As a Director, Room Leader or nominated Supervisor, you’re usually the one deciding where your professional learning budget goes. The wrong choice wastes time and money, while the right one shifts everyday practice across your whole team.
Government funded options through the Strengthening Early Learning Opportunities (SELO) programme help to remove the cost barrier but come with delivery expectations – so the question shifts away from whether to invest, to how to invest well. With more in-person and online courses available than ever, figuring out what’s going to meet everyone’s expectations can feel like a stab in the dark.
That’s why we have put together this 4-step guide for evaluating the most suitable online professional development courses for your kaiako. Full disclosure – examples used of the Essential Resources courses in this blog are aligned to Te Whāriki but are not part of SELO options here in Aotearoa.
However, this guide is more about finding the right course for you, than joining ours! Use it to keep the focus on outcomes for your tamariki, alignment to your quality goals and building educator capability that lasts beyond a single training day.
What should Early Childhood Education leaders look for in an online professional development course?
Step 1: Start with the impact you want, rather than the most interesting topic.
A strong course states the practice it intends to improve and connects it to children’s learning, not just a certificate of completion. When looking at ECE professional development courses, ask three questions.
- Is it grounded in a recognised framework?
- Does it move educators from awareness to application?
- Can the whole team engage with it, rather than just one kaiako who then needs to cascade it to the team?
Framework alignment matters most in this context. Look for explicit links to Te Whāriki. Professional learning that references Te Whāriki’s strands of wellbeing, belonging, contribution, communication and exploration will anchor learning in a bicultural, holistic view of the child, give your kaiako a shared language, and demonstrate that the provider has focused on delivering those outcomes when creating the course.
The best courses also translate theories of early childhood education into examples educators recognise from their own rooms. Essential Resources’ Building Social and Emotional Skills and Wellbeing course is a useful example of what “good” might look like. It pairs video modules and reflective worksheets with practical strategies, and there is a published case study available from a current ECE Leader who has gone through the training.
How to align online professional development to Te Whāriki and your learning priorities
Step 2: Professional learning that isn’t tied to Te Whāriki or your learning priorities tends to evaporate.
Before you enrol anyone:
- map the course against identified principles, strands, goals and/or learning outcomes in Te Whāriki
- check if it supports the quality improvement planning you’re already working on.
If your internal or ERO evaluation cycle has flagged Mana Reo: Communication, choose PD that speaks directly to that.
This alignment also matters financially. If you’re using SELO funded professional development, you need to demonstrate a clear line between the learning you choose and the outcomes you’re targeting.
Providers should try to make this easier for you by spelling out how their courses can be matched to funded priority areas, such as teaching and learner support capability or inclusive early learning environments. You can then simply copy and paste the relevant information so your professional learning plan and your quality improvement documentation can tell the same story.
Check out how Essential Resources achieve this for Australian early childhood education courses in various States with differing priorities, through our School Readiness Funding, Kindy Uplift and Start Strong pages.
What does evidence-based online professional learning development for teachers look like in early childhood?
Step 3: “Evidence-based” is easy to claim and harder to demonstrate.
In practice, it means:
- the course content reflects current research on tamariki development and pedagogy
- the delivery itself follows the latest pedagogy for how adults
Australia’s Education Research Organisation (AERO) recommends that professional learning is sustained, collaborative and focused on practice. Follow this approach and your kaiako efforts to train will be far more effective than one-off workshops.
So, when a provider says their course supports evidence-based teaching practice, look for the markers.
- Reflective tasks that ask educators to trial something and review it.
- Opportunities for kaiako discussion.
- Content that builds over several sessions rather than front-loading everything into a single sitting.
This is something we have intentionally built into courses like Foundations of Communication, Language and Literacy. Structured across topics with reflective questions and supporting texts, the self-led pace allows kaiako to control their own timeframe and allow for team exploration and discussion. The ultimate goal is increased capability that stays in the room long after the course is completed.
What should ECE leaders look for when choosing an online professional development provider?
Step 4: Choosing professional development is partly about the course and partly about the fit with your kaiako.
Flexible online learning for educators is now essential. Self-paced modules let staff learn around rosters and ratios rather than losing a day off the floor, and team subscriptions mean everyone engages with the same content instead of relying on second-hand summaries.
Four practical questions you can ask any provider.
- Can the whole team access it, and for how long?
- Is it genuine online PD for early childhood educators, or a school’s product repackaged?
- Does it map to Te Whāriki?
- Is it recognised by the funding programs available?
A provider that can answer these clearly and point to real experiences in ECEC settings is worth shortlisting.
Choose online professional development that keeps working after the course ends
The strongest professional learning decisions are deliberate ones. Before your next enrolment, pull out your quality improvement planning, identify the single practice you most want to strengthen, and evaluate your options against framework alignment, evidence base, whole team professional learning and funding fit. If you still aren’t quite sure what to prioritise, try talking to your kaiako about what capability you most want to grow over the coming 12 months.
If you’d like a starting point for your search, feel free to browse Essential Resources’ early childhood courses to see examples of how good quality, framework-aligned online PD should be presented to help you find your match.