Stages of Implementation: Community Process Guide

1. Gather quantitative data that demonstrates the local challenge, including:
   • Local reports
   • State reports
   • National reports
   • Policy statements
2. Share relevant quantitative data with partners in accessible and varied formats, including:
   • Reports written in plain language
   • Graphs and charts
3. Gather qualitative data.
   • Invite partners to share their data, personal stories, and perspectives on the problem or need.
   • Determine the strengths, challenges, and needs related to the problem or need
   • Survey families who are intended to benefit from the change effort.
   • Facilitate focus groups and public discussion with communities which experience disparities in access to information and services.
   • Focus on solutions; avoid turning the process into a blame game.
   • Learn about the problem and identify additional sources of information if data to understand the problem does not exist.
   • Once an area of focus has been determined, teams identify community partners to address challenges. Cross-agency collaboration will help combine resources and perspectives to enhance current infrastructure so new strategies or practices can be adopted.

Elevating the voices of community members and families will make a more powerful mission statement to leverage support for the project. Commitment to this mission will help improve systems so new strategies or practices can be adopted.

1. Engage partners who are directly and indirectly impacted by the problem or need. Consider partners who will benefit from the effort and who will be responsible for the change effort, for example:
   • Families, family organizations, and PTIC
   • Educators
   • Community organizations that provide resources and support
   • Tribes and tribal organizations
   • Policy makers
   • Funders
2. Prepare for community member engagement. Consider the following strategies that make community member engagement more likely:
   • Provide childcare
   • Compensate participant time
   • Use flexible scheduling
   • Reimburse travel expenses
   • Provide interpreters and translators
   • Ensure meetings and materials are accessible for members with disabilities
   • Translate materials into languages used in the community
3. Evaluate whose perspectives have been included and whose are missing.
   • Conduct focus groups
   • Conduct surveys using multiple methods
   • Gather missing perspectives and expand team membership
   • Provide an onboarding process for members of the community team
4. Identify the group's purpose, responsibilities, and the projected timeline.
5. Establish group agreements for attendance, orientation, and facilitation strategies for meetings and decision-making.
6. Provide time to establish trusting relationships among community team members.
   • Develop a glossary of common terms
   • Develop awareness about the impact of previous actions and decisions on community members
   • Clearly define the purpose and outcomes of each meeting
   • Clarify roles and responsibilities of each member

1. Clearly define the purpose and intended outcomes.
2. Promote awareness and cohesion of the work.
3. Address attitudes and beliefs.
4. Support buy-in for change.
5. Inform action planning.

With your partners, assess the feasibility of potential innovations in relation to needs, desired outcomes, contexts, vision, mission, values, and system resources. Community teams can also lean into the existing programs, strategies and practices that have been implemented to address the local challenges they are experiencing.

Review the research and evidence for the potential innovation:

1. Use plain language with partners.
2. Include the pros and cons of adopting strategies or practices.
3. Determine if strategies or practices align with the community's strengths.
4. Determine if strategies or practices align with the community's needs.
5. Ask if the potential strategies are teachable, learnable, and actionable.
6. Address barriers, for example:
   • Certification requirements
   • Additional staffing
   • Additional funding
   • Cultural relevance
   • Attitudes and beliefs
7. Reach consensus with partners on the strategies or practices to best address the problem or need.

Once strategies or practices are selected, the team develops action plans for what is needed to implement strategies effectively.

1. Identify resources needed and how they will be provided or funded.
2. Assign responsibility for action items and timeline.
3. Identify goals of the action item and how everyone will know success is achieved.
4. Determine team progress towards the goal and adjust as needed through check-ins.
5. Align action items with the mission statement.

The community team first identifies a lead agency that will:

1. Manage and monitor progress of the new evidence-based strategies or practices.
2. Ensure adequate funding, staffing, and other resources.
3. Provide structure for meetings.
4. Confirm the community team represents the community served.
5. Confirm community team members who commit to serve for at least two years.
6. Define roles of team members related to implementation.
7. Develop an organizational plan for who reports to whom.
8. Develop a timeline.

The team develops systems of support using evidence-based practices with fidelity. The community team identifies the challenges and solutions that impact the implementation of the new strategies or practices selected.

1. Develop an agreement between partner organizations and all programs.
2. Connect strategies or practices being implemented to early childhood quality rating or professional development systems to benefit provider participation.
3. Determine who is providing the training:
   • Trainers
   • Training participants
   • Space
   • Materials
4. Identify community partners to provide professional development.
5. Coaching for program implementation supports:
   • Leadership
   • Funding
   • Infrastructure to support practices
   • Policies
6. Coaching for practices implementation provides:
   • A coach
   • Time for learning and reflection
   • Data to measure progress

Use data to drive decisions and ensure changes are made to improve outcomes on an ongoing basis.

