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Performance Measure 4.1:

The grant recipient establishes intentional transition strategies for Head Start and Early Head Start children. Elements of this measure include but are not limited to how the grant recipient:

· Collaborates with receiving schools to support smooth transitions for children and families

· Incorporates strategies to support successful transitions to new learning environments

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Performance Measure 1.1:

The grant recipient uses research-based and culturally appropriate curricula to support child outcomes. 1302.32(a)(1)(i); 1302.32(a)(1)(ii); 1302.32(a)(2); and 1302.35(d)(1)(i) Elements of this measure include but are not limited to how the grant recipient:

· Uses a research-based curriculum appropriate for all provided program options, and trains staff to support their understanding of the curricula

· Establishes a process for monitoring curriculum implementation

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Staff are trained in Frog Street by an in-person training or virtual training shortly after hire. Ongoing support and training in the curriculum is provided by the education coordinator and coach.

The Frog Street fidelity tool is completed 3 times a year (fall, winter & spring) by the education coordinator and used at a teaching tool to improve fidelity practices.

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Performance Measure 1.2:

The grant recipient uses appropriate screening tools to refer children as indicated for evaluation. 1302.33(a)(1); 1302.33(a)(2); and 1302.33(a)(3) Elements of this measure include but are not limited to how the grant recipient:

· Performs developmental screenings for all children within the prescribed timeframes using research-based tools

· Uses a tracking and monitoring system to ensure that any developmental concerns identified through the screening are promptly addressed through referral or follow-up

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The teacher completes the ASQ-3 and ASQ-SE within in 45 days of enrollment. Screener follow up is completed by the teacher, monitored by the education coordinator, and center assistant.

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CESA 11 Head Start_Early Head Start Referral Procedure.docx (1)

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Performance Measure 1.3: The grant recipient uses appropriate ongoing child assessment tools to understand and support children’s abilities and progress and to individualize for every child. 1302.33(b)(1) Elements of this measure include but are not limited to how the grant recipient:

· Conducts ongoing child assessments of children’s progress aligned with the Head Start Early Learning Outcomes Framework: Ages Birth to Five

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Performance Measure 2.1:

The grant recipient staff identifies effective teaching strategies that are responsive to children’s needs. 1302.31(b)(2); 1302.33(b)(2); 1302.35(c)(4); and 1302.61(a) Elements of this measure include but are not limited to how the grant recipient:

· Supports staff to use teaching and home visiting practices that are responsive, communicative, language rich, and promote critical thinking and persistence

· Individualizes classroom practices to meet the needs of enrolled children, including dual language learners and children with disabilities

· Uses data from standardized observation tools to improve teaching and home visiting strategies

· Individualizes lesson plans and teaching strategies using child assessment data

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Process for individualizing for children based on assessment and parent input P1378.docx

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Classroom Individualization Form--MASTER DO N0T EDIT

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Performance Measure 2.2:

The grant recipient develops engaging learning environments that promote healthy development for enrolled children. 1302.31(a) Elements of this measure include but are not limited to how the grant recipient:

· Individualizes classroom environments to meet the needs of enrolled children

· Uses data from standardized observation tools to improve the quality of learning environments

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Teachers complete an initial home visit to gather information from the parent about their child's needs and interests and take this information into account when planning their classroom environment and activities.

They also write a goal with the family specific to their child's needs and strengths. This goal is considered when planning activities for the classroom on the classroom individualization form.

This goal is updated at each conference and home visit throughout the year.

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Teachers get to know the children on the first home visit. An "All About Me" form is completed with the family. The family sets an individual goal for the child during this visit. The teacher uses the child's interests and the family goal to set up the classroom environment for all children. IEP goals are also considered when setting up the classroom environment.

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Performance Measure 3.1:

The grant recipient establishes a system of professional development to support delivery of quality education and child development services. 1302.92(b)(5) Elements of this measure include but are not limited to how the grant recipient:

· Establishes a comprehensive approach to professional development

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Each staff member develops a professional development goal in the fall. Staff can use a variety of methods to achieve the goal--coaching, working with supervisors, attending trainings, etc. These goals are reviewed at the end of the year.

