Finding a way to talk about hard things can be challenging and stressful for even the most seasoned home visitor and family support professional. This has been especially true over the past year and a half as we’ve experienced the crises and challenges of the pandemic and more.

In talking to home visitors, supervisors and administrators about how they’re handling the current pressures of their environments, they’ve shared that what they really need right now is incremental support. In response to this need, we are pleased to announce the publication of the 4th edition of the NEAR@Home Toolkit. The NEAR@Home Toolkit is a free, self-study guide for how to safely, respectfully and effectively discuss ACES (adverse childhood experiences), trauma, and other hard things with parents by focusing on hope, respect and resilience. This newest edition features stories and quotes from home visitors to help contextualize the work described in the toolkit, and a framework for thinking about childhood trauma and adversity.

In-person conferences are back! This August, Start Early president Diana Rauner and I joined leading minds in technology and education from across the country in San Diego for the 2021 ASU+GSV Summit. With awareness of the importance of early childhood education and the care economy at an all-time high, more than a dozen sessions at this year’s conference explored critical issues facing our field, including kindergarten readiness, equity and workforce development.

As part of Start Early’s commitment to Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Belonging (DEIB), we strive to nurture and embrace racial, cultural and linguistically diverse teaching and learning environments. We know these diverse and inclusive environments unify our field and ensure equitable access to high-quality early childhood experiences. We are embarking on a journey to translate our professional development and research into languages other than English, starting with Spanish. Our goal is to be more inclusive of early childhood educators, parents and leaders that represent the populations we serve and who strive in their own role to support those who need us the most, our youngest children.

Over the past many years, my bilingual colleagues and I translated documents and resources into other languages (including Spanish), to meet the linguistic needs of the participants we support and serve. Nevertheless, the translations themselves, the process and the extra workload were not sustainable and needed to improve. Having multiple experiences with schools, centers and organizations throughout the early childhood field, we know these challenges are not limited to Start Early.

We launched a project to increase the accessibility of our training materials to better serve adult learners and support their professional development. The purpose of our project was to develop a process to translate trainings, materials and resources to increase Start Early’s ability and capacity to serve linguistically diverse customers. In addition, we designed a process to ensure the quality of the translations and the sustainability of the process itself. We kicked off the project with Start Early’s Essentials of Home Visiting – accredited online courses and webinars to support home visiting in any model.

In April 2021, Start Early merged with the Early Learning Lab (ELL) — a nonprofit with expertise in human-centered design, systems thinking and technology solutions — to drive stronger, more equitable solutions, programs and policies that are better informed by community voices to improve early childhood systems across the country.

The merger uniquely positions Start Early to develop new ways of working that draw upon the collective experience of both organizations in elevating parent voice, systems change, and knowledge transfer and network building.

The Early Learning Lab was founded in 2015 to bring new methods and tools from the social innovation sector to the early childhood field to catalyze the design, implementation and scaling of high-impact products and programs.

Now, the Early Learning Lab is a new division within Start Early. The Lab will continue its work to lift up family and community voices and advance smart technology solutions in early childhood programs and systems.

With the recent passage of the American Rescue Plan, we are at a critical and unprecedented juncture for early childhood education. With nearly $40 billion in federal stimulus funding to invest in child care alone, the field is facing both an enormous opportunity and an enormous responsibility. This investment is the long overdue catalyst our country needs to expand and deepen our focus on early childhood professionals and their well-being.

During our most recent Building Resilience webinar – How to Cultivate Teacher Well-Being and Improve Child Outcomes in Turbulent Times – three early childhood leaders from across the country shared how they have been supporting the professional well-being of their staff amidst burnout, fatigue and discrimination, ongoing problems of practice that have been exacerbated by the pandemic.

By Sarintha Stricklin

How can we as leaders ensure our early childhood programs are providing the highest quality care to our children?

Even before the pandemic, we asked ourselves this question often. Our search for a way to support teachers and continuously improve the quality of our programs within the Jefferson Parish Early Childhood Collaborative in Louisiana led us on a journey, which culminated in the implementation of The Essential 0-5 Survey. The Essential 0-5 Survey, developed in partnership by Start Early and the University of Chicago Consortium, is a measurement system that provides insight into the strength and weakness of organizational climate for individual programs.

The Jefferson Parish Early Childhood Collaborative focuses on providing intentional professional development to support teachers and leaders. Prior to engaging in The Essential 0-5 Survey, our professional development focused on day-to-day interactions between teachers and children inside the classroom; for directors, the focus was team support, assessment of children and behavior management strategies. We did not offer any professional development focused on the organization as a whole.

After years of implementing CLASS across a variety of programs within our network — including child care centers, Early Head Start and Head Start and public schools — we were seeing only marginal improvement in our quality improvement metrics, specifically instructional leadership. Upon reflection, we realized that our administrators needed different kinds of supports to elevate their instructional leadership to the level needed to improve quality within their programs. The Essential 0-5 Survey presented an opportunity to gather information in a systematic, research-based way and give leaders a unique vantage point into their programs. What’s more, the Survey measures both teacher/staff and parent perceptions in order to provide program leaders a holistic understanding of their programs’ strengths and weaknesses.

