During the first webinar in our “Building Resilience” series, experts across policy, program, and system levels shared their successes, challenges, and opportunities with Early Head Start-Child Care Partnerships (Partnerships). The discussion touched on many relevant and timely themes within the early childhood education sector, including the impact of the ongoing COVID-19 crisis on the child care industry.

As the early childhood workforce gathers virtually this month for the National Home Visiting Summit, we’ll be nearing a full year of living under the shadow of the COVID-19 pandemic. There’s so much to discuss, from the impact of the pandemic on our workforce and communities of color to the significant challenges the pandemic has revealed within our support systems for all families, particularly for those living in under-resourced communities.

As we continue our work to strengthen the home visiting workforce in the wake of the pandemic, we focus specifically on the many systemic factors and community conditions that affect staff retention, and ultimately, rates of family engagement in home visiting services.

Join me at the National Home Visiting Summit, along with facilitators Reyna Dominguez and Ariel Chaidez, as we explore local and national strategies to address these factors in a session, “Vocation-Vision-Voice: Strategies in Professional Development.” Using a case study of an Early Head Start Home-based program in Santa Clara, California serving a Latino community with fully bilingual staff, we’ll explore how supervisory leadership invested in ongoing professional development of staff promotes long term program engagement for both staff and families.

Coming out of the session, participants will be empowered with strategies and actions that can affect change in systemic and supervisory program conditions that promote workforce retention. Whether you can attend this session or not, I hope you’ll take time to consider the impact professional development can have to turn a job into a vocation through the skilled and invested interest of a supervisor attuned to the voice and vision of home visitors. Learn more about the research and methodology behind Start Early’s professional development portfolio.

In 2020, Start Early was selected to lead the implementation of the National Center for Parent, Family and Community Engagement (NCPFCE), one of four National Centers that develop evidence-based best practices for Early Head Start and Head Start programs across the country.

The NCPFCE identifies, develops and disseminates evidence-based best practices to support the growth and development of young children and strengthen families and communities.

Start Early will focus on creating high-quality responsive training and technical assistance, rooted in equity and cultural and linguistic responsiveness, to support staff, families and communities nationwide.

Our Work & Focus on Equity

Our belief that all change happens through relationships will shape the project activities, training, technical assistance, and resources produced by the NCPFCE.

Working with a consortium of partners, Start Early will lead the NCPFCE to support family well-being, effective family and community engagement, and children’s school readiness, including transitions to kindergarten. These partnerships will integrate the research-practice knowledge of family and community engagement, human services, early childhood, social work, mental health, parenting, leadership, and family economic mobility into the NCPFCE content and activities.

The NCPFCE will have a strong equity focus and seeks to bring program, family and community voice to the forefront of early childhood education. Throughout the project, schools in the Educare Learning Network and other Early Head Start and Head Start grantees will serve as on-the-ground labs for piloting and field-testing innovations in parent, family and community engagement.

Our Partners

• Child Trends
• LIFT
• Early Learning Lab
• Fred Rogers Center
• UNC Frank Porter Graham Child Development Institute

Our Funders

The National Center on Parent, Family, and Community Engagement (NCPFCE) is jointly administered by the Office of Head Start and the Office of Child Care.

Start Early is pleased to announce it has been awarded the National Center on Parent, Family, and Community Engagement (NCPFCE) by the Administration for Children and Families, Office of Head Start, in partnership with the Office of Child Care. The NCPFCE is one of four National Centers that develop evidence-based best practices for Early Head Start and Head Start programs across the country, as part of a comprehensive Office of Head Start Training and Technical Assistance System.

This award provides up to $5.9 million annually ($29.5 million over 5 years) to Start Early and a consortium of partners — Child Trends, LIFT, Early Learning Lab, Fred Rogers Center, and the UNC Frank Porter Graham Child Development Institute — to support family well-being, effective family and community engagement, and children’s school readiness, including transitions to kindergarten. These partnerships will integrate the research-practice knowledge of family and community engagement, human services, early childhood, social work, mental health, parenting, leadership, and family economic mobility into the NCPFCE content and activities. Start Early will focus on creating high-quality responsive training and technical assistance, rooted in equity and cultural and linguistic responsiveness, to support staff, families and communities nationwide.

“We are honored to work with an incredible group of partners as we continue building upon Head Start’s commitment to parents as their child’s first teachers,” said Start Early president Diana Rauner. “Together we will further bring family engagement, parent voice and community engagement to the forefront of early childhood education over the next five years.”

