Ana Valdez: Hello coaches, and welcome to this session on using the Florida Early Learning and Developmental Standards to strengthen your coaching practice.

The Florida Early Learning and Developmental Standards are, sometimes, lovingly called the FELDS.

Our objective today is going to be to support you in using these standards to help your coachees identify meaningful focuses for coaching, while also integrating some evidence-based practices that will enhance children’s learning and development.

We all know that your role is critical in helping educators translate standards into everyday practices that will improve child outcomes and classroom quality.

To start, I’m going to invite you to reflect on this question. How confident are you in your ability to use the FELDS as a coaching tool?

If you happen to have a notebook nearby, jot down where you currently see yourself on a continuum from not confident to very confident. This is going to help you track your growth as we move through the session. 

And don’t judge yourself too hard if you fall on the non-confident side of the continuum; we’ve all been there. It’s one of those things that if you don’t use it, we kind of lose the habit, so, offer yourself some grace if you fall into that non-confident side on the continuum, that’s OK.

Our goal is to eventually get us to very confident and these are some of the things we’re going to cover today: the approaches for using the Florida standards to identify coaching focuses, strategies for weaving evidence based practices into coaching conversations, how to leverage the standards to guide coaching toward practices that foster improved child outcomes. 

That’s one of those phrases that I love to repeat and stress: practices that foster improved child outcomes.

Let’s begin by grounding our ourselves in why the Florida Early Learning and Developmental

Standards matter for coaching. These standards are going to outline the developmental benchmarks children should reach across all domains. 

So think about domains like language and literacy, mathematical thinking, social emotional development and approaches to learning from birth to kindergarten. They kind of serve as a road map that ensures that teaching practices are aligned with children’s developmental stages and their needs.

So using the Florida Standards to identify a coaching focus is something that we always need to keep in the forefront of our minds when we’re having a coaching conversation.

Imagine you’re coaching a teacher who is unsure if their math center is developmentally appropriate. Instead of starting with opinions, which sometimes we tend to do, and that’s OK, remember we are moving ourselves from not confident to confident in that continuum, we can reference the mathematical thinking benchmarks for the age group that teacher may serve.

For example, the standards might indicate that children aged 48 to 60 months should demonstrate the ability to compare quantities. You could go and observe that Math Center to see if there are indeed opportunities for the children to engage in these comparisons, like using scales, counting objects or discussing the terms more and less.

Doing this for this approach is going to do three things. It’s going to ground the coaching conversation in clear developmental expectations, it’s going to encourage coachees to reflect on their classroom practices and it’s going to create a shared language between you and your coaching.

You might take this opportunity to ask some reflective questions, if you remember from coaching and those ORID questions, one of those is those reflective questions. 

So you might ask things like what do you notice about how children engage with the math materials? Which benchmarks are you hoping to support during center time? How might we add materials that will encourage county and quantity comparisons?

This is going to help your coachee make intentional choices while positively influencing teaching practices. Remember that part of that coaching conversation and asking those ORID questions is to get that coachee to kind of have that “aha” moment. We don’t want to tell them what is needed. We don’t want to tell them what to do. We want the coachee to make those intentional choices.

So let me give you something to think about. I want you to think about a coaching that you’re currently supporting or maybe somebody you supported. 

How do you think that using the Florida standards could help you and your coaching identify a clear and meaningful focus for your next coaching cycle? Remember in our coaching cycle, we want to make sure that we first begin with that focus. Remember that identifying a focus video you all did? That’s what we want to make sure we do.

We want to help the coachee identify a clear and meaningful focus for that coaching cycle. So think about that coachee and just jot down your thoughts. And if you don’t have something near you to jot down your thoughts, just keep it in the forefront of your mind.

Now we’re going to shift a little bit. We’re going to shift into evidence based practices.

What are evidence based practices? We hear that term all the time.

