Early Childhood Educator Credentials
The Early Childhood Educator Credential provides practitioners with professional development acknowledgement for skills and competencies developed throughout their careers. Demonstrate your skills and abilities, known as competencies, to start earning micro-credentials. Each micro-credential badge is aligned to a Texas Core Competency Area. When a practitioner receives all applicable micro-credential badges, they are awarded the Early Childhood Educator Credential.
Across the Core Competencies, three levels of practice are defined with each level requiring demonstration of greater depth and breadth of knowledge and increasing ability to apply knowledge to practice.
EDUCATOR LEVEL I
This level of practice supports practitioners in early learning and development through adherence to program and regulatory policies. Practitioners who are building basic knowledge and understanding across competency areas and typically rely on the observations and guidance of others to increase their effectiveness in the classroom. Practitioners at this level of practice require frequent observation and support to identify areas of need and appropriate courses of action. As their knowledge base grows they require support translating knowledge to practice.
EDUCATOR LEVEL II
Level II competencies build on Level I competencies by maintaining a focus on warm, responsive, and play-based interactions, supporting children’s social and emotional skills, providing opportunities for rich language and literacy experiences, and including key knowledge of developmental domains, stages, and milestones for children in their classroom. Thus, the focus of ECE Level II is to further teachers’ demonstration of foundational skills and knowledge of children’s development. The Level II competencies call attention to teachers’ abilities to use a variety of strategies, activities, and materials to develop children’s skills primarily within the social emotional and language/literacy domains, while gradually expanding to other domains (math and physical development).