Center of Excellence for Infant and Early Childhood Mental Health Consultation, part of Georgetown University’s Thrive Center

IECMH Consultant Training and Support Guide

While this is a free training & support guide, not all resources listed in this website are free to use. Resources with asterisks (*) are resources that require payment or permission from the original author to access the resource.

Introduction

Introduction Video

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Introduction Video Transcript (PDF)

As a program manager you hired individuals who possessed sufficient competency in the knowledge, skills, and experiences needed for the IECMH consultation role, see resource about hiring consultants. As a program manager one of your responsibilities is to build, reinforce, and deepen these consultant capacities year after year.

You can read about the three key areas by clicking on the plus signs appearing on the graphic below.

  • KNOWLEDGE

    A competent IECMH consultant:

    • Understands and embraces multidisciplinary approaches for working with infants, young children, families, and adults, drawing on fields of professional consultation, psychology, social work, health behavior, early education, IECMH, and family dynamics and systems theory.
    • Understands mental health concepts and psychological processes (e.g., parallel process, trauma, grief, loss) as experienced by infants, young children, families, and adults.
    • Understands how infants and young children form attachment relationships with important family members and other caregivers and considers the critical importance of these attachments for early childhood development.
    • Knows about and understands typical and atypical growth and development in infants and young children, including the general sequence of developmental milestones in all domains, including cognitive, sensory-motor, communication, play, self-regulatory, and social-emotional.
    • Understands family dynamics and systems theory (how each individual relates to the healthy functioning of the organization, group, or family). Understands how members of families and groups are connected to each other through complex relationships.
    • Understands that IECMH consultation (IECMHC) focuses on illuminating and affecting the beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors of the adults in infants’ and young children’s lives.
    • Possesses foundational information about trauma, its effect on the developing brain and body, and long-term implications of traumatic experiences.
    • Recognizes the impact of implicit and explicit bias as well as institutional and historical racism throughout infant and early childhood systems.

  • EXPERIENCES

    A competent IECMH consultant:

    • Has experience with infant and early childhood settings and the systems that serve and support the social, emotional, and relational health of infants, young children, families and adults, and understands these settings and systems.
    • Has experience working with infants and young children exhibiting typical as well as challenging behaviors.
    • Has experience with utilizing a range of clinical therapeutic tools and services with infants, young children, families, and adults for understanding and communication with aligned professionals, though not with an expectation of clinical delivery in this role.
    • Has experience providing training and delivering information using adult learning principles.
    • Has experience working with infants, young children, families, and adults with different abilities and from diverse cultural, racial/ethnic, language, and socioeconomic backgrounds.
    • Understands the role of culture as a strength through which to support the social and emotional health and well-being of infants, young children, families, and adults.

  • SKILLS

    A competent IECMH consultant:

    • Is skilled at communicating with consultees, peers, and allied professionals.
    • Has the service-navigation abilities and skills needed to understand the complexity of family needs and to make connections to community services.
    • Is comfortable working with individuals from diverse cultural, racial/ethnic, language, and socioeconomic backgrounds and provide culturally informed aware services.
    • Uses standardized and evidenced-informed tools to observe, assess, plan, and monitor change across infant, young child, family, and program consultation.
    • Has reflective capacity.
    • Demonstrates an ability to work in diverse early childhood education (ECE) programs or other settings.
    • Considers the influence of program or other setting and organizational functioning on ECE staff, families, infants and young children, and adults, as well as on service provision, and how this influence may differ based on an infant’s, young child’s, family’s or adult’s race/ethnicity, primary language, or abilities.
    • Suggests and/or supports interventions (e.g., programmatic and/or infant- or young child– and family-specific activities) that align with the particular program or other setting in which IECMHC is delivered.
    • Offers consultation that reflects and respects the philosophy and model of the program or other setting in which IECMHC is delivered and the community, cultural, and historical contexts in which that program or other setting is located and/or functions.

Getting Started: Supporting the Infant and Early Childhood Mental Health Consultant

These reflective prompts are designed for programs managers starting a new relationship with a consultant to consider

  • These reflective prompts are designed for programs managers starting a new relationship with a consultant to consider
    • What am I hoping for as this new consultant begins work with me and our team?
    • What do I expect a typical day for the new consultant to look like?
    • What am I hoping to share with and teach the consultant in this new position?
  • It may be useful to provide similar reflective prompts to the consultant as they begin to work with you.
    • What am I hoping for as I begin this work?
    • What do I expect a typical day to look like?
    • What can my program manager do to help me as I begin in this new position?

First Days

Action Steps

It is not uncommon for new consultants to be overwhelmed by the amount of information they need to assimilate. The following sections break down the process of introducing materials and resources to consultants over the first year.

