The Critical Role of Early Intervention
Danny Torres in conversation with Angela McGuire
Angela McGuire:
I think we often hear about when things don’t go right. We hear about the confrontations or we hear about the parents who are dissatisfied with services or the district that’s maybe not meeting the needs of children and families, but if everyone can keep the focus on the child and bring to the table the things that are strengths for them and recognize the things that are strengths in others, then they can benefit the child in greater ways.
Danny Torres:
Welcome to Leading Voices, a podcast brought to you by WestEd, a national nonprofit, nonpartisan research, development, and service agency. This podcast highlights WestEd’s leading voices shaping innovations and applying rigorous research in ways that help reduce opportunity gaps and build communities where all can thrive. I’m Danny Torres. I’ll be your host.
Last year, more than 441,000 infants and toddlers with disabilities and their families received early intervention services across the United States. At the heart of these services are early childhood professionals who partner with families to support the development of their children and equip them with tools to nurture their child’s growth and well-being. In this episode of the Leading Voices Podcast, we’ll discuss the critical role of early intervention in improving outcomes for our youngest children with disabilities and how best to support early intervention professionals in this work. Today we have Angela McGuire on the program. She leads the Comprehensive Early Intervention Technical Assistance Network at WestEd. It’s also known as CEITAN. Through CEITAN, Angela and her team provide early intervention professional development, technical assistance, and consulting for national, state, and local agencies serving children with disabilities and their families. She’s also a parent of a child with disabilities and a former classroom teacher. Angela, it’s great to have you on the program.
Angela McGuire:
I’m happy to be here. I’m excited.
Danny Torres:
Now, Angela, you’ve been working with early intervention professionals for many, many years. What do state leaders need to know to better support intervention professionals and the children and families they serve?
Angela McGuire:
Well, I think first and foremost they need to understand that early intervention is really a training ground for the families, and it establishes a foundation in support, to support the development and learning of their children throughout their educational career. The goal for early intervention is not to fix the child. It’s really to set them up for success in the future, so professionals need to be intentionally prepared and supported to know how to do that, to know how to support and engage families. There’s so much that’s going on in the field of education and in early intervention. Everybody’s dealing with staff shortages and issues of professional recognition and compensation, certainly. Our early intervention professionals, I think there’s a misperception that it doesn’t require a lot of training or special knowledge because you’re just playing with babies, and that is really not true.
The early intervention professionals need to have, first of all, a very solid foundation in typical development, but they also need to be able to identify when development is maybe off track and what to do about that and when it’s time to involve a specialist, that sort of thing. Depending on what state you live in, early intervention service professionals are contracted and compensated in different ways, so it’s become a real issue in some states where the caseloads are really high for managing the IFSPs for families and where maybe the professionals are… There’s not equity across different systems that deliver the services.
Danny Torres:
You mentioned IFSPs. For the benefit of our listeners, an IFSP is an individualized family service plan. Now, these plans guide services for children and their families. They’re written after a child has been evaluated and found eligible to receive early intervention services. How can states better support early interventionists and help strengthen their partnerships with families?
Angela McGuire:
Well, each state has a lead agency, and those lead agencies have a variety of requirements that they need to meet that could involve and take into consideration this idea of supporting the families to carry on. For instance, they provide professional development, both pre-service and in-service opportunities, and develop a list of competencies, things that early interventionists need to know and be able to do to support families. They also can help the local leadership to understand how they are required to engage families in improving state systems, taking into consideration what the actual needs of children and families are, what their situations are, and integrating that into the way that services are designed and delivered for families.
Danny Torres:
What are states doing to support workforce development and capacity building for early intervention professionals?
Angela McGuire:
One thing that we’ve seen is many states have reduced their caseloads for early intervention service providers. Because you’re reducing the number of children that they’re serving, of course you’re going to need to increase the number of early intervention service providers that you have. They’re really making an effort to make sure that they’re doing outreach and bringing in new professionals who reflect their communities that they’re working in, so bringing in a more diverse workforce. But you can’t be guaranteed that you are going to be assigned to families who look like you, so what we’ve done is helped our state to design some professional development that…
We called it the Cultural Humility Series, so that new professionals and existing professionals could build their capacity to be able to work with families that weren’t like themselves, so they could understand kind of the cultural preconceptions that they brought to the work and that they maybe have about some of the families that they serve, and address those so that they can work more effectively with different types of families. The other thing is we’ve had so many families coming from so many different parts of the world, it’s really difficult for any one agency to be able to really reflect what their community looks like, so helping the professionals build their cultural competency is also important as it is to reflect the community that you’re working in.
