The Institute offers a range of training opportunities and program development services to staff of child care agencies, community development corporations, and other agencies that work with children and families. Its aim is to improve organizational capacity to improve caregiver practices through professional development, staff training and technical assistance.
Home-based Care
To support individuals who provide child care to young children, the Institute works with policy makers and organizations to develop initiatives and to train staff who work with home-based caregivers. It offers the following services:
Working with Home-based Caregivers: A Guide for Trainers
The 30-hour training is intended for staff working with home-based caregivers--family, friends and neighbors who are legally-exempt from regulation as well as regulated family child care providers--who provide child care. Participants who complete the training receive a certificate from the Institute. The training can be offered on-site or at Bank Street College in New York City. To meet the specific needs of your program, the training is custom-designed. The following modules are a sample of those available.
To learn more about training to work with home-based caregivers, please email Toni Porter.
Parent Education and Family Support
In addition to its work with agencies and organizations to support home-based caregivers, the Institute also offers a 30-hour training to prepare staff who work with parents and families. Parent's Voices is an interactive parent education curriculum for families with children aged birth to five. It has offered the intensive training in facilitating parent support groups to several programs, including:
To learn more about parent education and family support training, please email Toni Porter.
Evaluating Efforts to Improve Child Care Quality
Policy makers and program administrators are increasingly concerned with assessing their investments in child care quality. The Institute offers a tailored training for policy makers, program administrators, and staff who are interested in learning how to design and implement an evaluation to assess their child care quality improvement initiatives. The training guides participants through the development of a theory of change model, which involves mapping the long-term and intermediate outcomes for the initiative. Drawing on A Toolkit for Evaluating Initiatives To Improve Child Care Quality, which the Institute developed in collaboration with Abt Associates, Inc. and the National Center for Poverty, the training prepares participants to develop an evaluation plan that will effectively measure the initiative!=s results. The Institute has made presentations about using the Toolkit to:
To learn more about child care evaluation training, please email Toni Porter.
The Child Care Assessment Tool for Relatives
With a grant from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Institute has developed the Child Care Assessment Tool for Relatives (CCAT-R), the first observation instrument specifically designed to measure the quality of child care provided by relatives. Although the CCAT-R is still in the validation stage, it is available to agencies and organizations that are interested in using it to assess the needs of caregivers in their programs or to evaluate the results of their efforts. The two-day training on the CCAT-R is offered by the Institute staff and can be done on-site or at Bank Street College of Education.
If you are interested in learning more about training to use the CCAT-R, please email Toni Porter.
Designing Programs to Support Home-based Caregivers
The Institute provides consulting services to agencies and organizations interested in developing programs to support home-based caregivers, particularly family, friends and neighbors who are legally exempt from regulation. We have worked with a variety of organizations across the country including community development corporations, foundations, and child care resource and referral agencies to design and implement programs to support this population of child care providers. They include:
To learn more about the technical assistance and services offered by the Institute, please email Toni Porter.