Practice-Based Coaching to Support Inclusion

Highly Individualized Practices Series: Practice-Based Coaching to Support Inclusion

Colin Gasamis: Hello, everyone. Welcome to the March webinar on practice-based coaching. It's part of the National Center on Early Childhood Development, Teaching, and Learning. My name is Colin Gasamis, and I'm a research associate at Cultivate Learning at the University of Washington in Seattle, Washington. I have with me today Kathleen Artman-Meeker and Ragan McLeod. Kathleen, do you want to introduce yourself?

Kathleen Artman-Meeker: Sure. Hi, everyone. I'm Kathleen Artman-Meeker, like Colin said, at the University of Washington. I am a faculty member in early childhood special education and have been working with the practice safe coaching team for a number of years, originally under the National Center on Quality Teaching and Learning, and I have been working with the team that did an institute around Practice Safe Coaching to support inclusion, so I'm really excited to share a little bit about that  with you today.

Colin: And we also have joining us today Dr. Ragan McLeod at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. 

Ragan McLeod: Hi, thanks Colin. Yeah, I'm Ragan McLeod. I, like Kathleen, have been working around the Practice Safe Coaching materials for a while both under the former National Center and, under the current National Center, to develop materials and lead trainings as well. So I'm happy to be here today.

Colin: Great, and so we're just going to go over a couple of housekeeping items before we get started. So if you can see on your screen now, you have several widgets. First of all, I just want to go over some of the features of the ON24 platform. So for the best viewing experience, we recommend that you use a wired Internet connection and that you close any programs or browser sessions that you have running at the same time. So any kind of programs that might use up some of your computing power will affect the quality of the presentation.

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Throughout the session, we'll be using the blue chat widget to engage with each other. You can also find additional answers to some common technical issues located in the yellow help widget at the bottom of your screen. Please keep in mind that this webinar is also being transcribed, and the transcription will be posted to the ECKLC website, and thank you all again for joining us today, and I'm now going to turn it over to our first presenter, Kathleen.

Kathleen: Great. Thank you, Colin. Good setup. So our agenda today is to focus on two main topics. I'm weaving those two topics together. We're going to talk first about evidence-based practices that support inclusion for young children with they're at risk for developmental disabilities or developing disabilities, and then using practice-based coaching to support individualization. So those are our two topics split roughly in half over the course of our webinar today, and thank you, everyone, for the chats that you put into the Q and A from the lobby, those of you who were able to join a little bit before the hour.

We asked you to chime in about your role and what you hope to learn, and so I was monitoring that and taking some notes as we went. I mean, it looks like most of you who are able to respond were looking for some strategies around supporting teachers around inclusion and looking for some new tools in your coaching tool kit for those of you who are working directly with providers in a variety of different roles.

We have a mental health consultant, family childcare, ECE managers, social/emotional coaches, a variety of roles represented today.

So we're going to make sure that we try to explain, for those of you who maybe aren't as familiar with practice-based coaching yet, the basics of what that is and then help see how we bring that together with inclusive practices to support all young kids in your program. Great.

So this is the practice-based coaching graphic. Ragan is going to talk to you more about that as we go through our time together today. So I'm just going to give you a very broad overview at the beginning so that you can kind of place some of the ideas as we're talking about them. So practice-based coaching or PBC as we may call it today, is a research-based coaching model. It's a cyclical process, so you can see by the graphic on the screen the supporting coaches use an effective teaching and home visiting practices that leave a positive outcome for children.

In each components in the cycle, it's designed to inform the actions taken by the coach and the coachee or the provider, the teacher, home visitor, et cetera. The PBC is focused on effective teaching or caregiving or home visiting practices, what we see in the middle of the circle there, and those practices inform the way goals and action plans are set, engage and focus observation, and then supportive of coachee growth and the development true reflection and feedback.

So we're going to talk today about what all of those pieces look like together to support inclusion in early childhood, and like I said, Ragan will take you into a little bit more depth about the practice-based coaching component in the second half of our webinar today. So I'm going to focus on the middle of the practice-based coaching graphic, these effective teaching practices, and you'll be teacher or caregiving or home visiting practices, and these are specific statements of the actions and behaviors of  education staff that support child learning, and practice-based coaching is designed to support these effective practices, and these practices can be focused on any setting: home visiting in the classroom, family childcare practice, and they're flexible.

