318: Unlocking the Secrets to Engaging and Effective Childcare Training

In this episode of Childcare Conversations with Kate and Carrie, the hosts chat about making professional development in childcare truly meaningful. They share tips on moving beyond “check-the-box” trainings, like using book clubs, setting personal goals, and encouraging real engagement; yes, even turning cameras on during virtual sessions! 

Carrie offers resourceful strategies for reflective learning and ongoing growth, while both hosts stress the importance of leadership modeling and accountability. If you’re looking to boost staff motivation and create lasting change, this episode is packed with practical wisdom and friendly advice.

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Transcript

Kate Woodward Young (00:05)
Sometimes those trainings that you send your staff to did nothing and nothing changed or it only changed for a week.

Carrie Casey (00:13)
Well, I mean, it did do something. You spent money and they get to check off that they got the training that is required for licensing. Now, is that what we wanted to happen? No. We also wanted it to change their knowledge base and hopefully some behaviors, some skills, but at least we did get some licensing compliance and a slightly lighter

Checkbook so we did something

Kate Woodward Young (00:45)
Yeah, we can always, yeah, we always have

the checkbook. So let's talk about this, Carrie. I mean, we all know, and if you have been in the industry for even, you know, six months, you're aware that there is professional development in our industry. And the pretty standard professional development in education from literally zero to 16 is some sort of just one day, one time training.

Now sometimes you do see opportunities for certifications and sometimes those certifications are a little longer. But a lot of times what we're missing is the accountability and the follow through and the behavior change. And so I know when, you know, we sit down and you listen to these episodes,

We're kind of part of that you've taken 20 minutes out of your day and maybe there's not a behavior change. And I think that it's worth kind of I'm not gonna call it call a spade a spade maybe Carrie. ⁓ And one of the things that we would really like to talk about today is

What should that follow up look like? Whose job is that follow up after the training? What are some things that you can do if you guys took a virtual training independently versus maybe a face to face as a whole school? with that, Carrie, what are some things that you know programs have done to kind of keep content relevant and even

add to some accountability internally. What are some of the things folks have done that you've worked with?

Carrie Casey (02:28)
Well, so what I love is before they go to the training, the staff to write down what they're hoping to get out of the training so that they're actually subconsciously looking for that information while they're in the training, whether it's virtual, whether it's reading a book, whether it's going to a conference, whether it's having someone come in to the program. All of these are good forms of professional development for some learners.

Some of these are gonna work better for different kinds of learners. But having people do the reflection part, which is part of best practices, right? We're supposed to have reflective learning. So first we have to start with where do we want to go? What are we hoping to get? And then people go to different sessions if you're at a conference or people...

whether they're all in the same room or watching the same video, they're going to have different takeaways. So.

Kate Woodward Young (03:30)
Okay, but

what if I don't want to be there to begin with, Carrie?

Carrie Casey (03:33)
Well, we've had those people and that's really fun as a presenter because Kate and I take sick pleasure in when we have the people who like literally put their notebook in front of their faces like they're in high school and we go over and walk and stand right next to those people. And we're not the only ones who do it. I actually had a conversation about this with another ⁓ national and international speaker.

and she will go and stand right by them too. So it's not just us, Kate, we're not the only ones who do it. And then she went and tattled. She went and told their boss that ⁓ they should not get credit for that session because they did not learn, they were not engaged ⁓ and all of that. So if the person...

Kate Woodward Young (04:22)
did that a couple of weeks ago. I did a webinar for a workforce board. So again, this is an organization that pays money to trainers and staff get to go to it for free. And I told people from the time they logged in that when we broke out into breakout rooms, they needed to go to the breakout room and participate. And that if they didn't, I would basically count them as not being present because you have to be able to engage and.

I know that people have gotten really comfortable with not having cameras on their screen, but that does you as a student such a disservice and it's even more of a disservice to your peers and to the presenter. you know what, if you know you're going to do an online training, unless you are actually eating food, turn your camera on or at least turn it on. So at least people see the top of your head. Now you can be eating down here, you know,

There is absolutely no reason. ⁓ We've all learned how to dress for Zoom, know, fancy on the top and sweats on the bottom if you're working from home. ⁓

Carrie Casey (05:25)
Again, the question is what are your staff doing? I mean, yes, it's also for us as the leaders, you do.

Kate Woodward Young (05:30)
But you gotta model the behavior, right? So you

can't expect your staff to do something that you're not willing to do. So okay, so we know that...

Carrie Casey (05:36)
⁓ okay. No, no, no. You just hit

a nerve because the centers that hire us and we're not cheap. We are not $50 an hour to come out and do your training. We were a little bit more than that. And they hire us to come out and in the back of the room, the admin team have the only comfortable chairs in the room and they're chit chatting all throughout our training. What does that?

Kate Woodward Young (06:03)
Or sometimes they're

not even in the back of the room. I've had some that they're right dead smack in the front. And a lot of times they're in the front and to the side. Yes, I was trying not to go there.

