Leading Inspired Learning

Ep: 38 - Introduction to the CECE, Pt. 2 with Melanie Dixon

Welcome to Leading Inspired Learning: A Strive Podcast! In this episode, Olivia hosts Melanie Dixon, RECE, Director of Professional Practice at the College of Early Childhood Educators (CECE). Melanie introduces and explains the Continuous Professional Learning (CPL) Program. Listen, learn, reflect, enjoy!

Duration:: 27m
Broadcast on:: 17 Jul 2024
Audio Format:: mp3

(soft music) - Hello and welcome to Leading Inspired Learning, a Strive Podcast. - Hi everyone and welcome to today's podcast. My name is Olivia Musico, R-E-C-E and one of Strive's Professional Learning Specialists and I will be your host for today's episode. - Today we are here welcoming Melanie Dixon, R-E-C-E and Director of Professional Practice with the College of Early Childhood Educators, also known as C-E-C-E. Welcome back, Melanie. - Well, thank you again for the invitation. - Absolutely, so we're gonna just kind of continue on talking about the role of the college today and also the role of educators. And I remember last time in our episode, we were talking about how educators have a responsibility to hold their title as R-E-C-E's with the college and one of them is that continuous professional learning programs. So we are going to be talking about that today, also known as C-P-L. So I guess before we get into it too much, I was wondering if you could kind of explain what the C-P-L is. - All right, so C-P-L stands for Continuous Professional Learning. And as we had tried it about the last podcast, that that is a responsibility, not only of the college, so the College of Early Childhood Educators has a responsibility, again, in the public interest to ensure that R-E-C-E's are maintaining their competency to practice, they're enhancing their skills, knowledge, experiences in practice. And so we have a responsibility to ensure members' ongoing education or learning. And so that is why we now have also to strengthen that piece coming out of the Early Childhood Educators Act. We have a regulation. It is a continuous professional learning regulation, which from that we have developed the continuous professional learning program. And the program, in essence, its intention is to, again, as I mentioned earlier, help support members in ensuring they're continuing to enhance their knowledge in the practice of early childhood education, build on their skills and capacity. One of the things that we do in this complex kind of every day, sometimes there's a lot going on, is using our professional judgment. That's one of the things that ongoing learning can help support as well that reflective practice piece. And basically just looking to improve our practice as R-E-C-E's, not only on our own budding collaboration with our colleagues as well. - Yeah, I think, I mean, you kind of answered what my next question was gonna be, but feel free to elaborate a little bit more if you want to. But I was curious to know why professional learning is an obligation for R-E-C-E's. I mean, we talk about the importance of lifelong learning, and obviously those are all really wonderful values for people to hold, but just curious why it's an obligation, not just a choice. - Yeah, so like other regulated professions, the public expects that we will continue to enhance our knowledge, skills and our capacity to practice. We know that as we move along, there's new research, which helps inform different aspects of our practice, provides us with new insights into how we might evolve our practice. And going back to that idea of the public, who is it that's expecting us to do this? It would be the families, our employers, our colleagues that we're working alongside with. And ultimately it's for the benefit of the children and families in our communities that we're working with in that practice as educators. And also for ourselves, helps contribute to our own identity and development as professionals. And more often than not on a personal level as well. - Yeah, I was just gonna say, I always find that when I go to engage in professional learning, I'm coming up with more professional knowledge, but also just being able to apply a lot of that knowledge to my personal life. And I think it's quite lovely how interwoven, those two lives can be and how you can take your learning from a professional learning opportunity and actually put it into practice in your personal life too. I think sometimes people think that it's one or the other and it's very black and white, but really it's so intertwined. Our personal lives are embedded in our professional lives and vice versa. We are who we are. And more often than not what we take from professional learning, gets applied for personal life. Yeah. - Yeah, for sure. When we talk about work-life balance, it really is more about work-life integration. And one of my colleagues calls it work-life harmony. And I actually really love that because they are so intertwined and it's about finding how you can harmonize the two of them. So shout out to Jen for that. So since we're on the topic of professional learning, I kind of want to debunk a myth right now. A lot of people, and even myself when I first started learning about professional learning, think that you can only engage in professional learning by attending events in person or virtual, but I've come to learn that that's not true. And there are many other ways to engage in professional learning