They can focus on supporting any developmental area such as practices that support social-emotional skills or language development. So throughout our time today, in the first half of our webinar, we're really going to focus on how do we think about these effective practices in the middle of the practicebased coaching framework related to inclusion and supporting young children with disabilities.

It's helpful to think about any conversation around practice-based coaching as sitting within what we refer to as the theory of change, and this graphic illustrates what we believe about how professional development, which includes practice-based coaching, can impact education staff, use of effective teaching and home visiting practices, and then impact child learning, which is our ultimate goal. 

When we offer high quality professional development, which includes practice-based coaching, we support education staff to use those effective practices in the middle of the graphic, and then we're more likely to see child outcomes occur. If children are learning, then school readiness goals are more likely to be achieved.

I'm going to focus your attention to the graphic of the house in the middle of the slide here. So looking at the pillars or the walls of the house, we know that teaching should be guided by research-based curriculum and practice, and if screening and ongoing assessment are needed to guide how children are learning and how we best ingest our interactions and our instructions in the ongoing needs. 

So those kind of two pillars of the house are really important and work together, and this is true for children with disabilities as well, but with children with disabilities, we also focus on the roof of the house which are highly individualized teaching and learning, and that's essential for really developing high-quality inclusion for children with disabilities, and we'll talk today about the DEC recommended practices, which are evidence-based highly individualized teaching and learning practices, the roof of the house, and just to note that these practices, the pillar and the roof, pillars and the roof, apply to children enrolled in any program option: center-based, family childcare, home-based, et cetera, but we're going to focus on the middle use of practices.

So I encourage you to take a second and think. Before we jump into the how PBC can support individualization, we're going to kind of dive into what kind of resources there are for research-based practices. So I encourage you to just chat into the chat box. How do you identify practices that support inclusion? Take a second to think about that, and chat an idea that may pop into your head.

Yeah, I think I'll repeat the question. I see the chat there. So how do you identify practices that support inclusion? Where do you go to look for resources or get ideas? Okay. DEC recommended practices -- so some of you are already familiar. ECKLC, the pyramid model, ECPA, PBIF, "The Clearing House" and Creative Curriculum, Early Learning Standards, class manual, developmentally appropriate practice. I see teaching strategies. Great. National Center for Pyramid Model Innovations and CPNI and collaboration with your colleagues who may have expertise in special education, other staff members and Teaching Strategies GOLD I'm seeing people chat in. Great. Okay. Well, that's a great list that you all generated, and I'm going to kind of pinpoint some of the strategies for where you're finding -- where you can go to find trustworthy resources related to inclusive practices. Great. Okay.

So the framework for effective teaching practices, the house that we talked about a little bit earlier has these five components that are important for all children: the foundation, nurturing and responsive interactions and engaging environments, that first pillar of research-based curriculum and teaching practices, the second pillar of ongoing screening and assessment of children's skills, and then the roof, individualizing teaching and learning, which is what we're really digging into today, and then the center, engaging family, and when connected with one another, these form that central single structure, the house framework that surrounds the family in the center in partnership with families to foster children's development and learning, and at the base or the foundation, we see that we already know that all children need nurturing and effective relationships and engaging interactions and environments to support their learning, and this is true for every child, children with or without disabilities or suspected delays as well, and then for children with disabilities, that highly individualized teaching and learning at the roof is essential for providing high-quality inclusion across all of your program options.

So we're now going to introduce you to a few resources that may give you some specific places to look to line up with some of the ideas that your colleagues have been sharing in the chat box related to where they go to find resources related to inclusion. So we'll show you a few places and introduce you to a few resources related to those highly individualized teaching and learning practices that maybe the focus of PBC when you're supporting an early educator about inclusion and inclusive practices. 

So in the chat box, many of you already mentioned straight out the gate about the Division for Early Childhood Recommended Practices, and this is a resource that's very aligned with the top of the house, so roof of the house framework, and the DEC Division for Early Childhood, which I'll often call DEC, was instrumental in identifying a set of research-based practices that support individualization, and the development of this set of recommended practices was really a rigorous process funded by the US Department of Education and carried out by commission appointed by DEC. 

So these are very vetted resources that have a lot of input connected to them, and the goal of this document, the recommended practices, is to inform and improve the quality of services provided to young children with or at risk of disabilities or delays in their family. From the left side of your screen, you see the graphic of the DEC recommended practices itself. This is available online and for free if you look up DEC recommended practices, and it's a set of research-based practices that support that
individualized teaching and learning.

