Metropolitan Community College - Kansas City

What information is included?

Change isn't easy. The advent of quality rating systems and other quality initiatives require professionals to engage in continuous improvement. States and other agencies provide itinerant consultants to help support early childhood and school age programs navigate the change needed to improve their quality. These consultants work with family child care homes, child care centers, school-age, and youth development programs, offering knowledge and guidance on a variety of aspects of care and education.

Strengths-Based Coaching™ is based on five foundations:

• Adult learning theory
• Core Beliefs
• The Apporach to Coaching
• Relationship building
• Communication

 

Participants learn how to apply these five foundations to create partnerships with those they coach, using positive feedback that builds on the strengths of each individual. Consultants, supervisors and staff members together explore how their values and beliefs affect their practice, and partner to brainstorm ideas and share information for improving the program.

This training provides a systematic process for gathering information, setting goals, supporting implementation of goals, and reviewing progress toward goals. Specific skills and tasks at each stage in this process guide consultants, supervisors and staff toward quality improvement.

Is there support after training?

Participants leave our training excited to begin creating a coaching culture with clients and staff. Research shows that follow-up coaching dramatically increases the likelihood that new information will actually be used on the job.¹

Francis Institute for Child and Youth Development can supply a personal coach to maximize the impact of this training on your practice. Working with your Francis Institute coach will provide:

• Opportunities to continue learning about coaching
• Feedback in a safe environment
• Support to apply new learning to your own situation
• Guidance to help you to reflect on your own practice
• Collaboration to brainstorm options and strategies
• Encouragement to recognize your achievements and celebrate success

"Follow-up coaching encouraged me to follow through with what I learned. It helped to have someone to be accountable to. It was one more layer of the training that was another growth opportunity."
                       -Kelly Estes, Recruitment/Training Specialist, School-Aged Child Care, North Kansas City Schools

_________________________________________________________ ¹Coaching appeared to contribute to the transfer of learning in five ways.
Those who received follow up coaching:

Practiced new strategies more often and with greater skill than those who were uncoached with identical initial training

Adapted the strategies more appropriately to their own goals and contexts than did those who were uncoached

Retained and increased their skill over time - those who were uncoached did not.

Were more likely to explain the new models to others

Demonstrated a clearer understanding of the purposes and use of the new strategies. The frequent discussions about them seemed to enable them to 'think' with the strategies in ways which those who were uncoached never showed.

(Barkley, S. G. & Bianco, T. (2005). Quality Teaching in a Culture of Coaching. Rowman & Littlefield.)