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Yang, W., Bautista, A., & Li, H. (2023). Curriculum-based professional learning in early childhood education: conceptualization, implementation and evaluation. Frontiers in Psychology, 14.

In recent years, Early Childhood Education (ECE) researchers have paid increasing attention to the quality of pre-service and in-service learning experiences of ECE professionals, in view of the need of enhancing the quality of services provided to young children. Given that curriculum guidelines are key in supporting the overall upgrade of ECE systems, Curriculum-Based Professional Learning (CBPL) has been proposed as a feasible and relevant way to better support ECE teachers’ readiness and skills for the profession. CBPL anchors professional learning in high-quality curriculum approaches and materials that enables teachers to encounter the learning experiences their students will receive and change their pedagogical practices, leading to better student outcomes (Short & Hirsh, 2020). Therefore, investigating and providing CBPL in ECE has the potential to allow pre-service and in-service teachers to receive more classroom-based and content-relevant opportunities in their professional preparation and skills development. However, how to promote and evaluate the CBPL in ECE remains a significant knowledge gap in the international research literature. To fill this research gap, we argue that it is urgent to make CBPL a research priority in the field.

The importance of CBPL for ECE teachers has been well established in the current literature. By highlighting the relationship between curriculum and teacher professional learning, providing effective CBPL can facilitate ECE teachers to use curriculum as a lever for process quality and promote collaborative teacher-initiated curriculum improvement at the school-based level, thereby leading to a boost to teachers’ pedagogical leadership. Despite its potential significance, it is still unclear about the conceptualization, implementation and evaluation of CBPL for ECE teachers.