8084 MD4 Dis

Implementation Experiences – Chris Amirault

Implementation Experiences – Chris Amirault Program Transcript

CHRIS AMIRAULT: In general we've had a very positive experience with NAEYC support for accreditation and haven't run into too many problems. That said, the main reason why I think I can say that is that we had adequate staff support to make sure that that could happen. And the person who worked with us on this and continues to do so did take full advantage of the online materials, phone support, on the paper-based materials that we received, and so on.

I think that the main challenge to our program has been, and I think in some ways continues to be, the fact that our curriculum is not a purchased product. And so providing documentation for what we do and how we do it has been something that we have had to learn how to do. There was one year, actually— again, I think it was 2006—where the teachers had done a lot of work labeling photographs to provide documentation for various things.

And the weekend before our visit, we went through our folders and learned that, again, there were some real misconceptions and things weren't quite labeled right. And we had to sort of move things around and make sure that they had the right labels and things like that. And it was a good example of, I think, again, the sort of burdensome level of detail that we didn't want to have fall on our teachers.

We wanted to have it fall on our administrators, but of course, at some point your classroom teachers have to be part of that documentation process. And we've gotten much, much better at that in the last 10 years, but that definitely was a challenge.

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