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COPYRIGHT 2002 ERIC Clearinghouse on Elementary and Early Childhood Education
Abstract
In the face of today's challenging social and family issues, many new efforts are underway to help children and families. One solution that many communities have adopted is the establishment of a collaborative partnership that involves all the relevant partners--home, school, and community--in the planning and monitoring of services for children. Unfortunately, achieving a strong partnership with meaningful participation can often be difficult and time-consuming. This article focuses on a set of training materials that has been developed to assist community partnerships in their efforts. These materials highlight eight elements of continuity and successful partnerships: (1) families as partners, (2) shared leadership, (3) comprehensive/responsive services, (4) culture and home language, (5) communication, (6) knowledge and skill development, (7) appropriate care and education, and (8) evaluation of partnership success. Results from a field study that included more than 200 reviewers and 8 pilot sites are summarized. Results indicate that a majority of reviewers found the training materials easy to understand, relevant to their work, and up-to-date. In addition, data gathered from the pilot sites indicate that the partnerships found the materials practical and useful for addressing a variety of issues, including time constraints, communication gaps, differences in professional training, and funding limitations.
We will need to become savvy about how to build relationships, how to nurture growing, evolving things. All of us will need better skills in listening, communicating, and facilitating groups, because these are the talents that build strong relationships. (Wheatley, 1992, p. 38)
Introduction
Communities face a host of problems that threaten the health and well-being of their children and families. Poverty, unemployment, inadequate care/education, and poor health care are just a few of the difficult issues that communities must confront. What makes these issues particularly challenging is that children and families who experience one problem are often likely to experience other problems as well.
Compounding the problem is that delivery of services to help children and families is typically fragmented and scattered. Even efforts designed to increase the quality and supply of services to children and families have, at times, created greater fragmentation and discontinuity.
In previous years, those who sought to improve outcomes for children concentrated only on the child. Today, however, many service providers have come to understand that the best way to serve and preserve children is to serve and preserve the supportive networks that benefit children (Family Support America, 1996). An extensive body of research identifies the elements that contribute to children's well-being, beginning with those closest to the child and moving outward to encompass the family, early care/education, the neighborhood, the community, and beyond. This ecological perspective (Bronfenbrenner, 1979) has motivated a growing number of communities to focus more closely on the need for collaboration--engaging in a process that allows the community to address many problems at once rather than one at a time.
One solution that many communities have adopted is the establishment of a collaborative partnership involving all the relevant partners--home, school, and service providers--in the planning and monitoring of services for children (Kagan, 1992; Hoffman, 1991). The goal of most of these collaboration initiatives is to improve child outcomes, recognizing that many of the child's needs are closely linked to needs of the family and the community.
Challenges to Collaboration
Community collaboratives/partnerships represent one of the most challenging--yet one of the most effective--efforts for creating a flexible, comprehensive system that meets the needs of children and families. They involve new relationships among service providers and the children and families they serve. They require time, resources, and the willingness of collaborating agencies to learn about and establish trust with each other. In short, they require change (Bruner, Kunesh, & Knuth, 1992).
As a result of the new roles and responsibilities that service providers must assume, collaboratives/partnerships encounter many common difficulties, including (Melaville, Blank, & Asayesh, 1996):
* staff or agency representatives who are resistant to relinquishing power;
* policies and regulations within individual agencies that make it difficult to coordinate services, information, and resources;
* differences in prior knowledge, training, or experience that make it difficult for members to communicate and work together; and
* lack of time to meet and plan together.
Many factors contribute to the success or failure of a community collaborative, and no two collaboratives operate in exactly the same way. However, certain guidelines seem to help smooth the way for a more successful partnership, including (North Central Regional Educational Laboratory, 1993):
* involve all key stakeholders;
* establish a shared vision of how the partnership will operate and
* expected outcomes for the children and families served; build in ownership at all levels;
* establish communication and decision-making processes that are open and allow conflict to be addressed constructively;
* institutionalize changes through established policies, procedures, and program mandates;
* provide adequate time for partners to meet, plan, and carry out activities.
The process of establishing and maintaining a collaborative partnership is not easy, and in the end, each partnership must find a way to proceed that is consistent with its community and unique set of circumstances. However, a number of resources and tools are available to help communities get started creating an effective system for delivering services. In this article, we describe one such tool that assembles elements essential to building a successful collaborative partnership.
Development of Continuity Framework Materials
For the past eight years, the 10 Regional Educational Laboratories (RELs) serving each region of the country have studied effective strategies for strengthening collaboration and increasing continuity among programs for young children and their families. The RELs are overseen by the U.S. Department of Education's Office of Educational Research and Improvement [now the Institute of Education Sciences], and their primary purpose is ensuring that those involved in educational improvement have access to the best information from research and practice. During the contract period of 1995-2000, the RELs established a program called the Laboratory Network Program (LNP), which convened representatives from each Laboratory as a national network working on common issues.
In 1995, the Early Childhood LNP developed Continuity in Early Childhood: A Framework for Home, School,...
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