Learning Collaboratives Prepare Child Care Providers to Offer Developmental and Social Emotional Screens to Children in Their Care

2020 Highlights

For the families that use them, child care providers play a major role in children’s lives. A child who attends child care every day can spend 40 hours a week with their provider during a very critical time period in a child’s development. As early childhood professionals, providers are in a great position to monitor how children are growing and learning, and serve as a “teammate” for families in detecting issues early.

That’s why Help Me Grow – Long Island (HMG-LI) partners with child care providers to offer developmental and social emotional screening to the children in their care. Screening is a way to celebrate milestones and identify children at risk for developmental delay. HMG-LI offers screening free for parents online, but also provides training, screening, and ongoing support for free to partners that want to implement screening at their own sites. In September 2019, HMG-LI collaborated with the Child Care Council of Nassau, the Child Care Council of Suffolk, and QUALITYStarsNY to host a learning collaborative for early care and learning providers around developmental screening. Over the past year we’ve jointly held three cohorts, training 22 child care sites to engage parents in their child’s development, provide screens, and make referrals as needed.

“This training was exceptional and I learned so much from the leaders of this cohort… I have done developmental checklists in my child care center before but the ASQ3 and ASQSE brings it to the next level and includes the parents…I am so excited to bring this to my center in the New Year!”

Learning collaborative participant and child care provider

The results speak for themselves:

• 1,500+ screens being completed by our partner sites
• 89% of participants strongly agreed that they now have a system in place to screen and refer children
• 78% of center directors strongly agreed that they had complete confidence in their ability to train their own staff on developmental screening moving forward
• 89% of participants strongly agreed that the learning collaborative model was a value add in implementing screening

As participants learn from us about how to screen during the learning collaborative, we learn from them as well, and have adapted the curriculum to meet the unique needs of early care and learning professionals. The program now consists of 6 group sessions over the course of 12 weeks, interspersed with one-on-one technical assistance from the Child Care Council’s Infant Toddler Specialists. In addition to the training and support, participants receive lifetime access to the ASQ (Ages and Stages Questionnaire) Online system, which includes screening materials, parent handouts, and data reporting capabilities. Participants also receive a “welcome kit” of supplies from the Learn the Signs, Act Early campaign to help promote developmental monitoring with families.

If your organization is interested in providing developmental and/or social emotional screening at your site, please contact info@hmgli.org. You can find a list of recent learning collaborative participants here.