What a great idea–in addition to hosting a presentation and discussion, the First 10 team set up tables on play and learns, the transition to kindergarten, the First 10 community school at Hennessy Elementary, The Basics, and early childhood programs for the Mayor and city council and school committee members.
Category: Transitions
Getting Started with First 10: Community Partnerships, School Hubs, and Work Currently Underway (Post #3)
The second post in this series showed how First 10 partnerships are funded, how they are advancing equity by using this funding to support urban and rural communities with significant low-income populations, and how some partnerships are combining First 10 with anti-racism efforts. In this post, I discuss how communities get started with First 10. I describe the two structures—community-wide partnerships and school-based hubs—First 10 partnerships employ to carry out their work, how they form teams, and how they begin their planning efforts.
Community-wide and School-based First 10 Structures, Sometimes in Combination
The First 10 initiative in York City, PA is a good example of a comprehensive First 10 community partnership (see Figure 1 below). York City is a district of approximately 6100 students, 91% are students of color, and 95% are low-income. The First 10 initiative spans the entire city. First 10 is overseen by a steering committee that includes a board member/parent representative and senior leaders from the district, several early childhood programs, the library, local funders, and other nonprofit organizations. York is forming a family advisory committee to allow for more direct community representation, and importantly, the school district is pairing its First 10 work with a major racial equity and cultural competence training push. At the beginning of the pandemic it established several First 10 teams to carry out a number of strategies that impact the entire community:
Continue reading “Getting Started with First 10: Community Partnerships, School Hubs, and Work Currently Underway (Post #3)”Alabama Launches a New Transition to Kindergarten Toolkit
Alabama launched its new Transition to Kindergarten Toolkit in December. We have really appreciated the opportunity to partner with Alabama on this important resource. Congrats to Secretary Barbara Cooper (Department of Early Childhood Education), her team, and her colleagues in other agencies. Alabama asks me to convey its thanks to the Rhode Island Department of Education for inspiring the basic idea of this toolkit.
States and counties may get ideas they can adapt from the toolkit, and communities will find helpful guidance materials in sections 2-9.
The focus of the toolkit is on supporting local communities in developing and implementing effective transition to kindergarten plans. Here are a few highlights that may be of interest:
Continue reading “Alabama Launches a New Transition to Kindergarten Toolkit”Hunt Institute Webinar this Thursday: First 10 in Action
I’m really looking forward to this conversation with Dan Wuori of the Hunt Institute about the great First 10 work underway in Maine and Pennsylvania. We’ll also talk about similar initiatives in Alabama and Rhode Island. I hope you can join us.
You can register by clicking the link here.
Taking Action for Children and Families: Learning from the First 40 Communities (Post #1)
“The ultimate goal of a stronger, more seamless care and education continuum is to initiate and sustain a strong foundation for future success by providing effective learning opportunities across the infant-toddler years, preschool ages, and early grades in all settings.” (National Research Council, Transforming the Workforce for Children Birth through Age 8: A Unifying Foundation).[1]
“The broader lesson of our analysis is that social mobility should be tackled at a local level by improving childhood environments.” (Chetty and Hendron, The Impacts of Neighborhoods on Intergenerational Mobility)[2]
The United States is on the cusp of making a historic investment in early care and education (ECE).[3] This investment comes at a moment in time when the pandemic has exposed the fragmented and siloed nature of our early childhood systems in both urban and rural communities. Widespread racial protests have launched a national reckoning with pervasive racial inequities. Also, during the past two years, an important development has been taking place in the ECE world that can help inform our response to these challenges. Twenty-eight states across the United States have been hard at work improving state and local ECE systems, supported by $275 million of Preschool Development Grant Birth through Five (PDG B–5) funds. The aim of these efforts is to improve the quality of early childhood programs and services, including how programs and services work together in a coordinated fashion to best meet the needs of children and families. I suggest that state and local system-building efforts like those supported by PDG B–5 are essential to how we address learning loss in the aftermath of the pandemic, and how, as we expand access to ECE programs, we rebuild better, more equitable systems of care and education.
Continue reading “Taking Action for Children and Families: Learning from the First 40 Communities (Post #1)”Join Us Thursday: Partnerships for the Whole Child (Panelists Posted)
I’m looking forward to moderating the first webinar in our 4-part series, School-Community Partnerships for the Whole Child this Thursday at 4:00 ET. Please join us as we learn about:
- Boston’s innovative PreK – 2nd Grade curriculum, coaching, and professional learning model and its collaboration with community-based preschools,
- The district-wide use of non-evaluative classroom observation tools to improve teaching and learning in the early grades in Lansing, MI, and
- Woonsocket, RI’s transition to kindergarten partnership and its city-wide approach to social-emotional learning in preK and kindergarten classrooms.
The panelists for the first two webinars are posted here, and the remaining panelists will be posted soon.
Improving the Transition to Kindergarten in Rhode Island (and a great Transitions resource)
My colleagues and I at EDC have been busy supporting First 10 work, including in Maine (13 communities and an inter-agency state First 10 team), Rhode Island, Lancaster County, PA, and Worcester, MA. First 10 in Pennsylvania is now expanding to include the 7-county South Central region of the state. I’ll be posting lessons learned from these initiatives in 2020. In the meantime I want to provide some context about a Statewide Transition to Kindergarten initiative in Rhode Island and share a key document we’ve been using to anchor this work.
