Relationship-Based Competencies for Early Childhood Professionals Who Work With Children in Group Care

Kathy Thornburg: Good afternoon! I'm Kathy Thornburg, and I would like to welcome you to this webinar. It is part of a series of webinars, Spotlight on Innovative Professional Development Practice, and it's sponsored by the National Center on Early Childhood Development, Teaching and Learning. As many of you know, this is the webinar that was scheduled for December 19, and we had technology problems. We're sorry we weren't able to get the problems corrected in a timely manner, so we're starting over, and thank goodness our partners at National Center on Parent, Family, and Community Engagement are willing to come back for round two. They will be sharing about the new relationship-based competencies. Before we begin, I'd like to go over some information regarding the webinar. We will be using some of the Adobe Connect features to help us interact, so at times, we'll ask you to type your responses in the chat box located to the right of the slides. We'd also like to point out the question-and-answer box to the right of the PowerPoint. If at any time you have questions related to the presentation, please type your question there. We will answer as many of the questions as possible. Supporting documents for this webinar, the PDF version of this presentation, can be found in the Supporting Documents box at the bottom right of your screen.

If for any reason you get disconnected, use the same link to rejoin the webinar. Good news is, this session will be recorded. And finally, at the conclusion of the webinar, we will post a slide with a link to an evaluation form. Please complete the evaluation because we use this information for improving and planning future webinar presentations, and upon completion of the evaluation, you can download a certificate of completion. If you're viewing this webinar with colleagues on one computer and only one person is registered, please forward the evaluation link to your colleagues who viewed the webinar so they can complete the evaluation and receive a certificate of completion.

It's now my pleasure to introduce our speaker. Dr. Cathy Ayoub is principal investigator of the Office of Head Start National Center on Parent, Family, and Community Engagement. She's associate professor of Harvard Medical School, faculty at the Brazelton Touchpoints Center and director of the Family Connections Project at Boston Children's Hospital. Her research interests are on the impact of childhood trauma across the lifespan and the development and implementation of prevention and intervention systems to combat risk and promote resilience with emphasis on young children and their families across cultures and communities. And now relationship-based competencies for professionals who work with young children, I welcome Cathy. Cathy, thank you for being with us. Cathy, we can't hear you. Cathy, are you on mute? Okay. This would not be fair for us to have technology problems again, so I'm sure, Cathy, when you go off mute, then I'll turn it over to you. Thank you. Well, of course, as any good webinar, you practice beforehand, and a few minutes ago, we could hear Cathy. She is talking, we understand.

Kim Alleyne: This is Kim Alleyne from the National Center of Parent, Family, and Community Engagement. I work with Cathy, so while we are waiting for Cathy to join, I'd love to welcome everyone and thank you again for joining us. We thank you, too, our partners at the National Center on Early Childhood Development Teaching and Learning, for hosting us. We are excited about the opportunity to share with you a preview of relationship-based competencies that we have developed for teachers and childcare providers who are working in group settings. So I hope Cathy will join soon, but in our presentation, we have four main points that we would like to review with you. We'd like to talk with you about why family engagement matters. We will follow our conversation with a presentation of the 10 relationship-based competencies for family engagement, and we will then follow with a discussion of how teachers and family childcare providers can and already do support family engagement. We also are looking forward to closing our discussion with a conversation about how to use the relationship-based competencies or the knowledge skills and practices related to family engagement in your work, in your states over time.

Kathy: Thank you, Kim. We'll just go ahead and start with the next slide, and then when Cathy is able to
join us, you can turn it back over to her. Thank you.

Kim: When we think about the relationship-based competencies and we're thinking about, why are such competencies important, well, we really wanted to be able to articulate the abilities that early childhood professionals need in order to engage families in positive, goal-directed relationships, and by those, we're thinking of those as being grounded in strength-based interactions or views of families. We also want to be -- we want to focus on goals or interests that families have set for them -- for their children's learning as well as for themselves. The relationship-based competencies that we've developed are based on research and practice from across many disciplines. We originally developed a set of competencies for Head Start and early Head Start, and this version of the relationship-based competencies, we've expanded the original set of competencies to be relevant for use in childcare programs, both center-based and in family childcare settings. And we also have had input from folks from those programs, and we also were able to consult families and parents and our National Center for Parent, Family and Community Engagement consortium partners, so I just want to say quickly our consortium partners include the Brazelton Touchpoints Center as the lead, Child Trends, the Center for the Study of Social Policy and Child Care Aware of America. So let's see. Oh, oh, Cathy --

