CDA Competence Goals Essay

I. To establish and maintain a safe, healthy learning environment. 1. Safe: Candidate provides a safe environment to prevent and reduce injuries. 2. Healthy: Candidate promotes good health and nutrition and provides an environment that contributes to the prevention of illness. 3. Learning Environment: Candidate uses space, relationships, materials, and routines as resources for constructing an interesting, secure, and enjoyable environment that encourages and fosters trust, play, exploration, interaction, and learning. II. To advance physical and intellectual competence. 4.  Physical: Candidate provides a variety of developmentally appropriate equipment, learning experiences, and teaching strategies promote the physical development (fine motor and gross motor) of children. 5. Cognitive: Candidate provides activities and opportunities that encourage curiosity, exploration, and problem solving appropriate to the development levels of each child. 6. Communication: Candidate actively communicates with children and provides opportunities and support for children to understand, acquire, and use verbal and nonverbal means of communicating thoughts and feelings. 7. Creative: Candidate provides opportunities that stimulate children to play with sound, rhythm, language, materials, space and ideas in individual ways and to express their creative abilities. III. To support social and emotional development and to provide positive guidance. 8. Self: Candidate provides a warm, positive, supportive relationship with each child, and helps each child learn about and take pride in his or her individual and cultural identity. 9. Social: Candidate helps each child feel accepted in the group, helps children learn to communicate and get along with others, and encourages feelings of empathy and mutual respect among children and adults. 10. Guidance: Candidate provides a supportive environment and uses effective strategies to help all children learn and practice appropriate and acceptable behaviors as individuals and as a group, and effectively provides support for children with persistent challenging behaviors. IV. To establish positive and productive relationships with families. 11. Families: Candidate establishes a positive, cooperative relationship with each child’s family, engages in two-way communication with families, encourages their involvement in the program, and supports the child’s relationship with his or her family. V. To ensure a well-run, purposeful program responsive to participant needs. 12. Program Management: Candidate is a manager who uses all available resources to ensure an effective operation. The Candidate is a competent organizer, planner, record keeper, communicator, and a cooperative coworker. VI. To maintain a commitment to professionalism. 13. Professionalism: Candidate makes decisions based on knowledge of researched-based early childhood practices, promotes high-quality child care services, and takes advantage of opportunities to improve knowledge and competence, both for personal and professional growth and for the benefit of children and families.