1. Coaching for School Readiness

2. Overview Coaching in the Early Achievers Model Coaches as agents
embedding science into practice
Links from early learning to K-12
Bringing it all together through Race to the Top - Early Learning Challenge Grant
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3. Framework for Effective Practice
when connected with one another, they form a single
structure that fosters children’s learning and development, regardless of if they are served in a family home, a center or a preschool.
A high-quality, research-based curriculum provides learning goals and activities in key areas
of children’s development that reflect the program’s school-readiness goals. A curriculum provides guidance as to what to teach (content) and how to teach (learning
experiences and teaching strategies). The content is drawn from current child development
science, the interests and ideas of the children, and the values of the community.
Assessment - information helps us to monitor progress—both for individual children and for the program as a whole. This takes the form of teaching and learning that is truly individualized and happens from the ground up — when teachers are sensitive and skilled in interactions; when they use ongoing formative assessment of each child's skills to plan instruction; and when they choose and use curricula and activities that engage all
children, regardless of their strengths or needs.
PD - strong link between research and practice, focused and evidence based, responsive to each learner’s background and current context, basis in core comps, and continuous assessment.
In addition to high quality PD and training, caregivers need time to plan, mentoring and to
engage with a community of practice to reflect and improve practice.
Every house must reflect the values and design of the community in which they are built, while maintaining the essential elements of quality.
High quality child care programs reflect the values and culture of the community that surround them.
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4. Coaching Framework
Designed to help providers access all of the supports of the house
Cultural Competency
Practice Based Coaching
Adult Resiliency
Classroom Assessment Scoring System
School Readiness
Resiliency: Adult Resiliency is a critical principle because research has confirmed what many have always
known - working with young children is both a rewarding and challenging experience. Resiliency gives coaches a positive and helpful language to use with providers as they work
through every day stressors and challenges and promotes the freedom to recognize challenges
and then move on towards the goal of preparing kids for school.
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5. Cultural Competency
Screen ensure that trainings and supports meet specific cultural competence standards that are aligned with those named in the Early Learning Professional Core Competencies and Early Learning and Development Guidelines
Promoting Inclusion - Coaches will gain tools to facilitate culturally inclusive dialogue among providers in child care facilities and communities of practice
Addressing language diversity in the coaching context will help coaches understand the importance of supporting home languages of providers and children, and engage in discussion about challenges and solutions to coaching across languages.
Purposefully woven into all trainings and coaching supports is cultural competency. Culturally
competent coaches meet specific cultural competence standards of the Early Learning
Professional Core Competencies and Early Learning and Development Guidelines.
Ensuring that work is inclusive, that we are building leadership at all levels, that there is adequate representation of Washington’s rich cultural and linguistic diversity.
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6. Practice Based Coaching Model
Goal Setting and Action Plans
Clearly defined, measurable, achievable within a defined timeframe
Focused Observation
Guided by goals
Reflection and Feedback
Variety of ways that this can occur
Collaborative Partnership
Safe, productive space, nonjudgmental
Culturally competent
Practice Based Coaching – This approach to coaching involves the creation of shared goals and action plans, conducting focused observations, and providing reflection and feedback within the context of collaborative partnerships.
Shared Goals and Quality Improvement Plans - Goals should be clearly defined, measurable, and achievable within a defined timeframe. Goals provide accountability and allow opportunities to celebrate progress.
Focused observations. The term “observation” refers to the process of gathering and recording information about implementation of desired teaching practices during on-going classroom activities, routines, and transitions.
Reflecting and Sharing Feedback -mutual consideration of the support strategies used and information gathered about teaching practices to identify successes, challenges, and areas for additional improvement or refinement (i.e., reflecting on
teaching practices); and (b) sharing feedback about implementation of support strategies and implementation of teaching practices. –debrief meeting -Corrective feedback should be specific and constructive.
Practice-Based Coaching is a supportive way to help adults grow professionally.
Developing a collaborative coaching partnership is an on-going process that develops over time.
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7. Adult Resiliency
Gives coaches a positive and helpful language to use with providers as they work through every day stressors and challenges.
Gives coaches and providers the freedom to recognize challenges and then move on towards the goal of preparing kids for school.
Begins a parallel process of promoting positive skills and abilities in everyone.
Recognizes and honors cultural differences in communication and methods of staying calm and positive
Resiliency: Adult Resiliency is a critical principle because research has confirmed what many have always known - working with young children is both a rewarding and challenging experience. Resiliency gives coaches a positive and helpful language to use with providers as they work through every day stressors and challenges and promotes the freedom to recognize challenges and then move on towards the goal of preparing kids for school.
