Page 19 - Gateways for Early Educators

Gateways for Early Educators
the field, programs that train early care and education professionals and guide and support them on their future career paths are of great importance.
Though Gateways makes training accessible to Early Care Educators across Los Angeles County, training alone does not guarantee sustainable behavior change.xxvi Training requires a coaching component to create sustainable changes in behavior.xxvii Early childhood educators (specifically, Latino teachers serving low-incoming childrenxxviii) are more likely to adopt new, reflective practices with in-the-field guidance.xxix As such, this reinforces the need for coaching as a strategy to help sustain changes in practice.
Engaging in coaching is a very personal process which places the mentee in a vulnerable positionxxx. However, if the mentee feels a sense of unconditional positive regard toward and from the coach, where trust, support and acknowledgment flow freely between the two parties, the mentee will be more open to new learning experiences and hence accelerate the learning and growth.xxxi Gateways ensures the success of this program by hiring highly qualified and experienced Coaches who are well-versed in relationship building and capacity building skills. Conversely, unrealistic expectations of the coaching experience can also decelerate the benefits of this collaborative process.xxxii To prevent such misunderstanding, the Coaches collaboratively develop clear goals with the early childhood educator and meet regularly to achieve these goals.
A review of 48 published studies on coaching in a QRISxxxiii included center-based as well as family child care programs. Many focused on overall quality improvement while others focused on language and literacy, socio-emotional development or instructional practices. Most used measures of overall quality and almost half of the studies assessed child outcomes. Much like the early childhood educators in the Gateways program, the practitioners in these studies worked in diverse settings with children from low-income families who were culturally and linguistically diverse. Many of the programs in the studies did not report a theoretical model on which the coaching program was established. However, the activities in the programs were used to support the goals of the coaching (e.g., overall quality improvement, curriculum in implementation or strategies to support children’s development in particular areas such as language and literacy). Activities were designed to ensure a positive relationship between the Coach and the practitioner and ensured the opportunity for observation, reflection, and modeling of practices. Most of the coaching programs also implemented other quality improvement activities such as classroom training or workshops, much like the Gateways program. This research paper recommends greater specification of data on coaching dosage, model of coaching, and definition of coaching in future research. A striking feature of this compendium of studies is that the majority reported that coaching positively affects the overall quality of the child care environment and/or improvements in specific child-related domains that were targeted by the program (e.g., language and literacy). The program’s theory of change is that coaching combined with training across broad areas will lead to career advancement and quality improvement for early childhood educators across Los Angeles County.
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