  • Familiarize the consultant with information about local early childhood context, community resources, and general background about the community/communities the program serves, such asthe diversity of families served, system challenges and systemstrengths.
  • Have the consultant Complete Consultant Assessment https://www.iecmhc.org/assessment
  • Help the consultant develop an understanding of the program’s model of consultation. Identify for the consultant what fidelity to the model means and how it is maintained. These topics should be revisited each month until the consultant has gained mastery of the concepts.
  • Start sharing with the consultant industry-specific information (e.g., state child care rules and regulations, home visiting procedures, integrated-care considerations such as medical HIPPA regulations).
  • Instruct the consultant to read chapter 1 in Mental Health Consultation in Child Care: Transforming Relationships Among Directors, Staff, and Families by Kadija Johnson and Charles Brinamen. Make a plan to discuss this and future chapters with the consultant during team meetings or supervision sessions.
  • Ensure the consultant understands reflective supervision and establish a schedule for reflective-supervision sessions.
  • Provide the consultant with guidance on how to use reflective supervision.
  • For additional information on reflective supervision see the November 2016 ZERO TO THREE Journal (opens in a new tab) focused on Measuring and Building Reflective Capacity. Here are some examples of tools that can be helpful:
    • Reflective Supervision Rating Scale - RSRS (Ash, 2010) - Introduces and assesses ways of being that have been found to be critical for an effective reflective supervision relationship, including factors such as reflective process & skills, mentoring, structure, and mentalization. Sharing the scale with the consultant as they start the with reflective supervision helps the know what to expect and how to get the most out of the supervisory experience. Checking in at 6 months should serve to make sure the relationship encompasses essential reflective qualities. Please contact jordana.ash.co@gmail.com to access this resource.
    • Provider Reflective Process Assessment Scales - PRPAS (Heller, 2012). This tool was created to assess change in reflective capacity in early childhood providers and practitioners after participating in reflective supervision or training. A deep look into a provider’s growing reflective processing on the dimensions of self-knowledge, self-regulation, collaboration, process, authentic attitude, and multiple perspectives. Please contact Sheller1@tulane.edu to access this resource.
    • Reflective Supervision Competency Scale - RSCS (Finello, Heffron, Stroud & Kocsis 2016) Designed to observe and evaluate process elements that are critical for effective reflective supervision, including qualities of interpersonal interactions between the supervisor and supervisee. This tool helps track growth in professional development as supervisors and uses digital and narrative measurement. Please contact kfinell@wested.org to access this resource.
    • Reflective Supervision Self-Efficacy Scale (opens in a new tab) – RSSESS - (Shea, Goldberg & Weatherston 2012). Designed to support the relational capacities of both supervisors and supervisees and to facilitate collaborative supervisory relationships. This scale asks raters to state their level of confidence that they can demonstrate a specific behavior or skill essential for effective reflective practice. The tool has shown correlations between reflective supervision self-efficacy and job satisfaction as well as burnout.

First Weeks

  • Review the consultant’s results from the Consultant Assessment, and go over strengths and areas for growth with consultant. Areas for growth may include need for knowledge, skills or experiences that are identified in the sample plan. Supplement discussion with the consultant with additional training based on the individual consultant’s needs.
  • Arrange for the consultant to complete the following Center of Excellence (CoE) Foundational Modules:
    • The Role of the Infant and Early Childhood Mental Health Consultant
    • Child and Family Focused Consultation
  • Review and discuss the following resources:
  • Arrange for the consultant to shadow more experienced consultants. Each shadow visit should be followed by an opportunity to debrief with the more experience consultant. Provide opportunities for the shadow visits to occur in the range of settings (e.g. child care centers, home child care programs, publicly funded preschools) in which the program delivers services. Review with the consultant the Shadowing & Reflecting Guidelines for recommendations on setting up these visits and how the consultant will proceed. Carefully select the individuals to be shadowed. The process of learning through shadowing and reflection is extremely important for the new consultant’s competency development. The program manager should think about who most effectively embodies the consultative stance and will demonstrate the activities and demeanor of consultation in such a way that the new consultant can see, hear, and experience excellence in consultative stance. Ideally the consultant should shadow more than one consultant so as to experience different approaches. Be sure to communicate with the new consultant how long the shadowing will take, what the purpose of the shadowing is, and how confidentiality will be maintained. Consider how the program setting and parents will be informed about the shadowing.

Shadowing and Reflection Guide (PDF)

First Month

Ensure that the consultant

Second and Third Month

  • Continue reflective supervision sessions.
  • Continue to work with the CoE Equity topics to support professional development based on areas of growth identified from the consultant self-assessment. The CoE Racial Equity Toolkit provides additional resources to explore. Begin with the “Start Here” section of the Toolkit. Continue to the "Dig Deeper” section as needed.
  • Plan supervision sessions to discuss material either individually or at a team meeting.
  • Consider enrolling the consultant in the the Irving Harris Diversity Informed Tenets for Work with Infants, Children and Families (opens in a new tab).
  • Plan supervision sessions to discuss material either individually or at a team meeting.

Fourth Through Sixth Month

Sixth Month Through First Year

  • Instruct the consultant to continue to participate in reflective supervision.
  • Note any activities that could not be completed. Ensure that the consultant has had adequate support to gain the knowledge, skills, and experiences necessary to perform their job.
  • Revisit areas that were challenging for the consultant and provide resources or additional supervision to help them in these areas.
  • Review the experience of reflective supervision with the consultant. Consider using the Reflective Supervision Rating Scale (opens in a new tab) to gain an understanding of the consultant's perspective of the supervision process, and discuss any areas in which the supervisory relationship could be strengthened.

Refresher

It is important that consultants continue their professional development. The Center of Excellence’s Sustaining Infant and Early Childhood Mental Health Consultant in Their Jobs is a resource for program manager’s that includes ideas on how to enhance consultants’ professional development. In addition consider encouraging experienced consultants to:

  • Serve as a mentor consultant for others in peer learning or shadowing.
  • Review content and materials as well as to be retrained in modalities, tools, and approaches.
  • Participate in new consultant training opportunities.
  • Continue with reflective supervision.

If the consultant is highly competent, consider designing opportunities for them to serve in a mentor role to new consultants, which could include serving as someone to shadow or to touch base with when consultation guidance or case review is required.

References

Resources with asterisks (*) are resources that require payment or permission from the original author to access the resource.