Topics to be covered include:
‐ Developing Awareness and Mindfulness
‐ Relaxation Strategies
‐ Learning to Think in Helpful Ways and Becoming an Optimistic Person
‐ Thoughts as Tools that Change Feelings and Behaviours
‐ Challenging Old, Resistant Habits
‐ Training our Attention towards Positive Elements
‐ Thinking like a Resilient Person in Challenging Situations
‐ Building Confidence Step by Step
‐ Identifying Role Models in our Family and our Community
‐ Forming Support Networks
‐ Developing Effective Skills to Deal with Conflict
‐ Exploring Solutions and Coping Step Plans
‐ Turning a Coping Step Plan into Practice – break it into small steps
‐ Preparing for Challenges now and in the future – Long-term Practice
‐ Noticing Body Warning Signs of Stress
‐ Celebrating and Taking Strength from our Successes
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8. CLASS
Highly trained coaches are able to identify and enhance best practices for:
Engaging environments and well organized classrooms
Instructional Support
Social and Emotional Support
CLASS gives providers and coaches a shared language to use when developing goals
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9. School Readiness Support for effective practices
Engaging interactions and environments
Research-based curricula and teaching practices
Ongoing child assessment
Highly individualized teaching and learning
Goals will vary depending on the needs of the provider and community
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10. An “Air Traffic Control System” in the Brain
Executive functioning is group of skills that help us to focus on multiple streams of information at the same time, set goals and make plans, make decisions in light of available information, revise plans, and resist hasty actions.
*A key biological foundation of school readiness
The term “Executive functioning” captures a set of skills that are increasingly understood as the biological foundation for successful learning and social relationships. They enable us to work effectively with others, with distractions, and with multiple demands These ARE the skills that contribute to the effectiveness of the American workforce.
If you really boil it down, EF skills enable us to execute deliberate, goal-directed, planful behavior. And, think of all of the ways in any given day, that we need to do this. We need to get dinner on the table, but the phone is ringing, our kids are asking for help with their homework, and the dogs are barking at the back door. So, we remember to check the phone messages when dinner is over, we let the dogs in but know just where to pick up with meal preparation despite this interruption, and we ask the kids to do what they can until you get dinner in the oven. So, what does this involve? Well, we have to focus, hold, and work with information in mind, filter distractions, and switch gears….this is why we refer to EF skills as the “air traffic control system” in the brain. ATCs have to manage lots of planes on lots of runways and it all requires exquisite timing. That kind of feels like daily life!
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11. What are Executive Function Skills?
Inhibitory (“Effortful”) Control — filter thoughts and impulses to resist temptations and distractions
Working Memory — hold and manipulate information in our heads over short periods of time
There are 3 classic components of EF:
Inhibitory control (represented by an image of the marshmallow test, a classic inhibitory control measure) is the skill we use to master and filter our thoughts and impulses so we can resist temptations, distractions, and habits, and to pause and think before we act;
Working Memory (represented by a photo of learning long division, an example of following a multi-step process) is the capacity to hold and manipulate information in our heads over short periods of time;
Cognitive or Mental Flexibility (represented by a photo of a child struggling to come up with a new strategy after the “game has changed”) is the capacity to nimbly switch gears and adjust to changed demands, priorities, or perspectives, to apply different rules in different settings, to catch mistakes and fix them.
So, think of a situation where a child needs to take turns. That pulls really heavily on exactly these skills. First the child needs to have IC because she needs to be able to stop what she is doing and let the other kids take a turn…needs to be able to inhibit the urge to keep going with HER turn. But, when it is her turn again, she needs to remember what she was doing; she needs to remember the rules of the game and where to pick up. This pulls on WM. But, if her partner does something unpredictable, she also needs to be able to adjust her plans to fit into the flow of the game. This requires MF.
Mental flexibility — adjust to changed demands, priorities, or perspectives
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12. Extended Development of EF Maps onto Development of Prefrontal Cortex
Skill proficiency
This is a conceptual graph that combines the findings of a range of tests measuring different forms of executive function skills. The vertical axis = the level of proficiency on those tests at age ranges along the horizontal axis. Note that the horizontal axis does not evenly distribute the ages – this is because so much happens in the first 30 years and comparatively little happens in the later years. There are two key take-home messages here beyond noting when the foundations begin to be laid: first, note two periods of especially rapid growth in proficiency on these skills: between about age 3 and 5, and between about ages 12 and 21, especially the late teen years. The latter confirms what we know about teenagers’ ability to use good judgment and predict the consequences of their actions, but it also shows the critical importance of helping kids get the right foundational experiences in the preschool years. And the second message is: it’s never too late.
As essential as these skills are, we aren’t born with them. Rather, we are born with the potential to develop them – or not – depending on our experiences, our neurophysiology, and the interactions between them.
This is a conceptual graph that combines the findings of a range of tests measuring different forms of executive function skills. The vertical axis = the level of proficiency on those tests at age ranges along the horizontal axis. Note that the horizontal axis does not evenly distribute the ages – this is because so much happens in the first 30 years and comparatively little happens in the later years. There are two key take-home messages here.
