Effective Coaching in Early Care and School Age Settings

Spotlight on Innovative Professional Development Practice: Effective Coaching in Early Care and School Age Settings

Awuse Tama: Hello, everyone. Welcome to our webinar on the Spotlight on Innovative Practices Series. My name is Awuse Tama with the National Center on Early Childhood Development, Teaching, and Learning, or NCECDTL. Today's webinar is on "Effective Coaching In Early Care and School Age Settings." Before we begin, I'd like to go over some information regarding the webinar. We will be using some of the features of this webinar platform to help us interact. So, at the bottom of your screen, you will notice some widgets. If you have any questions during the webcast, you can submit them through the purple Q and A widget. We will try to answer these during the webcast. Please know that we do capture all questions, so if we do not get to your question, we will respond to those by e-mail, and if you have any tech-related questions, please submit them
through this Q and A widget as well.

A copy of today's slide deck and additional resources are available in the resource list, which is the green widget. So, we encourage you to download any resources or links that you may find useful. And throughout this session, we will be using the blue chat widget to engage with each other. You will find some additional answers to some common technical issues located in the yellow help widget at the bottom of your screen. And you can also find the closed-captioning widgets in both English and Spanish. So, each of these widgets are resizable and movable for customizable experience. So, simply click on the widget, and you will be able to move it by dragging and resizing it using the arrows at the top corners. Finally, if you have trouble during the webinar, you can refresh your browser by pressing F5. Please be sure to log off of your VPN and exit out of any other browsers.

So, let's review our objectives. We will define coaching and how it works and explore existing coaching models. We will also become familiar with states that have coaching competencies and explore the elements of those competencies. And lastly we will learn about building coaching systems through a state example. And for our agenda today, we'll start with an overview of coaching, and talk about coaching in school-age programs. Then we will hear from Maine, followed by a discussion of coaching models and building coaching systems, and we will end with a review of resources, and wrap up. Again, thank you all for joining our webinar. I will now turn it over to our presenters and let them introduce themselves. 

Katherine Falen: Hi, everyone. This is Katherine Falen. I'm a senior state training and technical assistance specialist with the National Center on Early Childhood Development, Teaching, and Learning. Welcome.

Susan O'Connor: Good afternoon. This is Susan O'Connor, and I'm also a senior TNTA specialist and with the National Center on Afterschool and Summer Enrichment.

Katherine: I think Susan is going to get us started.

Susan: Okay, so we want to start out today with a poll, and we want to have you just fill in, who is served by your coaching system? And you can click on all the ones that apply to your state. We recognize that, for many of you, there may be multiple populations that you serve with your coaching system. And take another minute for people to make their choices. Okay. I'm hoping that someone from the team could help summarize.
Katherine: Are we ready to go to the results?

Susan: Yes, I think we do have the results here, and let's see. Let's start with the biggest one. So, preschool programs, 80 percent, followed by infant/toddler programs, then family child care programs, programs working with QRIS, and school-age programs at 30 percent. Thanks, everyone. Back to Katherine.

Katherine: All right. Great. Thanks, Susan. Well, we're just going to start off here with a coaching overview and give you a little bit of an introduction into what coaching looks like. We have a couple of definitions of coaching. It is a relationship-based approach, and it involves an expert with specialized knowledge and skills who often supports someone else in their learning process. It's designed to build capacity for specific positions and roles in the field, and it's focused on changing behaviors and goal-setting in order to determine what things the coachee wants to work on.

So, the definition here on the left is the coaching definition from NAEYC and NACCRRA, and on the right the Colorado Coaching Consortium defines it as, "A learning process based on a collaborative relationship intentionally designed to promote sustainable growth and the necessary attitudes, skills and knowledge to effectively implement best practices." So, you see the theme there, that it is relationship-based. It is intentional. It is collaborative, and it is designed around growing skills, attitude, knowledge, and achieving best practices. 

