Mentoring Directors as a Strategy to Improve Quality in Early Childhood Programs

Sim Loh is a family partnership coordinator at Children’s Village, a nationally-accredited Keystone 4 STARS early learning and school-age enrichment program in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, serving about 350 children. She supports children and families, including non-English speaking families of immigrant status, by ensuring equitable access to education, health, employment, and legal information and resources on a day-to-day basis. She is a member of the Children First Racial Equity Early Childhood Education Provider Council, a community member representative of Philadelphia School District Multilingual Advisory Council, and a board member of Historic Philadelphia.
Sim explains, “I ensure families know their rights and educate them on ways to speak up for themselves and request for interpretation/translation services. I share families’ stories and experiences with legislators and decision-makers so that their needs are understood. Attending Leadership Connections will help me strengthen and grow my skills in all domains by interacting with and hearing from experienced leaders in different positions. With newly acquired skills, I seek to learn about the systems level while paying close attention to the accessibility and barriers of different systems and resources and their impacts on young children and their families.”
Mentoring and coaching are well established professional development strategies. These relationship-based strategies are often used in conjunction with traditional instructional practices. Most research in this area, however, has focused on the use of mentoring or coaching with teachers to improve teaching practices. This evaluation study conducted for the Ontario Government was designed to determine the extent to which the Mentoring Pairs for Child Care Project achieved its primary goal of enhancing quality in early learning programs in Ontario, Canada by increasing the administrative knowledge and skills of center directors (supervisors). … Download this resource to read the rest of the research.
This resource is part of our Research Note series.