Collaborative Coaching approaches
Specific approaches used to ensure that adult family members and other important people in the child's life (e.g., child care providers) are confident and competent in using agreed-upon strategies in between intervention visits to promote the child's learning and development. The interventionist explains, models, and supports family members as they practice the strategies. While family members and/or other adults practice, professionals provide feedback on strategy use and elicit feedback from the family members and/or other adults on their comfort and confidence in using the strategies. Successful collaborative coaching results in (1) intervention strategies that fit the individual family context and (2) family members and/or other adults who are effective in using, and willing to use, the agreed-upon developmental strategies in between intervention visits, during their everyday routine activities. These practices have also been called family-guided interventions and collaborative consultation.
What is collaborative coaching and who is involved?
Collaborative coaching is the focus of the intervention visit is to ensure that the important adults who are a regular part of the child's life can and will effectively use developmental approaches in between visits. The person or persons the interventionist is coaching are those who are responsible for ensuring the child's learning and participation within the specific routine activity. Therefore, the answer is…whoever usually takes part in the routine activities identified as places to embed interventions. At home, those individuals might be parents, siblings, extended family members, or live in caregivers. In child care, they might be the teacher, assistant(s), family child care home provider, volunteers, or student teachers. In the community, it might be a family member or caregiver who accompanies the child during that activity, and/or the facilitator of a child-directed, formal activity, such as library story hour. Other community members may participate to varying degrees as appropriate.
