Personal Experience From Life – Refliction Case Study

During the first week of my internship at the Dennis Burton Right Steps center, I experienced a wide range of tasks and experiences ranging from preparing pulled pork for a staff lunch to participating in a site visit in search for potential violations of the National Association for the Education of Young Children (NAEYC) standards. Out of these various experiences, the high point of my first week was directly interacting with children in the infant, multi-purpose, and preschool rooms. For a couple of days, I helped care for and interacted with children, all below the age of three, in the multi-purpose room. While I was in this room, I witnessed helpful behaviors or good choices, redirected inappropriate behaviors through positive phrases such as, “use your walking feet please,” and led group time by guiding the children in the singing of the nursery rhymes, Old McDonald and the Itsy Bitsy Spider. I recognize that some of these children may lack stimulating activities and positive guidance in their homes. Therefore, since I was able to positively impact their lives in a small way, I experienced an immense amount of joy. It was extremely rewarding to see smiles on their faces and progress in their behaviors over these couple of days.

Although this first week was full of positive experiences, one low point occurred on my first day. As a new staff or intern, I was extremely excited, but also very nervous. Since I experienced nervousness, I felt that I was unable to initially interact with the staff as much as I would have liked to. At the staff lunch, as we were all sitting around each other eating baked potatoes and pulled pork, it seemed as if I was almost afraid to pipe into a conversation between my new coworkers. In other words, I felt that I let my nerves take over me, which hindered my ability to carry on a conversation with them. This left me feeling a bit upset with myself throughout the day.

Overall, I felt that I performed fairly well in this professional or administrative role especially towards the end of the week. At the beginning of the week, I mainly reviewed through various pieces of information regarding policies practiced in this center for orientation and completed training courses. However, once I performed in this role, I felt that I did a nice job checking on the ratios in each of the rooms in the morning. More specifically, a couple of mornings this week I helped out a staff member in the infant room as she already had four infants, which is almost out of ratio for one individual, around seven-thirty or eight in the morning. Since all the other classrooms were in ratio, I decided to help her out. Although I was able to successfully check the ratios, I feel that I still need to work on memorizing the ratios for each room. Often times, I referred to a sheet in my orientation binder because it had all the ratios for each room listed on it. Since I will be left in charge of the mornings in a couple of weeks, I will need to make sure that I have these memorized. This will allow me to use my time efficiently and run the center more smoothly.

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After helping out in the rooms to make the ratio, I learned that this child development center uses guidance approaches similar to those used in my HDFS practicum course, Guidance in Early Childhood, at Purdue. In this practicum, at the child development laboratory school on Purdue’s campus, we used the exact phrase, “walking feet,” in place of the phrase, “no running.” Both this center, and the Dennis Burton center use the more positive phrase, “walking feet,” to help redirect inappropriate behaviors. These more positive phrases help children with their behaviors because they communicate the more appropriate option or behavior, which allows the children to understand how to change their behaviors.

As for my overall experience this week, I feel that I can use these experiences to enhance my administrative abilities in this internship and a future career. Since I was able to frequently check the childcare provider to child ratios, I feel that I will be able to more comfortably complete this task in the future. As I become more comfortable in this task, I will likely be able to perform better, which will allow the center to run more smoothly. Additionally, I learned that there are ways that classrooms fail to meet the ratio even when there is enough staff in the room. Therefore, with this knowledge, I can more effectively guide staff members by suggesting other ways of positioning themselves to meet their ratios.

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