In this blog post, home visiting expert and former Start Early vice president for training, Janelle Weldin-Frisch, MA, explains the importance of bridging the gap between systems in the home visiting sector through the use of professional development.

Intensive, long-term home visiting services are proven to produce the best outcomes for families and help prepare children for school. Understanding the factors that keep families engaged in these services has given rise to research, training and evolved program requirements. And yet, sustaining family engagement is still often regarded as the primary responsibility of the home visitor. Family engagement is an impossible task alone for even the most highly skilled a home visitor. Strong partnerships at the systems, community and practitioner levels all impact what happens between a family and their home visitor.

At this year’s National Home Visiting Summit, I’ll be sharing a case study of two state leaders that are partnering across systems to strengthen the outcomes of each of their programs. In my session – Bridge Gaps between Systems with Professional Development – I’ll explore how this strategic collaboration can be replicated with other state and system leaders, to improve outcomes across the sector.

Some of the factors impacting family engagement include reliable program funding, competitive salaries for home visitors and supervisors, and access to professional development. With the turnover rate of home visitors exceeding 20% annually, it is critical that system leaders construct a professional development framework to support and retain home visitors and supervisors. In the example shared during the session, we will explore how the two state leaders leveraged a professional development resource – The Essentials of Home Visiting – to develop and implement a PD framework for their home visitors and supervisors. The Essentials of Home Visiting, an online professional development program with unique learning experiences created specifically for home visitors and supervisors, includes self-paced courses, webinars, and tools for supervisors to increase their impact on home visitors, and improve their outcomes with families.

Ensuring that home visiting practitioners have the organizational, supervisory and professional development supports to keep them engaged in the field, are essential factors in promoting family engagement between home visitor and parent.

Janelle Weldin-Frisch, MA, was the vice president for training at Start Early during her twenty-seven year tenure. She continues in a consulting capacity to facilitate a national community of practice for professional development in home visiting, cultivate strategic partnerships and provide state and regional leaders with technical assistance in the use of The Essentials of Home Visiting.

Start Early has long believed that a child’s first and most important teacher is their parent. That is why we have been an early champion of recognizing home visiting as a key component of early childhood systems of care and education.

Our very own Nick Wechsler, director for program development at Start Early, has been influencing the home visiting field in Illinois for 30 years and was recently honored as the recipient of the Home Visiting Leadership Award at the Annual Prevent Child Abuse Illinois Statewide Conference.

A Passion for Building Relationships

Nick, who holds a master’s degree in Infant Studies, started his career in the early 1970s, working as a community mental health worker in Chicago, providing therapy to communities in need under the supervision of licensed clinicians. Nick credits his experiences as a stay-at-home dad and as a family day care provider for preparing him for what ultimately became Start Early’s home visiting approach: relationship-based work.

Home Visiting – Helping Parents Through a Life-Changing Transition

Nick’s personal and professional experiences with new parenthood ultimately showed him that home visiting services can considerably support both children and parents.

The days and weeks following the birth of a child can be a time of great joy and excitement for all parents. Developmental science tells us that these first interactions between parents and newborns lay the foundation for a child’s healthy development in school and life. This can also can be a time of extreme stress for parents, exacerbated by exhaustion during a period of physical, hormonal and emotional vulnerability.

Home visitors can provide much-needed support to help ease new parents’ anxieties and provide them with the tools and knowledge to develop the secure attachments that allow children to thrive. By helping parents engage in meaningful play and learning interactions with their children, home visitors influence the development of nurturing relationships that support a child’s ability to grow and learn.

Home Visiting – The Early Years

Today, early childhood home visiting is an established part of national policy and is a publicly subsidized practice here in the U.S. and in many countries around the globe. But it wasn’t always so, Nick reminds us.

Public policy and subsidized center-based care for very young children was limited until 1995, when Early Head Start (EHS) was established. EHS extended home visiting into the Head Start model and added group care as an option for children from birth to age 3.

In the early years, Nick says, childcare professionals didn’t have what we now know as evidence-based models for home visiting. In the 1990s, home visitors drew on the theories of emerging brain science to inform what simply made good sense in supporting parenting: that a child’s early experiences and secure attachments with parents and caregivers lay the emotional, social and cognitive foundation for healthy development and learning.

Championing Home Visiting in Illinois and Beyond

“When I started working at Start Early,” Nick remembers, “we were primarily focused on providing home visiting to teenage parents. In fact, we were the only publicly-funded statewide network for home visiting.”

Throughout his first decade at Start Early, Nick trained and supported home visitors, helping them expand their base of knowledge and enhance skills and practice. He credits this early period for laying the foundation for Start Early’s own approach to home visiting. As early pioneers in the field, Start Early ultimately became a leader in innovating service approaches and advocating for better access to home visiting across Illinois.