Cathy Ayoub: Hey, Kim. Can you hear me? Kim: Oh, Cathy!
Cathy: Yes, I'm here! Ugh! Kim: It's great!
Cathy: You know me. I hate to be without a voice, and I have been! Sorry about the technology glitch, but thank you for -- See, I knew I needed you. We really...We work together. We're really, you know, these positive, goal-directed relationships are important all over.

Kim: After I promised everyone I would not unleash my froggy voice on the group, here we are. So, Cathy, back to you.

Cathy: Okay. Well, thank you, Kim, and thank you, everyone, for your patience. Again, I know Kim has given you a lot of information about the background of our work and what we've really tried to do, and we really hope during this webinar that you will really help us think about the RBCs, the relationship-based competencies, and really see if you think they may be important to you in your state and to the programs that you serve. I want to go back to the question that we asked you while we were waiting in the beginning and just to point out that a number of you have really talked about some ways in which your state really might be able to use these competencies. Your state, early childhood core knowledge and competencies often for many of you have some family engagement information contained in them, competencies knowledge, so we're hoping that this will be a nice companion to those and that it will really help build those out. And it does look like a number of you have already thought about those things. I saw New York and in Illinois. I was really taking a look at what a number of you said about how you might use -- Puerto Rico! Gracias! I love you!

Okay. In Puerto Rico, it looks like you're also using programs in early childhood to engage parents in special activities, so I think you're thinking a lot. Michelle in -- in -- from Pensacola talked about really encouraging parents to volunteer and be on committees, so great ideas. I hope we can come back to those. We also really want to welcome questions, and I'm now seeing the comments from West Virginia, from Trisha. Wow. Oh, Virgin Islands. Awesome! So it sounds like many of you are thinking about family engagement. We want to talk about the competencies and how we hope they really can be helpful to you. It's really important for us to know whether or not we're on the right track in both thinking about competencies for
the providers with whom you all work, and so we really want your feedback both about their use at the
state level and also for you to think a little bit about how programs will react, what some of the more challenging competencies may be, what the ones may be that really are the -- what I call the low-hanging fruit. What are competencies that you can really grab and take off with? So with that said, we want to make sure that we tell you about our whole suite of competencies and then focus on the competencies that we've developed for early childhood professionals who work with children in groups, i.e., teachers and family childcare providers, but we do hope that these will apply to many professional roles and many different kinds of early childhood settings. With that said, let me move on and tell you about them.

So some of you may have been aware of the fact that Head Start and Early Head Start had what we called relationship-based competencies, and those were developed for them back about 8 years ago, 7 or 8 years ago, and I do have to say that these competencies are based on these original relationship-based competencies that we developed back in -- I want to say 2012. So there are some things that are the same about those competencies. First of all, if you go up to the top of your screen, you see the little figure of the person with his hand up? If you could just let me know by raising your hands, how many of you are familiar with the Head Start or Early Head Start relationship-based competencies? Have any of you used them? So let me know as we continue here, and we'll take a look. So what we've done now is really develop relationship-based competencies to support family engagement for all childcare professionals whether they're in Head Start or Early Head Start or in a number of different other childcare settings. And so we have really enlarged on what we did back in 2012, and we've done this in a number of different ways. First of all, we've simplified them. We are hoping that professionals can see themselves in these competencies. We tried to simplify the language. We'll be talking to you and showing you what the competencies are, but we did add just one new one and that was on leadership and advocacy. We've also really developed the competencies now for a number of different professionals in different roles. We had a single set of competencies that really applied to --   that were more general that we tried to apply to everyone who was working in an early care setting, particularly focused on Head Start and Early Head Start, and now we've really expanded them beyond that. We also have continued to break out not only the roles of the direct service providers, in other words, the direct roles of teachers, but we also have a column, and I'll show you, that really addresses what their supervisors will do because we thought it was important to really delineate both. So I want to show you all of those things.