There are 66 specific practices outlined in the recommended practices, and they're divided into eight topic areas, but kind of two chunks. So the first is child-focused practices. You see those in a circle in the middle of your screen, and those are assessment, instruction, interaction and environment, and each of those topic areas have recommended practices nested under them, and then there's a second set of recommended practices related to family and system-focused practices, and those relate to teaming, transition, family and leadership, and when we take all of these together, they mirror Head Start and early Head Start systems and services model that includes providing direct services for children and system-level support for children and families, and that the practices really do reflect that critical role of family.

Families have their own recommended practice strand, but they're also woven and represented across the other recommended practices as well. It's not just pulled out into its own stand-alone recommended practice. because we know it's all integrated across in our work with families and partners. These recommended practices are supported by research, values, and experiences, and it's important to note they're not disability-specific. They are across the board individualization strategies that are effective with children with a range of disabilities or at risk for developing disabilities or learning delays. They're observable.

You can see the practices in action between providers and children or families, and they are focused on the birth to age 5 range for children who have or at risk for developmental delays and disabilities. They're not limited to children who are eligible for services or who already have an IEP or an IFSP. Those may be terms many of you are familiar with. They can be delivered in all settings: class, natural environments and in all of your service options, and they build on other standards such as developmentally appropriate practice or DAP. So we're going to be talking about how we use professional development and practice-based coaching specifically to help support the use of these recommended practices.

All right. So let's take a second to look at this slide. It's important to remember that the DEC Recommended Practices also align with the Head Start Early Learning Outcomes Framework, and so on your slide, you see two recommended practices in the big blue box on the right-hand side of the screen. So the DEC Recommended Practice example is environments one, practitioner -- whoops. Practitioners provide services and supports in natural and inclusive environments during daily routines and activities to promote the children's access and to participate in learning experiences, and instruction eight. 

They use peer-mediated interventions to teach skills and to promote child engagement and learning. So which of the Head Start Early Learning Outcomes Framework domains do you think these two recommended practices align with? With A, approaches to learning, B, social and emotional development, C, language and literacy and D, cognition. I'm going to open this slide up here. So if you think of those two DEC Recommended Practice, which do you think they align to? And you can vote in this poll right on your screen. And there's a question in the chat, "What does E stand for in E1?" So it's environments, and INS is instructions.

So while you're voting, just again, E1 is practitioners provide services and supports in natural and inclusive environments during daily routines to provide access and participation and learning experiences, and then the second one is use peer-mediated intervention to teach skills and to promote engagement and learning. So which do you think, which Head Start Early Learning Outcome Framework did those tie into? I think I am going to try and progress to the results. We'll see if those come in. Great.

So, many people are voting approaches to learning and social/emotional development. Great. So these do align in lots of different ways, but we see them aligning really tightly with social/emotional development and learning, right, and there's lots of pieces in approaching to learning, approaches to learning that it works good with as well. So we wanted to make sure that you had access to some other resources as well. So there are many great resources out there, and our goal is to just help you find them, and just to kind of clarify that on the previous slide, let me get the animation going again on this previous slide so that you can see, the DEC Recommended Practices are the two that you see in blue here, examples of DEC Recommended Practices that are those observable behaviors that adults use to support individualization with young children, and they align with the Head Start Early Learning Outcomes Framework of the HSELF, the acronym.

So I think our main message with that is that this isn't necessarily extra, right? This is aligned with what you do, what you're coaching or providing professional development around and program to help providers individualize the work to meet children where they are. So it's consistent with the Early Learning Outcomes Framework and consistent with the curriculum that you'd use and standards and developmentally appropriate tactics. It's those techniques that help people meet individual children
where they are. 

So some additional resources that can be really helpful, you have on the screen now a landing page with a collection of resources on the ECLKC, and there are resources that are organized around the eight topic areas, those evidence-based practices that were either child-focused or team and system-focused to recommended practices. They're organized around each of those, and they're based on their level of impact for learning and include alignment with practices in the Head Start Early Learning Outcomes Framework.

You can see ECLKC resources. You can find in the national center has a link to resources for individualization as well. You can also find examples on the 15-minute in-service suites that are available on ECLKC. Each of those suites have tip sheets for education staff and supervisors and hand-outs and ready-to-use PowerPoints and introductory videos and facilitation guides that you can use in any professional development that you provide.

