Exploring the Meaning of Childcare Teacher Learning Community Experience for Performing High Quality Teacher-Child Interaction

The purpose of this study was to provide childcare teachers with the opportunity to enhance their professionalism by providing them with a new paradigm of the teacher education program that can raise the teacher learning community, which strives to support high quality teacher-child interaction. This program strives to provide childcare teachers with constructive self-reflection and cooperative reflection opportunities. To achieve this, six childcare teachers in a workplace childcare center in Seoul were selected, and a total of two learning communities comprising the participating teachers were formed. As a result of this study, through the two groups of teachers’ learning communities with four members over two months, participating teachers taught their class according to the theme, In the meeting with the learning community, the teachers shared their reflection about the interaction with the children in their classroom with the learning community members and found positive emotions by encouraging them to identify their merits as teachers. Additionally, through the process of self-reflection and cooperative reflection with the learning community members in the process of identifying a solution to the problems, cooperative efforts were sought in concrete and substantive alternatives. This enabled the teachers to accumulate their practical knowledge related to child-teacher interaction.