Helping Families Support Their Child's Emotional and Behavioral Self-Regulation

Helping Families Support Their Child’s Emotional and Behavioral
Self-Regulation

Joyce Escorcia: Hi, everyone. I'd like to welcome you to the Home Visiting Webinar Series. Our session today is titled Helping Families Support Their Child's Emotional and Behavioral Self-Regulation.

But before we begin our discussion, we do want to take a moment and we want to share that we do understand that programs across the nation are all at very different touch points with their families, education staff, as well as children. With that said, our goal is to present information with you that supports home-based staff as they look ahead and plan for their next steps. Part of that work involves helping families support their child's emotional and behavioral regulation as they prepare for any transitions that they might experience this fall, as well as throughout the year, so we're really excited to be exploring this topic with you today. We do encourage you to visit the green Resource widget and download or print the Participant’s Guide.

Roselia Ramirez: Great, thanks, Joyce. Now that we have gone over some logistics and technology – we do know that that can always present some obstacles for us – let us tell you a little bit about who we are. My name is Roselia Ramirez, and I am from the National Center on Early Childhood Development, Teaching, and Learning, and I’m here with my colleagues, and we’re excited to be your Home Visiting webinar hosts.

Joyce, it's great to see you. Would you like to say hello to our participants?

Joyce: Hi, everyone. I'm so excited to be here with you guys. I work with the amazing Roselia, and I'm a Senior Teen Case Specialist, and also am now with you guys here on the Home Visiting webinar series. Some of you may recognize me from the Coaching Corner webinar series.  Just excited to kind of help connect the dots a little bit.

And we're also excited to have with us today as a guest Ashley MacNish, and she is a colleague here at DTL with us, and she also works with the National Center for Pyramid Model Innovations, and she's been a home visitor, as well. Ashley, would you like to say hello?

Ashley MacNish: Hi, everyone. I'm really excited to be here. I also used to help Joyce on those Coaching Corner webinars, so I may be a familiar face to some of you there. I was an early intervention teacher in both Tennessee and New Jersey, and I'm so excited to be part of the Home Visiting series today.

Roselia: Great, we're going to be hearing more from Ashley. It's great to have you ladies on this webinar today.

Let's take a look at our learning goals for this session. We have framed our discussion around the following two goals that you see up here on your screen – first, we want to describe emotional and behavioral self-regulation, and then we're going to shift our focus on identifying resources as well as some strategies that home visitors can share with families to promote children's self-regulation.

Joyce: Over the next several months, and including our previous webinar, we have been and are going to be focusing our webinar series on the Head Start Early Learning Outcomes Framework, or the ELOF, specifically approaches to learning, so that domain, and we've planned four webinars. This is … And each one of those webinars is going to cover one of the four sub-domains, and we're going to go over those four sub-domains in just a few minutes.

Something else exciting that we're trying out this year is to be kind of threading the same topic across our webinar series – Teacher Time, the Ed Manager webinar series, and inclusion webinar series, and also the Coaching Corner webinar series –to really make those connections across those different webinars and really think about it across those different audiences. We really hope that this provides an opportunity for learning and collaboration across those different roles in your programs.

Roselia: Yeah, I'm really excited about this approach, as well, Joyce. We want to emphasize that we will be providing a brief overview of the domain because we want to spend most of our time focusing on strategies as well as resources to support your work with children and families. If you're interested in taking a deeper dive into the Approaches to Learning domain, we do encourage you to explore the resources that we have provided in the Participant’s Guide, which again, you can find in that teal Resource widget.

Joyce: Kind of digging in a little bit into Approaches to Learning – when we think about approaches to learning, it really focuses in on how children learn. It refers to those skills and behaviors that children use to engage in learning.

Let’s pause here for second and think about how our work as home visitors – what that means in the context of approaches to learning, and how we can really support the development of these different skills. Teaching practices and home visiting are the ways that home visitors work with families to provide experiences that are really aimed at supporting the development and learning, their responsive interactions, and using the home as that environment, that learning environment where all that takes place.

Roselia: We also know that our work as home visitors is to focus on facilitating those parent-child interactions and engaging families in focusing on their child's overall development.

