A lthough in the last 20 years much progress has been made on understanding the challenging behaviors of young children and providing effective prevention and intervention, it is not at all certain that recommended practices have been widely adopted across early care and education programs. In this article, the authors argue that a major impediment to widespread use of recommended practices is a variety of supervisory issues, including the fact that direct service staff members often feel overwhelmed, overworked, and disrespected. To address these issues, the authors offer a set of strategies leading to what they call engaged supervision.
This article describes the efforts funded by the state of Colorado to address unacceptably high rates of expulsion from child care. Based on the results of a 2006 survey, the state of Colorado launched two complementary policy initiatives in 2009 to impact expulsion rates and to improve the use of evidence-based practices related to challenging behavior. The primary policy initiative involved the funding of a center to develop model sites, a state-level planning team, ongoing practitioner training, and certification of coaches and trainers all built around the Pyramid Model. The secondary initiative involved expanding the number of early childhood mental health consultants and modifying their reimbursement/payment formula such that direct preventative work with adult providers, consistent with the Pyramid Model, was reimbursable. A follow-up survey in 2011 showed a dramatic reduction in expulsion rates and a corollary increase in providers’ teaching of prosocial skills to children with challenging behavior.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.