So, the purpose of coaching is to, a couple of different levels. You have the programmatic level where coaching is for overall quality, may focus on improving overall quality, and it involves a different approach than those aimed at improving individual skills for teachers and providers. So, overall quality coaching might focus on environment or programmatic indicators. Individual factors may include help and safety materials and organization of the classroom or settings.

Programmatic factors may also include business practices and policies, staff benefits or family involvement in the program. Coaching, however, to support individual teachers often focuses on individual teaching practices and improving those and reinforcing and incorporating new knowledge gained through training, coursework or other professional development activities. 

So, teachers may go and receive training on a topic and then come back to the program and receive coaching to help them in implementing and making some of those changes. So, it's important with these two different kinds of coaching and purposes of coaching, to determine what the goals and priorities are for a program, an initiative or a state. Program leaders may identify coaching as a strategy to support goals in Head Starts, goals as defined by the state prekindergarten program, a quality rating and improvement system, or a goal to improve on an assessment instrument. Within state child care systems, some programs may receive both program-level coaching as well as individual coaching. And in state-quality improvement initiatives, coaching typically takes place as part of a broader professional development strategy that might include coursework, group training, mentoring or other professional development strategies. And, Susan, I guess it's ... 

Susan: Okay. Well ...

Katherine: ... back to you.

Susan: Sure thing. Thanks, Katherine, and let's just take a moment to consider what the research is showing for how TA can be effective. The National Center on Early Childhood Quality Assurance and Child Trends has identified three key outcomes that research shows to be associated with coaching. Number one: improved learning environments. Number two: improved practices, including teacher-child interactions. Number three: improved developmental outcomes for children.

But there is still much that we need to learn from research about coaching. We still don't know enough about which dimensions and features of coaching are linked to positive outcomes. We need to really explore how qualifications and training, how support of coaches can lead to positive outcomes. We need to know more about what is optimal for dosage and duration of coaching, and which coaching strategies lead to the best outcomes, and which challenges in coaching systems are most important to address.

There has been some cutting-edge effort to explore why coaching works from the perspective of neuroscience. As I talk about this, I want you to keep in mind that the field of neuroscience is changing rapidly and that this work is simply exploratory, but it does give us some important things to consider about coaching.

One work that is most frequently mentioned about coaching and neuroscience was published in 2006 by David Rock, and it's based on his study, which used magnetic-resonance imaging -- an MRI -- to study what happened in the brain during coaching sessions. I've combined his work with some 2017 work by Amy Brann to create this table about what really happens in the brain with coaching.

First, coaches can help people change by focusing their attention on the change they seek. The working memory where we store new information and for planning and aligning thoughts with action is in the prefrontal cortex. It has really limited capacity and forging new pathways for behavior is like cutting through a thick forest. When we are working with staff as coaches, we can focus their attention on the learning, on the creating of those new neural pathways. And it's so important, this role we can play in focusing the attention, because when people are under stressed or over-under stressed or overworked, the prefrontal cortex doesn't work very well.

So, as coaches, this is where building relationships and being attuned to the emotions and the availability to learn among our clients really intersects with neuroscience. To have insight, people need to reflect more. So, coaches play an important role in creating reflective experiences for individuals, and for teams, by helping them shut down external fences and helping them to focus on internal stimuli. This really engages the part of the brain that's used for making links, and it leads to the brain giving off alpha-based waves -- along with serotonin -- so that when we are reflecting, we also tend to feel good, which increases learning and memory. When the brain processes information across different regions, we have insight. The brain gives off gamma waves, which in turn produces adrenaline and serotonin, which creates a  sense of energy. So, the energy of insight might be the critical thing that helps to propel people through what is a very typical fear of change.

An important caution here: When people have had insight, that boost of energy that I talked about passes within an hour, so as coaches, we need to make sure that people make a commitment within that hour of energy to do something in the future, to create that action step. And if we want people to change, they have to really come up with the idea themselves so that that insight propels them forward into practicing the new behavior. The neuroscience of coaching is really something we'll want to track in the coming years, and for now, we'd like to just take a step to look at core knowledge and competencies, the CKCs that are commonly identified as important to coaching.