Let's get started with getting a feel for what folks know about the Approaches to Learning domain. We mentioned that over the course of this webinar series, we would be focusing on the sub-domains of Approaches to Learning. Let's see if you know what they are. Using the poll feature, we want you to choose what those sub-domains are. Let's go ahead and push that out. Here you have a poll, and we want you to take a look at this – we've got emotional and behavioral self-regulation, cognitive self-regulation, sense of identity and belonging, initiative and curiosity, and creativity. Go ahead and check the ones that apply to what you think are the four sub-domains of Approaches to Learning. Let's give you guys a couple of seconds there to enter your responses.

OK, looks like we've got quite a bit of responses that are coming in, so what do you think, Joyce? How do you think our participants are going to do?

Joyce: I don't know, I'm looking at a strong "A," I think.

Roselia: I think so, too. I think it's a  – I mean, the ELOF is part of the work that, …  It's our go-to, right?

Joyce: I know, right?

Roselia: Let's give it another second here. We've got quite a bit. We've got almost 300 responses. Let's give it a couple more seconds, I want to get to about 50%. We're right about 40% right now, so hopefully folks are … Got their thinking caps on and they're really looking at what those four sub-domains are.

Alright, well, I'm going to go ahead and push out our results and kind of see where we are. We're at right about almost 50%. Let's take a look here. We've got about 61% that identified emotional and behavioral self-regulation, we've got some cognitive self-regulation. Looks like everyone checked a little bit of all of them, but our highest was at emotional and behavioral self-regulation. Alright, let's move forward here.

Joyce: Just to review – most of you, we aced that, but just a quick review of that emotional and behavioral self-regulation domain – it is made up of four different sub-domains. The first one is emotional and behavioral self-regulation, which we're going to dig into today. Then we have cognitive self-regulation. Then we have initiative and curiosity, and we also have creativity. Each goal has this developmental progression that describes the skills, those behaviors and concepts children will demonstrate as they kind of make progress towards their goals. We invite you, if you want to know more, if you want to dig in a little bit deeper, check out the ELOF and the organization of the framework on the ECLKC.

For our session today, we are going to focus in, again, on that emotional and behavioral self-regulation. That's kind of where we're going to spend our time today. This is really about being able to manage emotions and behaviors within the demands of a situation. It's really our ability to calm down, to adjust to change, and to handle our reactions when we're frustrated or just feeling challenged in an area. We know that can be challenging for us as adults, right? Want to just invite you to take a moment and, using your Participant’s Guide, just think about what happens to your relationships, your way of thinking, and your behavior when your own self-regulation becomes challenging.

We're going invite you to share your responses in the Q&A. How do you feel when you are challenged with your own self-regulation? I'm going to take just a few seconds and let us ponder on that, and again, invite you to put that into the Q&A. And you can also, again, put it into your resource list, into your Participant’s Guide. Great.

Roselia: Looks like we've got … We're starting to get some of those responses coming in, and looks like folks are saying that they're feeling some overwhelmed, and … Let's see here. Saw overwhelmed quite a bit. Let's see here – feel sad or angry, feeling restrained, not good, sad – there's a lot of those types of emotions that are being shared. We do hope that pausing to reflect – go ahead and keep entering your responses there, but we do hope that this opportunity to pause and reflect got you thinking about why emotional regulation skills are so important in the work that we do as home visitors. We can really be faced with situations that make it challenging to manage our emotions, and without having those tools and skills, imagine what this would do for our relationships as well – our relationships with the family, with the child – as well as with our co-workers and how it might impact how we think and feel as well as how we might respond.

Let's shift gears now and explore why emotional regulation skills are important for young children.

Joyce: Roselia, when we think about the research, it really tells us that being able to manage emotions is really critical for academic achievement, for school readiness, and just for overall mental health. We also know that emotional regulation supports performance on cognitive tests like memory and planning, and it also predicts some academic outcomes. Just some things to think about there, as well.