So let me start and tell you what the entire suite looks like and then where we're going to focus. So these are relationship-based competencies to support family engagement, and there is one short document that we've developed, but it's really for all early childhood professionals. And this is what we have lovingly called our Universal Relationship-based Competencies. Then what we've done is developed three other resources that provide very role-specific information for three key groups of people who serve young children and their families. We have a guide for early care professionals who work directly with families, family support workers, and then the one we're going to talk about most today, we have a guide for early childhood professionals who work with children in group care, teachers and childcare providers, including family childcare. And then we have a third resource for -- that is a guide for early childhood professionals who make home visits, so I'm going to be talking about all three of them because there are a number of things that are parallel or that are really the same across all three. When we look at things from 1,000 feet, when we get down and look at things from 10 feet, there are a number of differences, so we want to be able to talk about both. Before I do that, I'm going to ask if we can have some help and go ahead and take a poll. We really want to know if your state childcare systems --

Who are the professionals who you think have the opportunity to connect with families each day? Oh, here we go. Let's see what folks tell us. So it looks like early childhood education, teachers, we're seeing lots of people, but we're also seeing some of the childcare assistants and subsidy staff. Wow. Family

childcare providers. Some childcare resource and referral staff. And some of you are working with home-
based folks. This is great. And feel free as you answer this. If this raises any questions for you or you have some questions for us, make sure you let us know. Feel free to put it into chat. I don't think we're close yet, so there are a few more people who look like they're responding. It looks like almost half of you or more are really -- really thinking about your early childhood education teachers, and we're going to talk about them a great deal today. Great.

Okay. Looks like we have some great results there, and it really does look like, you know, there's some of all of these people, but most centrally, we're really looking at teachers, and so let's make sure that we do that. If any of you have a particular interest in any specific group of professionals here, please tell us in chat and definitely let us know. Now I'm going to start to do what I call unpacking these RBCs, so here you have them, and let me tell you what it is that you have. These are what the revised relationship-based competencies look like, and so, on the left, you have a list of 10 of them, and I'm going to go through them quickly, and then, on the right, you have a description of the professional practice. So the competency in each category is really an overall dimension of the competencies that a staff person would be expected to have, and then, as you can see, when you move over to the right, under professional practice, there's a description of what it is that the professional practice should look like, so, for example, the first competency is goal-oriented relationships, to positive goal-oriented relationships, and in order to really engage in positive goal-oriented relationships, we would expect the professional to engage in mutually respectful, goal-oriented relationships with families to promote parent/child relationships and family well-being. So that is the primary professional practice of -- that's related to that particular competency, and as you see, we have 10 of them, and let me just tell you about each one briefly. I'm not going to read all this slide because they'll be available to you, but the second one is really to be self-aware and culturally responsive relationships, so those are a second. T

he first two really describe key relationships that we hope that all professionals who are working with children in groups are really practicing. The third is attention to family well-being and to families as learners.

The fourth is parent-child relationships and families as lifelong educators, and let me explain a little bit what the difference is. When we're looking at number three, which is family well-being and families as learners, we're really looking at how families learn and how they can pay attention to the things in their lives that are critical to help them be safe, to help them be economically secure and to help them be well and healthy. In number four, we're looking at helping families build strong relationships and also support lifelong learning, in other words, not just support the learning of the child, but support the ever-continuing learning of the adults in the family.

Then we have parents' connections to peers in communities, family access to community resources. Number seven is leadership and advocacy, and we added that one after we looked across all 50 states and found that this was something that was quite important to a number of people at the state level when we looked at both your QRAS systems, and your family engagement frameworks, and a number of the other kinds of documentations that you provide as states and territories. So then we have coordinated, integrated and comprehensive services is number eight. Although we know, for example, teachers really have a primary responsibility for working with children in their classrooms or in their homes that there also is a responsibility through those children and with those children to coordinate and to integrate and to provide comprehensive services and to think about those services for children and consequently also to coordinate and to integrate that work with their families.