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Center Specific Monthly Staff Development

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Center Specific Monthly Staff Development

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Staff are offered a variety of trainings throughout the year. New staff have monthly check-ins with the component leads. Large group trainings are offered in the fall winter and spring. The topics for these trainings are generated from staff needs and goals. Staff also have the opportunity to request individuated trainings outside of our agency.

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Professional Development Goals Desktop report 1800

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Professional Development Goals Desktop report 1800

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Performance Measure 3.2:

The grant recipient uses a research-based coaching strategy for education staff to support staff to use effective teaching practices. 1302.92(c)(1) and 1302.92(c)(2) Elements of this measure include but are not limited to how the grant recipient:

· Identifies strengths and needs for all education staff, and selects participants for coaching

· Uses a research-based coaching strategy for identified staff

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Performance Measure 3.3:

The grant recipient has qualified education staff. 1302.91(e)(1); 1302.91(e)(2); and 1302.91(e)(6) Elements of this measure include but are not limited to how the grant recipient:

· Monitors and maintains appropriate qualifications for staff

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Performance Measure 2.3:

The grant recipient uses home visits and group socializations to promote parent engagement and extend children’s learning. 1302.35(b)(1) and 1302.35(e) Elements of this measure include but are not limited to how the grant recipient:

· Promotes parent’s role as the child’s teacher through intentional and focused home visit plans for home-based programs · Provides families with opportunities for meaningful shared experiences during group socializations for home-based programs · Offers parents and families the opportunity to help plan the group socialization

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EHS Socializations Guidance for 2023-24 (P1130)

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DRDP is our ongoing assessment tool. Teachers collect observations on each child and each measure to complete the assessment. The DRDP is completed 3 times a year. Teachers analyze the data after each assessment period. DRDP is aligned wit the Head Start Early Learning Outcomes Framework: Ages Birth to Five.

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Copy of CESA 11 Early Head Start Referral Procedure

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Link for Head Start .gov

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Partners for a Healthy Baby | HeadStart.gov

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Discover more about Partners for a Healthy Baby. Learn how it addresses each criterion for effective, comprehensive home-based curricula. Use this information to select and evaluate curricula.

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Newborn Behavioral Observation overview Link

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The Newborn Behavioral Observations (NBO) system™

The Newborn Behavioral Observations (NBO) system™ is an infant-focused, family centered, relationship-based tool, designed to sensitize parents to their baby's competencies and individuality, in order to foster positive parent-infant interactions and contribute to the development of a positive parent-infant relationship from the very beginning (Nugent, Keefer, Minear, Johnson. and Blanchard, 2007).

The development of the NBO was inspired by almost 40 years of experience working with Berry Brazelton and the Neonatal Behavioral Assessment Scale (NBAS) (Brazelton, 1973; Brazelton and Nugent, 1995, 2011; Nugent, 1985; Nugent and Brazelton, 1989, 2000). However, it is not an examination or a test but is a set of shared observations designed to help the clinician and parent together, to observe the infant's behavioral capacities and identify the kind of support the infant needs for his successful growth and development. The NBO is therefore inherently interactive and family centered, so that parents are involved as partners in the NBO session. The clinician maintains a collaborative stance toward the parents during the session, which ends with the clinician and parents developing a joint infant-caregiving plan by identifying techniques most likely to foster positive parent-infant interaction. You can learn more about the NBO in this article, which appeared in the Zero to Three Journal.

A strength-based tool

The NBO is strength-based and is primarily guided by the principle that the quality of early experiences drives brain development and functional outcomes. It can be used to support parents at a time when the very bases for parental functioning are being established. It describes the infant's capacities in such a way that the parents can begin to see their baby as a person, better appreciate their baby's unique competencies and vulnerabilities, and learn to understand and respond to their baby, in a way that meets the baby's unique developmental needs. Moreover, the NBO can easily be integrated into a range of clinical practices and is used in hospital, clinic, or home visit settings by pediatric professionals such as nurses, doctors, psychologists, social workers, midwives, physical and occupational therapists, doulas, child life specialists, lactation specialists, home visitors, and other early intervention professionals.