Carrie Casey (06:10)
and they're on their phones and they're chit chatting.

And here's the thing, what are you demonstrating to your staff? If you're showing your staff that you can be playing ⁓ Candy Crush on your phone during a training, because you're in the front and you're playing Candy Crush, what does that tell your staff? If you are showing by being in the back of the room and talking with the other members of the admin team and you're chit chatting about

classroom behaviors, what are you showing your staff? If you're feeling called out right now, I'm okay with that. If you're going to hire someone to come in as a trainer, or you're going to go to a conference, you need to model for your staff what you want them to be doing. And if you're not gonna learn anything in that session, don't go. I don't wanna give you a training certificate for you having a gossip fest in the back.

And I think I've just decided that I'm not going to. If corporate hired me and the admin staff were in the back gossiping, I'm not giving them training certificates and I'm going to tell corporate. Just made a decision. That's what I'm doing. But how do we help staff to be more engaged, whether it's an online training, an in-person training at your center ⁓ or going to a conference? What are some things, Kate, that they can do to help the staff?

understand why they should be engaged. What can they do?

Kate Woodward Young (07:43)
not even just a staff. So I'm going to start with just a little step backwards, which is what are your own personal professional development goals? So, you know, we have a director credential that allows you to become a better leader. We have training specifically for directors that you can take either in a 30 hour swatch or you can do month, you know, take monthly. But

If your staff, if you haven't sat down and done goal setting with your staff, how do you even know what makes sense for them to be doing? Do they know what licensing or compliance issues they've had in their classroom and what maybe they need to take some workshops in and why? So yeah, absolutely do that pre-planning, do that reflecting, but before you invest the money in professional development for your staff, and again, it can't be a one-time thing. If you've got a classroom full of

kids with behavior issues, doing a one hour self taken online course is not going to help you the same way. A three session over three months with ⁓ an online facilitator, you're going to get a very different response. Is it going to be a different price? Yes. But what makes more sense? A free workshop on behavior issues to a teacher who

Carrie Casey (09:06)
that's gonna try to address

everything from infants throwing their food to school agers making out in the back of the room. And they're gonna try to do all of that in an hour. I don't think so.

Kate Woodward Young (09:18)
And then you've got no,

and then you've got the price difference between free and having an expert hold your staff accountable over three sessions. And yeah, may only be, you know, under 10 hours. So we're not talking about life-changing time, but it could absolutely be life-changing.

for that staff person. And I think the ultimate goal of professional development is making your staff love their job, right? We want that joy and we can't, know, Carrie and I can only do so much with Play-Doh, right? Like we can only tell you, you need Play-Doh. We can only tell you, should have Legos. We can only tell you that your staff need to learn to play bubbles and blow bubbles and play and have a good time. But if they are stressed out because...

Kids keep touching the floor or touching each other after they wash their hands and that drives them crazy.

Let's help them find the training and the resources that work the way they learn for the issues they're having.

Carrie Casey (10:18)
Yep. And I get the budget constraints, but your highest expense in childcare is your staff. Do you want to have good staff or cruddy staff? I want them to have good staff. So not only do we need to think about that, but we also want to make sure that the money we're spending is actually being impactful. And how do we do that? We have them

think about what they wanna get out of it beforehand, go over any licensing compliance issues that you might need to deal with, and tailor the learning to the way they learn. And then here's the thing, they're done with the training, how do we put that into action? And this is true for the directors and owners as well. We get lots of great training. Kate and I provide you good training, I think fantastic training, but how do you...

Kate Woodward Young (11:11)
Like 40

hours, like 40 minutes a week. Like...

Carrie Casey (11:14)
Yeah. How

do we help you? Like, how do you actually put it into action? And as soon as people are done with a training session, whether it's listening to a podcast, whether it is again, any of those other ways of learning that we've talked about, take notes, give yourself three action items. What are three things that you're you have learned from that thing?

Don't try to remember everything. It was a four hour workshop. You're not gonna remember everything. Three things. What are three things I learned and make at least one of those an action item. So in this one, I would suggest one of your action items is to learn the learning styles of your different members of staff.

Kate Woodward Young (12:03)
and help them learn their learning style.

Carrie Casey (12:04)
and help them learn,

right? So that you know.

Kate Woodward Young (12:08)
We

could come out and do the who is your best self workshop. Okay, so shameless plug. Sorry about that. Go ahead, Gary.

Carrie Casey (12:12)
Yeah. So like

do that as one of your action items from ⁓ this podcast. I don't know what your other takeaways are, but I'm going to tell you that should be one of them. But at the end, so we write our notes, our three notes, and then you set a calendar reminder to look at it in two weeks. Because sometimes it just has to percolate in your head for a while.

and then you can go back and look at your notes two weeks later and be like, this totally hits different now that I've been doing one of the three things I said I was going to for three weeks. And that one thing has made this difference. What if I did all three things or if I took all of them on board?