Then we have data-driven services and continuous improvement, which is a core competency for any professional as is number 10, which is to really promote professional growth. So I wanted to give you a sense of flavor of each of those, but now let me really unpack them. Okay. Let's take the first one --
positive, goal-oriented relationships, and here again, you can see the professional practice which is
described. Now, this professional practice applies to, we hope, applies to all of the professionals who are working in early care settings. These may be teachers. They may be teacher's assistants. They may be receptionists. They may be the cooks in the kitchen. They may be the bus drivers if you're transporting children. They may be family service workers or supportive mental-health staff. It applies to the directors. It applies to the management team, all of those people. So this is, again, program-wide. Then when you get down to it, there are examples. So for all of those folks who are really demonstrating positive, goal- oriented relationships, not only do we have the competency and the professional practice, but we have some examples. So we expect those professionals, for example, to understand the importance of working in partnership with parents to support child learning and development and family well-being. Now, there may be some professionals that essentially have more focus on one part of that example, but all the professionals within our early childcare systems really, in some way, engage in -- in any or all of these examples. Now, there's three different components in terms of the kinds of things, let me just use that highly technical word, that we expect staff to do. First of all, we're going to look at knowledge, what professionals need to know in order to really be competent in working with issues that relate to family engagement.

The second is, what skills do professionals need to be able to do? So what do you need to know? But it's not enough to know. You also have to do, and so what skills do professionals need to be able to do? And then you take knowledge and skills, and you put them together, you put them into action, and they become a set of practices, and so we're talking about professional practices, and so, in each case, we're including key examples of what those practices look like, what it is that professionals actually are doing based on what they know, and that's what we're calling a cluster of practices. So let me give you some examples of each, and for each competencies, we -- for each competency, we actually talk about the knowledge dimensions required, the skills and the practice. So we're back to number one, the positive, goal-oriented relationships, again, engaging in mutually respectful goal-oriented partnerships with families to promote parent-child relationships and family well-being, right? So what is it that professionals need to know across all roles? They need to develop knowledge of effective relationship-building practices with parents, with extended family members, with children and with other professionals with whom they work. Then they need to have, for example, the skill that helps families feel safe and respected by building mutually trusting relationships over time, so it's not just a single action, but it's building trust and trusting relationships over time.

That then leads to a set of practices, one of which we could think of as the one that's demonstrated here, which is respecting families by maintaining confidentiality and asking permission before sharing confidential information. And my guess is, you can think of a number of other practices that will fit into this category of positive, goal-oriented relationships, but things now also get more specific, and I'm going to use the second competency here just because we've done a bit for the first. So the second one is self- aware and culturally responsive relationships. So when we take a look at this, generally, this is a relationship-based competency for all, but when we go to unpack it, if we think about it as it applies to all staff, they may adapt material to family's cultures -- cultures, beliefs, values, traditions and languages. That makes sense. But there's some very specific things that the teacher may really prioritize doing in order to really be able to meet this competency. So a teacher, in order to address this competency, might make sure that the learning environment includes music and images and materials representing the child's home language, culture and living situation, and my guess is that many of you could think of other things that the teacher could do beyond this step.

And again, I would ask you to -- If you have suggestions of ways in which you can think that teachers might really do more very specifically to meet the professional practice in this competency, let us know. Now,
again, as I said before, we felt it was really important not only to talk about teachers and family childcare
providers, those people on the front lines that are doing the work, but to also really address their supervisors. And so, in looking at this competency, a supervisor would do something like this example. Make sure that the program materials for families, posters, art inside our classrooms, are culturally, socially and linguistically appropriate, and the supervisor might go beyond that to really try to make sure that the environment outside of the classroom as parents enter the classroom also is a welcoming environment for them, and that then leads into what program leadership -- ...might consider doing in order to be responsive to this competency, that they welcome families who are diverse in structure, cultural and perspective and provide them with an environment in which they can recognize their own cultures, and they can feel connected and cared for. So you can see each competency drills down in this way, and each one is connected. Now I want to stop and open things up for discussion. I've said a lot in a short period of time, and we have two questions here, but I also would like to know what your questions are. I know a number of you are doing things with families, and we're wondering, however, how might the professionals use these competencies? Can you see using these competencies in your states, in your territories, in your communities? Can you see programs using them, and can you see ways of really integrating them in some of your state-level work?

Kathy: Cathy, this is --

Cathy: So those are our questions. Yes, Kathy?