There are also Head Start Early Learning Outcomes Framework, the ELOF Effective Practice Guides, and these guides provide information about domain-specific teaching practices that support child development. Each domain includes specific practices that you can use to individualize for children who may need a little extra support, and the guides show what these practices actually look like in early learning practices settings, and they help staff reflect on and improve their teaching practice.  So they can be a really great resource in coaching. In home-based studying, teaching practices are the way that home visitors work with families to provide experiences that support child development and learning, engage in responsive interactions and think about the home as the learning environment, and these guides that you see a screenshot of on your webinar screen right now also include vignettes to show how individualization works in home settings and classroom settings. So these can be really nice, professional development resources and tools for identifying what those effective practices are that support inclusion.

We also noted in the chat where you were talking about your resources earlier on that several people mentioned ECTA, and ECTA stands for the Early Childhood Technical Assistance Center and what's lovely about ECTA resources is that they also have created some documents that really help you take up recommended practices in early learning programs. So it's developed performance checklists and practice guides that you can use to support the implementation of DEC's Recommended Practices.

So each of the Recommended Practices has a clear performance checklist with observable practices aligned to that recommended practice kind of going a little bit in depth beyond the Recommended Practice itself, and it has really nice resources and practice guides both for practitioners and for families and video illustrations, a number of resources. So I really recommend taking some time to look at the ECTA Center's website if you're note familiar with it yet because they have really put in some nice resources related to inclusive practices. And this is a link in the chat there for the ECTA Center website, and one of the newer resources supporting the implementation of the Recommended Practices are Recommended Practice Modules, and these might be really useful for many of you who do professional development to know about.

So each module is focused on a specific DEC Recommended Practice, and then there are short lessons within each module that include video demonstrations and quick knowledge checks, and the modules are organized into sections using the learning and improvement framework with the plan to study ACT, and right now, there are five modules available. There's one on interactions, another on transitions, environment, teaming and collaboration and family. So five modules are available now all tightly aligned
to the Recommended Practices, and we will walk through how to use some of those within coaching as we go a little bit later into this webinar.

So at this point, I'm going to hand it over to Ragan to think with you about how PBC or practice-based coaching can be used as a form of PD, professional development, that supports these Recommended Practices in action.

Ragan: Thanks so much, Kathleen. So we're going to talk about all those practices and resources that Kathleen just mentioned and kind of how that would look within practice-based coaching. So we'll walk through an example, but before I do that, I wanted to just check, and this is the first time I'm using this platform, so I hope I do this correctly, but I wanted to just do a poll. So I'm going to send this poll check, and I'm hoping it's going to show you guys a thumbs-up or a thumbs-down. I just want to see how many people on this webinar have been to some sort of PBC training before, so either a webinar or an inperson training about practice-based coaching. So hopefully you guys see this thumbs-up/thumbs-down.

So if you've been to a PBC training, could you click on the thumbs-up? If you've not, would you click on the thumbs-down? Thank you for those of you who are responding. This will help me to think about what we cover on the next few slides. and what we talk about around practice-based coaching. For those of you actually doing that, I just want to point to the graphic on the slide again and reiterate what Kathleen said earlier, which is when we think about practice-based coaching, the center of practicebased coaching are those effective practices, that we're supporting teachers and visitors, family childcare professionals to use with families and children.

So these are the things we want those education staff to be doing. So when we think about inclusion or individualizing for kids, that center that is effective practices are really those resources that -- We find those effective practices and the resources that Kathleen was talking about. So the DEC Recommended Practices, those highly individualized teaching strategies and in the roof of the house, and that's really what we can plug into the middle. That's where we find those practices. So, once we've plugged those into the middle, we can think about how we use practice-based coaching to support the use of those practices.

So thank you so much for those of you who checked in a box whether or not you've been to a PBC training. So it looks like a good portion of you have some knowledge of practice-based coaching. I'm going to talk through the principles of practice-based coaching somewhat briefly and then couch it in using some of these inclusive practices, practices for individualizing. So thank you again for responding. 