DTL reviewed about 18 states' core competencies, and this isn't an exhaustive list. We started with the 11 states that were part of a Quick Looks document that's in the link at the bottom of the page, which was written in 2013. So, we know that there are probably other states that aren't listed up on this page, and if you're one of those states and want to put into the chat bar that you now have coaching CKCs, we'd really appreciate it so that we can follow up on that. 

You can just put in the state, or you could actually put in the link to your CKCs. But each state has taken really a unique approach to creating their CKCs. Some, for example, may have one level. Others have multiple levels of coaches. Some include a self-assessment. In the case of Hawaii, they really liked Colorado's CKCs, and they received permission to use them, and Hawaii and Colorado are the only two states whose competencies are based on those competencies developed by the International Coaching Federation.

So, let's take a look at how these CKCs are similar across the states that we've reviewed. This slide shows some of the more common domains or big ideas that you might find in coaching. As you can see, nearly all states included relationship-based practices, which is so critical to the success of a coach. It includes concepts like establishing trust with the coaches, demonstrating personal integrity, and demonstrating a commitment to shared learning. Using authentic communication; being culturally responsive.

Then 17 states included a section on professionalism and ethics. So, really making sure that people have the knowledge of the NAEYC Code of Ethics, making sure that coaches understand legal requirements, that they establish clear expectations and boundaries with programs that they work with, that they have good work practices. Other common domains in CKCs include adult learning principles, content knowledge, facilitating growth, communicating effectively, and assessment, and evaluation.

So, we want to take a moment here just to ask you to include in the chat pod some successes you've had in building your coaching system. I will just pause while people write into the group chat. And one thing that's popping up here is that Indiana now has CKCs as of 2016. Thanks for sharing that, Danielle. I appreciate it. Any other successes that you've had in building your coaching system? Here is something from Caroline: "Support from child care administrators." 

Thanks.

Oh, and Pennsylvania has CKCs. Most recent update is 2014. And Texas is working on one, and it should be out in September. Yes, we're asking for successes you've had in building your  coaching system at the state level, but of course if you're working for a regional organization or you're working for Head Start, please feel free to add something about your coaching system that you consider a success, something you're proud about. "Better communication. A shared language." That's great. "Increasing class scores." So, many ideas coming in. 

I want to just say to you that we will be collecting these ideas that come up in the chat and sharing them out. "We use practice-based coaching. Transfer of learning." These are all great, and as you continue to type in, I want to move us along and ask that people also share out, what are some continuing challenges that you've had? If each person could just put in one continuing challenge, I bet we're going to start to see some overlapping concepts. Things that are challenges really nationally. "Developing trust, especially when the coachee and coach have mutual respect." That might still be up.

Here is a challenge: "teacher turnover." Absolutely. "Time for the coach." I hear that all the time, that coaches really feel they need more time in a program. "Large caseloads. Resistant staff buy-in." Oh, we're seeing lots of repeat challenges here. "Time. Turnover. Resistance." 

These are all things that we so, so often hear. Going to give you one more minute to be typing your challenge in here. "Funding." Mm hmm. "Resentment at being required to change." Okay.

Thanks so much for your input. Really helpful.

We're going to move now to spend a few minutes zeroing in on some ways to strengthen the capacity in building school-age coaching systems. Let's start by looking at the current status for school-age and quality-improvement efforts. NCASE has developed data profiles for school age,
including this national overview, but we've also developed a data profile for each state, and these are located in the NCASE library.

What does the data tell us about school age and quality improvement? The first national data point I want to draw your attention to is the circle right in the middle of the page on the left, the 45-percent figure. This says that 45 percent of children served with CCDF subsidy are 5 to 12 years old. This equals nearly 635,000 children. So, given that nearly half of all children served with subsidies are served in school-age programs, it's so important that we invest equitably in quality improvement and in technical-assistance supports.