that can be applied to your CPL requirement. So I was just wondering if you would want to maybe give folks some other ideas beyond the sessions that Strive provides, what else can people engage in? - Oh, for sure. And it's a really important message to be getting out there and to be talking about where reflective, intentional professionals, RECEs, are engaging in their learning on a daily basis. They're, if you are being open to, you know, providing and putting forth, bringing forth the best that you can be as an RECE, you're learning from the children, families and your colleagues on a daily basis. And so it's really important for people to kind of even just capture those moments that can also be considered in the portfolio cycle, which perhaps we'll talk about shortly, but listening to podcasts like this, reading articles, reading a book, maintaining a journal around a particular area of practice that you're looking to kind of think more about, having conversations with colleagues around that topic of interest that you've identified in your goal. It's really wide open and also thinking about ways you can do learning by contributing, contributing and engaging, could be contributing on an article for the family or parent newsletter, could be job shadowing, mentoring. It really is wide open. And so I'd really like to draw listeners' attention to a resource that we do have on the college's website and it's called Examples of CPL activities. And it really shows all kinds of different possibilities. And I know sometimes, you know, people want to keep it simple and perhaps they have a particular way or style that they want to learn and that's cool too. But there are best ways that we can actually continue our learning. - Yeah, I think that's something that we at Strive are really striving to do, provide for our community is obviously we have in person, virtual and hybrid events, but we also have the blog. We also have the podcasts. We've got the resource center. So if you're listening and there's something that you would like to see Strive provide and support your CPL, feel free to let us know. Maybe there's a resource that you'd like to see a book. We've done book clubs before, all of that stuff. So reach out to us and check out the College of VCE to see how you can engage in professional learning and see which one best suits your way of learning. Yeah, so I guess we can talk a little bit more about the CPL program, folks, I'm sure at this point, know now that things have shifted. Previously, it was a two-year cycle and recently it has shifted to a one-year cycle. And so I was wondering if you would like to explain, I mean, we can explain a little bit about the two-year cycle and how it has changed for folks that were engaging in that two-year cycle and what has changed for them as they move to the one-year cycle and for folks that are like myself that are just starting right into the one-year cycle, what can we expect to see and how can we engage in that? Okay, great. So just as a reminder for those who have entered practice recently in your first year, you're doing the expectations for practice module and the sexual abuse prevention program in the first year of practice. And then after that point, there's the start of the one-year portfolio cycle. Now, for some folks prior to this change, there was the two-year portfolio cycle. It was basically a two-year cycle that repeated itself. We only really got into kind of two-in part, two-year cycles because we had the interruption of the pandemic that came along, but a member in their first year of that two-year cycle had to do a self-assessment, using the self-assessment tool, come up with three goals for the two-years plan activities and kind of determine when they might, what those activities were, when they might do them over the two-year span and document those activities as they engaged in them over the two years. And then the second year would be like, okay, let's check in on the goals. How am I doing around activities related to the goals? Are there any shifts? That was an opportunity also just to, sometimes goals had to change because somebody might have started a new position or a new program was being implemented. So there was a lot of flexibility. It was self-directed and self-reflective process. But it was confusing for folks. So based on feedback that our observations in terms of implementing the program, feedback from members, there was an opportunity for us with the need to incorporate the sexual abuse prevention program to, okay, let's take a broader look at the CPL program and we had the pandemic and still, we were still living the impacts of that. So we thought, okay, let's take this opportunity to refresh the portfolio cycle as well. So we moved to a one-year annual cycle where members do some self-reflection around, okay, what happened this past year? What am I anticipating for the year ahead? In terms of priorities, areas of focus, areas of interest related to practice and create one goal. So it's basically one year, one goal and finding activities or experiences that they wish to have that are related to that goal. So it still is self-reflective, self-directed program, fundamentally based on the code and standards because that's really our core responsibilities are around what's in our ethical and professional standards. And that's why our learning needs to be linked to that somehow. - I'm curious, like as someone new into this