Topic: Create a professional development plan and discuss your career goals.
Topic: Create a professional development plan and discuss your career goals.
In Part 2, you will create a professional development plan and discuss your career goals.
Part 2: Professional and Personal Goals
For this part of the course project, you will create an individual professional development plan that consists of professional and personal goals related to your career development/skill acquisition as an early childhood practitioner.
To complete this section, download the following template: Individual Professional Development Plan Template. Be sure to completely fill in all spaces on the template.
Develop two (2) professional goals and two (2) personal goals related to your career development as an early childhood practitioner. Consider your chosen specialty when creating your goals.
List the target date for completion and steps needed to achieve each goal or acquire each skill.
Identify a local, national, or distance/web-based training resource for each goal. Include a brief summary of how each resource could assist you in achieving each goal.
List the skills and knowledge you currently have either professionally or personally. Consider the six Transferable Skills when you assess your knowledge.
Discuss what you want to learn and how it will benefit you or the children/families you work with.
Determine how you will assess your progress and knowledge/skill acquisition.
You must proofread your paper. But do not strictly rely on your computer’s spell-checker and grammar-checker; failure to do so indicates a lack of effort on your part and you can expect your grade to suffer accordingly. Papers with numerous misspelled words and grammatical mistakes will be penalized. Read over your paper – in silence and then aloud – before handing it in and make corrections as necessary. Often it is advantageous to have a friend proofread your paper for obvious errors. Handwritten corrections are preferable to uncorrected mistakes.
Use a standard 10 to 12 point (10 to 12 characters per inch) typeface. Smaller or compressed type and papers with small margins or single-spacing are hard to read. It is better to let your essay run over the recommended number of pages than to try to compress it into fewer pages.
Likewise, large type, large margins, large indentations, triple-spacing, increased leading (space between lines), increased kerning (space between letters), and any other such attempts at “padding” to increase the length of a paper are unacceptable, wasteful of trees, and will not fool your professor.
The paper must be neatly formatted, double-spaced with a one-inch margin on the top, bottom, and sides of each page. When submitting hard copy, be sure to use white paper and print out using dark ink. If it is hard to read your essay, it will also be hard to follow your argument.