So I'm going to, again, briefly talk about the different components of practice-based coaching as we're putting this -- as we're thinking about this around inclusion so we're all on the same page about these pieces. So for practice-based coaching, our graphic in there is this kind of outer ring. We think of the collaborative coaching partnership as really the foundation for practice-based coaching to happen and to be effective, and so this collaborative coaching partnership is all about the interactions between the coach and the coachee. This says teacher, but we knew not really globally. Could be teacher, home visitor, family childcare professional, someone who is working directly with families or children. So you have your coach and your coachee, and they work together, and they work collaboratively through this coaching process. So then it really is a safe place for the coachee to try out new practices and to really hone their skills as that practitioner. We know that it has to be that kind of safe place for coaches to really feel comfortable trying something new and getting feedback because, as we all know, getting feedback is very hard. That can be very difficult for someone if you're not feeling like it's a safe place to really try something new.

So when we think about this collaborative partnership, we have these kinds of tenants, these pieces that we think are a big part of that collaborative partnership. For one is that you have a shared understanding of where you're going with coaching, of what the purpose of coaching is, and you have a shared focus around how you're going to get there. We'll talk about that more in a second with our goals and our action plans. You have a rapport and a trust, and this also connects with this ongoing communication, right? There's this sense that we are working together towards a goal. Coaching is all about support and not about evaluation because this is not supervision. This is supporting a coachee to really achieve their goals, to really implement effective practices, and then another big piece of our collaborative partnership that's really important is that we celebrate when people succeed. 

We celebrate when coaches really are able to meet their goals. So that's really the basics. That's not specific to working around inclusive practices. That is what we talk about in practice-based coaching is really needing to be there for it to be effective as a coaching method. So in our practice-based coaching models, our first component is what we call shared goals and action planning.

So in shared goals and action planning, you conduct a needs assessment around the effective practices that you're going to focus on with coaching, and that needs assessment helps you to identify goals that you want to achieve through coaching, and once you've identify a goal, you develop an action plan for meeting that goal. So as I said, the first component is really conducting a needs assessment, and a needs assessment is a way to identify what specific practices does that coachee want to work on and need to work on, and so a needs assessment is compiled of different things.

So it can be -- It can include an observation of the coachee implementing just their routine as a teacher teaching and taking from observational data on how they're using those practices you decide to focus on. It also includes the coachee's self-assessment. So in practice-based coaching, we always have someone that is coaching completes their own needs assessment and says, "These are the things that I think I need to work on, and these are the things that I think I do well," and then it may also include data that your probing has gathered to determine, you know, to measure effective teaching practices.

So for example, sometimes the class might be used as part of a needs assessment or the HOVRS you're working with home visitors, the home visitor observations. Rating scale, sorry. We've gone over it if your not familiar with it. If you're thinking about inclusive practices, one of the measures that we have of that is called the "Inclusive Classroom Profile."

It's a measure that's published by Brookes if you're familiar with it, but all of this data has been collected by the coach, the coachee. Again, maybe you have program data, that together the coach and coachee review this data, and that's how they determine what sort of practices they want to focus on through coaching. So one thing I didn't say at the very beginning of this is typically when we talk about practicebased coaching with a program, we say as a program, you need to identify a set of practices that you're going to focus on with coaching, right?

So it might be a list of 10 to 15 practices focused on something that's important to the program, and then that's what we build our needs assessment around. That's what we look at for our practices. That's what a teacher or a home visitor, family childcare practitioner might weight themselves on as well as what the coach might observe, too. So after you have collected all of that data and assessed it, I apologize. I forgot that I wanted to show you a couple of examples of where you might get these needs
assessments specific to inclusive practices or practices around individualization.

So these are two examples. The example on the left is a product, a needs assessment that was developed under the former National Center which is still floating around out there, and it is built around the roof of the house. So it's practices around highly individualized teaching, and so you can use -- there's a set of practices there that you can have a coachee write themselves on or as how they're working on those individualizing practices. On the right side is actually a checklist from the extra materials that Kathleen mentioned earlier. So they built all these lovely checklists around different DEC practices, and so you can use that directly as a needs assessment or as a list of practices to focus on.

So those are two good places that you can find practices for a needs assessment, and I see a question in the chat box around can a needs assessment be used on providers. So these are actually set up as needs assessments, needs assessments that can be used as self-assessments by the practitioners. So you could also use this as an observation checklist, but these are intended as something that the practitioner would fill out themselves, although I say that, but they have the checklist as it can be used either way, and maybe more. It's set up more as an observational tool. So hopefully that answered that question.

