Page 5 - Gateways for Early Educators

Gateways for Early Educators
Overall, participants reported a positive experience in the computer and technology training and reported change in various computer and technology skills. Participants rated the training Excellent or Good (Excellent=4, Good=3, Mean=3.87). In addition, 100% of participants indicated that they plan to do something different in their program as a result of the training. However, there were disparities by language such that Spanish-speaking participants entered the trainings with less computer skills and benefited more from the trainings than English-speaking participants. It is recommended that a more advanced computer and technology training module be developed and offered to participants ready for more advanced training.
The performance goals for the number of participants to be coached were met. The goal was to coach 1,000 early childhood educators decreasing to 850 through attrition. A total of 1,015 were coached in 2015-2016. The session and hour requirements were met with participants receiving 1.2 hours and 1.1 sessions of coaching on average per month. There was variability across the agencies in the intensity of coaching for quality improvement and career development. It is recommended that agencies discuss if there is an optimal coaching intensity model.
The most common coaching method was through site visits to the child care program, both for quality improvement plan and career goal development coaching. However, there was much more variability across agency in the coaching modality employed for career goal development and for follow-up coaching sessions for career goal coaching. This is understandable considering the fact that a coach needs to be on-site to assess the quality of the environment and then offer targeted coaching throughout the program to work toward positive changes. However, discussions regarding career development can often occur at any location. Agencies may want to discuss if there should be a standard for coaching such as 80% or 90% of quality improvement coaching occur on site at the child care program (Gateways is currently above the 80% level). Barriers to regular on-site coaching need to be considered during these discussions. For example, some participants mentioned distance as a barrier to participating in quality improvement activities and this has been found in federally funded research at CCRC. In addition, participants and coaches also describe a lack of time as a barrier. Distance- reducing methods could be considered such as Skype in order to have “on-site” coaching be remote when there are time and location barriers.
Continuous quality improvement in the program was evident through various programmatic changes from the prior year. The percentage of participants receiving email coaching (sometimes referred to as technical assistance rather than coaching) has continued to decrease with almost no participants receiving this type of coaching when developing their career goal or quality improvement plans. Furthermore, the percent of quality improvement plans developed focused on Adult-Child Interactions has continued to increase. During the 2015-2016 program year, quality improvement plans targeted Learning Environments (72.4%), Adult-Child Interactions (18.8%) and Special Needs and
2016
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