Evidence based practices in early learning are strategies that are supported by research that show positive impacts on children’s development and learning. They help teachers not just meet standards, but do so effectively.

And some of these things might look like, some examples for you to think about is, reading aloud with interactive questioning that’s going to build vocabulary and comprehension, using visual schedules to support smoother transitions (we love those visual schedules, right?) and providing opportunities for child-led exploration that’s going to foster some problem solving and creativity.

So you might be wondering, how do these practices connect to the standards?

Well, the standards are going to provide the what, while the evidence based practice will provide the how.

Let me say that again: the standards are going to provide the what, while evidence based practices are going to provide the how.

For instance, if the standard focuses on demonstrating curiosity, an evidence based practice might include setting up open-ended exploration centers. For literacy benchmarks, dialogic reading with questions like “what do you think will happen next?” is a very effective evidence based method. And you as a coach can ask reflective questions, remember we talked about those reflective questions part of ORID, such as how do children respond when you use open-ended questions during story time.

You’re going to want to highlight strengths, for example, “I noticed you paused during your read-aloud to let children share their thoughts.” That’s going to align beautifully with fostering comprehension, and you can also connect directly to benchmarks, sharing how the practice they used helps meet the target developmental area.

So let me give you a little example of a coaching conversation.

“Miss Diaz, I noticed during your math center that you encouraged Jamal to count out five blocks before adding one more.”

That aligns with the benchmark for counting and quantity comparison.

How did you feel about that interaction? Would you like to explore additional strategies to support children who are still developing one to one correspondence? 

Using this approach is going to honor your coaches expertise while also integrating the standards in a reflective, strength-based way.

Here’s an additional practical example:

If a teacher struggles with transitions, you can always explore visual schedules or transition songs to support that executive functioning and social emotional development. If a teacher wants to improve peer interactions, you might introduce partner play strategies and explicitly teach turn taking, which is aligned with the social emotional development standards.

That’s a lot I’ve given you, so let me give you something to pause and think about.

Which evidence based practices have you recently observed in classrooms you coach? How could you explicitly connect these practices to the Florida standards in your next coaching conversation? Take a moment to write down or think about one evidence based strategy you would like to highlight with a coachee along with that relevant benchmark. 

As you’re considering integrating these practices, what barriers might you face in helping educators use the FELDS with intentionality?

We know that these barriers always arise. There’s either going to be a barrier or a roadblock. And a lot of times we hear yes, but those are all barriers, so think about what barriers you may face when you’re helping these teachers use the standards intentionally.

What might you, as a coach, shift in your coaching to make this process feel more supportive and

actionable for your coaches? Think about or write down any potential challenges and your ideas for addressing them, because whenever we hit a roadblock, we know we have to find a way around it, so think about those things. Think about potential challenges and any ideas for circumventing them. What can we do?

I’m going to leave you with a closing reflection. As coaches, you have the power to make the Florida standards come alive, not just on paper, but in the everyday decisions that teachers will make with their children. So think of a coachee who is working hard but not seeing the progress they hoped for, we see a lot of those.

How could you use the standards to shine that light on what is already working while identifying the next intentional steps to support growth?

Remember, the Florida Standards and evidence-based practices are tools that we have to empower our early learning educators. Your role as a coach is not to fix, it’s never to fix, but to partner, reflect and highlight strengths while guiding the next steps.

Make sure you keep your coaching grounded. Keep it grounded with connections, clarity and growth.

Thank you for the work you do everyday to support teachers and young children. Your work does not go unnoticed. Your commitment to this process creates ripples that impact children’s learning and lives for years to come.

Thank you for joining this session and please feel free to revisit the Florida Early Learning and Developmental Standards. We have the website there for you for resources, benchmarks and examples that you can share with your coaches. Become familiar with the website. It’s a powerful tool to have in your back pocket.

If you have any questions or would like to share a reflection from your next coaching conversation using these approaches, we’d love to hear from you.

Thank you for joining us today.