The NECTL now and NCECDTL needs assessment that you see on the left works that up as a selfassessment. So once you have identified what a practitioner would like to work on using the needs assessment, you would then set a goal. So the coach and coachee again in that collaborative partnership would work together to develop a goal, and the goal is really setting that expectation that both the coach and coachee knows, right? This is where we are working towards in our coaching right now. It relates to those effective practices, again, of what we're expecting through the needs assessment, what the program has decided, or, in the case of inclusion or individualization, what's specific to that kid? What are the practices that we might need to use to support inclusion of this child? When we write goals, we want to make sure that they are specific, observable and achievable.

So what I mean by that is that there's a specific practice, and I'm going to show you some examples of these in a moment. They're observable, so I as a coach can come in. I can see whether or not that coachee is meeting that practice. I can measure it. I can take data on it. So those most useful goals we can see, we can measure. So here's some examples of what -- I'm sorry. Sorry, I was noticing in the chat someone said to go back. I'm not exactly sure where you want to go back to, so if you would let me know, I can flip back in a moment. So here are some examples of goals for what we can -- that we've written for classroom teachers. So the first, if you look in the first column, this is around systematic construction, and this actually is in the second column is a needs assessment item, and this needs assessment item was taken from one of the exit checklists from the systematic instructional practices checklist, item five, and the checklist item on there is, "Use verbal, physical or other kinds of prompt, and prompt fading as necessary to promote child use of target behaviors."

So that's an item that's directly on that exit checklist. A coach and coachee might decide that that's something that they really want to work on through coaching, and so they might develop goals like you see in the third column. So one goal might be if the coachee is looking to use that with multiple kids in her classroom, might be that, "During small group activity, I, the coachee, will use verbal prompts for Jess and Sam as they need help to complete the work," or if the coachee is looking to use that specifically with one child in her classroom, it might be, "During transitions between activities, I will give Sam an individual reminder to transition and then show him a picture with another reminder if he doesn't respond to the reminder."

So you can see how we have this needs assessment item that the coach and coachee have decided is really something they want to focus on, and they've used that to develop goals specific to the coachee and her classroom and studying her kids. That helps take that practice and really individualize it for the teacher, who then will individualize it for the children.

Similarly, you can see the second DEC Recommended Practice, which is around embedded instruction. We have a needs assessment item from that needs assessment I showed you in the previous slide that was originally developed by NECTL around the roof of the house practices, and that item was on the needs assessment was I used an activity matrix to identify individualized learning objectives to target during various activities, and so you can see some sample goals that a coachee and a coach might
develop together. "I will include opportunities for Alex, Jia and Heda to practice their language goals in centers, circle time and lunch," and, again, that was for a group of children, if she's focusing specifically on one child in the classroom. "I will develop and use an activity matrix for James to focus on his language and social interaction goals across the day."

So, again, just to show you how we might go from a needs assessment item, a process that's on there, to how that actually looks in a goal for a coach and coachee. So these were some classroom examples. I want to also show you some examples for home visitors, and so these, both of the needs assessment items on here were from also from [inaudible] materials. This is an observation scale that [inaudible] so another place where you can find practices, and so you can see in the first row, the practice was, "The practitioner support family functioning, promote family confidence and competence and strengthen family-child relationships by acting in ways that recognize and build on family strengths and capacities.

In the sample that I will now share specific examples of when the family supports their child's learning during their interactions." So that would be a goal that a home visitor and his or her coach would write together to work towards. Similarly, you can see in the second row, "Practitioners are responsive to the family's concerns, priorities and changing circumstances." So, again, that's a needs assessment item, and a sample goal they would write, if they identified that as an area to focus on, "At the beginning of the home visit, I will ask two to three questions to gather information about the progress of the child on goals and any concerns or changes that the family has experienced since the last visit."

So hopefully, that gives you some examples of how we might have these practices we've identified focus on DEC Recommended Practices and how we take those, populate a needs assessment, and with the coachee and the coach to identify what they want to work on and develop goals from that. So just to follow along, we have our needs assessment data. We use that to set goals. Once we've set goals, then we develop an action plan. The action plan is really what we call a road map [inaudible] where we have, as a part of an action plan, the goal we'd identified, steps toward reaching that goal, so it's really breaking it down kind of, "What do we need to do in smaller chunks in order to meet the goal?"