process, could somebody have the same goal two years in a row or does it need to change? What's that look like? - Yeah, for sure they could. And it could be that they just wanted to look in and dive into let's say a little bit more around pedagogical practice and let's say observations. And so they took that year to consider and explore a topic of observations. Then kind of still related to that and pedagogical practice, okay, what let's move into documentation, pedagogical documentation. So, or you could take pedagogical documentation and probably study that for a good couple of years as well, right? So we have, for example, related to that topic, we have a practice guideline of pedagogical practice. Literally somebody could examine that one practice guideline for the year. It would include reading the document. There are pause and reflects scenarios, links to other resources. So perhaps generated from, you know, exploring that resource for the year, there's a topic area that, oh, well, that interests me. I want to think more about assessment, for example, or whatever tweaks their interest pedagogical leadership. There's so many opportunities. - Yeah, I actually, I think it's really lovely that it's that self-reflection to really decide on what goal you want to focus on, self-directed rather than being told, because I think it allows folks to really think critically about what they want to learn about further or reflect on and see if their thoughts change through that process too. That's great. So I've heard that there's something called an auditing process that can sometimes happen to folks in relation to the CPL program. I was wondering if you could describe that process and what happens if someone gets audited. - All right, so we have an audit process as one of the ways for us to check out how people are completing the portfolio. So getting a sense of how they're responding to the questions, what are they engaging in? You know, are they responding to the questions in the ways that we anticipated? So it's one of the ways that we can look at portfolios and how members, a sampling of members, are completing that to help inform us around, do they require additional support or resources or communications? So we're doing that from a broad communication and supports to the membership. So if somebody is selected for an audit, they're required to provide their portfolio and some other documentation. And they have to do that within a 30-day period. We review the portfolio and if it's all good, we say, great, thank you for sharing that. If we feel there's a reason to give some feedback, perhaps they weren't. It appeared based on what they provided that they didn't understand something or something was missing. We'll connect with the members and provide some feedback on that front. After 30 days, if we still haven't heard from the member, we enter basically a non-compliance process. They're provided a notice of intention to suspend. They have another 60 days to again produce the portfolio. And, you know, if somebody is really non-responsive, doesn't communicate with us in any shape or form, then we have to take steps for a suspending for failure to comply with the CPL program because it is a responsibility and a legislated one. - Makes sense. I am someone that always tries to make sure I'm prepared and I know if I were to ever be audited. I'd probably get a little scared, even if I had everything ready to go. It just seems like a little bit of a daunting experience. Do you have any tips on how people could have their portfolio organized throughout the year so that if they were to get audited, that fear of, "Oh my gosh, do I have everything?" might actually dissipate because they'll maybe feel confident in their portfolio. - So members can maintain their portfolio in whatever format they opt for. So they could print off the components. So the reflection and planning tool and the record of professional learning, they could print that off and do lifestyle paper and pen or maintain it electronically as well as maintain electronically any other documentation or it could be a hybrid. But basically the way I like to do it is I actually have a folder in my computer that's called my CPL and it contains my, I fill out my forms electronically. That's my preference. And then I'm also taking notes as part of my documentation. I tend to do a lot more like reading or watching webinars. I will find occasion to document a conversation that I may have had or an exchange as well. So, but that's how I'm opting to maintain it electronically. So it's all in one space electronically. And so probably other tips would be is, do your documentation as close to the event as possible? I know we have good intentions and then the time goes by and then we kind of forget what we were thinking. We often get asked when we're doing webinars, is there a certificate? Certificates, not that they don't matter. That's not the only way and we actually would rather members take time to think about what was it they just read, heard, discussed, reflected on and documented that way is more likely to stick and to potentially also make its way into practice if it's irrelevant and it feels like something they wanna try out. - I feel like you actually just read my mind because the next thing that I was gonna maybe myth bust was our certificates needed to prove. - I was sorry. - Completed a PL, so that is amazing. And you've just proven to us that it's