Danny Torres:
Thanks, Angela, for mentioning the issue of diversifying the workforce. I think it’s a very important topic, and in fact on our next episode we have Monica Mathur-Kalluri to discuss how best to do that. What I’m also hearing is that it’s not only about diversifying the workforce, which I think we all agree is important, but it’s also about building cultural competencies among intervention professionals in general. Let’s shift gears a little bit and talk about policy. What role do state education leaders have in policymaking?
Angela McGuire:
Sure. IDEA is our federal law, but each state also has their state version of that early intervention law. In California where I live and where my daughter received her early intervention services, we have the California Early Intervention Services Act, so yes, they do have their own laws, their own policies, and then they establish regulations and just ways of working for the delivery of the services. Every state and territory in the union provides these services, but each state tends to do it a different way. The states… Yes, they influence the way that those early intervention services are delivered to families.
Danny Torres:
Can you tell us about the Comprehensive Early Intervention Technical Assistance Network at WestEd, also known as CEITAN, and the work that you’re all doing specifically in California?
Angela McGuire:
Sure. We’re currently working in a couple of states, but we have the longest history and relationship with California’s Early Start program. Early Start is what we call the Early Intervention Part C program in California. We have been working in California for 30 years, probably more, and we’ve developed a curriculum to educate early intervention and early childhood professionals about typical development and development within the context of specific developmental areas and within specific disability conditions. We’ve included in that curriculum principles for working with families of children with disabilities and delays and practices for delivering services.
All of our content is evidence-based; it’s grounded in seminal and recent research; it’s family-centered; it’s relationship-based. We recognize the family as the consistent critical influence in the life of a child, and we actually actively partner with parents of children with disabilities, parent leaders and younger parents to design and deliver the curriculum to professionals. Our approach, it blends interactive educational technologies with strategies that are both live and model that relationship-based learning that we hope to see early interventionists using with families.
Danny Torres:
Can you tell us a little bit more about the educational technologies that you’re talking about here?
Angela McGuire:
Sure. We have just… Let’s see. For the past 12 years, we’ve actually been delivering most of our content online, but when we designed that system, we wanted to make sure that we didn’t lose that relationship-based focus. So the first thing that we did was involve families in the design of the curriculum, but we also formed these parent and professional facilitation teams. When someone takes a course in our Early Start online courses, they join a cohort of learners, and each of those cohorts is facilitated by a parent and professional team. They’re modeling that relationship for the folks that are taking the courses online, and their role is to interact with the learners to make sure that they’re getting the content, but also to engage them in conversations so that they can learn to have those conversations with families and other professionals.
That’s how we’ve kind of tried to model and promote the relationship-based services. We do that as well in our live trainings. We produce a variety of live trainings. We have an annual conference that we assist the state to produce, and occasionally we’ll have kind of a more structured annual curriculum delivery, but we encourage all of our training teams to partner with either parent leaders in their communities to present their presentations or actual families who are maybe recent graduates of early intervention services with their children so that you always have that parent and professional voice in our professional development.
Danny Torres:
Angela, in your Q&A blog post published in February of 2024 called Transforming Early Intervention and Improving Outcomes for Children, you mentioned that a core component of your professional development model is your relationship-based approach. Can you explain that approach and how it’s different from the family-centered approach?
Angela McGuire:
Yeah. Of course, no young child exists independent of their family or caregivers, so it’s really important that because the family is so integral to that child’s care and development that they’re involved in the intervention activities. That’s where the family-centered and the relationship-based comes in. Actually, both of those terms are kind of multifaceted. So, family-centered, yes, the early intervention is focused on the family, but it’s also intended to reflect the family’s concerns and priorities and culture. You’re probably not going to see early intervention services that look identical from family to family or are delivered the same way across families or even in the same neighborhood or city by the same service agency. It’s very individualized and focused on the acknowledgement that the family is that very important first teacher.
Now, relationship-based, that’s, like I said, also multifaceted, but the relationship that we’re referring to is between not only the caregiver and the child, but also between the caregiver and that early intervention service provider. You get a very close bond with your early intervention service provider because they’re working in your home. They’re working with you directly to support your child. You get to know each other very, very well. They get to know you really well so that they can pull the strengths out of you and identify maybe the areas where you need a little extra support to support your child’s development.
Danny Torres:
Angela, as an expert in this field and as a parent of a child with disabilities, what can you tell us about how we can best prepare parents in particular to support the development of their children and then advocate on their child’s behalf as they move into the K-12 system?