In addition, we would ask that you consider partnering with the State Department of Education on Coaching because at the bottom of the page, it says that almost three times as many children, 1.6 million children, are served under 21st Century Community Learning Centers, and they also really need to have access to this important support of coaching for quality improvement.

In addition, we know that school-age programs are eligible to participate in QRIS in 24 states, that includes D.C., and in two territories. However, even the states that include school-age providers report that the rate of participation is often significantly lower than that of early childhood programs. Understandably, the states that mandate participation in quality improvement for programs receiving CCDF funding have the highest rates of participation. 

In building TA systems that include school-age specialists, you can get support by reaching out to any of the 50 state after-school networks -- or state after-school associations -- who could help you to recruit, train and supervise coaches or perhaps reaching out to city intermediaries, like those funded by a big Wallace Foundation project, including cities like Denver, New York, Providence and Grand Rapids. If you're going to be doing coaching for school-age programs, there are some key issues or challenges in school-age programs that it's important to be aware of. Right at the top of the list is that most of our staff positions are part-time. People may be working just three hours during after school or may also be adding an hour or more by working in before school, and as a result of these part-time jobs, our staff-turnover rates are higher than in early childhood, typically averaging around 40 percent a year.

And in these times of low unemployment, programs in school age are reporting a staffing crisis and are having a particularly hard time keeping part-time jobs filled. The part-time staff are often hourly employees that may be full-time college students, or they may be holding down a second or even a third job to make ends meet. They often come to us with little formal education on use development, and they may have, furthermore, little time for participating in training or quality-improvement efforts because they're racing in the door, and then they're racing out the door to go to that second or third job.

One strength that we have though is a group of highly educated full-time staff with long retention rates, and these folks form a leadership core for our field. They are often the anchors, of course, for quality-improvement efforts, and a number of states that participated in a peer learning  community that we held on quality improvement have decided to focus their system level efforts on building the capacity of their program leaders, and some models have even created a training and support for leaders to become internal coaches.

We think it's very important that states recruit school-age specialists to become part of their coaching cohorts and to prepare all coaches that you may have in your system to work with school-age programs and to really be able to support the needs of the high number of license exempt programs in our field. For example, most school-based or school-run programs are exempt along with many Ys, Boys & Girls Clubs, faith-based organizations, public recreation.

And we also need to really focus on strengthening instructional quality.

Before we leave school age, I want to just take one moment to think specifically about summer programs because summer programs really shift a lot from that part-time day during the school year. Did you know that more than half of the achievement gap can be explained by unequal access to summer activities? Just consider for a second the impact of summer learning loss on reading skills.

What the research has shown us is that middle-income children actually gain about one month of reading skill, while low-income children lose three months of reading skill in the summer, and by middle school, this can accumulate to nearly a two-year difference in reading comprehension between low-income children and their more affluent peers. This gap increases the chance that a low-income youth will be less likely to graduate from high school or college, but three to four consecutive summers of high-quality learning and summer programs can get kids reading on grade level.

Often though, there isn't enough access to summer programs, and there are some unique challenges to summer-program quality because there are these long summer days. We tend to hire a lot of new staff, some of whom are quite green, and there's a lack of time for training and for CQI efforts. So, we ask that you pay specific attention with your coaches to summer programs.

Now we're going to shift out of just focus on school age to focus on the full birth-to-12 continuum through an example from Maine. It's my great pleasure to introduce a team from Maine who are doing some very interesting work on their coaching system, and they're going to share how their coaching system is structured, how they, what their TA competencies are, and other innovative practices.

So, I introduce to you Crystal Arbour, who's the Child Care Services Program Manager at the Office Child and Family Services for the Maine Department of Health and Human Services. She's the lead administrator of the CCDF in Maine's state Child Care Subsidy Program. Linda Labas, early-childhood coordinator from the Center for Community Inclusion and Disability Studies at University of Maine, and they're a partner in the Maine Roads to Quality Professional Development Network. And Jill Downs, who manages the technical-assistance system for Maine Roads to Quality and the Professional Development Network. I turn this over now to the team from Maine.