Despite the challenges brought on by the pandemic, 14 community-based programs within our network signed up to pilot The Essential 0-5 Survey in the fall of 2020. These 14 programs have now successfully implemented the survey, received their program-level data and begun to engage in growth efforts recommended through the process. The survey data has empowered these leaders and their staff to explore the “why” behind their stagnating instructional leadership metrics. The small changes they have identified to make as individuals and as a team have resulted in rapid and meaningful improvement for themselves and the families and children they serve.

The Essential 0-5 Survey is rooted in decades of research from the University of Chicago Consortium and their 5Essentials framework focused on K-12 education. Research demonstrates the impact organizational conditions have on program quality: a program strong in three of the five essentials is 10 times likelier to substantially improve student engagement and achievement in math and reading (see the graph below).

Schools Strong in Three or More of the Five Essentials 10x More Likely to Improve

Want to learn more? Check out startearly.org/theessentialsurvey or email essentialsurvey@startearly.org.

Dr. Stricklin serves as the Director of the Jefferson Early Childhood Network supporting leaders of publicly funded programs in south Louisiana. She has worked in early education for over 30 years as a teacher, administrator, trainer, coach, and consultant. Currently, she leads a broad coalition of thought partners who are collaborating to increase access to high-quality early care and education across neighborhoods in Jefferson Parish, Louisiana.

The COVID-19 pandemic has had a destabilizing effect on preschool and infant-toddler classrooms across the country, impacted by substantial staff losses, pressure on families, safety demands and financial shortfalls. Program staff are currently under immense pressure to reimagine teaching, learning and family engagement.

When navigating unprecedented obstacles, a strong and supportive environment is critical for children and families to thrive and to ensure educator’s well-being. A strong organizational climate is the foundation for the connectivity and collaboration that staff need to feel motivated and confident, even and especially when physically distant from their colleagues.

For many years, Start Early has focused on helping the early childhood field broaden the focus of improvement efforts beyond the classroom to the organizational conditions that support staff and families. Throughout the ongoing pandemic, we’ve continued our work with programs across the country to help them strengthen their organizational conditions through The Essential 0-5 Survey — an evidence-based measurement system for program improvement. We are inspired to see programs’ continued focus on staff well-being, instructional leadership, collaboration, and continuous quality improvement.

Data collected during this pandemic through The Essential 0-5 Survey will not be an outlier. Even (and especially with!) the pressures of this unique situation, survey data point to critical patterns of organizational culture and climate. For example, if staff do not have relational trust during a crisis, these same patterns will emerge when not in crisis. In other words, patterns that emerge during this acute situation may point to chronic issues.

Now more than ever, we are witnessing how imperative it is for programs to have systems in place that foster healthy, safe and positive environments. If you’re interested in learning more, check out the research-to-practice report “Early Education Essentials: Illustrations of Strong Organizational Practices of Program Poised for Improvement”. The Essential 0-5 Survey is available online to support your program in this virtual environment. Email professionaldevelopment@StartEarly.org to get started today.

As the 2021 National Home Visiting Virtual Summit comes to a close, this year’s presenters share final thoughts on equity, systems, diversity, flexibility, families, innovation, home visiting, parent voice and hope.

During the first webinar in our “Building Resilience” series, experts across policy, program, and system levels shared their successes, challenges, and opportunities with Early Head Start-Child Care Partnerships (Partnerships). The discussion touched on many relevant and timely themes within the early childhood education sector, including the impact of the ongoing COVID-19 crisis on the child care industry.

As the early childhood workforce gathers virtually this month for the National Home Visiting Summit, we’ll be nearing a full year of living under the shadow of the COVID-19 pandemic. There’s so much to discuss, from the impact of the pandemic on our workforce and communities of color to the significant challenges the pandemic has revealed within our support systems for all families, particularly for those living in under-resourced communities.

As we continue our work to strengthen the home visiting workforce in the wake of the pandemic, we focus specifically on the many systemic factors and community conditions that affect staff retention, and ultimately, rates of family engagement in home visiting services.

Join me at the National Home Visiting Summit, along with facilitators Reyna Dominguez and Ariel Chaidez, as we explore local and national strategies to address these factors in a session, “Vocation-Vision-Voice: Strategies in Professional Development.” Using a case study of an Early Head Start Home-based program in Santa Clara, California serving a Latino community with fully bilingual staff, we’ll explore how supervisory leadership invested in ongoing professional development of staff promotes long term program engagement for both staff and families.

Coming out of the session, participants will be empowered with strategies and actions that can affect change in systemic and supervisory program conditions that promote workforce retention. Whether you can attend this session or not, I hope you’ll take time to consider the impact professional development can have to turn a job into a vocation through the skilled and invested interest of a supervisor attuned to the voice and vision of home visitors. Learn more about the research and methodology behind Start Early’s professional development portfolio.