Scaling Professional Development with a Diverse Early Childhood Workforce

This qualitative phenomenological study examines how CDI teachers and community mothers in Colombia experienced the implementation of a professional development program structured as a cascade model. Semi-structured interviews were used to explore participants’ accounts of implementation and the conditions they described as facilitating or constraining their engagement with the program. Participants’ accounts suggest that the cascade model operated within a workforce already differentiated by institutional roles, professional trajectories, and working conditions, with these differences being reflected in participants’ experiences of training and pedagogical appropriation. Participants also described drawing on motivation, professional judgment, and peer networks, some of which supported the continued circulation of program-related knowledge beyond the formal training structure. Together, these findings suggest that cascade models can extend the reach of professional development but may also reproduce pre-existing structural inequalities unless workforce heterogeneity and the capacities educators already bring to implementation are explicitly considered in program design.