Roselia: Absolutely, and research also tells us that children who regulate their emotions appropriately, they've been found to display greater social competence, better social skills, as well as their ability to not only make, but to keep friends more easily. In addition to this, children's ability to regulate these emotions, it facilitates their transition to kindergarten and school readiness by supporting the ability to acquire academic information. Emotional regulation affects the child's understanding of different situations, how they will respond, as well as their behavior. This becomes important as they learn to negotiate relationships, as they learn to problem solve, and really, their ability to be ready to learn new information.

Joyce: We know we've given you guys a lot to think about, and we've just kind of scratched the surface. And again, you can dig in more into approaches to learning by checking it out … Checking out the ELOF on the ECLKC and the resources in your Participant’s Guide. Just to summarize where we are now – we've introduced the Approaches to Learning domain and its four sub-domains, and we've focused in on that emotional and behavioral self-regulation as a sub-domain that we're going to focus in on today.

Now we want to kind of shift gears a bit and really start exploring some of those resources and strategies that promote self-regulation that we are really excited about. One of those resources that we are super excited about to help connect the dots a little bit are the Head Start Early Learning Outcomes Framework Effective Practice Guides, so if you’re not familiar with the Effective Practice Guides, we really encourage you to visit the ECLKC for a deeper dive. There is a link in your Participant’s Guide in the resource list that will take you right there. We’re sure you’re going to want to dig in a little bit more as we talk about this a little bit more today.

Roselia: Absolutely, let's take a look a little bit about this resource, Effective Practice Guides. It really provides information about domain-specific teaching practices that support children's development. This guide shows what these practices look like in various early learning settings, including home-based. They also help staff, including home visitors, to reflect and improve their teaching practices. As we said at the beginning of this webinar, teaching practices in home-based studies are the ways that home visitors work with families to provide experiences that support the child's development and learning, how they engage in those responsive interactions, and use the home as that learning environment.

Let's talk a little bit about how the effect of practice guides are organized. The guides are organized around four components of learning. Let me see here. Oh. Sorry about that. I clicked a little bit soon. First, we have the Know. This really refers to the teaching practices that are effective for supporting children's development in the sub-domain. Then in the See component, these are actual video clips of effective teaching practices so that you can actually see those practices in action. And then you have the Do – these are tips that you're able to try in your own program when working with children to support their development in this sub-domain, or when working with children and parents in it that home-based setting.

Then we move on into the Improve. In the Improve component, this follows the practice-based coaching, or PBC steps, as a way to think about using coaching to improve domain-specific teaching practices. The steps include planning goals and action steps, focused observation, as well as reflection and feedback. And then at the last part is Reflect. While Reflect is not a specific section within the Effective Practice Guides, you are prompted to reflect at various points throughout each section of the guides. Taking advantage of the reflection moments is key to helping you process what you are learning, and then planning on how you will translate what you are learning into your daily practice. How can you take the information that you're learning and put that into the work that you're doing?

Joyce: Thank you, Roselia. As we mentioned in the beginning of our webinar, we are so excited to have Ashley with us today. I know, Ashley, you and I have had lots of conversations about how the Effective Practice Guides are a useful resource for home visitors. As a former home visitor, do you have any tips for how to use the guides?

Ashley: Yeah, that's a great … Sorry, go ahead.

Joyce: Sorry, I got a little excited. No, I was just going to invite our audience, as well, if you're using the guides, to give us any tips in the Q&A, as well. Yeah, Ashley, any tips for us?

Ashley: I think the Effective Practice Guides can be a great jumping-off point to help focus your visits with families. I think making sure when you're reading the practices to make the … Read them from a way of, how would I support a family in using this teaching practice? Because at the end of the day, our role is to really help the family in supporting their interactions with their child. For example, if I was on a visit with a family of an infant and I am looking at the Know and the Do section, maybe I'll start off with asking them, "How do you calm your child when they are upset?” And that could provide me knowledge about the strengths the family might already have, things they already do to help their child to self-regulate. Maybe they are not there yet, and maybe that provides me an invitation to share knowledge about co-regulation of infants and help the family plan ways to respond in the future.

