United Way of Tucson & Southern Arizona | Great Expectations for Teachers, Children, and Families

Building High Quality Infant and Toddler Care and Education	Raising the Quality of Early Childhood Environments	Supporting High Quality Inclusion	Connecting Early Childhood Environment Assessment to Quality Improvement
Promoting emergent literacy and language in family childcare homes	Creating Pathways from Associate’s to Bachelor’s Degrees	Strengthening Developmentally Appropriate Practices in All Early Childhood Classrooms	Improving Kindergarten Transitions for Tribal Children
Improving Inclusion and Advocacy in Public Preschools	Increasing Early Childhood Degree Completion	Strengthening Teachers’ and Elementary School Principals’ Knowledge about Developmentally Appropriate Practice	Building a Developmentally Appropriate Professional Development System
Increasing Family Childcare Providers’ Knowledge of Language and Literacy Development in Young Children	Building High Quality Family Childcare	Expanding Literacy and Language Development in Rural Communities

	Building a Developmentally Appropriate Professional Development System
In Tucson, the United Way of Tucson and Southern Arizona is working to build a new early childhood professional development system. With funding from all five First Things First Regional Partnership Councils in Pima County, we have created 10 Communities of Practice. Each one of them is helping to build a high quality system for teaching early childhood teachers to be the best that they can be. We call our new system-building work “Great Expectations for Teachers, Children, and Families.”
Naomi Karp Director, Early Childhood Professional Development nkarp@unitedwaytucson.org 520.903.3951