Imagine for a moment about how you, the leader of a state or regional early intervention program, might benefit from access to expertise, resources, and best practices in developing early intervention coaching programs — and access to collaboration with fellow administrators and experts across the country.
Picture the rich discussions about emergent strategies on topics like improving the impact of home visits through practice-based coaching. Perhaps you discover a handy new coaching rubric shared by another state program. Or tune into a video created by a coaching expert who discusses the importance of shifting practitioners’ focus from just a child’s development to fostering a strong, capable family. You may even support another program director at an earlier stage of building a coaching program by sharing your first-hand experience with launching your own.
It’s a powerful vision, isn’t it?
As an early intervention leader, you already know that high-quality professional development and coaching play a central role in cultivating a program’s practitioners, coaches, and even administrators. By nurturing your team’s skills and professional growth, you’re improving the quality of services provided to your families. And this investment pays off by driving positive family and child outcomes.
But how can you, and your fellow early intervention leaders tasked with building professional development and coaching programs for your organizations, work together rather than in isolation to support one another’s journey toward impactful, sustainable programs?
By tapping into the power of professional learning communities (PLCs).
At the regional and state levels, PLCs unlock potential in more than just individual practitioners and coaches in a single organization or even neighboring ones. A well-structured PLC for administrators — one that goes beyond program and regional borders — can help to create effective coaching programs through inter-organizational collaboration.
Table of Contents
- The Importance of Professional Learning Communities for Early Intervention Professional Development Programs
- Cultivating Inter-Organizational Collaboration Through Administrator-level PLCs
- Introducing Your Coaches Corner, an Online Professional Learning Community for Early Intervention Leaders
The Importance of Professional Learning Communities for Early Intervention Professional Development Programs
Research has long shown the benefits of PLCs at the individual and site level, both in early intervention services and other organizations that partner with families. Teachers in grade schools, practitioners in early childhood education settings, and even school administrators and others at the leadership level of education programs benefit from PLCs.
Here are just a few of the many ways PLCs support both individual and organizational growth:
- Additional mentorship and coaching: Many early intervention practitioners in the field may have access to one-on-one coaching and support. In the PLC setting, they gain additional mentorship opportunities from their fellow educators.
- Collaborative problem-solving and reflection: Collaboration and thoughtful reflection are skills that require practice just like any other. PLCs offer the space for teams to build these muscles with the ultimate goal of improving their program’s impact on the communities they serve.
- Sharing resources and best practices: The more open and collaborative a PLC is, the more ideas and expertise can flow across the team. A great way to foster knowledge-building is by encouraging exchanges of exemplary resources, such as coaching rubrics aligned to Head Start performance standards. PLCs can also be the staging ground for practitioners and coaches to learn about new developments in best practices and plan ways to integrate these learnings into their daily workflows.
- Continuous improvement: In the end, all of these benefits generated by PLCs culminate into a culture of continuous improvement, at both the individual and programmatic levels.
Almost regardless of setting or program level, PLCs are a tremendous asset to cultivating staff excellence in service of positively impacting families’ lives.
Cultivating Inter-Organizational Collaboration Through Administrator-level PLCs
It’s clear that PLCs are an especially powerful resource for an individual organization to exchange knowledge, best practices, and encouragement among its team members. But PLCs are also critical for program, regional, and state directors looking for ways to implement broader improvements that impact a much larger community — like up-leveling their coaching and professional development offerings for staff. At this leadership level, PLCs that span multiple organizations, regions, and even states offer the greatest benefits.
The idea of inter-organizational learning communities is quickly emerging as a necessity for driving innovative and thoughtful solutions, and not just in the early intervention space. As an example, the field of human resource development is slowly but surely positioning itself increasingly towards cross-pollination. One research article published in 2023 highlighted the growing need for public-private inter-organizational learning communities, where leaders can co-create knowledge and collectively address emerging challenges affecting the rapidly evolving nature of work.
Learning communities that bring together state and regional early intervention leaders can yield similar outcomes for the benefit of the communities they serve. Every organization providing early intervention services wants the children and families they serve to thrive. A PLC structure creates a space for these directors to share their knowledge, exemplars, best practices, and lessons learned — all in service of helping one another to build high-impact coaching and PD programs for their staff, which in turn improves the quality of services provided.
But where do early intervention leaders find such wide-reaching collaboration opportunities and learning communities?
Introducing Your Coaches Corner, an Online Professional Learning Community for Early Intervention Leaders
TORSH, a leader in the early intervention professional development and coaching space, recognizes the potential of PLCs to aid leaders with designing and implementing effective coaching and PD programs that boost family outcomes. Because of these benefits and the essential role of professional growth in program excellence, TORSH partnered with the Division for Early Childhood to create a one-of-a-kind PLC specifically for early intervention leadership: Your Coaches Corner.
Uniquely focused on state and regional leaders like you in the early intervention space, Your Coaches Corner offers access to:
- Resources: Gain access to carefully curated tools and content to accelerate your organization’s journey to develop an effective coaching program.
- Connections & Collaboration: Engage with fellow early intervention experts from across the country, sharing experiences and learning best practices from one another.
- Unique Insights & Support: Tap into the knowledge from leaders in varying stages of building coaching and professional learning programs to guide decision-making and fuel program growth.
Visit yourcoachescorner.com to learn more and join the community. It is free for DEC members to join.
Your Coaches Corner is built on the TORSH Talent coaching and professional learning platform. Hundreds of early intervention organizations across the country rely on the FERPA-compliant and HIPAA-secure online platform to facilitate anywhere, anytime coaching, training, and collaboration. With TORSH Talent, organizations have a 360° infrastructure, including actionable data, to support high-impact coaching and professional learning that improves practice. Learn more about partnering with TORSH to accelerate the growth of your program’s practitioners.