We include a goal achievement statement, and I'll show you an example of that in just a moment, a time frame, how long we expect this to take, and in general, we want our goal to take, you know, what we call two to four coaching cycles, which ends up being around two weeks to a month, something like that. So smallish goals are achievable in a somewhat limited time frame, and then any supports or resources that need to be provided as a part of that action plan by the coach or the coachee.

So let's look at an example related to a goal that might be developed for a child who needs support in the classroom. So our goal, this is related, similar to a goal you saw on one of the previous slides. So, "During transitions between activities, I'll give Sam an individual reminder to transition and then show him a picture with another reminder if he doesn't respond to the first reminder." So that's the goal for this coachee. In this case, it's a teacher in a classroom, and you can see in the second row, that is what
we call our goal achievement statement.

So it's -- What will it look like when I'm actually using this practice? And so in this case, we have, "When I have given Sam an individual verbal reminder to transition and show him a picture of another verbal reminder, if the first verbal reminder was not effective for 80 percent of transition opportunities." So we have some hard data there about when the teacher is actually using this practice effectively, and then you can see how our goal steps might be broken down, so having picture cards available, creating those picture cards for the transitions and then breaking down what the kind of chunks of the goal are. So getting Sam the first reminder face-to-face, and then the third step on there is then giving him the second reminder if he doesn't follow the first.

So really, we've broken it down into individual steps, and the more coaching, we may be only focused on, you know, a couple of these steps. We may only try the first two steps the first time I come out as a coach, so you can see that as the date there, or we may be coaching on all three, depending on how an action plan is written, and that is an example of how we would walk through from a needs assessment to setting a goal to developing an action plan.

I wanted to move forward to focus on observation, but please feel free to chat any questions that you have, and if we don't get a chance to answer them today, we certainly will. It sounds like we are happy to respond offline. So once we have that action plan, then we use that for what we call a focused observation. We're very specific about our language, that this is an observation focused on what's written on the action plan and focused on progress towards that goal. So, in the focused observation, the coach watches and listens to what the coachee is doing. The coach will record information about what they're seeing, about how the coachee is using that practice, how they are implementing those action steps, and, particularly if this is a live observation, so we can do observations live, so the coach is in-person with the coachee, or you can do them from a distance by video, Skype, that sort of thing. 

So if you're live particularly, the coach may use coaching strategies such as providing verbal or gestural cues or other kinds of visual reminders for the coachee, having discussions modeling the practice. These are all strategies a coach might use if they are on-site. So again, here's our action plan we were just looking at. So when we think about this action plan for Sam's future, what do you think you would observe, or what data might you record? What support might you give? So feel free to chat if you have thoughts about those questions. I'm going to talk a little bit about them just because as a coach, what's important is that we think about all of these things before we go into the observation. When we think about, "What would you observe, and what data would you record, and what support might you give." not only do we as the coach need to think about that, that needs to be a conversation with the coachee as well.

So I'm not coming in without the coachee knowing when I'm going to be there, what I'm going to be looking for, how I'm going to support him or her in using that practice. So those are questions the coach needs to think about, but also, that's a conversation with the coachee about how this is going to work. Going back to our collaborative partnership and knowing that if this is really going to be a support, then it needs to be something that's transparent and something where the coachee feels comfortable and safe trying out this new practice. And so I see someone has chatted that they would observe during different transitions. That's right.

So obviously, with this, if we want to know how this coachee is using this practice during the transitions, we're probably going to have to do a few transitions, right, to collect more bullet points of data, and so that's different than if we were observing some practices that the coachee is using, say, during circle time because we'd have to observe at a different time. So here's an example of what the notes that a coach might take during an observation, and you can see that these notes are very specific to the practice, and detailed to be able to give feedback, and so you can see that the coachee, I'm sorry, the coach recorded three different transitions, and for each one of those transitions, they took data on those specific action steps, and almost the breakdown of that goal, of the different pieces that the coachee needed to.

Those are the parts the coachee needed to implement in order to be implementing that full practice. So I'll give you a moment to look through this information, look through the notes here, and I'll reflect on a couple of the comments that were made as far as the other data that people are including in the chat. So lots of people saying that they record the visuals and the student responses. So you can see some examples here of that as well. So... As well as someone mentioned that they would have Sticky Notes for taking notes that they were observing. Great.

I think that a lot of the things you guys are saying we see in these observation notes. So we're going to go into reflection and feedback in a moment, but I want you to take a look at this, and I'll bring it back in a minute. But think about what might you as the coach do as your next step? What does this focused observation tell you about how this coachee is progressing towards her goal? So keep that in your head, and we'll talk quickly about reflection and feedback.