not the case. We tend to get that question a lot too 'cause we at Strive, we do provide certificates after completing a PL. But I think it's really great to encourage folks to think of other ways that they can engage in the PL and use that to reflect upon and incorporate into their portfolio rather than just relying on a certificate itself because I know for myself, I mean, I have loads of certificates from Strive but just by looking at the certificate, it doesn't speak to what I was thinking and what I learned in that session. And especially if like myself or a lot of folks in our community that attend lots of PL, I'm sure that just gets all mushed up in your brain and you can't believe what I'm doing. - I know, even when I write notes, I have to keep them quite detailed 'cause if they're brief, I'm like, what did I mean by those three words again? - Well, and I know that some people are more oral and would like to talk about it. There's nothing saying that you can do a recording, an audio recording of your reflections and save that. - Great idea. - Your video recording of your reflections and save that. As I said, we are open and to receiving, perhaps for some people, they're a little more tactile, they like to doodle, make kind of connections in that type of way. So maybe it's more of a graphic or a mapping or yeah, kind of a combo of things. So those are great ideas. I never even thought about doing like a audio recording to just talk about just processing and debriefing a session or doing a graphic of some sort. We've talked about, and we've actually had sessions on sketch noting before. - Oh, cool. - That would be a great way to engage in that too. - Okay, I feel like that is the key points that we really wanted to bring to our community in relation to the CPL portfolio. I was wondering if you have any final points that you'd like to discuss. I am new to this process. So there might be points in there that you think would be important to share with the community that I might not be aware of. - Yeah, I think in one of the things that we do talk about when engaging with members about the program is you don't have to do this alone. Yes, it's an individual responsibility and you need to complete your own forms and your documentation and like your portfolio. However, share with others what your goal is because there may be somebody else who's kind of interested in that sort of same topic area and wants to have some ideas about what they're doing and you could do it together or they may have suggestions for resources or other people to connect with or an upcoming workshop or webinar and also finding those opportunities to engage in discussion with others about what you're learning provides you an opportunity to further reflect and get some other perspectives. So that just has a greater, I think, opportunity for us to kind of help solidify some of the learning, maybe take that step to try it out in practice or talk about what you've learned with somebody else. So that's a great point and something I think that the community will really like to hear is that they're not alone in this process and you can do it with your colleagues. That's great. - Before we end, we sometimes complete our podcast with a little bit of a fun game with some super random questions. So the first one that I'm curious about is do you have a favorite children's book? And if so, what book is it? Sorry to put you on the spot, oh boy. - Oh, I love reading. Oh, children's book, I have to go back. I had a lot of fun reading with children in childcare as well as my own children, books by Robert Munch and a little brown hair, the rabbit, the one with the, I don't know that, how much do you? I'm sorry, I can't remember. I love you to the moon and back and all of those. - Yes. - Yeah. - Yeah. - Those are great ones. - Yeah. - Okay, next question, do you have a favorite ice cream flavor? - Oh, I'd say it would be chocolate. - That's a good classic one. - Oh, then I can think of some others. Like a tiger tail is fun when you go when you're in the summertime and that reminds me of summer. - Yeah, I think that question has always been the hardest for me to answer 'cause I love every ice cream flavor that I've tried so far. - I would have to say, so I'm gonna go back and say, "Dremoca Common Fudge from Baskin Robbins." - That's my favorite, that's a good one. That's a great choice. - Well, Melanie, thank you for joining us once again. Your expertise and knowledge has been so wonderful. I've learned so much and I'm so excited for our community to continue to learn as well. Just a reminder to folks that we do have the CPL support network that goes throughout the year. So keep an eye out for when that registration opens up so that if you have any questions or like Melanie mentioned, you can work with others on your goals. So you can come join us for that professional learning opportunity throughout the year. Thank you again, Melanie. This was a great conversation and I will probably go and maybe do an audio about what I've learned here today. - Okay, great. Well, thanks again for the opportunity and it was a pleasure. - Until next time, everyone. - Thanks so much for listening. You can connect with us on Instagram at leading inspired learning pod or on our website at strive SWO.ca/podcast. I would love to have you tell a friend or colleague about this podcast. Thanks again for listening. Please join us next time. (gentle music) (soft music)