Kate Woodward Young (13:00)
Okay, so we've talked about a couple of different things. We've talked about looking for training and training providers that offer things in a series. We have talked about taking your own notes and reflection and creating kind of your own quasi accountability or your teachers creating some accountability. But the other thing that I am seeing become more and more popular, which I absolutely love, is program-based book clubs.

And so these book clubs as an admin team, there are a lot of coaches and consultants across the country. Associations in different states are hosting these book clubs. We have discussion questions available for book clubs for several of our books. So ⁓ if you've ever bought one of our books or interested in one of our books, we do have book club discussion questions because it allows the leadership.

Carrie Casey (13:25)
Ooh, yeah.

Kate Woodward Young (13:53)
And it can be leadership from multiple programs to have some of that dialogue and discussion. And what's great is it is just what we just talked about. It is bite-size. So you're reading a chapter or two, you discuss it, you talk about maybe what worked, what didn't work, why that is hard for you to make that transition, or maybe why it's easy for you to make that transition, or maybe it doesn't apply at all. All of those things kind of work really well into a book club discussion.

and the book clubs can be weekly, they can be monthly, they can be three months, four months, six months. It kind of depends on the book, Carrie, don't you think? Because I mean, I don't think there's a standard formula ⁓ for that. I mean, I've seen some small books take six months because people only meet once a month. And although the chapters are fairly short, there's a lot to think about and you got to like kind of process it.

Carrie Casey (14:48)
Yeah, and

I think doing a book club sort of like you might have with your friends where you read one book and then you all get together, that's not what we're talking about here. So let's just clarify that a little bit. So it's more like a book club that Kate and I are in where we're reading a book that is several thousand pages. ⁓ And so we're taking months and months and months to read it. We just went to a book club that was the first six chapters.

⁓ And then the next one is the next five chapters and so it's meeting once a month to talk about part of the book because. I've been in plenty of book clubs well probably not as many as other people but i've been in like three or four that we spend fifteen minutes talking about the book. Or maybe a half an hour.

And then another hour and a half talking about our personal lives and people are drinking some wine and having some cheese and some crackers. That's not what we're talking about here. We're talking about, doing a section of the book and really talking about it. And if, if you only can get 30 or 40 minutes of discussion out of it, cool. Get 30 or 40 minutes out of the discussion and you can then give yourselves training certificates for

how much of the book you read and that amount of time of discussion depends on your state as to how that all works. If you live in Nevada, you can't do this. But in many other states, as long as there's goals and objectives and you have a learning activities and a way to assess, did anybody learn anything, you can do those training certificates. But even if you can't get a training certificate, you can still have learned some stuff.

which I think is the important thing.

Kate Woodward Young (16:39)
There's a lot of,

absolutely, and there's a lot of books. Child Care Conversations has a Pinterest board, and on our Pinterest board there's something called the Director's Bookshelf. And there we have all kinds of books from every, I mean, all kinds of folks. Like, it's not just our books, it's other early learning leaders, it's other female leaders, there's leadership books by Brene Brown and by Sheryl Sandberg and...

like other customer service books, there's some Disney customer service books, so all kinds of books on that Pinterest board. But what's great is if you see those authors, Google something like literally type in book club discussion questions and Google not AI because AI might lie to you and just give you questions that it thinks might work. so actually put it into Google and see if somebody already has.

discussion questions on that book. Sometimes those books have actually been made into even TEDx talks. And so you might even be able to have a 15 minute TED talk about a book that might not cover the whole book. It might only cover a chapter or two, but it might be a great way to launch that discussion. So we have given you some ways to hire people in asking people to deliver things in series.

We have shared with you, I love Carrie's concept about pre-planning and then self-reflection and self-accountability. So how to get the most out of conferences that you're already paying to go to or even free training provided by your state or local associations or regional and state associations. And then the third one that we gave you as a potential option is group.

book clubs that go over time. yes, so like Carrie said, and I mentioned also, which is these are not a one and done type of a book club. So these are book clubs that meet over a series of weeks or months on the same book and you get to kind of digest them and have little nuggets a little bit at a time. So.

Carrie Casey (18:50)
Kind of like a CDA class where you go over the course maybe of a whole year and you're learning a little bit about different parts of the CDA book. Yeah.

Kate Woodward Young (19:00)
Absolutely,

absolutely. So hopefully that's given you some help on ways to think about training because a one and done training isn't gonna do anything other than like Carrie said, lighten your ⁓ pocketbook that was one you had to pay for or check a box. And after a while, your staff are gonna get tired of checking that box for anywhere from ⁓ depending on your state.

10 to 40 hours a year of professional development. There's a pretty wide range in our industry across the country as far as what states require. try to figure out how to make this more than just checking a box. And with that, go to our website, childcareconversations.com and go sign up and join our newsletter. If you don't know that our podcast has a newsletter that comes out with every episode and we can't wait to talk to you in a few days.