Contents

The NBO system consists of a set of 18 neurobehavioral observations, which describe the newborn's capacities and behavioral adaptation from birth to the third month of life. While it describes the infant's capacities, the NBO provides parents with individualized information about their infant's behavior, so that they can appreciate their baby's unique competencies and vulnerabilities and thereby understand and respond to their baby, in a way that meets her/his developmental needs. The 18 items include observations of the infant's capacity to habituate to external light and sound stimuli (sleep protection); the quality of motor tone and activity level; the capacity for self-regulation (including crying and consolability); response to stress (indices of the infant's threshold for stimulation); and the infant's visual, auditory, and social-interactive capacities (degree of alertness and response to both human and non-human stimuli). The NBO can be used to track the process of self-regulation as the infant attempts to stabilize his autonomic, motor, and state behavior, and prolong his periods of alertness and social availability over the first weeks and months of life. These weeks and months make up a special period of developmental change and reorganization in the patterns of infant attention and emotion, which are captured by the NBO.

Theoretical framework: AMOR

Over the first few months of life, newborn infants face a series of hierarchically organized tasks in self-regulation, which involve the integration of autonomic, motor, state, and social interactive behavior. This includes the infant's capacity to first regulate her physiological or autonomic system, her motor behavior, then her state behavior, and finally her affective interactive behavior, which develop in a stage-like epigenetic progression over the first 2 to 3 months of life. These tasks are summarized by the acronym AMOR: autonomic, motor, organization of state, and r esponsiveness.

autonomic/physiological stability: stabilization of breathing, temperature regulation, reducing tremors and startles, etc.

motor regulation: development of good motor control and feeding skills; ability to maintain a controlled activity level

organization of state: ability to cope with stress; able to regulate state and develop predictable sleep-wake patterns

responsiveness: development of a growing awareness of the environment and the capacity to process visual and social information and engage in social interaction

The framework enables practitioners and caregivers to interpret and attribute meaning to the behaviors and communication cues they observe in the context of the NBO. While the NBO attempts to reveal the full richness of the newborn's behavioral repertoire, the clinical focus is on the infant's individuality, on the aspects of behavior that make the baby unique and different. In other words, the NBO provides the baby with a "voice," with a "signature." It gives the baby an opportunity to tell the caregiver who he or she is, if you will, what her preferences are and what her vulnerabilities might be, and in what areas she may need support. By providing this behavioral profile of the infant's strengths and challenges, the NBO can provide clinicians with the kind of individualized guidance that can help parents meet their baby's needs. This, in turn, will help the parents develop the kind of confidence they need to support their baby's development and enjoy the experience of being a new parent.
Above: The NBO is being used in Bangkok by Kevin Nugent (left) and Oslo by Unni Tranaas Vannebo.
Research and evidence-based practice

A series of randomized controlled studies have demonstrated the effectiveness of the NBO as a form of support for parents. In a number of studies, the NBO was associated with enhanced mother-infant engagement (McManus and Nugent, 2012; Nicolson, Carron & Paul, 2022; Nugent et al., 2017) and was effective in helping parents be more responsive to their infant's communication cues (Kristensen, Juul & Kronberg., 2020; Høifødt, Nordhal, Landsem, Csifsák, Bohne, Pfuhl, Rognmo, Braarud, Goksøyr, Moe, Slinning, 2020). A study by McManus and Nugent (2012) showed that the NBO could be successfully integrated into Early Intervention programming and was associated with higher parent-reported quality of care with high-risk newborns and higher perceived confidence among service providers using the NBO with low- and high-risk newborns and their families. A study in Norway demonstrated that the NBO conducted in home visits is a feasible and acceptable intervention for both parents and healthcare workers within the well‐baby clinic services (Greve, Braarud, Skotheim, Slinning, 2018). In another multi-site randomized trial, the NBO was associated with greater gains in cognitive and adaptive function at 6 months, in children referred for Early Intervention (McManus, Blanchard, Murphy, Nugent, 2020).

A number of RCT studies have shown that mothers who participated in the NBO sessions demonstrated a reduction in postpartum depressive symptomatology and anxiety symptoms. Mothers receiving NBO care had fewer maternal depressive symptoms than control mothers receiving Usual Care (McManus et al. 2020; Nugent, J. K., Dym-Bartlett, J., Valim, C., 2014). In an Australian sample of 111 first-time mothers with antenatal distress and risk of postnatal depression (PND), there were NBO intervention effects on maternal emotional availability, with higher sensitivity and non-intrusiveness in the intervention group and on anxiety symptoms, although not on depression symptoms (Nicolson, Carron, Paul, 2022).

