Early childhood educators are in high demand due to a general increase in the demand for childcare. Now is a great time to enroll in Rhode Island College’s Early Childhood Education BS to secure a career in the field.
First, choose from one of three concentrations: birth to three, community programs or teaching. If you select the teaching concentration, you will be eligible for full certification to teach pre-K-2 in Rhode Island. The community programs and birth to three concentrations prepare you to work with children ages birth to three, and three to five years of age.
Rhode Island College is an exclusive member of the Common Application.
Here we provide information on course requirements, course descriptions and an Academic Rhode Map for each program, a semester-by-semester plan to help you toward graduation in four years.
Admission and Course Requirements
Academic Rhode Map for Concentration in Birth to Three BS
Academic Rhode Map for Concentration in Teaching or Community Programs BS
Writing is central to the field of education as it is through writing that we make sense of the world; learners use writing to think, to discover, to understand. Writing is also a means of communication and teacher candidates must show competence in writing to communicate with families and community, contribute to academic reports on students, write plans for substitute teachers and participate in professional writing on district, state and national levels.
Most importantly, writing is an art and a craft: We write to convey, to express, to inform, to entertain, to remember, to explain, to surprise, to examine, to teach, to convince, to persuade, to analyze … and prospective teachers must show competence in these (and other) areas of writing as, ultimately, they will serve as models of writers and writing for students in classrooms.
ELED 469 Seminar in Student Teaching (Elementary)
ECED 469 Seminar in Student Teaching (Early Childhood)
Both ELED 469 and ECED 469 are capstone courses. They encapsulate the varied writing experiences students will have engaged in throughout program coursework, culminating in the Teacher Candidate Work Sample (TCWS).
The TCWS is an academic piece of writing which tells the story of how students engage in learning a particular aspect of content, while also using writing to:
Students in the Elementary and Early Childhood programs should expect to engage in three broad kinds of writing:
As they write in these three domains, students will have opportunities to practice other kinds of writing, including:
All of the writing in which students engage will help them learn to:
Students in the Elementary and Early Childhood programs will experience, first-hand, writing practices they will be asking their students to engage in: choosing topics, one-to-one writing conferences with the professor; meeting in response groups in class to share writing and receive feedback; examining what makes a piece of writing effective – or not effective – and discussing why; reading model pieces in a variety of genres and discussing characteristics of effective writing; participating in the process of developing a rubric on which their own writing will be assessed – engaging in self-assessment, then reflecting on the process of rubric design and assessment and what that means for work with future students.
They should know that writing has power: to inform, to instruct, to influence; that the genre and form depend on the purpose and audience; and that writing is a process which is recursive, not linear and it requires long, uninterrupted blocks of time.
We offer accredited academic programs that prepare teachers to function effectively in early childhood and elementary school teaching positions.