Kathy: This is Kathy, and a couple of good ideas have come through, and I know people are typing now in response to the questions you just asked, but I just wonder if you're familiar with any --   The questions that came up, someone asked, "Has anyone embedded the RBCs into job descriptions?" And I didn't know if you've heard of that or not.

Cathy: Ooh.

Kathy: But not only job description, yeah, others think it's a good idea, but also, some think they might lead to some program policies, so I didn't know if you all were aware of any of this, thought you might want to talk about that as they're typing in some other ideas that I think you'll be able to see here in a minute, but those were good ones that I wanted you to respond to.

Cathy: Oh, thank you, Kathy. These are great questions. We can tell you from the first set of relationship- based competencies that, again, that came out early on that were directed at Head Start and early Head Start, programs did a number of things. Yes. We had a number of programs that began to use them in hiring, and they both used them for developing questions for interviews for possible candidates. Also, I know that teachers formed groups and also talked about how, across classrooms, they could do work. A number of programs did develop policies and procedures so that they had in writing from their leadership how they would more specifically interpret these competencies for their own programs, for their own special families, and that was really important to be able to translate a general competency into ways of practicing the competency that really connected with the families that they served. So those are...Absolutely. People are right on the right track. I know there was another program that did have some family service and some mental-health folks available, and they really took the competencies and reorganized the kinds of consultation services that they received around family engagement, so they actually developed a whole family-engagement division of their childcare, their partner childcare organization, and used the competencies to really organize that entity, so instead of calling it social services or family advocates, they developed a group of core mental-health and social-service people that consulted to all of their childcare programs that was really built in a more strength-based way around the competencies.

Cathy: And, Kathy, are you able to see all the good ideas coming through in the chat, in the question-and-
answer box, about -- Can you see those? Because Heather says, "I think they would work well for professional development" and really targeting where she and others, you know, need to improve or the staff would need to improve policies and program goals. Can you see what folks have either asked or suggested?

Cathy: Yeah.

Kathy: I think it'd be good for you to answer some of those.

Cathy: Yes. Let's go through those, and I'm just looking at those now -- as people have a lot of thoughts. I do see Heather's question about job descriptions. I think that's great, think we talked about that. Let's see. I do love --   No, and I see Barbara's comment about practices that could lead to program policies, which I really think is helpful. I think also --   James comments about designing a framework for policies and procedures and program goals. Hopefully, this will provide a framework. We've also seen people use it. I think I've said this, but let me say a little bit more about individual performance review, and one of the things that we did put out with the first version of the relationship-based competencies was a self- assessment document that just allowed each professional to go through and say, "You know, I think I'm doing this well. I think I need more help. I'm doing competency one well, but I think competency two I need a little bit more help. Oh, I think I'm really able to do an outstanding job, you know, on competency three." So we did find that a number of programs were actually using the competencies around not only hiring but performance review. I do see that Sunny has said that the competencies will fit well with the state guidance. I'm really happy to hear that. I'd love to hear more, Sunny, because we don't want these competencies to be seen as anything that's competing with what you've already done. We really want them to augment the work that you've done and to confirm it and to reinforce it, so that is really, really important. Um...

Kathy: And, Cathy, when I look -- Oh, I'm sorry. Cathy: No, go ahead.
Kathy: When I look at what Heather wrote about how Vermont is weaving them through their family and community engagement road map, it makes me think that, if Heather would put the link, type the link so everybody could see quickly how to get to those, I think that would be a really good addition as well.

Cathy: Oh, that would be fantastic. Heather, if you could do that, that would be super. I also saw that Christine was talking about the importance of reflective supervision, and we really spent a good deal of time embedding the constructs of reflective practice and reflective supervision into the relationship-based competencies and so that, on the supervisors of teachers and childcare provider side of the competencies, we spend a good deal of time talking about how it's important for supervisors to really support reflective practice and to engage in supervision. So one of their skills is really to engage in reflective supervision and to really support reflective practice throughout their work. And in that context, particularly the last two competencies that really have to do with professional development and ethical practice, there are a number of statements there in the competencies that actually do address the need for reflective practice and supervision and how important it is, so thank you for bringing that up because that is one of the core constructs that we're really, really looking at. I mean, it really does -- It looks like the work you're doing, Heather in Vermont, is really quite amazing. And you do have to weave -- You know, you really do have to crosswalk and weave the information into the materials that you have in order for the system to be authentic. I think that's a really important message, and it would be wonderful to see those -- those materials.

