Experiences with We Grow Together, a Professional Development System to Support Caregiver-Child Interactions for Infants and Toddlers

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P-5 Competency Domain: 1-Early Childhood Development: how development unfolds from conception to age 5 across social, emotional, cognitive, language, physical, and motor development and ways to responsively support it

Infant-toddler caregivers often have few opportunities for systematic professional development (PD) and little is known about the specific PD strategies that may support their practice. This webinar will describe the professional development experiences of caregivers who participated in a field test of the We Grow Together (WGT) Professional Development System (Atkins-Burnett et al. 2020). WGT was designed to help infant-toddler caregivers in center-based settings and family child care homes understand how caregiver-child interaction supports development. It provides training, strategies, and materials to help local professional development providers scaffold the implementation of high quality practices by infant and toddler caregivers.

In this webinar, we will describe the fall 2018-spring 2019 field test of We Grow Together, including participants' experiences engaging with the PD system and whether the system could be used by early childhood professionals to support change in beliefs, knowledge, or practice when interacting with infants and toddlers. This work was funded by the Administration of Children and Families as part of the Professional Development Tools to Improve the Quality of Infant and Toddler Care (Q-CCIIT PD Tools) project. This webinar will address the following questions:

Who were the caregivers and PD providers in the WGT field test?
What types of relationships did caregivers have with their PD providers before participating in the WGT Field Test (fall 2018)?
What types of PD experience did caregivers and their PD providers have before participating in the WGT Field Test (fall 2018)?
What types of PD experiences did caregivers have during the WGT Field Test?
How did caregivers change from fall 2018 to spring 2019?

Participants will hear about a new professional development system that is being tested. Aspects of that system and challenges to how it was implemented may be relevant to participants current work. Learners will be able to:

Define the purpose of the the We Grow Together (WGT) Professional Development System and Field Test
Describe the PD experiences of caregivers and their PD providers during the WGT field test
Recognize ways that field test participants changed from fall 2018 to spring 2019

Shannon Monahan (Moderator)

Principal Survey Researcher

Mathematica

Dr. Shannon Monahan, our presenter, is a Principal Survey Researcher at Mathematica. Her work focuses on developing early childhood assessments and observational measures, understanding programs that serve young children and their parents, supporting the early childhood workforce, and formulating evidence-based practices for educators.

Louisa Tarullo (Moderator)

Developmental Psychologist and Senior Fellow

Mathematica

Louisa Tarullo, Ph.D., a developmental psychologist and senior fellow at Mathematica, focuses on studying policies and programs to support healthy development and learning for young children facing adversity. Dr. Tarullo directs the We Grow Together project, and served as Mathematica's director of early childhood research.

Sally Atkins-Burnett (Moderator)

Senior Fellow

Mathematica

Sally Atkins-Burnett, a Senior Fellow at Mathematica, has more than 20 years of research experience on providing and improving services for children from birth to 5. She was one of the lead developers of We Grow Together. She is currently principal investigator on multiple studies of early care and education including Baby FACES (the study of Early Head Start), Home-Based Child Care Supply and Quality, Implementation and Assessment of Competencies for Teachers and Caregivers Serving Infants and Toddlers study, the Quality of Caregiver Child Interactions for Infants and Toddlers (Q-CCIIT, now known as QCIT), and a lead developer on other measures of quality and child outcomes. Dr. Atkins-Burnett has delivered multiple presentations and authored reports and publications about assessment and services in early childhood education, including peer-reviewed publications and chapters in The Handbook of Early Childhood and Blackwell Handbook of Early Childhood Development.

Slide Handouts: We Grow Together

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**Live Attendance Required**

ZERO TO THREE is pleased to offer Continuing Education Units for a wide range of learning events, both in person and on line.

Contact hours and CEUs are automatically added to your registration for no additional charge. Registrants can earn up to 0.1 CEU or 1 Contact hour for attending this event. Continuing Education Units are awarded with live attendance, completed session evaluation, and a passing quiz score of 2/2.

Learning objectives include:

Define the purpose of the the We Grow Together (WGT) Professional Development System and Field Test
Describe the PD experiences of caregivers and their PD providers during the WGT field test
Recognize ways that field test participants changed from fall 2018 to spring 2019

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