The NCPFCE identifies, develops and disseminates evidence-based best practices to support the growth and development of young children and strengthen families and communities. Its work includes providing training and technical assistance on staff-family relationship building practices that are culturally and linguistically responsive; integrated and systemic family engagement strategies that are outcomes-based; and consumer education, family leadership, family economic stability, and individualized support for families facing adversity.

The NCPFCE will have a strong equity focus and will partner with schools in the Educare Learning Network and other Early Head Start/Head Start (EHS/HS) grantees across the country to create, pilot and field test innovations in parent, family and community engagement. This will ensure that training and technical assistance (TTA) activities result in high-quality comprehensive services that bring diverse family, community and program voices to the center of the work.

Start Early brings nearly 40 years of expertise delivering best-in-class doula, home visiting and Early Head Start and Head Start programs and advocating for thoughtful policies and adequate funding at the local, state, and federal levels. From roots directly serving families and children on Chicago’s South Side and in rural Illinois, Start Early has expanded to impact early childhood programs and policies nationwide, with partnerships in 25 states.

Dr. Rebecca Berlin, senior vice president of quality, solutions and impact and Dr. Mallary Swartz, director of family engagement research at Start Early will serve as principal investigators for the NCPFCE. Berlin has more than 25 years of experience in strategic visioning in the early childhood field, including assessment and professional development initiatives. Swartz brings 20 years of experience as an applied researcher in family engagement and relationships-based professional development in early childhood education, particularly EHS/HS programs.

Start Early has also hired Brandi Black Thacker, director of TTA and integrated services and Manda Lopez Klein, director of the NCPFCE to lead the NCPFCE. Together, the two early childhood professionals bring a combined 40 years of experience as Head Start leaders and advocates to the work.

Throughout her career, Thacker has served communities as an educator, case manager, advocate, Head Start director, TTA specialist and served as the director of TTA for the NCPFCE for the past nine years. Klein is a former Head Start director and the founding executive director of the National Migrant and Seasonal Head Start Association (MSHS), and is an expert in curriculum development, family engagement material development, and professional development, including services for monolingual and bilingual families.

“As national Head Start leaders and advocates, Brandi and Manda bring decades of experience collaborating with families and community partners to the new NCPFCE,” said Rebecca Berlin, senior vice president of quality, solutions and impact. “Under their leadership, the NCPFCE will continue to elevate diverse voices that strengthen the work and ensure better outcomes for children and families across the country.”

As a first step, Start Early will sign the cooperative agreement later this month and launch the center by the end of November.

About Start Early

Start Early (formerly known as the Ounce of Prevention) is a nonprofit public-private partnership advancing quality early learning and care for families with children, before birth through their earliest years, to help close the opportunity gap. For nearly 40 years, Start Early has delivered best-in-class doula, home visiting, and Early Head Start and Head Start programs. Bringing expertise in program delivery, research and evaluation, professional development, and policy and advocacy, Start Early works in partnership with communities and other experts to drive systemic change so millions more children, families and educators can thrive.

Watch as NEAR@Home facilitators explore topics such as the power of listening, the parallel process and the therapeutic use of self in these meaningful conversations that discuss best practices and aim to empower home visitors.

In the last three decades, scientific research has demonstrated how deeply adversity in childhood becomes embedded into biology, behavior, and risk, and how these can be passed on to future generations. This body of science — Neuroscience, Epigenetics, Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE), and Resilience research, or NEAR — is one of the largest public health discoveries of our time.

Home visitors knowledgeable about the NEAR sciences and research are interested in bringing this information to families but worry about causing harm. The NEAR@Home toolkit addresses these concerns and provides strategies for engaging parents in discussing NEAR sciences and using the ACEs questionnaire in a safe, respectful and effective way for both home visitor and family.

Home visitors are uniquely positioned to help families mitigate the effects of past, present, and future adversity through supporting protective, responsive parenting and safe attachment relationships. The NEAR@Home process gives parents choice, offering information, assuring safety, being respectful, allowing time and space for reflection, and by always closing with hope and resilience.

The NEAR@Home toolkit was created, tested, and revised by home visitors, mental health providers, and other experts in the field of NEAR and home visiting in Alaska, Idaho, Oregon, and Washington. The NEAR@Home toolkit is designed as a training manual with guided processes to help you learn and practice language and strategies to safely and effectively talk about the trauma of ACEs. We emphasize safety and reflective support for the home visitor as a critical element in this process.

The NEAR @Home toolkit was developed as a self-study process and is being shared without cost because we believe that all home visitors deserve to have access to this guidance. Many home visitors discovered that while self-study of the NEAR@Home toolkit was useful, they preferred a supported learning experience and have informed the development of NEAR@Home Facilitated Learning. Learning how to be safe, respectful, and effective while talking about the NEAR sciences with parents is a complex process that requires and deserves time and support.