I also think the See section can be a really great way to show families the action and practice. Before you have them practice it themselves, you can maybe show a video clip of what it is you are trying to convey or get them to do with their child so they can see it in action, and then you can try it together. Or you might go to the Reflect section and have some questions prepared of what you might ask the family to do to reflect after viewing that video for … About whatever it is that your focus is for that visit, and really listening to their responses. I think families provide a lot of cues to us in those conversations on how to respond and how to set them up.

I was also thinking about if a parent's a dual language learner, you'll want to help support them in promoting and preserving their home language. For example, if a practice is labeling emotions, maybe learning yourself and teaching them, why don't you try labeling that emotion word in both languages for their child? You'll really want to work with the family in using this guide and identifying potential learning goals, that you can help them through those joint conversations to create goals for an IFSP or an IEP. And there may also be some opportunities, and I will be sharing more resources, too, but not only thinking about the child's self-regulation, but the adult's self-regulation as well, and what are opportunities to practice those skills?

Sorry. Had a little delay with my computer.

Joyce: Awesome. Those are some great examples that you shared, Ashley. This is a great place to perhaps pause and to watch a video. In this video, you are going to see a home visitor who is checking in with a parent on self-regulation. In your Participant’s Guide, we invite you to jot down some strategies that you see the home visitor using to support this parent and the child. Let's play that video.

[Video begins]

Visitor: And how is she doing with her emotions, her feelings, and do you notice any occasion that she gets more frustrated, like during …

Natalie: [Inaudible]

Visitor: Oh, outside?

Mother: Outside. That's a car.

Visitor: That is a car outside passing by. Is there a moment that you think she's more frustrated at that time? When it is time to clean, when transitioning to something, to go pick up brother, or anything like that?

Mother: When she's trying to communicate, most of the time.

Visitor: Yeah, that's frustrating.

Mother: For her. And that's why she throws herself on the floor and starts crying.

Visitor: Yeah. You continue putting her to the side for her to regulate her feelings, supporting her. Continue on the goal of the family trying to labor her emotion right now, you're feeling very sad because you wanted to go outside, and we can also describe why she is feeling sad, giving her those words. You felt sad because you wanted to play with the LEGOs, and we were all done.

Mother: You were not happy, Natalie.

Natalie: Yeah.

Visitor: Yeah.

Mother: You were mad.

Visitor: I also have this helpful handout for you about emotions, about, you know, always want to get on her level next to her for her eyes to look at us and to say, "Now that I see your face, tell me how you're feeling.” You can ask her questions, ask her, "How are you feeling," and that is when, "Oh, I know. I can see you have tears running down. You're feeling sad. You've got your frown, you're sad, or maybe angry at that time, too.” But when she's more calm, when she's not yelling or screaming, that's when you want to take the time to notice her and talk about those feelings.

[Video ends]

Roselia: Alright, so what did you guys think about that video? We invite you to share in the Q&A any strategies that you saw the home visitor, and how she was interacting with the parent and just some things that you think really kind of stood out to you. And while our folks are doing that, Ashley, are there any additional thoughts from you on how to support this parent and child?

Ashley: Yeah. I think there were definitely some opportunities the home visitor could have provided some great supportive feedback. For example, the mother did a great job of imitating language, of labeling her child's emotions. I know a lot of times I was very guilty of this. You're just so excited to share information and provide that piece and be that resource, that sometimes you overlook what the family is already doing. So bringing to attention and providing that. I also see in the chat box, which she did really a good job of modeling imitation. Imitation of actions and words. They were all at the child's level during that interaction. She was doing a great job of asking open-ended questions to the mom. And, I mean, I think all the home visitors are really – in the chat box, I'm seeing covering a lot of really great skills.

Roselia: Yeah, absolutely, I think they are really liking seeing that example of that reflective language going back and forth and being able to prompt the parent to kind of think about what they're seeing and how they're interacting with the child. Great. Well, I am going to move us along here.

Joyce: Thank you, Roselia. Now we want to dive into another great resource, and that's the Digital Social Emotional Toolkit. For that, Ashley, can you tell us a little bit more about this great resource?

Ashley: Sure. This resource can be found in your teal Resource List widget if you would like to look at it along with us. And as Roselia and Joyce did such a great job of telling us why social emotional development and learning is so critical for the child's overall development, and especially right now during these uncertain times where children and adults more than ever may need that extra support navigating and adapting their routines and their learning formats and environments.

