Wendy Morgan, PhD, a senior implementation specialist and instructional design services lead at UNC Frank Porter Graham Child Development Institute (FPG), provides strategic and scalable infrastructure for the ITTI Care Project. Funded by the North Carolina Division of Child Development and Early Education and housed at Duke University, the project offers professional development for the infant/toddler child care workforce across the state of North Carolina to support the provision of trauma-informed child care.

The project’s principal investigator, Katie Rosanbalm, PhD, associate research professor at Duke’s Center for Child and Family Policy, asked Morgan to join her in her work because of Morgan’s extensive experience in shaping the direction and design of community-focused professional development and technical assistance.

Using a coach-the-coach model, ITTI Care coaches train and coach those who provide direct support to North Carolina early childhood teachers, family child care home professionals and child care administrators. Each year, the ITTI Care team runs a nine-month cohort-based learning collaborative for coaches working in early childhood education.

The collaborative includes technical assistance, consultation, mentoring, and practicum support with the goal of training the classroom coaches to support childhood professionals to:

• promote understanding of the impacts of stress and trauma on infants and toddlers;
• develop skills to form supportive, resilience-building relationships and learning environments; and
• identify strategies to support child care provider health and well-being.

While trauma-informed care practices within infant-toddler child care settings have been part of the project’s training materials since its inception, Morgan is charged with shaping the work, building a scalable infrastructure by organizing the practices within a strategic learning design framework. The strategic framework includes discrete learning objectives and clear ways of measuring the achievement of those objectives.

In addition to creating this conceptual infrastructure, Morgan implemented a corresponding technical infrastructure to guide and document coaching support without disrupting it. She also provided the ITTI Care team with visual translations of complex concepts, creating graphics to communicate the model in a clear and compelling way.

The ITTI Care training and coaching content is organized into “rings,” which illustrate the goals of child care that drive the ITTI Care project. These rings—which Morgan helped articulate and visually convey during an earlier engagement—are concentric circles representing consecutive goals. The first goal, found in the center of the rings, is “Start with you,” reminding child care providers that they must first care for themselves before they can help others. Morgan has created unique learning objectives relevant to each ring at each of the three coaching foci.

“Wendy is a wonderful thought partner who helped me turn ideas into something coherent, streamlined, intentional, and effective,” said Rosanbalm. “She helped me step back from the day-to-day work to look at the big picture and think deeply about what I was trying to accomplish; this allowed me to be intentional about my content and design to achieve my goals by incorporating adult learning principles.”

Morgan created a three-phase approach to delineate the learning objectives driving the ITTI Care coaching model. In the first phase, she and the project team derived and articulated a clear framework of goals from the existing training materials and processes. In the second phase, they reorganized and revised the training to more clearly align with and convey that conceptual framework. In the final phase, they created a systematic process that leverages the framework to drive coaching results.

Morgan hired former FPG Data Visualization Consultant David Bogojevich, MEd, to create new coaching support structures aligned with the framework she has implemented. He is developing specialized forms that ITTI Care coaches will use during and after sessions with classroom coaches. Currently, Morgan and Bogojevich are working with spreadsheet prototypes that are easily revised through iterative cycles of development, but eventually this infrastructure could be translated to software development.

Rosanbalm is appreciative of Morgan’s contributions to the work. “Wendy is a wonderful thought partner who helped me turn ideas into something coherent, streamlined, intentional, and effective,” said Rosanbalm. “She helped me step back from the day-to-day work to look at the big picture and think deeply about what I was trying to accomplish; this allowed me to be intentional about my content and design to achieve my goals by incorporating adult learning principles.”

“My job here was to help ITTI Care delineate and articulate the amazing work they were already doing so they could build on it,” said Morgan. “Now they can clearly convey to classroom coaches the skills they have developed. And with a system in place that organically documents growth and provides data without encroaching into natural coaching conversations, they are well-poised to scale their project. I’m grateful to have the opportunity to support their critical work.”

Morgan appreciates getting the chance to support Rosanbalm’s work. “My job here was to help ITTI Care delineate and articulate the amazing work they were already doing so they could build on it,” said Morgan. “Now they can clearly convey to classroom coaches the skills they have developed. And with a system in place that organically documents growth and provides data without encroaching into natural coaching conversations, they are well-poised to scale their project. I’m grateful to have the opportunity to support their critical work.”