Kathy: We already got some links from Indiana and New York as well.

Cathy: There they are.

Kathy: So thank you for that. Cathy: Oh, this is fantastic.
Kathy: Yeah, and then I think Heather mentioned that they're still in process and that she'll be able to share them later, so that's great news as well.

Cathy: Ah, I see.

Kathy: And there is one other question, Cathy, I think, before we move on from Courtney that said, "Are there any measures, self-assessment or observation, to help identify whether people are exhibiting or feel confident in competencies?"

Cathy: Okay. We do have a self-assessment measure that came out with our original competencies that is out there and that folks are using. At this point in time, we are working diligently to actually get the competencies, particularly the universal competencies and the competencies for professionals who work with young children in group care, a.k.a. the teachers and the family childcare providers, out by late this spring, but I'm hoping we will then fairly quickly turn around and develop a simple sheet that staff can use either as a self-assessment or an assessment that a supervisor might be able to use. The other documents that I can refer you to are some of the documents that we've developed at the National Center, and Kim may want to step in here as well because we do have a suite of materials that should be out by mid to late spring that both describe family engagement, what we've called our adapted materials, that are written specifically for childcare, and they really talk about both definitions and practices of family engagement that I think really could be quite helpful, and we also have some materials on relationship-based work that I think might be helpful. And I do think that the original set of competencies are something that can hold you over until the new ones come out. Kim, do you want to say anything more specifically about resources?

Kim: Cathy, I will put the link to the Child Care Technical Assistance, or to some, the CCTAN or CCTA, website, so folks could find those short resources that you talked about that describe strength-based aptitudes and relationship-based practices that define family engagement that we think would be helpful. I'm wondering, Cathy, if you want to talk about the past measures compilation that we did as a possible answer to Courtney's question or a resource she might look at.

Cathy: Oh, thank you, Kim. We do have a whole series that's called "Measuring What Matters," which really describes ways of thinking about measuring family engagement. We also have a compilation of measures as well as a series of documents that really talk about thinking about how you would go about designing and planning and then collecting information and analyzing and understanding information about family engagement and measurements, whether you're looking to measure what programs do or what individual providers do or how parents respond, and we do actually have a limited -- We call it a compilation package of early measures. We are going to be working on augmenting that -- that work this year as well. Oh, thank you. Everyone is giving us great info. Thank you, Heather.

And Sunny also is talking about the guidance for developing family engagement plans, which I think is also a really helpful, helpful document out of the Office for Early Learning. Again, it's wonderful to see so many people who are really interested in all of this work. Are any of you interested in any of the particular competencies or any of the specifics? Again, when this comes out as a resource, it is a fairly lengthy document, hopefully not overwhelming. But we do have quite a bit of details that -- on any of the competencies. My other question would be as well is, do you see any of these that are going to be particularly challenging? We want to be aspirational, but we don't want to set, you know, a vision that's so far beyond what realistically folks can do that they just get discouraged, so those would be my other two questions, are there any specifics that you'd like to know more about, and are there some things that
you think are going to be more challenging and some things that might be easy? I'll wait and see if folks have some thoughts. I see there are people typing. Ah, so some real questions about families experiencing homelessness, and it sounds like they're going to be challenging. Again, Kim, I don't know if you want to say anything about some of the work on homelessness that we're going to be doing, but hopefully, we can -- There will be some resources out there. Sounds like you're -- you're all -- you're hitting on the big ones, poverty, grieving, the kinds of things that really impact family well-being. Connie says, "It challenges buy-in from families." Sometimes you really have to change the culture in the relationship with families, which is why the relationship-based competencies. Oh, and it looks like Barbara is talking about culturally responsive practices, that that also can really be challenging. When parents experience multiple adversities, which again, homelessness, it sounds like, you know, housing, I think you're hitting on all the difficult kinds of things that we often encounter with working with families. This is living and what it's like to walk with them in doing this work, again, poverty, grief. I don't know, Barbara, if you want to say more around culturally responsive practices, and there's some things there that sometimes it's hard. I don't know how many of you are -- are looking at the program level or even the state level when we have so many families that come from so many different cultures, and you want to be able to be respectful and sensitive to all of them, and I was working with a program several weeks ago, and we were really --

