

Awuse: PD trainings. 

Alison: Trainings, okay. I think a number of states have sometimes developed training and often developed it around the—Often, it's CDA training, but maybe beefed up to align with particular, you know, introductory courses in an associate's degree. It's easier, for whatever reasons, it's often easier to move that into an associate's degree than into a bachelor's degree. So, yes, I think some have done it, often as kind of beefed-up CDA training. The other thing I'll say is often, rather than say the training must be offered outside of the associate degree, sometimes it's embedded right into the associate's degree. And then the quality, here's where the tricky thing in thinking—Is this training meeting our quality requirements for a college degree? The critical question there is, "Is it college-level training?" not, "Is it good training?" Is it collegelevel training. And there are national organizations that do those reviews. 

Awuse: I think that maybe the first—

Michelle: So, Alison—Ooh, sorry, Awuse. Go ahead. 

Awuse: I was just going to say there's a question in the chat asking if there will be written transcripts available. Yes, this webinar is being transcribed, and the transcription will be available on the ECLKC. 

Michelle: Great. Thanks, Awuse. There is another question, Alison. In the states you have worked with, do any have a central coordination or maybe coordinator that works with the institutions to monitor, renew and update agreements if curriculum changes? 

Alison: Often, there's someone sitting in the department of education in the state who's already doing that for other articulation agreements, so that's the first thing to know. You know, it's not just us in the early childhood world who's doing this work. Often, whoever is your office around higher ed or teacher licensure or any professional licensure, but usually it's in the department of education and with teacher education side of things, in our case, there is someone who's working on articulation agreements. I think what we want, because we think of it all a little differently like CDA and with all of the associate's degree is different in early childhood, so I think we want to partner with that person on the monitoring so that we're monitoring for the things that matter in early childhood that might not matter if you want to be a math teacher. 

Michelle: Right. Alison, we have a couple of comments about CDA. One just simply says, "Could you explain CDA?" And another regarding CDA is, "It is important to note that federal requirements are a CDA or college program of study equivalent to a CDA," so there's a couple of questions there or thoughts about CDA. So, explain CDA, and the federal requirements are CDA or college program of study equivalent to a CDA. 

Alison: [Distorted speaking ]...itself is the credential... associate credential awarded to an individual from the Council for Professional Recognition. The Council of Professional Recognition requires a structured documentation of training in the five competency areas in order—as a part of earning those credentials. So, a lot of the training agencies have—

Michelle: Alison, I'm going to—Alison, I'm going to interrupt for just a second. All of a sudden, you have become very distorted and garbled, so I'm not sure what is happening with your phone connection, but I am going to—Sorry about that. Thank you for all of those comments about the audio. The audio did definitely change on us. Someone has put the CDA Council website in the chat, so that's very helpful. That will give you some information about CDA if you couldn't understand what Alison was saying in terms of her explanation there. And Shauna said yes, the federal requirements that she was referencing were related to Head Start, and thank you for that clarification. And we have another comment from Michelle, who says, "My experience is college coursework may exist but is rarely offered for infant, toddler and preschool because few register." 

And so that is certainly one of the issues that these articulation agreements strive to meet in that, so, yes, we have these articulation agreements, but is there the demand that will keep those programs up and running and allow the institutions to maintain those students coming in and through their program? So, I think that the more that states can work with institutions of higher education and align with NACY and align their CKCs and align their PD planning and their PD training that they provide in the state, that that will—And then create that pathway that will allow an early childhood educator to go from community training to it stacking to meet some AA or BA requirements that then articulate into those institutions. And it is something, yes, that we hear, unfortunately, we hear that quite a bit, that the coursework is there, that they just don't have the demand for it. So, thank you once again. I'm sorry to cut you off, Alison. 

Alison: Can you hear me now? Oh, that's okay. Can you hear you me now? 

Awuse: We can. 

Alison: Let me add one thing to what you just said. 

Michelle: Okay. 

Alison: This is probably why thinking program to program rather than course to course can help. In some areas, there just won't be enough students to fill an infant-to-toddler course, but the infant/toddler content could be spread across three courses, so there is different ways to think about how to ensure that infant/toddler content is there. 

Michelle: Right. 

Alison: Some places can support an independent course. Some areas really can't. 

Michelle: Right. Great. Thank you. And we do have a couple of additional questions in chat, which I am going to have to—We will get back to you, I promise. Alison and/or I will respond to those questions. I want to real quickly wrap up and give you some final information. Do want to alert you to some resources that were mentioned in Alison's presentation. Early Educator Central has two very good resources on articulation. This one, "Getting Started with 

Articulation: What State Partners Need to Know," and this one, who is by our very own Alison Lutton, "Supporting Successful Degree Completion by Early Childhood Professionals." So, both of these were referenced in the presentation, and they will be available to you. The resources are available in your little resources widget so you can download them there. There is also some great information on ECLKC, which is the Early Childhood Learning and Knowledge Center. There is the Early Childhood 

Workforce: Career Pathway Goals and Strategies—wow, this is a long title—for Developing, Improving and Evaluating Higher Education Articulation Agreements. This one is great because it does have an overview of selecting goals. It's got 15 additional resource links within the document itself. It also gives you some additional state examples of states who are working toward articulation agreements. And for those of you would like additional information on the brief state examples that Alison talked about, there are some links here that you can also follow to get some more information about those. So, I thank you very much for being with us. Thank you again, Alison. I believe that Awuse is going to take us through the final slides. 

Awuse: Thank you all so much for joining us again today. Please take a few minutes to complete the evaluation for today's webinar. It will help us to better meet your needs, and we would also love for you to join us on our next two Spotlight on Innovative Practices webinars coming up next year. We do have one on April 30 that will be on the Effective Coaching in Early Care and School Age Settings, and, in June 2019, we have one on CCDF Funding for Supporting the Infant/Toddler Workforce. So, we want to thank Michelle and Alison and also thank you all again. And here is our e-mail addresses if you have any questions that you weren't able to ask during the webinar. 

Please feel free to send us an e-mail, and we will be sure to respond. And, again, here is the link for our evaluations. Thank you all again so much. I hope that you all have a great day.

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