Last summer – well, last fall, sorry, we were developing it in the summer – November, December 2020, the National Center on Early Childhood Development, Teaching, and Learning, in collaboration with the National Center for Health, Behavioral Health, and Safety, created this Social Emotional Toolkit, and it was sent out as a resource to Head Start education managers. We just wanted to maybe take some time to highlight a few of the resources from here.

Joyce: Yes, we are definitely excited to learn more about the resources in this toolkit and how home visitors are able to utilize this in the work that they do. Let's begin by taking a look at how the toolkit is organized. Ashley, can you tell us a little bit more about the organization of the toolkit?

Ashley: Sure. There's about six pages, you'll see, of wonderful resources that are intended for teachers, family childcare providers, and home visitors to support social and emotional learning for children and families. You’ll see that the toolkit is organized by these icons that you see. It will let you know if that resource is available in multiple languages, whether the resource is intended as a family resource or a classroom-based resource. It was intended to help you see those resources and identify them easily with these icons embedded so that it would give you kind of some information on how to use them.

Joyce: Ashley, I really love how  easy to access the toolkit is and the resources there. I want to dig into that just a little bit more, especially with you and your experience as a home visitor and with the current work that you're doing. And I'd love to hear more about how you are using the toolkit, because we know that because of circumstances and just some of the uncertainty, we know that families are always looking for useful resources related to the pandemic. Now, does the toolkit include these kinds of resources, as well?

Ashley: Yeah, it does. The toolkit's actually organized by topic areas, and the first section is specifically related to pandemic resources. Helping Your Child During the Pandemic is this middle resource you see on the slide here. And it really provides a lot of helpful tips to families and easy-to-use language to add safety during these unpredictable times that we're having about … Tips on providing that positive attention to their child, teaching safety habits, ways to plan ahead or how to respond when changes occur. As a home visitor, it might be helpful to look at some of the tips yourself before and in between visits just to have it as ideas in your toolbox when things come up in conversation, and then maybe have a few printed out on your visits that you could share and bring with you.

Another great resource I wanted to highlight, really goes hand-in-hand with this, it is the one on the left, Tips for Supporting Yourself During the Pandemic, that you can share with the adults in the families that you work with. Many of the adults that we are working with, maybe they've experienced job loss or the loss of a family member. Just on top of life stress as it is, we’re adding these other crazy stressors. This handout can be really helpful just to help adults plan ahead and make their own self-care a priority and have some of those strategies in their toolbelt so that they can take care of themselves and in turn be available to their children.

Then that final resource is a social story, I Can Be Safe and Wash My Hands! Home visitors, you might want to print this out. I always laminated them so that it could be used over and over again to offer as a resource for families. The language is very family-friendly, and it offers scenarios of when a child might need to wash their hands. And just help, because sometimes, you know, especially young kids, they're having fun, they're playing, and we might be asking them to wash their hands a little more right now – to really help them understand why and support those transitions. And there are some really fun, easy-to-implement strategies that families can learn within the hand-washing routine that don't make it feel like just a routine. They can be playful with it. And I would like to point out all three of these are available in English and Spanish.

Joyce: Really glad you brought up that whole aspect of self-care because sometimes we tend to overlook taking care of ourselves. The section on Social-Emotional Mental Health Resources has resources on things such as trauma and resilience, mental health consultations, substance use, self-care for providers and families, and these resources can also be useful for home visitors as they continue to make self-care a priority and to use as they’re supporting their families. Highlighted in the picture is the Taking Care of Ourselves page on the ECLKC, and it's stressing the importance of self-care for staff as well as for families.

And we know that, in your work as a home visitor, how would you use some of these resources? We invite you to take a moment and reflect on that and then jot down some of your ideas in your Participant’s Guide. And we also invite you, our webinar participants, to share how you have or would use these resources in the Q&A. If you are familiar with them and you've used them over the course of the last few months as you were getting back into working with families, what are some of the ways that you have or would use those resources?

Ashley, what are your thoughts on how a home visitor could use these resources?

