My name is Nathanael Gale I'm a program officer for SETA Head Start
For those of you that don't know SETA Head Start is the grant grantee for the County
of Sacramento I'm Denise Gale I'm an Education Coordinator,
also with SETA We have been going into our 5th year of implementation
of Teaching Pyramid in a good portion of Sacramento County
We thought to share a little bit on the vision that we have tried to create in our program
Some of the things that have gone well and the challenges that we have had
Much like a lot of you when you probably entered into this situation, this Teaching Pyramid
situation as we call it You were potentially very confused and I know
for the first year or two we were clueless We would sit on our Leadership Team and everyone
would go around the table and have such wonderful, fabulous things to say and we would still
be like "I don't know?
We are still trying to figure this out."
Our agency is moderately sized We serve thousands of children county wide
in Sacramento Our SETA operated programs, the grantee serves,
I believe 2500 children We have 100 different classrooms at 30 plus
different sites So it's a large program
What we have done, what we are beginning to be in the process of doing is a cultural shift
in our program Prior to Teaching Pyramid, our mental health
services, our social-emotional curriculum, our services in the classroom had a lot of
variety to it Often, people would talk and they would be
talking a different language So we had a very fragmented situation
With Teaching Pyramid, one of the most important thing it has done is given us a common language
What was pretty challenging for us to push forward because being in a middle management
admin situation and I'm bringing a social-emotional, or mental health perspective to mental health
experts And telling them, "Hey, you know what you
were doing?
That's really cool and you work really hard, but we want you to do this"
I think some of the success that we've had is that we've had some pretty strong driving
agents in our program I think if you are going to be successful,
you need to identify one or two people in your program that don't really take no for
an answer That are able to remove obstacles because
there will be a lot of obstacles One of the obstacles again is getting people
to participate We have had to become comfortable with transitioning
from volunteers to volunteered and selecting people
We have a couple of our teachers that we have volunteered to participate in our Leadership
Team Also, volunteered them to be mentor sites
It doesn't make you the most popular people but in the end it's worked very well because
we have identified people that will drive the ideas and will carry them through
If anybody works in Head Start, then you know we got a new pair of shoes every program year
A new focus that we have to have So having someone that stay true to that course
and promotes Teaching Pyramid We have successfully, and at this point, we've
got complete management buy in Our deputy director knows what Teaching Pyramid
is We remind her that she needs to be friendly
and respectful **audience laughs**
Obviously this is a long process, so I'm not going to sit here and tell you that all of
our classrooms are CSEFEL strong, if you may, but we are making progress
We have plans on how to move forward with this
I also wanted to bring up, first of all we train through the county in small pieces
Some from each agency, that's how we started Then we decided internally, just in a SETA
operated program, how are we going to train our 300 plus staff
We had just a sprinkling of just 2 or 3 sites at that point that had gone through all 4
modules..
The 3b thing throws me I need it to be 1, 2, 3, 4 just so you know
**audience laughs** So we started with module 1 and broke it down
to 3 smaller trainings so our staff would come in
We had to repeat it 8 times in order to have all of our staff go through that training
We just started off that way and it took us about, and then we did the same thing for
module 2 and then 3a and 3b That was all of our staff, through 1 and 2,
including our teacher assistants Then module 3a and 3b were training our Head
Start teachers and site supervisors only at this point
That is basically how we found a way to train everyone in our agency
And we struggled with our coaching, we are still struggling to build that pool and make
that stronger I'm thinking there is something else she wanted
me to cover Oh!
The other thing I wanted to talk about just really briefly about is the shift for our
mental health Nate mentioned it a little bit, but we have
Ronald Dent, who is here and has been a part of it the whole way
And Shondell who is now a portion in Ambar as well
To speak for Ronald as far as what happened to him
He was giving his services for years and years and years and we came in and said, "Your services
are going to change a little bit" And it really is bigger than that, but Ronald's,
the transitions he's made is from a mental health specialist to a Teaching Pyramid coach
So he is still working with some of those children at the top of the pyramid who have
referral But more than that the job has evolved into
a coaching position essentially That is what they are solely providing and
have been providing it to all classrooms whether the have referrals or children at the top
of the pyramid or not So that has been a big shift that has effected
our policies and procedures We had to completely rewrite our policies
and procedures that surround mental health We've also modified all of our forms and our
flow charts in regards to mental health services to meet the pyramid model
Now we are in the process of actually melding our special education and mental health services
into one very similar process using a lot of the same strategies to meet the children's
needs in our program