Institute for Early Childhood Well-Being

What is Nuestros Niños program? It is a federally funded project that provides professional development to teachers and assistant teachers in school districts in Massachusetts and Colorado. In Massachusetts, this professional development is being offered by Boston University Wheelock College of Education and Human Development. It aims at educators meeting high standards in the early education of the youngest English Learners.

Our Goals

The Nuestros Niños program’s goals are:

To improve language and literacy education for young bilinguals in PreKinder classes.
To enhance parents’ abilities to promote their children’s language and literacy by supporting teachers in strengthening home-school partnerships.

Professional Development

The Nuestros Niños Professional Development (NNPD) program consists of four courses leading to an academic certificate:

Working with Families, Professionals, and Communities
Young Bilingual Children’s Development and Learning
Methods for Teaching Young Bilingual Children
Fieldwork in Education: ECE for Young Bilingual Learners

Program Evaluation

Nuestros Niños has a program evaluation of the effectiveness of implementing the professional development program to prepare teachers to work with bilingual children. This evaluation involves volunteer teachers of Spanish-English young bilingual children, students, parents/caregivers, and coaches. Participating teachers will complete a teacher questionnaire and their classrooms will be observed by a project team member. Some teachers will be invited to participate in an interview about their experience in the program. Spanish-English young bilingual students randomly chosen to participate in the study will have their language and literacy knowledge assessed in both languages. Parents will answer a questionnaire and some will be interviewed. Then coaches will also be interviewed.

What are teachers getting from this project?

Teachers who enroll in this program learn about teaching bilingual children, obtain 12 college credits that can be applied to a Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Early Childhood Education (ECE), and learn with Boston University professors online, with individual support from a coach. For the home-school partnerships and classroom support, teachers will receive multilingual children’s books for use in their classrooms and to send home to families.