The landscape is much different today – home visiting has become more professionalized and is evaluated with the highest level of scientific rigor. The federal government has created guidelines and funds home visiting services through Early Head Start programs. New legislation made possible by the 2010 Affordable Care Act allowed for $351 million to be appropriated annually to support approximately 150,000 parents and children through almost 1 million home visits a year as part of the federal government’s Maternal Infant Early Childhood Home Visiting (MIECHV) programs.

Reaching More Children and Families

Over the last three decades, the scope of Start Early’s home visiting work has expanded, and Nick’s work has been key to this development. Under his purview, work that was limited to teenage parents at the beginning has grown in its depth and breadth.

Start Early designs, delivers, trains and supports home visitors who work in under-resourced communities, including home visiting for mothers experiencing homelessness, as well as those in the criminal justice system. Nick and Start Early have also been working with state advocates and local communities to establish a new approach to this work – universal newborn supportive services – which offers all parents home visiting in the first weeks after birth.

“Nick has dedicated years of professional service to support and promote healthy interactions between babies and the people in their lives they count on most to nurture, teach, love and protect them. He exudes a reflective mindset that has shaped many of us as professionals, and he is a trusted and highly valued thought partner, mentor and colleague,” Kelly Woodlock, vice president of national home visiting, says.

Start Early congratulates Nick for this great recognition and we thank him for his commitment to serving children and families!

“The recognition is a bit awkward, yet it also fills me with great gratification and joy. It truly makes my career’s work visible. Knowing that ideas and labor that came from within me have become useful tools for home visitors, that my creations reach into homes and become meaningful in the lives of children and parents during home visits throughout Illinois – this is a personal and professional treasure,” says Nick.

Start Early recently received IACET accreditation for its professional development programs. In this blog post, we share our insights on how Start Early is building expertise and scaling its impact in the early childhood field.

Innovative thinking, commitment to excellence and a drive to improve: three key aspects of any organization determined to be the cream of the crop. Start Early is steadfastly pursuing all three, exemplified by our recent IACET accreditation of our professional development offerings.

The International Association of Continuing Education Training (IACET) accreditation is the gold standard in professional development. Receiving this honor is the ultimate validation of the quality training and learning experiences that we provide to the field. Start Early has always focused on tackling the challenges facing the field of early childhood education on a national scale, and this recent IACET accreditation will now allow us to do that with even greater impact.

If you’re new to IACET, you may be wondering why IACET programs are so highly regarded? The application process is rigorous, and requires detailed information and evidence supporting every facet of the program, from environments and support systems to record maintenance and follow-up evaluation of learning outcomes. The entire application process took us over a year, and we’re thrilled to say that we can now offer IACET Continuing Education Units to participants in select training programs.

Receiving IACET accreditation has been a long road for Start Early, and a road we continue to travel as we innovate additional professional development offerings for the field. Start Early’s commitment to impacting high-quality early childhood education has been recognized, and we will only go forward from here.

Start Early has been committed to serving parents and families directly for nearly 40 years, and we continue to grow our ability to impact families beyond our direct reach. Through high-quality professional development programs, we have taken the research-based methods applied in our programs and made them available to practitioners and leaders across the field of early childhood education.

We are proud to announce that we have received the International Association for Continuing Education and Training (IACET) accreditation. The IACET accreditation adds a level of validation to our training programs and provides early education professionals with learning experiences that demonstrate elevated expertise, help them continue advancing in their careers and expand their skill sets.

Our professional development offerings consist of in-person and online learning experiences focused on a range of aspects within early childhood education. These opportunities help early education leaders grow in their work and address their most crucial areas of need.

Currently, these programs have received IACET accreditation:

• The Essential Practices of Educare allows program leaders and practitioners to improve their skills and knowledge, leveraging the Educare Learning Network’s research-backed model to deliver stronger results for children and families.
• The Essentials of Home Visiting is a best-in-class online training program for home visitors. It includes innovative online courses and webinars for home visitors, supervisors, and family engagement professionals. These learning experiences were created by Start Early’s home visiting experts based on decades of leadership in home visiting throughout Illinois.

We are actively pursuing IACET accreditation for the following programs:

• The Essential 0-5 Survey is a unique measurement and leadership tool for early education leaders to address the core characteristics that contribute to the success of early childhood education institutions. The Essential 0-5 Survey provides in-depth analysis that allows teachers and organizational leaders to collectively improve the culture of their program and provide a stronger learning environment for children.
• The Essential Fellowship is an intensive leadership fellowship that provides leaders with the opportunity to learn how to build systems and routines that improve classroom instruction.

Our professional development programs provide the opportunity to share Start Early’s wealth of knowledge with early childhood professionals across the country, as well as learn alongside them to iterate, innovate and improve.