Ashley: Absolutely. I, as a home visitor, was always a proponent for knowing your resources. Not just these wonderful ones that we can print out and provide families, but also resources to us. For example, especially maybe new home visitors, maybe if you've never worked with a mental health consultant before, knowing there is a resource in this toolkit that is called Infant and Early Childhood Mental Health Consultation: Engaging with Families, and so it could provide you some background on when you might pull a mental health consultant into a visit with families and how to team with them.

Also, there are a lot of really great self-regulation strategies in here that you could use yourself. There's one called Managing Stress with Mindful Moments, and there are videos that are created by the National Center for Early Childhood Health and Wellness that teach various mindful moments. So either using that between visits on a break for yourself, or maybe even thinking about incorporating that into a visit with your family. I always kind of had a “Hello” and ”Goodbye” routine that I would do. Maybe pulling that in there and modeling and then sharing information on how taking deep breaths, for example, is helpful for all of us. When your child is experiencing a big emotion, just practicing taking deep breaths throughout your day can really help support your self-regulation so that you can be a support to your child during those moments.

Roselia: Yeah, Ashley, I’d also like to mention, because we are hearing in the Q&A, interest as to where these resources are located. Most of these are in your Participant’s Guide. There is a resource list, and you will find the links to those resources there.

Sorry about that, Joyce.

Joyce: No, no, you're fine. Definitely want everybody to be able to have access to all of this great stuff. Ashley, I just love how you're kind of bringing us back to mindful moments, and it really is kind of about taking care of ourselves, as well.

Now we want to look at another resource, right? We really want you to walk away with this treasure chest of things that you can take and use. You may not … Feel overwhelmed that you have to use them all at once. Maybe you can walk away and think, "OK, I'm going to try using that ‘Mindful Moments’ resource next.” But just know it's all here that you can come back to.

Now we want to look at a newer resource. This is “The Pyramid Model and Trauma Informed Care: A Guide for Early Childhood Professionals to Support Young Children's Resilience.” This is a new resource that was not ready in time for the digital toolkit, but it can be accessed on challengingbehavior.org. This guide provides resources that support early childhood professionals to integrate the pyramid model for promoting social and emotional competencies in infants and young children and trauma-informed care. Really the purpose of the guide is to help early childhood professionals understand how The Pyramid Model and Trauma-Informed Care can kind of meet the diverse needs of young children and families that we are supporting who have experienced trauma. Ashley, can you tell us a little bit more about this resource?

Ashley: Yeah, what I love – as a former early interventionist, this is probably the first resource we created at NCPMI that includes all the different early childhood settings. It does a great job of defining trauma, sharing research related to the prevalence of trauma and early childhood and outcomes, and then it shares information on understanding how behavior relates to trauma, which is really helpful. And then suggestions for integrating the Pyramid Model practices with a trauma-informed care approach. There are suggestions for home-based programs, so at the program level, some trauma-informed care. Not just for families, but inclusive of staff's needs.

Then as a home visitor, there are trauma-informed practices listed for your interactions with families. For example, in this first bullet, obviously we all know how important it is to acknowledge families’ strengths during our visits. Also sometimes being mindful during those visits – families share really personal things with us, and becoming comfortable with acknowledging the bravery and strength in that alone really can support your relationship with the family and them trusting you to be a resource for them.

That second bullet is an example of a principle a home visitor might use to support a family in accomplishing with their child. For example, I might ask what parts of their day feel more easy, what parts of their day feel a little more challenging, and by reflecting on some of those easy moments, we might identify some things the family is already doing really well, or what motivates their child during those times. We can bring some of those pieces into those more challenging parts of their day and really work together as a team to make decisions around what strategies they might use during those more challenging moments. I just love – I wish I had had a resource like this when I was working with families.

These are some other resources that are found in the ”Family Resource” section of the Digital Social Emotional Toolkit. These can be used with home-based programs or be shared with families that are being served in Head Start and Early Head Start. The resources in this section, they range from tip sheets for families around social-emotional development and skills to just quick little visuals and scripted stories that families can use to teach their child specific social skills like problem-solving, self-regulation, and managing their emotions. They have them at both a pre-K level and an infant/toddler level.

