Reflection - Alyssa Kok
Awareness of Early Childhood Issues
As most of us studying in the field of early childhood education know, manpower is one of the main current issues that we educators have to face. There are not enough teachers who are willing to work in the early childhood sector. Even if they do, the turnover rates are high and they do not stay for long. According to Grosse and Peh (2018), “The manpower crunch remains, however, given that the number of full-day places in pre-schools has risen by almost 60,000 over the past seven years.” In addition to that, by 2020, owing to the demand from parents for places in pre-schools, 3,000 more teachers are needed to be in place, which is an 18 percent increase. This is also because of the rising number of mega preschool centres being set up all around the country. This was the research topic that I had done during this capstone project. Many young parents in new neighbourhoods are looking to place their child in a quality childcare centre. Hence, schools such as MyFirstSkool and Skool4Kidz have set up these mega centres which can take in 300-500 children. Therefore, more educators are needed so that there are sufficient to meet the teacher-child ratio in every class.
Many educators join the sector due to the government advertising the many pros of being an early childhood educator, but they do not realize how much effort, physically and mentally, it takes to be able to manage a large group of children with different personalities and temperaments. However, the government is still trying to attract more future educators to join the EC sector. For example, “the National Institute of Early Childhood Development has also been set up to consolidate the fragmented early childhood training ecosystem and to enhance the quality of pre-school teachers.” (Grosse & Peh, 2018). This shows that there is really a demand for more teachers to join the field and enhance professional development to ensure that the teacher will not have the desire to leave the early childhood sector.
After reading through the principal’s feedback for our capstone project, I have learnt that what we think is best to help the centre, may not always be the most realistic and practical method to do so. For instance, our ‘Sensational Day’ was said to have too high of a budget, which is actually true, considering that their centre consists of more than 70 staff. Staff outings also seem like it would help connect the teachers together, but having to plan outings regularly from scratch may not be the most practical idea for the teachers. A couple of them had also given feedback that the workload is too much and they cannot always cope with it.
Personal Growth
This project, in particular, had many learning points for me. I think the most valuable lesson for me was learning how to communicate with people that have different styles of working. Frankly speaking, I had a really difficult time working with my groupmates, most of the time I was frustrated that they could not understand my point of view and it felt very biased. However, all these obstacles taught me to be open to other’s opinions. For example, after conducting the interview with the centre principal, we all had different opinions on what we should do next. Since the principal did not discuss anything related to our initial topic of burnout, we felt like we had no choice but to do a topic we did not want to do. However, we agreed to just be open-minded about it and try to work around the subject.
In terms of communication throughout the project, I felt that my team and I were not on the same page. Although we got the work done, I always felt upset and unmotivated because of certain conflicts we had along the way. For example, we had differing opinions on what solutions were best to meet the centre’s needs. Hence, we struggled to find the middle ground and to incorporate everyone’s ideas together as best as we could. This also strengthened our problem-solving skills as a group. In the future, as an early childhood educator, the ability to work with people of different personalities and styles will come in handy as we will have to work alongside many others. Even if we do not agree on something, communication skills are extremely important in order to work our way around challenges.