Early Childhood Implementation Snapshots, No. 4: Implementation Sites and Demonstration Sites

Resource Spotlight

The Statewide Implementation Guide provides Implementation and Demonstration Sites Materialsto assist programs from the exploration stage all the way to the scale up and sustainability stage. States have found planning a short and long-term sustainability and scale up plan to be critical. Here are two documents to guide with the sustainability and scale up process for implementation and demonstration sites:

• Implementation Site Development from Selection, through Practice Fidelity, to Scale-up and Demonstration
• Demonstration Sites Q & A

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Equity Planning Tools

The Importance of Contextual Fit When Implementing Evidence-Based Interventions

This resource defines contextual fit as the match between the strategies, procedures, or elements of an intervention and the values, needs, skills, and resources available in a setting. It proposes a set of core elements drawn from the existing literature that can be used to define contextual fit and guide practice, policy, and research which are: need, precision, evidence-base, efficiency, skills/competencies, cultural relevance, resources and administrative/organizational support. The elements of contextual fit have relevance for:

1. the design and selection of interventions,
2. the process of initial implementation, and
3. the ongoing adaptation of the interventions needed for sustainability.

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Early Childhood Program-Wide PBS Benchmarkes of Quality: Cultural Responsiveness Companion 2021

The EC-BOQ Cultural Responsiveness Companion is a resource for coaches and teams implementing the Pyramid Model to improve the fit of their Pyramid system with the needs of each and every child and family. It is not an additional fidelity of implementation measure but rather an action planning resource that teams can use to improve their implementation. Teams may use this tool either during the initial Pyramid Model implementation to build cultural responsiveness into systems from the beginning or after initial implementation to enhance equity within existing systems. The tool is aligned with the Early Childhood Program-Wide PBS Benchmarks of Quality (EC-BOQ) so teams can adapt the core Pyramid elements to make them more culturally responsive.

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Motivating Diverse Learners Using Culturally Relevant & Reponsive Education: A Practice Brief for Educators of Diverse Populations

CRRE is a process that is committed to educational equity. Educators using CRRE teach to and through learners' diverse cultures, lived experiences, and interests by adjusting the curricular, pedagogical, and social supports of the classroom. Beyond simply "good teaching", CRRE is aligned with social justice because it challenges structures and expectations that can perpetuate racism. Thus, to implement CRRE effectively, it is critical that educators exercise awareness of themselves and their students. This practice guide is designed to be used by educators in the design of their curricula for more equitable outcomes for all students.

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Exploring Equity Issues: Community Engagement for Student Success

This resource is designed to help educators consider how to engage with the community in ways that facilitate the success of all students. The authors noted the definition of community offered by Chavis and Lee: Community is both a feeling and a set of relationships among people. People form and maintain communities to meet common needs [and experience]. Members of a community have a sense of trust, belonging, safety, and caring for each other. They have an individual and collective sense that they can, as part of the community, influence their environments and each other (2015).

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Voices from the Field: Iowa

Program Implementation Coaches Sharon Helt and Terri Novak-Cicha of the Iowa City School District have been passionate about the implementation of Pyramid Model practices for several years. In order to become a community partner and receive funding, programs also agreed to attend Pyramid Model training. The Program Implementation Coaches provided teaching teams practice-based coaching, planned professional development experiences, and other incidental learning opportunities.

Their work paid dividends in student outcomes. Public school teachers began noticing that the students who came from Pyramid Classrooms arrived in kindergarten with a variety of highly valued skills and began asking what was being done in preschool to prepare these children. Kindergarten teachers were interested to learn how children were included in preschool. They asked about the strategies used to engage children with identified special needs into the daily routines. The summer of 2019 Terri and Sharon developed a weeklong learning lab for kindergarten teachers. In the lab, the kindergarten teachers role played as students. They practiced using the visuals and supports students would use and reflected on how it felt. Teachers were provided time to make and take materials and collaborate with their team. In the afternoon students arrived so teachers could observe the practices in action.

During the 2020-2021 school year, Terri and Sharon saw the use of remote trainings as an opportunity to address a need on the Benchmarks of Quality to provide more choices and differentiate trainings. Diverse learning needs of staff were addressed by involving teacher-leaders who are part of their Program Leadership Team. Terri and Sharon organized the training with the assistance of the teacher-leaders. They chose presentation topics based on data from Teaching Pyramid Observation Tool observations, as well as other district data collection tools and selected classroom staff that were demonstrating exemplar implementation of identified topics of pyramid model practices to train their collogues. Trainings were done in large and small groups and covered topics such as:

• Peer mediated interventions,
• Pyramid practices,
• Differentiation for children in curricular areas, or might provide opportunities to Collaboration with specialists.
  • Speech-Language Pathologists came in to provide training on the use of their Core Board communication system and provided mini-trainings on building relationships.
• Whole group meeting on the use of Behavior Incident Reports

Iowa's hard-working State Leadership Team helped Pyramid Model practices to be been woven into the Iowa Quality Preschool Program Standards.

See also: Social-emotional program teaches preschoolers: ‘Bee’ your best

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Considerations for Equity

• Equitable representation of children, families and staff in program leadership and implementation support teams strengthens your decision-making and implementation. Families have direct knowledge and experiences of the communities you serve so they can help you recognize gaps and barriers in the system that create inequities. Provide multiple means for participation (virtual, in person) to support families to become and remain engaged in decision making (e.g., input on the developing program wide expectations and rules for children and families). Families are actively involved in goal setting for children, share information used in the development of classroom routines, and are encouraged to be active members of the learning community to their level of comfort.
• Identify and eliminating practices and processes that create or support bias and inequity (e.g., suspension, seclusion or expulsion of children). Iowa coaches(above) provided trainings for the use of BIR data and a modeled a culture that embraces the examination of data for continuous improvement.
• Cultural contexts of families and communities are considered. Discussions about culture and identity are revisited in professional development experiences as part of the routine of trainings and coaching. In the example above, highlighting the skills of teacher-leaders, para educators, and specialists encourages teams to value the knowledge that each team member brings.

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Considerations for Policy

Programs that adopt and implement evidence-based practices, which are proven as viable solutions, should adopt new or amend current state policy to ensure sustainability. Ongoing evaluation of the policy should occur to verify whether implementation and its effects are aligned with the objectives that were explicitly or implicitly set out.

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References

• Statewide Implementation Guide. (2019). ECTA Early Childhood Technical Assistance Center. https://ectacenter.org/sig

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