Crystal Arbour: Thank you. This is Crystal Arbour. The state of Maine partners with Maine Roads to Quality Professional Development Network for the professional development needs of Maine's early care and educational workforce. This work includes assisting with Quality for ME, Maine's quality improvement rating system. And happens through funding from the Child Care and Development Block Grant. The Maine Roads to Quality PDN supports professionals who work with infants, toddlers, preschoolers, and out-of-school tying school age, birth to 12 years, in all types of settings: family child care, center-based, and after-school programs. 

As you can see on this slide, the partnership includes the Maine Afterschool Network, the University of Maine Department of Psychology, and the Center for Community Inclusion and Disability Studies. Next slide, please.

Linda Labas: Good afternoon. This is Linda, and I'm talking a little bit about the overview for the Maine Roads to Quality professional development activities. And we're kind of zooming out, so that you have a opportunity to understand our broad picture about professional development activities. In this slide, you're going to see the three circles, and this is coming, again, from the glossary that was referenced earlier by Susan from NAEYC and NACCRRA, and what this really, where we adapted it was to put in the arrow and look at how the intersect of all three of these activities, the training, education and technical assistance, including the approaches there viewed under technical assistance: mentoring, coaching, consultation and peer-to-peer networks. When those intersect, we understand from the literature that that's where the most learning takes place, and that's how we're approaching our professional development to enhance the quality across those settings that Crystal talked about. Next slide, please.

Jill Downs: Hi. I'm Jill Downs, and the I'm the Technical Assistance Manager from Maine Roads to Quality Professional Development Network. The visual that you are seeing represents a technical assistance system, and you will notice that all supports are tied to Quality for ME, which is our quality QRIS system. And we offer consultation and peer-to-peer network, and in the consultation section, you'll see that includes phone and e-mail. We have a warm line, and  the warm line is there to support programs to provide resources for inclusion of children with special needs and disabilities, mental healthcare needs, and concerning or challenging behavior in both early childhood and out-of-school-time programs. This warm line is staffed by inclusion and mental-health consultants from the PDN.

We also have on-site consultation, and this is a core team of early-child and youth district coordinators that cover the state of Maine. There are eight of them, and they provide a consultation, which includes mentoring and coaching. Their primary role as consultants is to provide the consultation, and we do adjust the needs based on what individual consultees are asking for. Looking at our peer-to-peer networks, we have accreditation cohorts, and you'll see that there's NAEYC, NAFCC, and COA accreditation.

We also have credentials in Maine, and currently our credentials include infant-toddler inclusion, youth development, and a director credential. The last box demonstrates a visual of communities of practice. Currently we have 28 communities of practice, which are, some of them are face-to-face and within different regions around the state, and we have some virtual ones as well that are specific for some audiences. And specifically those audiences could be child care directors.

We have virtual family child care communities of practice. We are about to launch directors, hybrid community of practice in the northern part of Maine. So, there's a lot of variety of needs around practitioners getting together and learning from each other through these community practice.

Next slide, please.

Linda: This is Linda again, and I'm going to talk a little bit about our competencies, and I was interested in the slide presented earlier about the different areas of competency that were across the state that were researched. Ours has five areas of competency, and as I looked at those and compared them what we call the Technical Assistance Competencies for Maine's Early Childhood Workforce, all of ours include, if they're not separate, they're included, embedded within the competency areas that we cover, and that's professionalism, principles of adult learning, building relationships, the technical-assistance process, and systems knowledge. 

And part of this, I think it was spoken about, that some of the CKCs are unique. I think ours are somewhat unique in that we created competencies for technical assistance to be inclusive of all the four approaches that were referenced in the glossary, and once again, those include the mentoring, coaching, consultation, and peer-to-peer network. 