The NEAR@Home Facilitated Learning process is very different from most training programs. Thinking about, talking about childhood trauma stirs feelings in all of us, whether ACEs are part of our life story or not. Our learning process is guided by Facilitators who are relationship focused, trauma sensitive, and fluent in infant mental health concepts and processes. The Facilitators model self-regulation, co-regulation, spacious listening, and reflective processes to walk with home visitors and supervisors through learning how to do a NEAR home visit. Implementation Science guides the structure of the learning process from a mutual exploration of fit and feasibility to follow up reflective consultation to support home visitors as they integrate these new skills.

The value of and the need for this platform was immediately clear. For example, at the beginning of the pandemic, a child development director from Arizona asked fellow members to share their strategies on how to best support child care workers adopt guidelines set by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on wearing protective face coverings while balancing concerns for how this might impact day-to-day interactions with children. Responses from members across the country poured in, offering ideas of the different types of masks she could investigate and giving the director a sense of validation and connectedness. Ultimately, the director learned of masks with clear mouth coverings that are now in use in her pre-K classroom to better support children in reading their lips when speaking.

This is just one of many connections that resulted in an improved practice on the ground across our country. As we continue to build on the success of Early Childhood Connector, we are excited about the potential this initiative has to accelerate knowledge sharing and spread promising practices across early childhood partner networks to improve outcomes for children and their families.

In this blog post, Start Early vice president of translational research, Debra Pacchiano, highlights her recently published research on the importance of providing strong and nurturing leadership to early childhood teachers in order to improve child outcomes.

Recent early childhood research has confirmed that— if we want teachers to nourish children, we must first nourish teachers.

When a child begins their life-long learning journey, parents and families expect they will be cared for and taught in safe, positive, and effective environments. Unfortunately, that’s not always the case. The quality of early learning programs varies tremendously with the highest quality programs disproportionately serving children from the most advantaged homes. By contrast, lower quality and less effective programs disproportionately serve children from under-resourced communities—the very children who stand to benefit most from top-notch early childhood education (Valentino 2017).

Teaching is complex work. In early childhood, teachers work with young children, often from vulnerable populations, who are in critical developmental stages. Variations in children’s early learning outcomes are often attributed to under-engaged teachers and low-quality teaching. Yet, all too often teachers face their complex work without needed sustained supports from leadership and their peers.

Start Early has worked at the intersection of research, practice, and policy for more than three decades, spearheading innovation and quality improvement in early childhood education. We activate creativity to design solutions rooted in research and applied science to address chronic issues in the field.

As part of this work, we spent time observing early childhood education programs, some that were high functioning and some that were not. We talked with leaders, teachers, staff, and families about what supports and what hinders their effectiveness advancing young children’s learning. Differences in their organizational mindsets and practices were unmistakable. Simply put, high-performing programs had organizational environments far more supportive of teaching, learning, and family engagement than lower-performing programs. In response, we built The Essential 0-5 Survey (formerly known as the Early Education Essentials), an organizationwide measurement system that elevates the voices of teachers, staff, and families in early childhood settings and empowers collective action towards improvement.

A recent Education Week study found substantial gaps between the perceived and real impacts of leadership on teachers. By highlighting teacher and staff perspectives on organizational strengths and weaknesses in key areas of climate and culture, The Essential 0-5 Survey can help close those gaps between the impacts leaders believe they have, and the impacts teachers and staff actually feel.

In a Young Children journal article, published by myself and other Start Early researchers, we highlight the positive impacts The Early Education Essentials can have on early childhood environments and teachers’ experiences. The article features the clear differences that were identified, through The Early Education Essentials, between organizations strong in the areas of effective instructional leaders, collaborative teachers, involved families, supportive environment, and ambitious instruction, and those that were weak in those areas. Listen to what one teacher in a strongly organized program had to say about her organizational culture:

I feel like it’s empowering [here]—it’s not just from the top down. It’s right here, and we believe in this stuff and I have something to share and it’s valued by our administrator. Then your co-teachers and your colleagues also buy in too, and you have that energy and you have that love. Then you have an administrator that pushes you in that way and supports you and guides you and nudges you a bit farther. I think it’s kind of what we try to do with our students too, now, even when they’re only 3. I think [the principal/ director] leads by example, for sure.

Strong organizational environments in early childhood education empower leaders, teachers and families to aspire to and realize higher-quality practices and better outcomes for young children.