So the other day there was a lot of debate from my share about the College of ECE having no control over the 3 components in the CPL that everyone hates and despite sharing the regulations that clearly state what the college does and does not control ECE are still feeling that the college could just scrap the process because it is just too time consuming.
So this is my response to that - YES when reading the regulations
they do have 'some' control but my whole point of the post with links to the Education Act and the Regulations specific to the CPL was there are
certain things legally required of the College to ensure they have as part of the process - so like it or not
the self assessment, the learning goals and the record of learning components
are all required under the Act's regulations. As are keeping records and the
auditing process to cull that members are actually engaging. The framework of
the CPL is set out by the Act and it is not going anywhere easily! The Ford government is making cuts to education they are not going to be willing to open the purse strings to revisit amending regulations for early childhood educators around professional development!
So sure within those required
regulations the college has wiggle room around how those 3 steps look. So they
could perhaps be able to streamline the self assessment portion somehow but the
self assessment is something that needs to be done 'consistent across
membership' under the Act so we all need to be using the same
process/benchmarks to assess ourselves so the Expectations of Practice seems
that standard benchmark since job descriptions are so vastly different they
would not be a consistent benchmark, they could require us to have MORE or less
learning goals than the 3 over 2 year period they could have chosen 3 annually
for example. And yes they could choose to control how much PD is actually
required of members in a quantitative manner and perhaps give us a stricter
amount of hours or really stringent lists of what would qualify as PD.
IMO within the current process they
have chosen around the actual 'pd' actually gives US a whole lot of that
control back. Aside from the self assessment and dictating that we must have 3
goals over a 24 month period they have given a very broad definition of what PD
actually is - technically this right here having this conversation could be PD
under the current flexible guidelines if I had mentoring other ECE on the CPL
completion as a goal.
So if we only want to do 3-5 PD
activities a year or heck spread that over the whole 2 year period that is OUR
choice the College has no quantitative definition under the CPL as how much or
how little PD you actually must engage in as long as you complete the 3 step
process required under the laws mandated and do SOMETHING on your record of
learning for each of those goals you are technically compliant!
So do we really not have the 'time'
to do this? If we look at 'time' if we were to do ONE PD activity under each
goal over a 12 month period - so that is 1 activity every 4 months and it can
be as little as reading a 5 minute article online and doing a little 5 minute
'this is what I learned/found interesting and this is how to plan to apply that
to my practice' .... that is 10 minutes of PD and do that 3 x per year - 30
minutes out of our 43,800 minutes or 60 minutes of our time out of 87, 600
minutes of our life in a two year period. I think so many ECE are blowing this
'time it takes' up in their minds into something it actually isn't ... some
people will always go way above and beyond what is required and that is their
journey but if you just want to meet the requirement - stick to the space they
give us in the forms. There is not a whole lot of space there for TWO years of
PD. Read the samples on the college website - they are not complicated and they
all stick within the space allotted in the forms.
Have an amazing day!
Margaret
Live Well, Laugh Often, Love Much
Be Totallyawake4-life
