Coaching and Consultation Practices in Early Childhood

Coaching is one of the best ways to enhance the skills of early childhood practitioners and ensure high‐quality learning experiences for young children with and without disabilities. With this authoritative professional learning resource, educators and early interventionists will learn how to use coaching and consultation methods to support inclusion and ensure the best outcomes for all children from birth to five.

Written by two experts on early childhood intervention and special education, this book introduces multiple models of professional collaboration and offers in‐depth guidance on how to implement an effective consultation/coaching model in early childhood settings. From big‐picture considerations to small logistical details, professionals will master the entire process of creating, maintaining, and evaluating a successful coaching relationship. In each chapter, case examples, discussion questions, chapter summaries, and group activities reinforce key points and encourage reflection.

An essential professional resource and an ideal textbook for courses on consultation and coaching, this comprehensive guide will help early childhood practitioners work together to improve educational and developmental outcomes for all young children.

DISCOVER HOW TO:

• Establish ground rules and objectives for coaching
• Build rapport and strong communication skills within a coaching relationship
• Systematically gather information about the child, teacher, and learning environment to inform coaching practices
• Work together to set and prioritize intervention goals for children
• Create and implement an action plan that addresses intervention goals
• Deliver effective performance feedback
• Evaluate the success of both the coaching plan and the partnership
• Use current technology to harness the benefits of tele‐intervention, mobile coaching, and remote consultation

PRACTICAL MATERIALS: Support successful coaching and consultation with more than 25 reproducible downloads, including progress monitoring forms, action plans, a planning matrix, self‐assessments, and coaching session sample logs.

Dr. Laurie Dinnebeil is a Professor and holds the Daso Herb Chair in Inclusive Early Childhood Education. She was a preschool special education for five years before entering higher education. She has taught a range of undergraduate and graduate courses related to early childhood education and early childhood special education and has published extensively in the area of itinerant ECSE service delivery. Dr. Dinnebeil is a proficient grant writer, having secured over $6 million in national and state funding over the past 15 years.

Dr. Dinnebeil is very active in the field of early childhood special education at the local, state, and national levels. She is a past president of the Council for Exceptional Children's Division for Early Childhood and a past president of the Ohio Higher Education Consortium for Early Childhood Education. She is Associate Editor for Topics in Early Childhood Special Education and serves on editorial boards for numerous academic journals related to early childhood education and special education. Dr. Dinnebeil is active in the local, state, and national early childhood education communities. She is a 2002 Mid-Career Fellow for Zero to Three. She also has college administrative experience as a department chair and associate dean for graduate studies and research.

Dr. McInerney is a Professor of Special Education in the Judith Herb College of Education at University of Toledo in Ohio. He teaches graduate-level courses in the early childhood special education (ECSE) area. Throughout his career, Dr. McInerney has secured U.S. Department of Education-Office of Special Education Programs (USDOE-OSEP) funding to support graduate-level training of ECSE teachers and early intervention personnel. He has managed several grants that have focused on itinerant early childhood special education (IECSE) services and has coordinated, with his associates and the Ohio Department of Education, a statewide professional development program for IECSE teachers and their supervisors. He and his colleagues at the University of Toledo have presented their work at professional conferences and have consulted with school districts and state education agencies concerning the status and future of IECSE services.