STEP Quality Rating and Improvement System - Long Beach Day Nursery
Thanks to the Steps to Excellence Project (STEP) offered by the Los Angeles County Office of Education, the preschoolers at Long Beach Day Nursery’s West Branch have expanded their vocabularies, regularly using adjectives like “joyful,” “beautiful” and “delicious” to describe their emotions and experiences in the classroom.
STEP is Los Angeles County’s first pilot quality rating and improvement system for licensed child care programs, and Linda Blackshire, the school’s director, has seen a great improvement in the quality of interactions between teachers and children since beginning STEP. The Adult Involvement Scale (AIS) that STEP uses to evaluate teacher-child interaction has made teachers more aware of how they communicate with the children. After receiving feedback from the evaluation, teachers began increasing their dialogue with children to encourage their creativity and build their vocabulary, and started asking the children more detailed, thought-provoking questions to help develop their critical thinking skills.
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