And I noticed in the chat box that someone mentioned as a strength in their coaching system a shared language, and I would say that was one of the impetus for us to create competencies that went across system sectors and settings. So, that what we call our end users, anyone who receives technical-assistance support in any number of those approaches, had a framework so that they were being approached and involved in a relationship that was similar so that they weren't getting the messages, and other systems were sharing in the training, and looking at their own competence and competence as they were engaged in providing technical assistance.

The process that we provided as one of the funders for developing the Technical Assistance Competencies was an engagement at different levels of experts in the various areas of technical assistance, as well as stakeholders from the system such as Crystal's position, those at the Maine Department of Education, those professionals who run our Maine family home visiting program and our early intervention and special-education services. There's a link at the bottom of the slide that you can access to download the competencies, and we have a companion self assessment checklist, and those can also be accessed at that link. Next slide. You can go to next slide.

Jill: It's Jill again. We are about to move forward and build on the competencies that have been developed to begin a credential. And so what you'll see here is what will be all of the components of the required training for this credential. We have the district coordinators that I mentioned earlier, they have all been trained using each of these training modules. So, they were our first pilot to help us learn about what we want to retain and change around developing the credential. So, the next step, again, is to work on that so probably in the fall. 

Linda: Mm hmm.

Jill: So, when we look about the coaching training, this training is informed by evidence-based coaching models, which include practice-based coaching, Rush and Sheldon's early-childhood coaching, and strength-based coaching. Again, this is where we are at this point. We are writing a new coaching curriculum, which will also inform the development of our credentials. Next slide, please.

Here is some links to some of the resources that you can click on. It'll bring you to a on-site consultation page at our Maine Roads to Quality website. We also have a link to the warm line, communities of practice page as well. We wanted to highlight the youth-development credential, so you'll see the information packet that is included on our website, as well as the Technical Assistance Competencies. You can get this in two ways, the one that was previously on the link on the previous slide, and also on this page.

So, this will really help you get a sense of what we do in Maine for the Professional Development Network, and feel free to explore the rest of our website. There is some great information on all of these topics and more.

Linda: So, this is Linda, and I'd just like to add in keeping with one shared view of the three circles. One of the things we're very committed to, and Jill as the manager of the TA system for the Professional Development Network can speak to this, but we continue the evolution of learning with the district coordinators who provide the technical assistance and coaching. 

And I also do some work with others in the state to have some ongoing communities of practice or opportunities for us to continue to grow and learn together and explore those challenges that some of you spoke about, which are really ones that come up. I notice there were those that talked about coach-supervisor dual roles, which comes up an awful lot in some of the work we do, as well as time and some of the effort around dosage and case load. But it's a continuing process, and we really want to, and I borrowed this phrase from someone else, look at coaching and the other supports so that the, we don't get into not following our structure or our goals as we develop those and to continue that learning on various ways.

Susan: Okay. Well, thanks so much to the Maine team, and we have a couple minutes for questions if anybody wants to ask them some specific questions about their presentation. I  didn't see any come up in the group chat, but please post them there if you want to ask them something about the many things that they're doing.

Katherine: Susan, we had a question about metrics, and I was wondering if the Maine team might be able to share anything about the metrics that they're using for their coaching work. 

Jill: Mm hmm. Yes, we collect data for our consultation through a registry, so the people that are providing both consultation and communities of practice services, we enter all of that data into the registry. So, we have demographics; we have common goals and activities that are used as well. We also have, we evaluate our communities of practice twice a year, as well as our consultation is evaluated at a midpoint, and when the consultation closes. We, again, we have a lot of demographic information about who, and also as far as time dosage, that was something that was brought up earlier. What, the way we have structured our consultation is, we offer up to six on-site visits.

So, it doesn't have to be over a specific time period, but we do have some parameters around that. Sometimes, it's less. Sometimes, it's a little bit more if we need to adjust the goals that are part of the consultation.

Susan: Okay. Thanks. Thanks so much. Any other questions? If not, we're going to move on, and I turn this back over to Katherine.

