Environment

Center staff  include head teachers and associate teachers, many with advanced degrees in Early Childhood Education and/or Child Development. The retention of the professional staff is exceedingly high and many staff members have been with each program since their inception. The teaching staff is complemented by undergraduate psychology practicum students, temporary student employees, or graduate-level researchers.

Each group of children is supervised by a staff of professionally trained teachers including a certified head teacher, an associate teacher, and University students. The adult/child ratio ranges between 1:3 and 1:7 (depending on the ages of the children) for each of the classrooms.

The Center for Working Families serves as a resource for research and training for the University of Michigan community, and has been a vibrant setting for research, observation, and training projects. Since the program’s inception, roughly 20 research projects have been conducted each year. These projects have spanned a range of topics from children's cognitive development to preschool teaching methods and have included individuals from a spectrum of disciplines including medicine, public health, nursing, psychology, linguistics, social work, music, and education. These projects have resulted in over 50 research publications in top-tiered journals with publishers such as Oxford University Press, MIT Press, Child Development, Cognition and Culture, and Journal of Child Language. Results from research is disseminated throughout the U.S. and internationally through presentations at a variety of professional societies including the Society for Research in Child Development, Japanese Educational Psychology Association, International Society for Research on Child and Adolescent Psychopathology, and International Society for Research on Aggression.