The implementation of early childhood inclusion has been challenged by the lack of adequate staff development and high-quality community programs. Although consultation is a viable option for providing teachers with new knowledge, skills, and support to facilitate inclusion, few models use as their foundation assessing and improving global program quality. This article presents one model for preparing community-based consultants to work on-site alongside the staff of early care and education programs to improve the quality of their early childhood environments. We provide measures of global quality in the participating community-based programs, including infant-toddler, early childhood, and family childcare home settings, to determine the quality of care that children were receiving before and after consultation.
Innovations brought about by Public Law 99-457 require early intervention personnel to expand their work practices to involve and support families in the provision of early intervention services. To support training needs in this area, and to understand possible barriers to change, this study examined the extent to which 142 early interventionists from two states felt competent in working with families, valued family roles, and were concerned about changing to family-centered practices. Relationships among these characteristics and experience, discipline, and job category were explored. In general, nurses and social workers scored higher than did educators and other health-care professionals on several dimensions of family-centered care. Many professionals expressed concerns about collaboration.
The rapid increase in services for infants with handicaps and their famiies has heightened the need for qualified special education professionals. This article reports the results of a telephone survey to a random sample of preservice training programs, a mail survey sent to programs with an infancy or early childhood focus, and a working conference with leaders in infant personnel preparation. The purpose of those activities was to determine the current status of preparing special educators to work with infants and toddlers with handicaps, as well as with their families, and to identify current needs for training materials and curricula associated with that effort. Results indicated that typical students receive very little content related to infants or families in either undergraduate or graduate special education. Substantially more coverage was found in programs specializing in infancy or early childhood; furthermore, programs with an infancy focus (0-3 years) had more infancy coverage than did programs with a broader early childhood focus (0-5 years). No differences between early childhood and infancy programs were found in family assessment and intervention. The small number of graduates found in specialized programs, however, is not likely to meet the need for qualified professionals. Implications of the findings for training and materials development are discussed.Within the field of early childhood special education, a distinction often is drawn between the infancy and preschool periods.Public Law 99-457 has reinforced this distinction by allowing lead agencies other than education to provide infant services, creating separate eligibility criteria and funding formulas, and establishing different guidelines for program planning and service provision, with a particular emphasis on family-based services during infancy. These differences are reflected in practice, with infant programs more likely to be home-or hospital-based and family-focused, with services offered by multiple agencies and professionals. Preschool programs, on the other hand, are more often center-or schoolbased, with services primarily provided by early childhood special educators.The implications of this differentiation for personnel preparation have not gone unnoticed. Severe shortages of personnel with ex-
This article describes the development and use of a 32-item self-rating of professional knowledge and skills in the context of early intervention for infants and toddlers with handicaps. Participants in a series of workshops designed to teach familyfocused skills completed the form prior to training. Although items on the scale differentiated knowledge and skills in 16 areas of competence, professionals did not make that distinction in rating themselves, with 73% of the knowledge items rated exactly the same as the skill items. A factor analysis revealed three clusters of items: family-focused ratings, child-focused ratings, and team-focused ratings. Cronbach's coefficient alpha indicated high internal consistency for each factor. Changes in participants' ratings over time are described, and implications of these findings for self-rating procedures in general and for evaluating inservice experiences in early intervention are discussed.Inservice education is widely accepted as a mechanism for helping professionals keep abreast of new knowledge about effective teaching or therapeutic practices. Workshops, institutes, conferences, university coursework, expert consultation, and independent study activities all form the core of typical inservice experiences. Although the need for inservice has been well established, serious questions about the effectiveness of traditional inservice experiences (Guskey, 1986) mean that some form of evaluation is essential.Most evaluation efforts address the extent to which participants are satisfied with the training experience. Ultimately, however, the providers of inservice education must ask whether the training actually influences professional practice. Unfortunately, the time and expense required to document change in professional practice serve as substantial barriers to meaningful evaluation. The lack of feasible alternatives often means that no evaluation is done.One economical alternative is to have the recipients of training rate their own professional skills. In the present article, we review the research on self-ratings and discuss issues regarding their usefulness in evaluating the effects of inservice experiences. An instrument designed to assess the skills of professionals working with young children with handicaps and their families is described, and data are presented in support of its use as an evaluation procedure. Issues unique to inservice education in the context of early intervention are described, and implications for future research and training are discussed.
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