Bonnie Keilty’s article, in this issue of Young Exceptional Children (Assessing the Home Environment to Promote Infant–Toddler Learning Within Everyday Family Routines), is a gift to practitioners and faculty/professional development (PD) providers. Using the examples of Talia (an early intervention practitioner), the Bautista-Cooper family, and Julio (their child), the author both reviews and demonstrates the relevant recommended practices and how to effectively apply them in home settings. The beauty of the author’s approach is that the strategies offered for home intervention would also work well in any setting. Read on to discover how to use this article as a model for effective learning, intervention, and teaching.
Do You Work With Infants and Toddlers?
Use the DEC Recommended Practices to support effective intervention that is responsive to the context in which you are working. The article highlights a process for learning how to use a home environment to support a child and family. The first step in the process is reviewing the physical, social, and temporal aspects of DEC Recommended Practices for Environment, followed by discussing options for using the practices effectively with team members, assessing all components of the environment in which you will be working, using what you’ve learned to identify potential adaptations to intervention plans, and monitoring and adapting plans based on progress. The benefits of this process are clearly delineated and could, as the author points out, also be used to learn about and plan for intervention in any program or community environment.
Do You Provide PD as a Faculty Member, Instructor, or Other PD Provider (e.g., Coach, Mentor, or Supervisor)?
Use the model provided in the article to help others learn how to use the DEC Recommended Practices to inform their work. The article walks through, step by step, a thoughtful, culturally and contextually responsive sequence for using the DEC Recommended Practices to support one young child, Julio. After reading and discussing the article, a faculty member or other PD provider could provide a different vignette, like the one below.Learners could then be asked to delineate the steps they would take in considering how to support Razae by answering a series of questions: (a) How would you learn about Razae’s social, physical, and environmental contexts? (b) How would you assess the environment(s) in which he is learning? (c) How would you apply what you learn to support both Razae and his family? (d) How would you monitor progress and adjust plans and priorities?
Use variations on the model to explore other areas of Recommended Practice, ages, and settings. By providing vignettes of children and families of different ages, cultures, and life circumstances, the same model could be used to support students/learners to discover new tools and strategies. Razae’s story, for example, would also lend itself to learning about Family Practices. A vignette featuring a toddler who is a dual language learner would create opportunities for learning about and applying evidence-based practices to promote second-language acquisition.
Razae is 12 months old and has been placed in foster care since he was 4 months old. He was prenatally exposed to drugs and was placed in foster care because of domestic violence in the home. Emma and Andrew are the young couple who are providing foster care for the first time.
Razae is a very sweet, rambunctious boy who enjoys music and movement. He’s also a great sleeper. Razae has learned how to walk, makes a variety of sounds, and is imitating others’ language consistently. Based on developmental delays in several domains, Razae qualified for and is receiving home-based early intervention services. He was slow to attach to his foster parents but is now bonding through play and enjoying skin-to-skin contact and other attachment-based activities. These are areas that were goals in Razae’s Individualized Family Service Plan (IFSP). He is thriving in this placement. Razae still visits his maternal grandmother and there is talk of placing him with her in the future.
