Facilitating play skills: Efficacy of a staff development program

Staff members of a day care center took part in a year-long training program designed to help them facilitate a child's ability to learn through play. This paper briefly describes the training objectives and methods used in the first two workshops of this program. An evaluation of the effectiveness of those methods is presented, based on pre-training and post-training observation of interactions between caregivers and children in the day care center. Results indicate that the training was very effective in increasing caregiver verbal involvement with children during play, but was less effective in reducing the number of verbal directives delivered by caregivers in interacting with the children. A negative relationship was found between caregiver's level of education and amount of verbally directive behavior after training, but not before training.