They were interested in doing work with parents, and they had Hispanic families from four or five different Latin American cultures. They had Haitian families. They had a large group of Arabic families, Vietnamese families and, I believe, Laotian families, oh, and Chinese families, and they were really overwhelmed with being able to try to really do their best for all of those families. The interesting thing was, once they were able to invite the families and make them welcome, the families did a great deal of the work in getting to know each other. It was really very, very interesting. So. "Single parents that are felons and can't get out of housing," Carol says. Yes, really difficult. I don't know if any of you are working with incarcerated children and their families. That's really, really hard. And these are -- these are the struggles because these are the families that are struggling, but it sounds like what you've really said is that there are families who are facing multiple adversity, and those are often the families who really are looking to us to really partner with them to really provide them with support and care. Sounds like sometimes it's hard to get family buy-in. That was the other one I really saw here. And then the third real issue is really, what does it mean to really have families from cultures, from multiple cultures or from cultures that are different than the providers that serve them?

So tell me if I'm not on the right track. I know Connie also mentions grandparents raising children.

Yeah, and it's hard for grandparents who don't have the energy to commit to anything. And one of the things that we've learned about family engagement is there isn't just one way, but oftentimes, it's really multiple approaches, but the power  often  that teachers can  have with families because of their -
-   because of the important relationship that families share with teachers in the care for their children can really create an incredible bond even with those tired grandparents. Being a new grandparent myself, I can understand. My 7-month-old grandson does wear me out. A lot more comments. It looks like Connie also mentions limited staff, and it is interesting. If there are troubles with staff and staff turnover and having access to enough people, it can make the work harder, and it's harder to build and maintain those relationships.

Kathy: Cathy, we only have a couple minutes left for your last few slides, but this has been so -- such an amazing discussion and so many good resources that have been shared among ourselves, but if you want to just finish up in the next couple of minutes so I can tell them about next time.

Cathy: Absolutely, and I think I'm going to stop. I'm going to end. Just I think Kim makes a really good point. Sometimes for some families, asking about their dreams for their children as a way to start a conversation, and we've had really just had the opportunity of having an extraordinary experience of
asking that question of families in communities that initially parents saw as pretty bleak, and in partnering with agencies, the vision around an entire community changed to a really positive way of thinking about community. So wow. Keep writing, and I'd be glad to even answer in writing because it just looks like so many people have comments. I'm going to move on, Kathy, and I think we really have done a lot of talking about unpacking the RBCs. I'm really anxious for you all to see them. Again, I think we've talked about a lot of these applications at the program level. I know we went to these, and these are the questions that you're answering. So I just want to remind you that we will be coming out with relationship-based competencies for teachers and family childcare providers and probably the universal package first some time, we hope, before the summer. I hope I can say that, Kim, and that's our goal, and if you have more thoughts and you want to be in touch with us to let us know if you think about other kinds of things that we should be doing or thinking of, please let us know. And if you want some additional --   I think we did a lot on resources. I think I've probably covered all these slides without showing the slides, but if there are any final thoughts, I'd be glad to to answer them in chat, and I'm turning this back over to you, Kathy.

Cathy: Thank you, Kathy, for all the great information, and I must say, you know, thanks to Kathy and Kim but also to all the participants who shared such wonderful information, so this was really everyone's webinar in terms of what we -- we learned. So mark your calendars for the next in the Spotlight on Innovative Practices webinar series. You can see it's April 24, same time, and we'll be talking about lessons learned from the state LMS MyPeers work group that many of you may want to learn about in terms of resources for your state. So please take this survey. This slide, you'll see a link. Take the survey by clicking on that link and then remember, after you've completed the survey, you'll receive a certificate of completion once you submit the survey, so we'll leave this up for a few minutes, but again, thank you so much for your attendance, and again, a big thanks for Cathy. And, Kim, I know you weren't going to talk, but thank you so much for sharing your thoughts with us as well and for all the great information you both provided to us today, so again, thank you, all. We'll leave this slide up so you can fill out the evaluation. Thank you.

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