Testimony to the Texas Early Learning Council
Susan Landry, Ph.D.
Children’s Learning Institute
December 2, 2011
Beginning Education: Early Childcare at Home (BEECH) Project
BEECH is a mentoring study for home-based child care providers. This two-year study will assess the effectiveness of an online professional development system and mentoring services for home-based child care providers to improve school readiness for the children in their programs. Each year, 90 providers in Harris County will participate in the pilot research study. In each year of the study, all 90 providers will receive the same school readiness toys and materials. One group of 30 will only receive the materials. Another 30 will complete the online training modules, in addition to the materials. The final group of 30 will receive materials, online trainings, and professional mentoring sessions.
Beginning last month, the 90 participants for the first year of the study began the online training modules. CLI over-recruited for this study and have replaced two providers who dropped out of the study. All participants have been trained in the online training platform.
Updates
- All 30 providers in the mentoring group have completed the first session online.
- Of the 30 providers in the non-mentoring group, 8 did not complete the first session.
- CLI contacted each provider who did not complete the session. The providers mentioned technical reasons for not being able to complete the session, including computer access problems and inability to log in. These issues have now been resolved.
- Both groups will complete session two this week (November 30-December 2).
- Providers are also working on their 5 goals and getting these turned into CLI.
Course Development
All of the content for the online video trainings has been completed, but the videos are not all uploaded into the online training platform yet. The videos are polished with professional audio that will be completed before the end of the 2011.
Assessments
All 90 providers have completed the Teacher Behavior Rating Scale (TBRS), including the two replacement providers. The parents of 542 parents whose children are enrolled at programs with these providers consented to the child assessment. CLI will complete all child assessments by the end of this week. We did encounter some challenges with the assessments. One director was resistant to the assessments. Another provider only has an assistant teacher working with the infant and toddler children, but the provider did not want to ask this assistant teacher to go online. CLI will follow-up with the provider to encourage participation.
Trainings and Mentoring
BEECH was launched on November 5th at the Saturday training. There was a make-up training the following Saturday. Also, CLI staff conducted one-on-one trainings for a few providers that could not attend either Saturday training. The trainings were a success; providers were excited about the program. CLI is currently conducting the ongoing supervision visits to all 90 providers. CLI is working with the mentors to complete their certification for the BEECH program. The certification is completed in two sessions. Mentors are trained to directly evaluate the providers, perform active coaching, and on the use of video playback and self-reflection activities.
Training Sessions
In each training session in the online platform, providers will review a video on a specific topic and complete exercises on the topic. In each training video:
- A brief review of the session from the previous week.
- Practice what topic was viewed.
- Discuss the current session.
- Practice the current session.
Providers will also be able to view videos from the two previous weeks online.