Katherine: Great. Thank you, Susan. And thank you, Crystal, Jill, and Linda, for caring about the exciting work that you're doing, and for everyone, you'll see that there is contact information there for them in your slide.

So, now we just wanted to go and talk a little bit more about some coaching models that, a little bit more general information about coaching and specific information about some of the models that we'll highlight as well as some others we'll just give you some brief information about.

So, the idea of a coaching model and approach is a framework or process that guides the entire coaching experience. That model's theoretical underpinnings will guide every component of the framework. That model will provide direction to help coaches practice that model with fidelity, and coaching models reflect the purpose, the goals and the principles of that project. And regardless of the agency, coaching structures typically include qualification requirements for coaches.

Not just anyone can come off the street and begin coaching. There may be requirements as we saw earlier for coaching credentials, or there may be coach core knowledge and competencies that are in play. Additionally, several states do have those competence and credentialing systems, particularly for their state-level coaching systems, and coaching-system policies may also dictate the dose and duration and intensity of the coaching experience, which is then supported by the appropriate case-load assignments. 

We heard earlier some comments about caseloads being large, and so there's not a simple answer for those issues. They still come up, and many states are dealing with those kinds of questions and wrestling with those issues as they figure out the best way to deliver coaching in a way that is going to be meaningful and support effective change. And that, of course, that  critical factor to determine the appropriate approach to use to achieve those goals that the system is designed to support. So, most coaching models as we said are built on trusting relationships, goals, and expectations. Those are all very shared aspects of coaching, and they offer an opportunity to use reflective practice to learn and grow.

Research also suggests that the five key elements of a research-based coaching model includes goals, setting goals specifically to work on, developing an action plan to help move you towards accomplishment of that goal. What are you going to do in order to implement and achieve that
goal? Observation by the coach, that then contributes to feedback and reflection from the coach to the coaching.

There are several different delivery models. Traditional coaching methods are provided on-site with program leadership, teaching staff or providers. There are alternative methods to the more traditional coaching practices, and they've been explored, which include using virtual approaches, online platforms to provide support for multiple participants at a time, or to accommodate teachers who may work in rural or other isolated areas.

We're also seeing the use of video to document teaching practices with providers to reflect and discuss in distance coaching. So, videotaping and video review can also augment any coaching delivery method, whether there is on-site delivery, in addition.

Coaching may also really depend on the type of organization providing the services and the model that they use. For example, a student teacher might have a coaching experience as part of a course while an experience teacher working in the classroom may receive coaching through their local child care resource and referral agency, or an in-house coach in the case of some Head Start programs. And a family child care might be coached through an early Head Start child care partnership.

So, those coaching delivery styles, they're delivered to different types of roles, from and expert or a technical-assistance provider, even including peer-to-peer coaching. I think someone mentioned earlier that they had teachers who were coaching, or in-house staff who were doing some coaching, and one of the challenges was that maybe they did not necessarily know more than their coachee, but there are a variety of delivery systems from expert to TA provider to peer-to-peer coaching and, in some cases, even self-coaching. 

So, now we're just going to go over a couple of examples of models that are based in research or evidence, and this list is by no means exhaustive, but it reflects popular approaches that are used currently in early childhood or related fields.

So, the first one that we're going to talk about is practice-based coaching, and this one is quite popular amongst Head Start programs, and it is a model that highlights the focus on effective teaching practices, and using a cycle to improve those identified teaching practices. So, you'll see on the circle on the right in the center of the circle the effective teaching practices. That is at the core of it. That is what the teachers are working on. The outer green ring talks about the collaborative coaching partnerships. Those are the partnerships between the coach and the coachee, and it is critically important that that relationship be there and that partnership be there.

And then you see the other three components, which are shared goals and action planning, focused observation, and reflection and feedback. On the left-hand side, you can see that there are multiple ways to deliver practice-based coaching. The coaching partners can be an expert, a peer, or a self.

