National Pilots Underway to Test Scaleability
The Family Partnership developed and successfully piloted a new Executive Functioning Across Generations© curriculum designed to boost executive functioning and self-regulation skills with Minneapolis preschoolers and their caregivers.
Now, The Family Partnership is scaling up the preschool version of the intervention through large pilots with two Head Start centers of Family Service of San Antonio.
New partnerships with the Harvard Center on the Developing Child – Frontiers of Innovation (FOI) and the Children’s Home Society of America are testing the feasibility and scalability of new adaptations of the curriculum for virtual service delivery in home visiting and parent education programs.
Using FOI’s IDEAS Impact Framework™, a science-based innovation approach to program development, testing, and evaluation, organizations in four states (Minnesota, Wisconsin, Nebraska, and Delaware) are using rigorous evaluation measurement strategies for the pilots of the virtual home visiting and virtual parenting group adaptations. Pilots are occurring in 2020-2021. Through them, The Family Partnership and its partners continue to innovate in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, safely expanding service delivery while infusing cutting-edge brain science-informed strategies that increase program quality and impact.
The Family Partnership will also be offering home visiting organizations across Minnesota the opportunity to pilot the virtual home visiting adaptation of Executive Functioning Across Generations© in a second wave of pilots in 2021. We are pleased to have the MN Coalition for Targeted Home Visiting as a partner in recruiting home visiting program sites for this effort.
Why Innovation is Needed – and What Comes Next
It often takes 20 years for research findings to translate into practical improvements in human services. While there have been many research projects in the last 50 years exploring innovations in the early childhood field, the most significant and promising practice innovations are over 40 years old – well before all the recent discoveries in emerging brain science.
That is why Harvard Center on the Developing Child launched the Frontiers of Innovation initiative: to accelerate the translation from scientific discovery to practical application in the early childhood field. The goal is to accelerate incorporation of brain science into early childhood practice through small scale pilots that facilitate fast cycle evaluation, quick modification of approaches to increase impact even further, and scaling the strategies that prove effective.
The Family Partnership became a Frontiers of Innovation partner in 2020, joining an international community of researchers, practitioners, and evaluators seeking to innovate and accelerate our impact on children and families. We are thrilled that The Family Partnership is now part of the FOI community, and that the further development of Executive Functioning Across Generations will benefit from this opportunity.
Interested in learning more?
Contact us for information on piloting or scheduling a presentation:
John Everett Till
Senior Vice President of Strategy and Innovation, The Family Partnership
Email: jtill@thefamilypartnership.org