Touchpoint: Refreshed Platform, New Courses from The Academy

June 2021

Transcribed below:

Hello, NHSA community. Good to see you, Dr. B here for another Touchpoint. This is Touchpoint #2, pretty excited about that. And we have a lot to share with you today.

A Love Note

Of course, as always, we’re going to start with a love note. And this month’s love note goes to Dr. Kim Johnson. She’s been joining NHSA, offering a course called Bias Buster for almost three months now. And every session has filled up. We’ve had added second sessions because they’re so popular and I got to sit in on some of them and she is just dynamite. So I just want to send a love note to her for bringing her energy and passion to everyone in those classes. And we’re going to continue to work on some exciting new things from her because she does have so much to offer and her work is so relevant to what we do. So thank you very much, Dr. Johnson.

Now Available: Pre-Service, On-Demand Course: Bias Buster Basics

This Month’s Theme: New Offerings from The Academy

All right, so for this Touchpoint, our main topic is going to be talking about the new The Academy that we’re getting ready to launch very soon. By the time you watch this, we will probably have our registrations up on the website and we’ll be launching our courses in August.

And I just want to let you know about so many exciting things that are in the queue for pre-service this year for you to tap into. My hope is to make these classes accessible and affordable. I want them to be rich and meaningful, and I want them to, I want all of those things to feed into you being able to offer professional development to everyone in your program at a deep level, which is really exciting because the best thing we can do for our staff is support them.

One of the ways we do that is through professional development, reminding them that they matter, that their growth matters, that they’re important. And as they learn and grow as a professional, your organization will do the same thing. So super exciting.

Head Start Basics

So I did some research, listened to some of you, and one of the pieces of feedback I got is, “Could you offer something like a ‘Head Start Basics,’ something that covers most of the requirements that we have to offer during pre-service?” So we listened and I’m so excited to have put together a course that is going to cover most of what you would cover in pre-service for all of your staff based on the standards.

I figure it hits about 80% of what you would do. It doesn’t drill down into the specifics for a particular employee or a role, but it’s the general staff things, the things that everybody needs to learn, and the exciting thing is the class is going to be asynchronous, and that means that you sign up all your staff and they take it on their own time. Not all at one time, you don’t have to coordinate schedules and we give them a certain amount of time to finish. And it’s well within the requirements based on the performance standards. So the certificate is delivered to them through an electronic means on the LMS, in their little transcript, which will keep track of all of their professional development, and you will get a notification that all of your staff have been trained.

So it’s a really, hopefully, more efficient way of doing this. A little less expensive is the goal as well, but also very meaningful, so excited to launch that.

Bringing back The Academy’s beloved credentials

And then, of course, we’re bringing our credentials back. So many wonderful people participated this year and we had so much fun. The Director’s Credential and the Data Literacy Credential were both very popular. And based on that, we are using our new technology to really tweak these opportunities for you, enrich them, raise them a little, and even do something a little bit different for different groups of folks. So we’re still going to do the Director’s Credential, the basic credential like we did this year, but we’re going to build that for folks with up to seven years' experience.

So your newer directors up until about seven years, and once you surpass seven years, we’re going to do something a little different and call it an Experienced Directors Cohort. And instead of it being a formal class, it’s going to be more project-based, learning where the folks involved get involved in projects that are important to them. They get facilitators and experts to help them along the way. And all of this will culminate at the end in some presentations and some exciting launching, and all of our credentials and all of our cohort will do the same thing.

So we’re going to have our Health Services and Family Service Credential continuing as it did last year, but on the new platform, easier to access, easier to submit your things. Our Data Literacy will continue.

Introducing other new opportunities

And then we’re going to add something new in the area of local leadership. So something that you can offer your folks who are leaders at the local level, whether they are site directors or managers or they are center directors, or maybe they oversee a big group of educators as ED managers and really talk about what it means to lead at a more local level than if you’re leading the entire organization.

So excited about that. And as I said, the cohort model, we’re going to apply to directors, to local leaders, we’re going to have a special cohort just for Early Head Start, for Migrant and Seasonal. And we’re even going to do a Coaches Cohort to meet the needs of those folks who are out there coaching our teachers and really trying to raise the quality in our classrooms. Those folks can really benefit from coming together and, again, taking that project based learning approach with facilitation and resources, so excited about that. And then we’re going to have some other courses that are going to be rolling out throughout the year, we’re going to have a Data Analysis Basics, a Family Service Workers Basics, we’ll do Bias Buster Basics for all staff. That can be part of your pre-service which would accommodate some of those requirements around diversity. Just so many courses.

So I encourage you to go check that out. Look at the list, read the description, see what’s appropriate for your staff. And hopefully, you’ll be as excited as I am about it. And if you have ideas, share them with us because I’ve done a lot of this from listening to two people and hearing them say, “Hey, we could really use this kind of class.” And if it makes sense, we’ll do our best to offer it to you. So looking forward to that, looking forward to your feedback, we want to continuously reflect and improve on this process. So very excited.

In Case You Didn’t Know

Pride Month

And then of course, In Case You Didn’t Know. I have two “In Case You Didn’t Know”s in this Touchpoint. The first one is: In case you didn’t know, June is Pride Month, and you may or may not have known that NHSA has resources specifically designed to support LGBTQ+ families. And it’s important that at Head Start, we embrace the whole child that means embracing the whole family. So take some time, check those resources out, see what’s appropriate for your program, for your community. And hopefully, there’ll be some resources there to support you.

Early Head Start Rising

And the second In Case You Didn’t Know: In case you didn’t know, Early Head Start Rising, launched in May. And we are very excited with a summer learning series that has six webinars every other week, just about through July. And if you haven’t attended any and you are an Early Head Start provider, you can look into the ones that are remaining. They are accessible to everybody. And we’ve had some really rich content. We’ve really tried to focus on very specific issues around the birth to three-time of development, as well as pregnant women. So see if there’s something there that interests you, we’d love to have you there.

And we’ll continue our Early Head Start Rising campaign well beyond this summer learning series. So keep your eye out for more exciting things around Early Head Start, including the Early Head Start Cohort that we will be putting together for next year. We really want to make sure that we are focusing on our Early Head Start folks, we know their needs are unique and, you know, we want to make sure we’re meeting them. So excited about that. And I know this is going to reach you right about when programs are closing up, at least for the program year, maybe you’re going through the summer. But it is summertime.

So I hope that as you get this message, you have plans to relax and rejuvenate and enjoy some summertime.

And in the meantime, don’t forget: Head Start is access to the American dream. Go make dreams happen!

Dr. Deborah Bergeron has spent over thirty years working to support the growth and development of children. She led the Office of Head Start and the Office of Early Childhood Development at the Administration for Children and Families in the Department of Health and Human Services from 2018–2020. As the Deputy Director of Community Engagement and Innovation at the National Head Start Association, she aims to bring the Head Start and Early Head Start community together, provide the necessary support to ensure high-quality programming, and be a constant reminder to the folks on the ground that they are the backbone of Head Start and Early Head Start.