The Rhode Island Department of Education (RIDE) is making a major commitment to improving the Transition to Kindergarten statewide. The Transition to Kindergarten is an important component of the First 10 continuum and of First 10 school hubs and community partnerships. At its heart First 10 is about bringing early childhood programs, K-12 education, and health and social services together to improve outcomes for young children and their families. Transition to Kindergarten initiatives focus on the bridge between early childhood and K-12 (ages 3-5), knitting systems together in support of ready children, families, schools, and communities. The transition to Kindergarten serves as a natural place to begin First 10 initiatives, and in fact all the First 10 plans we help communities develop include transition and alignment strategies.
We have worked with RIDE to support Rhode Island’s statewide Transition to Kindergarten initiative for the past 15 months. This initiative includes:
- Providing an ongoing series of professional learning summits and onsite coaching for two cohorts of three communities each: (1) Newport, West Warwick, and Woonsocket, and (2) Coventry, East Providence, and North Providence. Community transition teams participate in these activities as they develop and implement Transition to Kindergarten plans.
- Documenting these communities’ efforts in a lessons learned and case study publication.
- Holding two statewide summits to engage and inform other communities around the state.
- Developing a Transition to Kindergarten Toolkit to be shared with all communities.
- Conducting a survey of kindergarten teachers’ use of data to inform teaching and learning at the beginning of the school year.
Communities have found these supports to be very helpful, and Rhode Island plans to continue offering them to more and more communities across the state.
We began this work by collaborating with Jennifer LoCosale-Crouch, a Transition to Kindergarten expert and professor at the University of Virginia, whose contributions have been invaluable. Jennifer shared an excellent resource she and colleagues developed for the National Center for Quality Teaching and Learning, Planning the Transition to Kindergarten: Collaborations, Connections, and Six Steps to Success. We have used this document as the anchor resource for all of our Transition to Kindergarten work in Rhode Island and elsewhere. It reviews the four types of Transition connections (child-school, family-school, school-school, and school-community) and describes a six-step planning process. I’m also sharing a companion list of sample Transition Activity Ideas by Connection. Many thanks to Jennifer. We recommend these documents and hope you find them helpful.
Hint: Where Planning the Transition to Kindergarten says, “Head Start” read, “Head Start, community-based preschools, and family childcare.”
The Important Role of the Transition to Kindergarten for Low-Income Children
Drawing on his new report, Connecting the Steps: State Strategies to Ease the Transition from Pre-K to Kindergarten, New America’s Aaron Loewenberg writes in Spotlight on Poverty and Opportunity:
“Transition activities such as teacher home visits; parent orientation sessions; and collaborative meetings and trainings between principals, child care center administrators, and pre-K and kindergarten teachers are key strategies for closing the persistent achievement gap between low-income students and their wealthier peers.
In fact, a 2005 study established a link between the number of transition activities schools facilitated prior to and near the beginning of the kindergarten year and gains in academic achievement by the end of the year. These positive gains were greatest for children whose families were low- or middle-income.
A separate study, which focused on pre-K programs, found a positive association between the number of transition activities undertaken by pre-K teachers and kindergarten teachers’ later perceptions of student skills, particularly those of low-income students. Unfortunately, while low-income children stand to benefit the most from a smooth transition to kindergarten, they are also the least likely to attend schools that provide meaningful transition activities.”
“The Preschool Fade-Out Effect Is Not Inevitable”
In Education Week by Stanford professor Deborah Stipek:
“Is fade-out inevitable? No. Studies have shown definitively that investment in preschool can yield sustained effects and significant social and economic returns. But fade-out is common and remains a persistent reminder that simply providing preschool to low-income children is not sufficient to achieve long-term benefits.
If we want to sustain the effects of preschool, we need to look at what happens after children enter school. Clearly, the quality of schooling they receive in the early elementary grades matters. Poor instruction can undo the effects of high-quality preschool experiences. But instruction has to be more than good to sustain preschool effects; it has to build strategically on the gains made in preschool.”
“The Preschool Fade-Out Effect Is Not Inevitable”
And see these two summaries by the New America Foundation:
What “Transforming the Workforce” Says About the Importance of Continuity
New Bedford’s Emerging Work on Transitions and Some Good Resources
The New Bedford Birth–3rd Leadership Alignment Team has chosen to focus its work on three strategies: 1) improving transitions, 2) aligned and collaborative professional development for community-based and district early childhood teachers focused on social-emotional and literacy skills, and 3) effective use of Teaching Strategies Gold data. I’m supporting the New Bedford team along with Titus DosRemedios of Strategies for Children. The Leadership Alignment Team has been investigating the current state of transitions in New Bedford and is developing a survey that will capture additional information on transitions, curriculum, assessment, students served, and related practices.
New Bedford’s Birth–3rd team has also formed a Transitions Working Group that will plan and implement New Bedford’s transitions strategy in consultation with the broader team. As this group begins its work, we have come across a few helpful resources. Karen Surprenant of Pace Head Start shared this slide deck on Effective Transitions to Enhance School Readiness from Head Start’s National Center on Quality Teaching and Learning. In addition to the two sample transition forms shared by Somerville and Pittsfield, we are reviewing the Articulation Checklist and Transition Discussion Template found in the Ounce of Prevention Fund’s very useful Birth-to-College Collaborative Toolbox. Also see this page of transition resources from the MA Department of Elementary and Secondary Education.
Of course these resources only scratch the surface of the many useful guidance documents on transitions, so please share ones you have found helpful by commenting on this post or emailing me at jacobsondl [at] gmail.com.
First 10 