Tag Archives: Management Systems

Engaging Families of Infants and Toddlers with Disabilities: Strategies to Enhance Your Practice

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Wednesday, July 6th 2 – 3:30

Presenters: Amanda Schwartz, Ph.D. and Lorelei Pisha, Ed.D.

This session is sponsored by the United Way Center for Excellence in Early Education.

 

Engaging families can be a challenge, particularly if their infant or toddler has a disability or may show signs of developmental delay. Families of children with disabilities are often deluged by service providers and advice from early intervention teams, therapists, doctors, and other professionals. However, strong relationships between program staff and families are an essential component of effectively including infants and toddlers with disabilities in programs. Join this session to learn strategies for enhancing family engagement practices for your program as well as your staff’s confidence in building culturally responsive partnerships with families of the infants and toddlers with disabilities included in your program.

Participants will learn:

1) The every day context for families of infants and toddlers with disabilities

2) Strategies for enhancing program systems to support and engage families of infants and toddlers with disabilities

3) Professional development strategies to enhance staff’s competence and confidence in talking with infants and toddlers with disabilities

All sessions are 1.5 hours long, and include a brief announcement from our sponsor.

Register at: https://www.earlychildhoodwebinars.com/presentations/engaging-families-infants-toddlers-disabilities-strategies-enhance-practice-amanda-schwartz-lorelei-pisha/

 

Preventing Suspensions and Expulsions in Early Childhood Settings | An Administrator’s Guide to Supporting All Children’s Success

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1/3/2017

Purpose of The Guide:

Suspensions and expulsions of young children are not developmentally appropriate practices. Yet, recent data indicate that suspension and expulsion occur regularly in early childhood settings. These exclusionary practices, which disproportionately impact children of color, deprive children of valuable learning experiences and have a negative impact on children’s development that extends into grade school and beyond. Eliminating all forms of exclusion is urgent and vital to preparing all children for success. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and U.S. Department of Education (ED) have made this a key priority and issued a Joint Policy Statement on Expulsion and Suspension Policy in Early Childhood Settings.

The purpose of this guide is to provide relevant, specific recommended policies and practices that are actionable and address the underlying root causes and provide effective alternatives. The recommended policies and practices are based on the most important research for eliminating suspensions and expulsions in early childhood settings and were developed with guidance from a panel of national experts.

Using the interactive guide, program leaders can find resources on supporting social-emotional development, reducing challenging behavior, recognizing the role of cultural differences and implicit biases, and more.

The guide is intended for those most likely to make an impact and with a great need for resources: early education program leaders in center-based settings who implement policies and procedures and promote practices; however, anyone seeking to learn more about strategies for eliminating suspension and expulsion in early childhood settings can benefit from using the guide.

Get Started

The Introduction describes the contents of the guide and provides tips for how to get the most out of the guide. The guide can be read from start to finish, or the individual recommended policies and practices can stand alone. We recognize that implementing all recommended policies and practices may be overwhelming and that programmatic changes often need to occur in stages.

To help you prioritize what recommended policies and practices are most necessary and timely to implement in your program, we have developed a self-assessment. The self-assessment is an optional tool that includes a brief questionnaire to help you reflect on your program’s policies, practices, and needs. The results of the self-assessment will help you reflect on your strengths and needs and provide you a roadmap to navigating the guide.

Source: SRI Education’s Center for Learning and Development

Available at: http://preventexpulsion.org/

The Birth Through Third Grade Learning Hub

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7/2015

The goal of the Birth through Grade Three (Birth-Third) Learning Hub is to support communities in their efforts to improve young children’s learning and development. This website tracks, profiles, and analyzes Birth-Third initiatives with the aim of promoting learning, exchange, and knowledge-building across communities.

Building Capacity and Knowledge Across Communities.  An underlying premise of the hub is that the more Birth-Third leaders know about the work of other communities, the better able they will be to design and implement effective strategies. Recent work on education reform in high-performing countries and regions emphasizes the importance of building capacity across communities, capacity built by developing knowledge, relationships, networks, and regional collective commitment. Through case studies, analysis, guidance documents, tools, videos, and collaboration with technical assistance providers, the Learning Hub promotes sharing of promising practices and collaborative problem-solving directed towards common problems.

Real-Time Action Research. In recent years both the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and the Aspen Institute have released concept papers based on years of research on community change and innovation at scale—innovation at the community-level. These papers–Networked Improvement Communities and Building Knowledge About Community Change–call for action research in service to community change that is applied, timely, informed by practitioner perspectives, and formative in nature. Consistent with the messages of these reports, the Learning Hub aims to synthesize findings across Birth-Third partnerships and provide analysis–informed by the research literature–of common trends, patterns, challenges, and innovations. See this page for a description of Birth-Third strategies. Key topics of interest include the following:

  • Strategy and Planning and Plan Management
  • Standards and Curriculum
  • Assessment and Data-Driven Inquiry
  • Effective Teaching Strategies
  • Developmentally-appropriate Practice
  • QRIS
  • English Language Learning
  • Professional Learning Communities
  • Coaching and Professional Development
  • Home Visiting
  • Parenting
  • Special Needs
  • Transitions and School Readiness

Source: The Birth Through Third Grade Learning Hub