Angela McGuire:
Well, one of the things that I always say to my early intervention colleagues is that they’re so nurturing. They really are. They’re just… I think they came to this profession because they love babies, they love working with families, and they want to take care of them. That’s very nice. It’s a very nice thing to do. However, it’s really important that our early intervention professionals work at working with families and not doing for them. That’s one of the big pieces of advice that I like to give, working with families and not doing for them. When a child turns three, that does not necessarily mean that the child’s developmental support needs go away or certainly that their disability goes away. It was never intended to eliminate the disability, just to provide the support for development. So who’s going to carry that on later on? It’s going to be the family.
This early intervention experience is what is preparing the family to carry on, and that is to advocate for their child. Families need to learn and to be confident about navigating probably multiple systems. If a child does not qualify for special education services when they leave Part C, there’s a very good chance that they are going to maybe be involved in some other systems. The healthcare system. I mean, how many of our kids go through their entire childhood and don’t ever get sick? Parents need to have the confidence to be able to talk about what their children’s needs are and what their family’s priorities are. The other opportunity that I think early intervention provides for families is the power to influence their child’s future, but also the future of other children if they so choose.
Not everyone, not every parent is going to become involved in the kinds of stakeholder engagement opportunities that you have once your child enters, well, actually any of the services under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, but there is an opportunity to participate on school site groups, on district planning groups, at the state level in what we call under early intervention. We have the Interagency Coordinating Council on Early Intervention. Every state has one, and they all must have parent representation on them, and parents of children who are younger than mine, so there’s always an opportunity for parents of younger children to participate. Those kinds of bodies provide information to the state education agency, the state lead agency, or the Office of Special Education Programs about how services should be delivered for all families, so there’s that potential to influence the future of other children and families.
Danny Torres:
What are some emerging trends or innovations that you’re seeing in the field of early intervention?
Angela McGuire:
The emergence of AI or artificial intelligence. When Cassidy, my daughter, was little and receiving early intervention services, honestly the internet was kind of in its early days, and we were already overwhelmed with information. Now we’ve got this really huge universe of information from the internet and artificial intelligence where you can go on a website and ask a question and get who knows what kind of information that’s advising you of what to do maybe with your kid. I think educators and others, hopefully, are really looking at what is it that families need to know about AI? How do you recognize when something has been created using artificial means? How do you check the veracity of information that you’re getting? How can you use AI to support your child?
There are possible uses of AI that would be really, really fantastic, I mean, especially thinking about later years, just making modifications to curriculum for kids who are at different reading levels from their classmates. That would be a cinch with AI. There’s a lot of potential there. There’s a lot of things to kind of be cautious about as well, and same thing for professionals. They need to know when and how to use it ethically and carefully and protecting the information of families and themselves.
Danny Torres:
Angela, if you had state leaders, early intervention professionals, and parents all in the room together right now, what would you say to them?
Angela McGuire:
Gosh, I’d like to just speak to all of them. I think that the most important thing that I would say is work together on behalf of the children. I think we often hear about when things don’t go right, so we hear about the confrontations, or we hear about the parents who are dissatisfied with services or the district that’s maybe not meeting the needs of children and families, but if everyone can keep in mind, keep the focus on the child and bring to the table the things that are strengths for them and recognize the things that are strengths in others, then they can benefit the child in greater ways than if they’re meeting each other with confrontation and withholding information. Yes, work in partnership with each other.
Danny Torres:
To approach things collaboratively.
Angela McGuire:
Collaboratively, yes. When I first came to working in early intervention, it was as a consultant to the State Department of Education. The contact from the State Department who would invite me to come out on his monitoring visits to early intervention programs throughout the state would always say, “We’re all equal partners.” I would always add that the parents are more equal because the parents are the thread that goes throughout the child’s life, and so it’s really important to make sure that the relationship between the child and their family members is strong and to maintain that relationship with the family on behalf of the child.
Danny Torres:
It looks like we’ve come to the end of our time. Thank you very much, Angela, for being on the program today. It’s really been an honor to have you.
Angela McGuire:
Thank you for having me. It’s always fun to just talk about my work. I love it.
Danny Torres:
Thank you to all our listeners for joining us. For more information about WestEd’s early intervention work and services, visit the Early Childhood Development, Learning, and Wellbeing page on WestEd.org. You can find this and past episodes of the Leading Voices Podcast online at www.wested.org/leadingvoicespodcast or on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Pandora, iHeartRadio, and Spotify.
This podcast is brought to you by WestEd, a national nonprofit, nonpartisan research, development, and service agency. At WestEd we believe that learning changes lives. Every day we partner with schools and communities across the country to improve outcomes for youth and adults of all ages. Today’s episode focused on one really important facet of the work that we do at WestEd, and I encourage you to visit us at WestEd.org to learn more. Special thanks to Grace Westermann for her collaboration on this episode and to Sanjay Pardanani, our audio producer. Thank you all very much for joining us. Until next time.