Roselia: Those are some amazing resources that you have shared and a good start to building a toolkit of resources to be able to have with you.

Now we're really excited about this next portion of our presentation because we want to share a few more resources that have been developed since the toolkit was released. You can add these resources to your own toolkit, and we have actually included these new resources for you in the Resource widget. Be sure to visit that teal resource widget. These are not on the printout that you see on the slide here – those are all part of that emotional toolkit – these are new ones that have been developed since then. Ashley, we know that you had a hand in developing these, so we're really excited to hear about these new resources.

Ashley: Thanks, Roselia. Erin Barton, she's my colleague and co-resource developer at NCPMI, and we are always asked by home visitors and early interventionists, “What are some resources that identify the practices that families can use to support their infant or toddler's social emotional development?” That's what brought us to create this handout by topic – so Responsive Communication, Responsive Interactions, Teaching Emotions – list practices that you can have in your toolbox, if it comes up in conversation with families of actual practices, they can do and implement in their different parts of their day.

I would have loved to have something like this, especially those moments when you're starting to build that relationship with the family where maybe you ask an open-ended question like, "Hey, what is your priority for today?" And you get those blank stares, to just then be able to pull something like this out. Also really listen in your conversations with families, which I'll talk about on the next resource on what you can do. But these practices support communication, interactions, teaching emotions, child participation during routines and activities, communicating expectations, and addressing challenging behavior.

This resource really goes hand-and-hand with the last one where the last one's kind of just a list of those practices, like a quick cheat sheet. This is a really great tool that can support that joint planning with families. All of the practices listed here are the same ones on that last resource I shared, but it really goes a step further in that shared decision-making with families. This is not intended to be an assessment that you take on visits and you walk through every practice and find out, what's a family doing, what do they need to learn? You really want to be intentional using this tool.

I know many times on home visits, families would say, "I just want my child to talk. What do I need to do to get them to talk?” That would be a cue to me as a home visitor to maybe pull this out and just focus on that responsive communication piece and go through those practices and talk through. Maybe I find out that they're doing a great job imitating their toddler's sounds, but maybe through our conversation, they identify they are not pausing in those back-and-forth interactions. That would be something that we could create a goal around and really start then to talk about, well, what routines do we want to try to do this, and practice turn-taking?

Then on this form, this kind of takes it a step further where whatever it is you kind of decide and plan in the last resource, you could help just to write down for an easy area like the fridge or something. We tend to call this a written manual. But basically, let's say they decide to work on pausing between those back-and-forth in conversations with their child for turn-taking. We would write that in the yellow part, and then we could check off the parts of their day that they would like to practice that skill in the red, and then list any materials they might have or specific actions they might do. Maybe they intend to use peekaboo as a game to practice that pause. That would be written in the blue. It breaks down whatever it is that you all talk about on how they are going to implement that skill.

This is another great form that supports home visitors and families to have conversations and plan around specific routines and activities. For example, maybe the transition into getting into the car is a challenge. The home visitor might ask the family to list out the steps of currently what they do during that transition, or maybe they observe it and write it down themselves. The form prompts the home visitor and the family through the conversation. For example, it might be they want their child to calmly get into the car seat. The second page really helps the home visitor and the family work together to now create a plan. What specific actions will the caregiver do prior to the transition, and then how might they plan to respond to the behavior when it happens? It gives them a plan for what to do between visits.

Finally, we talked a lot about helping families create those safe, predictable routines. I had a family that bedtime was a big thing, and so I made a little visual board for their very smart 3-year-old. We made a visual schedule. For younger children, you might use a first-then schedule to just show, first right now we're eating, and then you get to read your book. It really helps support transitions and to let children know the expectations and what's happening during their day.

Finally, parents and families, we know, are the key to holding those high expectations and supporting their child in learning their home language. Families can promote positive experiences for their children by emphasizing their strengths, including the cultural and linguistic strengths. This resource helps provide … The DLL toolkit is located on the ECLKC, and it assists families in supporting their children's development and learning in a variety of languages.