So this is our third component. This is really the opportunity for the coach and coachee to reflect on their progress towards that goal, and it's an opportunity for the coach and coachee to give and receive feedback and to problem-solve any issues. It's another time for the coach to use coaching strategies such as problem-solving discussions, sharing resources, modeling their role-playing again if that's something that's at the point that they're at. These are some of the reflection starters that we use. We also start with "How did it go trying this out? How did it feel? What worked? What didn't work? What do you think went well? What would you do differently?"

It's a really different opportunity for the coachee to reflect on their experience with trying out this practice. So we typically start our debriefing meetings with that reflection piece. When we give, as coaches, when we give feedback, in practice-based coaching, we always provide two types of feedback.

One is supportive feedback, so this is things that are going well towards meeting that goal. We also provide constructive feedback. So, "What could you do differently? What could you do better towards reaching that goal?" because we know that the supportive feedback is important. It provides good examples of what the coachee is doing well, but we also need to help them do better, right, towards meeting that goal, towards progressing towards the goal.

Our feedback is always grounded in data. So again, thinking about the focused observation notes that we have, we can think about, and if you have thoughts from earlier when I said, "What kind of -- What information would you share as the coach?" What sort of supportive feedback might you give? What sort of constructive feedback or feedback towards change might you give?

So we are running low on time, and so I apologize. I'm not going to have a lot of time to debrief on this other than to say that there are obviously some places where the teacher completes all the action steps and that we can get some really good supportive feedback about those completed actions where she is able to actually follow through on the parts of this goal, and then there are some other places where some things happened which might give us a good chance to do some problem solving, right?

So in the last example where she ended up being distracted by something, so that's a good opportunity to say, "Okay. How can we structure the classroom different?" or "How can I support you to think about what we could do so that you have the opportunity to follow through?" So, and I see some good conversations going on over here around these specific observations and this format of taking notes, and that may feel a little bit different than other ways. Again, the way, the reason why we show this one
example is because practice-based coaching is very data-based, and so we want to be able to get that feedback from a very objective perspective with, "This is what happened. This is what went really well. 

Let's think about how we can support you with those things that aren't going as well, and, again, I apologize for rushing through that last piece, but I do want to say just a couple more things as we are -- as we're getting to the end of the webinar, and I appreciate the conversations that are going on, so please continue to chat with each other.
So, again, if you have questions, please feel free to put them in the chat box, but hopefully you've gotten a sense of how we think about using these recommended practices, these practices for inclusion and individualization in a practice-based coaching framework. As a part of the program, the current program performance standards, you might have heard, you might know that the programs are required to have a research-based coordinated coaching strategy for education staff. So we wanted to mention this because we are just thinking about supporting inclusion or individualization may be a part of that research-based coordinated coaching strategy, or it may be something that you're doing because you see it as a need in your program, and it's not been part of the original coaching plan.

So it may be embedded as part of that, or maybe on an as-needed basis focused on individual children as this need support arises. So we wanted to leave you with some questions to think about as you're trying to think about how practice-based coaching for inclusion, for individualization might fit into what you're already doing around coaching, and so because there are some pieces that are different than what's already in place for your research-based coordinated coaching strategy.

So these are some questions that we'll leave you with, and I won't read them to you, but give you a chance to look through them, and with two minutes left, I think, unfortunately, I need to turn it back over for the evaluation piece. I want to say thank you so much for joining us today. I hope that y'all carry something away from this, and feel free to check in with us, e-mail us, ask any questions that you might have. We're happy to answer them, and I believe that this is our link. Erica, did you want to say anything about the link for the evaluations?

Erica: Yes, you're welcome to click on the link. It will take you right to the evaluation where you can complete it, and at the end of completing the evaluation, you will receive a new certificate of attendance.

Colin: Thanks, Erica, and this is Colin again. I just wanted to thank both Dr. Meeker and Dr. McLeod and thank all of you for attending. Great questions and great discussion in the chat, and for those questions that we didn't get to during the event today, we'll make sure to answer them in an email format after the event. Just wanted to remind everyone that we have office hours as part of the disabilities and inclusion network each month, and then we'll have another webinar in May on embedded learning opportunities for infants and toddlers and thank you again.

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