CDA Competency Goals and Functional Areas

CDA COMPETENCY GOALS

FUNCTIONAL AREAS

I

To establish and maintain a safe, healthy, and responsive learning environment.

1. Safe:  Candidate helps parents provide a safe environment to prevent and reduce injuries.

2. Healthy:  Candidate promotes good health and nutrition practices and helps parents to maintain an environment that contributes to physical and mental wellness.

3. Learning Environment:  Candidate helps parents use physical space, relationships, materials, and home routines as resources for preparing a responsive, secure, and enjoyable environment that facilitates play, creativity, exploration, and freedom for learning.

II

To advance physical and intellectual competence.

4. Physical:  Candidate help parents provide a variety of equipment, activities, and opportunities to promote the physical development of children.

5. Cognitive:  Candidate encourages parents to provide activities and opportunities that support curiosity, exploration, and problem solving appropriate to the developmental levels and learning styles of children.

6. Communication:  Candidate encourages parents to communicate actively with children and provide opportunities and support for children to understand, acquire, and use verbal and nonverbal means of communicating thoughts and feelings.

7. Creative:  Candidate helps parents to provide opportunities that stimulate children to play with sound, rhythm, language, materials, space and ideas in individual ways and to express their creative abilities.

III

To support social and emotional development and to provide positive guidance.

8. Self:  Candidate supports parents in providing physical and emotional security for each child and helping each child to know, accept and take pride in himself or herself and to develop a sense of independence.

9. Social:  Candidate encourages parents to ensure that each child feels accepted in the family, to help children learn to communicate and get along with others, and to support feelings of empathy and mutual respect among children and adults.

10. Guidance:  Candidate helps parents provide a supportive environment in which children can begin to learn and practice appropriate and acceptable behaviors as individuals within a family.

IV

To establish positive and productive partnerships with families.

11. Families:  Candidate maintains an open, friendly, and cooperative partnership with each family, encourages parents to take leadership in personal and family education; supports family empowerment, involvement in program, and positive family relationships.

V

To ensure a well-run purposeful program responsive to participant needs.

12. Program Management:  Candidate is a manager who uses all available resources to ensure an effective operation.  The Candidate is a competent organizer, planner, record keeper, communicator, and a cooperative coworker.

VI

To maintain a commitment to professionalism.

13. Professionalism:  Candidate makes decisions based on knowledge of early childhood theories and practices, promotes quality in child care services, and takes advantage of opportunities to improve competence, both for personal and professional growth and for the benefit of children and families.