Improving Family Engagement, Cultural Competence, and Socioeconomic Awareness in First Steps Provider Training

Abstract

To effectively demonstrate equity within the practice of early intervention, providers must feel that they are supported and equipped with family-centered and evidence-based strategies encouraged by their early intervention programs, such as First Steps. First Steps is the statewide early intervention program from the Division of Disability and Rehabilitative Services for Indiana. To perform best practice and encourage positive child outcomes, early intervention providers should continuously apply family engagement, cultural competence, and socioeconomic awareness throughout their work. Although the importance of these aspects is emphasized in various core values and principles, it can be a challenge to apply them due to ambiguity of these terms, lack of professional development on these topics, and the tendency to solely focus on the child. To address these challenges, this capstone will aim to reduce the ambiguity of these terms, to provide training for First Steps providers on these topics, and to better understand the perspectives of different families on how to strengthen these domains within First Steps. The overall purpose of this capstone is to conduct virtual focus groups with families of First Steps and to use their feedback with evidence-based principles to create a professional development course for First Steps providers. Thus, this capstone will aim to practice inclusion of family voices within the professional development course on family engagement, cultural competence, and socioeconomic awareness to promote First Steps providers in producing more positive child outcomes.