Congdon, Nugent, McManus, Coccia & Bush (2020) provided evidence for the reliability and validity of the NBO by demonstrating sub-scale associations with infant salivary cortisol reactivity and maternal report of infant temperament. In a series of experimental non-randomized studies, the NBO has also been associated with enhanced mother-infant engagement, a greater understanding of the baby's communication cues, increased levels of confidence among parents, positive parental perceptions of their interactions with their high-risk infants, increased levels of father involvement, and higher perceived confidence and enhanced practitioner mentalization among service providers in working with low- and high-risk newborns and their families in settings around the world (Alvarez-Gomez, 2014; Appleton, Nickell & Nicolau, 2016; Braden, 2017; Cheetham and Hanssen, 2014; Dallmeyer & Lyle, 2019; Dittz, Alves, Duarte & Magalhães, 2017; Gibbs, 2015; Guimarães, Alves, Cardoso, Penido & Magalhães, 2018; Holland & Watkins, 2015; Hawthorne & Nicolau, 2017; Kashiwibara, 2012; Nugent & Alhaffer, 2006; Sanders & Buckner, 2006; Savage-McGlynn & Hawthorne, 2014; Schilling, Nicolson & Ridgway, 2017; Simkin-Tran, Harman & Nicolson, 2020; Subramaniam & Plant, 2014; Windarti & Suryawan, 2021).

The NBO is associated with higher perceived confidence among service providers, working with low- and high-risk newborns and their families (McManus and Nugent, 2012), and in a national trial of 222 pediatric professionals trained in the NBO from 10 settings around the United States - representing inner-city, suburban, and small city sites - pre- and post-NBO training evaluations conducted by Philliber Research Associates showed that 98 percent of the NBO trained practitioners agreed that the NBO was excellent or good in helping parents learn about their newborns and that it fostered parents' interest in their baby, while 97 percent of the trainees believed that the NBO could enhance the clinician's partnership with parents. One month after the training, trainees (n=102) continued to rate the NBO as excellent or good in providing information to parents, and a comparison of pre-training and one-month responses (n=72) revealed that parents became better observers of their infants (p<.001), learned new information about their infants (p<.01), and practitioners were more "connected to" or "tuned in" to parents as a result of the NBO (p<.05). Parents themselves (n=31) reported that their understanding of their infant increased significantly as a result of the NBO (p<.001).

A number of randomized controlled and experimental non-randomized controlled studies using the NBO as a form of relationship support are now in progress in China, Denmark, Iceland, India, Japan, and the United States.

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Learn about the Newborn Behavioral Observations (NBO) System from the Brazelton Institute.

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Get access to files anywhere through secure cloud storage and file backup for your photos, videos, files and more with Google Drive.

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All family service staff completed "Handling Upset: The Adult First Mindset Shift," followed by a presentation by a national trainer, April 9th. The presentation focused on how to implement Conscious Discipline strategies in Families.

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Conscious Discipline indpendant Bookstudies 

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Conscious Discipline indpendant Bookstudies 

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Staff was invited to participate in 2 book studies: Easy to Love Difficult to Discipline and Conscious Discipline Building Resilient Classrooms.

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Partners for a Healthy Baby curriculum Fidelity Check

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Partners for a Healthy Baby curriculum Fidelity Check

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Get access to files anywhere through secure cloud storage and file backup for your photos, videos, files and more with Google Drive.

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Mobile app for aa Home visitors to access

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Mobile Tools for Home Visitors | HeadStart.gov

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Explore free mobile tools for home visitors from the Office of Head Start, including ELOF@HOME and Text4HomeVisitors. Discover effective practices and get text messages focusing on home-based topics and resources.

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We are working with our Training & Technical assistance staff to complete a DLL assessment. Interpreters are available to work with children in the classroom and with families. Classrooms provide visual supports for all of our children.

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New TA/CWA training manual

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New Teacher Training Manual

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Learning Centers training powerpoint

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Family Services Transtion Planning with Families

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Family Services Transtion Planning with Families

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Family Services Transition Planning with Families (P1267)

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Cheri Jacobson and Angela Lueck monitor and support Intro to Early Care and CDA (initial and renewal). Coordinators support professional development plans through reflection and scheduled check ins. Education requirements tracked in ChildPlus.