First, the foundations of EF are laid down in the earliest months and years of life. Let’s skip to the next slide for a moment and look at the bottom row.
Birth 3 5 10 15 25 30 50 70 80
Age (Years)
Weintraub, et al., (2011)
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13. Outcomes at Age 32 EF in childhood predicts outcomes at age 32:
Physical health
Drug dependence
SES
Criminal convictions
Controlling for SES, IQ when a child
Moffitt et al. (2011)
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14. Effectiveness Factors for Building Executive Function
"The most effective way to improve EFs and academic achievement is probably not to focus narrowly on those alone but to also address children’s emotional and social development … and children’s physical development."
Address stresses in their lives
Stress reduction practices
Deal with external causes
Foster social interactions
Progressively increase demand on EF skills
Include repeated practice throughout the day
Encourage vigorous physical exercise
Relationships
Children develop in an environment of relationships. It starts in the home but includes extended family, non-related caregivers, teachers, medical and human services professionals, foster parents, and peers. Children are more likely to build effective executive function skills if the important adults in their lives are able to:
support their efforts;
model the skills;
engage in activities in which they practice the skills;
provide a consistent, reliable presence that young children can trust;
guide them from complete dependence on adults to gradual independence; and
protect them from chaos, violence, and chronic adversity, because toxic stress caused by these environments shuts down the brain systems required for executive functioning and triggers impulsive, “act-now-think-later” behavior.
These effectiveness factors for building executive function come from Adele Diamond’s 2011 literature review paper.
“The four curricula-based programs shown to enhance EF development have many commonalities. We’d like to highlight two: They don’t expect young children to sit still for long. Such expectations are not developmentally-appropriate, teacher-student tension, and some children coming to dread school and/or being wrongly labeled as having ADHD. Second, the programs tend to reduce stress in the classroom, cultivate joy, pride, and self-confidence, and foster social bonding, all of which support efforts to improve EFs and academic achievement.”
“The best approaches to improving EFs and school outcomes will probably be those that (a) engage students’ passionate interests, bringing them joy and pride, (b) address stresses in students’ lives, attempting to resolve external causes and strengthen calmer, healthier responses, (c) have students vigorously exercise, and (d) give students a sense of belonging and social acceptance, in addition to giving students opportunities to repeatedly practice EFs at progressively more-advanced levels.”
Source: Diamond, A.,, et al. (2011). Interventions shown to aid executive function development in children 4 to 12 years old. Science, 333, 959.
Source: Diamond, et al. (2011)
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15. Supporting Executive Function – Link to Early Achievers
Scaffolding Learning
Turn-taking: listening and talking
Use of cues to learn new skills
Making plans and following-through, especially with peers (reflection)
Building language as a regulatory tool
Practice, practice, practice
Just as teachers work with children to scaffold learning, Wa State’s focus on continuous quality improvement also asks coaches to reflect on and use their own executive function development:
Here is an example of two children buddy reading – It is a turn taking exercise, they use the cues (ear or lips) to understand and practice and practice doing this type of language development on a daily basis.
Why do things something not work in classrooms? Either the child lacks inhibitory control and cannot resist or
the teacher lets the children try to exercise EFs but doesn’t provide supports (scaffolding) and children fail to self-regulate and get
scolded for lack of control (e.g., for being a poor listener)
The analagous opportunity should be available for adults – Being able to learn from a model – using cues to help scaffold new skills (Example – questions on sticky notes during story time), making plans to set goals and then reflecting on that with a trusted mentor, the ability to use language through the goal setting process to internalize the learning (example – journaling, etc..), ability to practice
Environments of Relationship (CLASS and ERS)
Scaffolding of pertinent skills
Sustained joint attention
Support for emotion regulation
Give and take interactions
Ordered and predictable environments
Routines
People
Rules and consequences
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16. Supporting Executive Function Development - Link to Early Achievers
Environments of Relationship (CLASS and ERS)
Scaffolding of pertinent skills
Sustained joint attention
Support for emotion regulation
Give and take interactions
Ordered and predictable environments
Routines
People
Rules and consequences
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8/15/12

17. RTT-ELC Core Strategies
Children
Parents
Professionals
Professional Development
WaKIDS
Washington Early Achievers
Supports
All early learning programs are built on child development guidelines; child progress is monitored; accountability for progress
Parents are engaged and have access to information about quality standards, child outcomes, and parenting supports
Professional development is consistent throughout ALL programs, high-quality, and built on child development guidelines
Tying it all together. Promoting school readiness for high needs kids.
Build integrated systems for children B-5 across programs, agencies, and populations
QRIS (Early Achievers) at scale by 2015
Kindergarten Assessment (WaKIDS) at scale by 2015
Integrated professional development system
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