So, a self-coach might be someone who is much more advanced and is doing really well and maybe needs to do some extra reading and can do things and facilitate some of their own learning, or peer coaching also can be two staff members who are strong and who can help each other by observing and helping one another.

There is on-site and distance delivery of practice-based coaching, and then there is group and individual coaching. Teachers learning and collaborating together, learning and collaborating, is one of the group approaches and, of course, individual coaching with a coachee and a coach.

The PBC training, practice-based coaching training, that is available starts with a leadership academy, which is really geared at the leadership in a program or with a state organization that will give them an overview of what coaching using practice-based coaching is. 

Then once that is in place and they consider, with that training, how to develop their system, then they go into the next layer, which is coach training. There is also a TLC again, Together, Learning, and Collaborating. There's a facilitator training, and then the last one, I believe, it's very hard to read. I apologize. I'm having trouble reading that. That is online coach training. 

So, the next example that we want to talk about is MyTeachingPartner. This one people may also be familiar with. It uses the Classroom  Assessment Scoring System, or CLASS, as the observational assessment tool used in MyTeachingPartner, and it is, serves as the definition of the effective practice. So, those are the practices based on the CLASS that they're focused on improving or enhancing. It does use a video-based approach, though it does not need to be done in person.

The classroom teachers videotape themselves and submit those to their coach. The coach then provides feedback. They analyze those interactions, and that can be done in individual or small group as well. As you'll see, both of these approaches include a cycle, and they all really
represent that, what the research says about having a goal, planning, reflection, observation,and feedback.

So, there's just a couple of others that we wanted to highlight that you'll be able to get some more information about in the links that you have there. But we have the coaching interaction style, and this one was originally developed for home visitors and is a capacity-building practice to help parents and professionals use existing abilities in developing skills to attain the desired outcomes.

The Early Educators Excel coaching model was launched by Excellent Schools Detroit, and it's focus is on language, literacy and socio-emotional development using CLASS and the model, partners with programs and agencies across sectors.

Instructional coaching is most commonly used in the K-12 education system and helps teachers reflect and examine their practices. The key focus is on student content knowledge and the model uses student outcomes to measure the improvement of teaching practices. And then  finally Partnerships for Inclusion is a theory-based, collaborative, problem-solving model of consultation developed at Frank Porter Graham Child Development Institute, and it's a model of assessment-based, individualized, on-site consultation. It's a consultation rather than a straight coaching model, and it involves joint problem-solving by early educators and on-site consultants, and it's based on the tenant that change is possible when teachers are actively involved in the change process and have opportunities to apply that new knowledge and skills, and it uses the environmental rating scales tools as their pre- and post-assessment. All right. 

Now we just want to share some resources with you. We can't cover everything, of course, in an hour, but we do have several resources that you should be able to access through your slide deck and through the resources tab on your widgets.

So, we have several resources here around coaching and early care and education. Some of these were the references used in the material that we highlighted. So, you have an opportunity to dig a little bit deeper if you'd like to. And then we have some additional resources specifically for the school-age information. I know there were some questions about school age in particular, and so we've got information, two sets of slides that you can look to for additional resources on that as well.

And as we wrap up here, we do want to thank you for joining us today. We hope you've enjoyed learning about some of the systems and issues and innovative ideas, particularly from our friends in Maine.

Thank you again for joining us and sharing what it is you're doing, and we look forward to keeping track of how that continues to evolve. This is a continuously evolving subject as more and more states and programs are looking at ways to integrate coaching into their systems and quality initiatives, and we look forward to bringing you additional information as the work continues.

We do want to make sure that you please take a moment to fill out our evaluation. The link should be on the screen now, and if you can just take the last minute or two to do that, we would love to have your feedback about anything we can do to improve future webinars that we do. And I think based on questions that have come in if they have not already been answered, we are going to take those questions and be able to respond to you directly. 

So, if you did ask a question and it didn't get answered, we've captured that, and we'll be getting back to you offline. So, we're going to leave this open for a few more minutes while everyone completes the evaluation, and thanks again.