Elizabeth Dunlap

CHD 265 – FA #6
04/02/20

I consider myself an Early Childhood Professional based off the education and field experience I

have been “collecting” over the years. I think these are two very important key things to have in

order to be considered a professional.

I personally think that in order to be a professional anything a person needs to be educated,

otherwise they’re going to go into a profession not really knowing about it. I think education is

especially important if you want to go into a field where you’re teaching young children. There

a lot of things that we don’t know specifically about kids and education really helps out with

that. Over the course of three years I have been working the Early Childhood program and it

has truly taught me a lot about the career I’m going into. I have learned about many strategies

to help me work one on one or to a group of students, how to create lesson plans for a variety

of age groups, how to teach content subjects to young children, how to manage a childcare

facility and managing behaviors. Every class I have taken given me so much insight on what my

career will look like and I know that it’s going to help me in the future.

Before being truly educated in the field of early childhood I began working in the field. At first it

was very difficult and overwhelming because the only experience I had was babysitting for a

friend of my mother’s. It also didn’t help that the center I worked at didn’t have a structed

curriculum for the children enrolled. They weren’t hiring the right people and it was an absolute
nightmare. It wasn’t until I moved to Arlington, that I knew I really wanted to learn more about

what it took to educated young children. I wanted to be able to form my own opinion of the

“right way” to teach children. After being educated for a while, I was able to use what I learned

in school through my work in the field. I truly think that it helped me improve so much, because

in the beginning I felt like I knew everything and that I was a glorified babysitter in a sense, but

really, I was out there not knowing exactly what I was doing.

Education and Field Experience are two important key elements when one wants to work with

young children. You could think that you know everything because you have so much love for

kids, but loving kids isn’t the only thing that comes with wanting to be an educator. Not

everyone is cut out for working with kids, I’ve met many people along the way that have proved

that very point. You have to have the patience, the passion, and willingness to learn about the

child and how they learn in order to teach them. There isn’t a correct way because there are

many ways but all of these things are pretty required when one wants to teach children.