1. Identify tools to evaluate the supports provided, including:
   • Program Benchmarks of Quality
   • Practitioner self-assessments
   • Pre- and post- tests
   • Coaching logs
   • Fidelity of practice measures
   • Family surveys
   • Practitioner feedback on effectiveness of coaching and strategy supports
2. Develop data systems to help make informed decisions.
   • Determine how the community measures success
   • Create data collection processes to gather family input and determine how it will be used to make decisions
3. Create an evaluation plan that reflects the data that has been collected, including:
   • Program Data
   • Family Outcomes Data
   • Child Outcomes Data
   • Attendance
   • Suspension and expulsion
   • Measure of challenging behaviors
   • Change in inclusion of children with special needs in natural environments or least restrictive environments
4. Follow-up with families to show how their input will guide decision-making.
5. Use data to celebrate growth, spread community awareness, and share with future partners.
6. Finalize an action plan to guide the adoption and use of the strategies or practices for the present and future that will:
   • Use data-based decisions to guide changes
   • Include efforts into areas of the community without prior support
   • Support new team members in seeing how changes to their work relate to solving challenges

1. Performance expectations that relate to using the new evidence-based strategies or practices are written into job descriptions, orientation, onboarding, and supervision activities.
2. Recruitment, hiring, and retention processes and policies ensure that staff have the knowledge, skills, competencies, and dispositions to support the new evidence-based strategies or practices.
3. Recruitment, hiring, and retention processes and policies ensure that staff reflect the demographics of children served.

Ensure that the practitioner coach has the competence and confidence to review the fidelity data with the individual practitioner and gather feedback based on use.

1. Use feedback loops and improvement cycles to adjust implementation support using data from:
   • Family advisory panels
   • Surveys
   • Focus groups
   • Public forums for discussion and input across the community
2. Develop coaching and training for continuous improvement.
3. Practitioner coaches receive training and mentorship to support their role.
4. Provide on-going training and coaching for people learning to use the new strategies or practices with fidelity.
5. Develop professional development (PD) plans based on processes such as:
   • Performance observations
   • Reflection and self-assessment for continued improvement in using the strategies or practices
6. Review data regularly.
7. Use fidelity measures, such as performance evaluation tools, to regularly assess if new strategies or practices are being used as intended.
8. Use data from fidelity measures to make adjustments before expansion to other classrooms or programs. The necessary changes may be related to:
   • Policies
   • Procedures
   • Funding
   • Staffing
   • Other
9. Use training and program level data to make decisions and incorporate changes into action plans such as:
   • Local program indicators
   • Training evaluation data
10. Develop annual survey to determine whether partner feedback is valued and appreciated.

Implementing practices as intended may require adjustments to the support being provided by the community team. Barriers to completing the work should be addressed.

1. Use community indicators to identify additional support or needed changes.
2. Test the adjustments being made in the organization or program.

Frequent communication with program leadership and staff, service providers, families, implementation teams, and coaches is important to maintain buy-in.

1. Consider the ways in which data are represented and shared.
2. Provide additional training on the strategies or practices, when needed.
3. Celebrate success using testimonials from existing partners that:
   • Feature positive child outcomes
   • Share family stories
   • Highlight program data and outcomes that have been achieved
   • Describe changes in practitioner attitudes, beliefs, and implementation of strategies or practices

Community partners use data to manage and monitor progress and ensure adequate funding, staffing, and other resources.

1. Review and adapt training and coaching support to ensure that staff continuously improve skills and fidelity of practices.
   • Identify individual coaching needs from staff fidelity measures data.
   • Provide training for new staff and administrators.
   • Provide ongoing booster training to staff.
   • Provide coaching for new and experienced staff.
   • Ensure that coaching and fidelity data are separate from supervision of job performance.
   • Onboard new coaches as needed to continue to support buy-in.
   • Adjust training and coaching based on feedback from participants and coaches.
2. Ensure data systems, policies, procedures, and funding sources are integrated, aligned, and fully functioning.
   • Community teams use data to make ongoing decisions that maintain or improve fidelity.
   • Communication plans/agreements and feedback loops ensure that organizational structures continue to support implementation of the new strategies/practices being used.
   • Reliable data systems provide information about specific practices, processes, strategies, and outcomes.
   • Community team reviews leadership meeting evaluations, membership demographics, and family surveys to ensure positive outcomes for each and every child.
   • Policies, procedures, and budgets are examined and adjusted to support implementation and sustainability.
3. Use data and outcomes to inform budget planning with new partners.
4. The community team and existing partners share lessons learned, featuring the positive child, family, and program outcomes that have been achieved.
5. Adjust workload, policies, procedures, and budgets to support scaling up to additional programs.

With the Professional Development Network (PDN) of Program Implementation Coaches, record and reflect on what you've learned over the course of the implementation process, for example:

1. Fine tune processes and policies as new partners are added.
   • Recruit, hire, and retain staff who will use the strategies/practices
   • Write job descriptions, orientation, onboarding, and supervision activities that relate to the new evidence-based strategies/practices
   • Ensure recruitment, hiring and retention processes and policies describe the knowledge, skills, and competencies that support the new evidence-based strategies/practices
   • Onboard new staff on how to use the strategies or practices.
2. Ensure program support reflects the demographics of children and families served (for example, hiring staff who speak the languages of the families served)
3. Develop communication plans that:
   • Translate resources for families and practitioners
   • Ensure families and practitioners can access materials needed to actively participate
   • Translate progress updates
4. Assess staff use of the strategy or practice through multiple sources of information.
   • Self-assessment
   • Observation tools aligned with the specific strategy or practice
   • Video
   • Communities of practice
5. Develop supervision practices that are strength based, transparent, and aligned with the performance review process including use of the strategies or practices.

1. Community team members share their work through ongoing communication with families, funders and community partners.
2. Recruit new programs to implement using knowledge gained from other partnering organizations in the community.