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
Level I competencies represent a set of key foundational skills related to building positive teacher-child relationships, supporting children’s language development, and providing opportunities for play-based learning. Practitioners who are demonstrating Level I competencies showcase their knowledge and understanding of practices that are foundational for creating high quality classroom environments for young children.
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).
EDUCATOR LEVEL III
Level III competencies build on the foundational practices demonstrated in Levels I and II by focusing on intentional, responsive, and individualized teaching. At Level III, practitioners showcase their abilities to plan classroom experiences across developmental domains, adapt activities and environments based on children’s needs and interests, and use observation or assessment information to guide instruction. These competencies also emphasize adjusting interactions and guidance strategies for individual children, supporting deeper language, literacy, and thinking skills through scaffolding, and creating learning environments that meet young children’s needs.