Roselia: Wow. That was a lot, Ashley. Lots of, lots of great new resources. Again, we did include those for you in the teal Resource widget, be sure to check those out. And we know it was a lot of information, I think one of the things that we will do is we are going to explore these on the MyPeers home visiting community and maybe get some conversation started around how each of these resources could be used, and maybe some of you out there that use these can share with your colleagues your successes or what you've found with utilizing these resources with families.

We are coming to the end of our time together, and there's just a few more things that we do want to share with you. The National Center on Early Childhood Development Teaching and Learning is hosting the 2022 Disability Services Coordinator Institute. This is going to be a virtual two-day professional development opportunity to explore those coordinated approaches and inclusion practices through the lens of race, equity, and belonging. There actually are a couple of sessions that are focused on home visiting work, and we do encourage you to pass this information along and share this with your disability services coordinator. Registration details will be available this fall. Head Start and Early Head Start disability service coordinators are encouraged to attend the Institute with their team of staff, including local education agency liaisons and part B and part C partners. There will be certificates of completion as well as CEUs available for this event, so please be sure to share this information and then also be sure to save the date.

Joyce: Definitely. Again, thank you, Ashley, for kind of digging deeper into several resources, including that Digital Social Emotional Toolkit, and for really giving us some helpful examples on how to use some of the resources. I know that’s my favorite part of things many times. We know that we've given everyone a lot to think about, and so we just want to invite you to pop any questions you may have into the Q&A. And we will kind of … If we don't have time for them today, we will definitely keep the conversation going in MyPeers.

I did see a couple of questions  floating up, and one was about accessing all of the resources here. Again, in your Resource widget, we have the resources for this webinar. You can download those there, and then also we’ll be posting them in MyPeers, as Roselia mentioned. And we would love to hear how you are using the resources or how you plan to use those resources. Those were just a couple of things that  came up in the Q&A that I saw. And just keep those questions coming.

Roselia: Sorry, I just wanted to mention also there's a question about those last resources and if they are available in Spanish. Ashley did mention that they are in the queue to be translated into Spanish. The newer resources are not yet available in Spanish, but soon to come. In the queue to be translated.

Joyce: Yes, and in the toolkit, as well – if you noticed when Ashley was kind of going through and talking to us about how they were divided up – there is actually an icon there that will indicate which resources in the toolkit are already available in Spanish. That's just an easy go-to thing to look and see and not have to plan it quite as much. Hope that is helpful to you, as well.

Roselia: Alright, we also want to be sure that you know about PUSHPLAY. In case you missed a webinar, you can now go to PUSHPLAY DTL On Demand, where you can view the recently aired webinars at your convenience. We have made it easy to find exactly what you are looking for, and the more views you have, the more customized the experience it becomes. And one more thing, certificates of completion are also available when you participate in a webinar through this option. Please be sure to bookmark the site and then save it, or you can also find it on MyPeers. We wanted you to be aware of that in case you missed one of our webinars or the other webinars, you can go back and take a look at those.

If you're not already a member of the MyPeers Home Visiting Community – we have mentioned that quite a bit – this is really a platform of networking, and so we do invite you to join that. You can find the link to that on the ECLKC page on the very bottom. We do encourage you to join the home visiting community. Again, this is a space and a place to share ideas, ask questions of your peers, share resources, and stay connected with your colleagues.

Joyce: And again, a great place for resources would be the ECLKC. We invite you to dive in there with us and explore the resources that are relevant for you and what you need. That's another place that you can dig. We also wanted to highlight the iPD. That's lots of great resources there, including the beginning Home Visitors Series and the Leave the Bag Challenge. Be sure to visit the iPD if you have not been on the iPD and quickly kind of get access and get in there. Again, there's free CEUs, and a lot of them are self-paced and just a great place to find some really enriching professional development. I invite you to kind of dig in there, as well.

Again, now we've given you a lot to think about for this time. We also want to invite you to put a little X on your calendar for December the 8th. We will be back with you again for our next webinar, and then we are going to be talking about another sub-domain of approaches to learning, and that is going to be to Promote Cognitive Self-Regulation. We are super excited to dig into there and give you some more resources and strategies that you can use.

Again, thank you for joining us today.