Another successful year with mass online preschool professional development

It has been six years since KLCII began packaging mass training programmes for early childhood education clients. From 2020, with the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic. it pivoted to online continued professional development (CPD) training for preschool educators with instant success.

In the last few years, the biggest attendance for an online mass CPD programme was for over 600 staff for the four preschool brands of the Crestar Education Group (CEG).

Earlier in May this year, KLCII organised a Professional Development Day for Skool4Kidz to promote and reinforce its culture for continuing learning amongst its staff. The online training exercise saw some 260 infant and preschool teachers separately attending three eight-hour virtual workshops on teaching Music & Movement to their respective age groups. Skool4Kidz is an Early Childhood Education Agency (ECDA)-appointed anchor EC operator under CEG.

On 22 July 2022, KLCII organised and conducted another Professional Development Day for about 350 educators from Elfa, Kinderland and Nurturestars.

The latter is jointly managed by Kinderland and SAFRA. Besides, staff from Singapore, about 70 representatives from the preschools’ overseas centres such as those in Bangladesh, Cambodia, China, Indonesia, Malaysia and Vietnam also participated.

Billed with theme “Understanding children: Insights into inclusivity and diversity”, it focused primarily on inclusive education. It aimed to support ECDA’s initiative to equip more educators to identify and better guide children with developmental learning needs.

Specialists were invited to provide insights to help participants “reach new heights in their profession as early childhood educators”.

In her opening speech, Dr Carol Loy, Director of Curriculum & Professional Development, Kinderland, ELFA and Nurturestars, said: “We believe that every child must be given the opportunity to develop at his or her own pace. It is our professional undertaking to learn to understand the different learning needs of every child. We can then cater our  teaching according to their strengths and differences.”

In addition to two topics on inclusive education, participants also had the opportunity to participate in a synchronous-learning workshop on “Agile Problem-Solving in a Volatile, Uncertain, Complex and Ambiguous (VUCA) World”. The session was specially designed to help them become more responsive and creative in addressing the evolving learning needs of preschool children.