Email to Regional Providers

Early Childhood Training and Technical Assistance (T/TA) Cross-System

Evaluation Project

Appendix A2: Email Invitation for Regional-Level T/TA Provider Semi-Structured Interviews

To: T/TA Coordinators, Regional Head Start

T/TA State System Specialists, Child Care State Capacity Building Center

Subject: Invitation to Discuss ACF’s Early Childhood Training and Technical Assistance (T/TA) System

[GREETINGS]

The Administration for Children and Families (ACF), in partnership with NORC at the University of Chicago, is designing a utilization-focused evaluation for the specific purpose of documenting, assessing, and enhancing ACF’s Early Childhood Training and Technical Assistance (EC T/TA) System. As you already are aware, ACF’s Early Childhood Training and Technical Assistance (EC T/TA) System has recently undergone a transformation, and the activities associated with this evaluation will be designed to assist with this process by providing information that is critical to the enhancement of T/TA practices, resources, and materials. A key component to the success of the evaluation will be gathering insights from a wide range of stakeholders—in particular ACF program staff from the Offices of Head Start and Child Care, outside experts, and those who have direct involvement with the System, including national and regional-level Early Childhood T/TA providers.

We would like to speak with you via telephone to learn more about your use of T/TA resources and methods, use of data, and recommendations for future evaluation activities. Please know that your participation is voluntary. These discussions will provide our team with critical input for designing a cross-system evaluation that can also support your own continuous improvement efforts. The information collected through this effort will be used for internal purposes to design the cross-system evaluation study and to develop resources to support evaluation activities among T/TA system stakeholders. We will protect individually identifiable information and will summarize responses when we share findings internally with T/TA stakeholders, ACF Federal Staff, and a Technical Expert Panel. The information we collect will not be released to the public.

To schedule a discussion, please email us your availability for a 90 minute telephone discussion during the next two weeks. Once we hear back from you, we will email you different times when we are also available.

We look forward to speaking with you further and learning more about your T/TA services and evaluation activities and interests. As always, please let us know if you have any questions!

Thank you, 

Carrie E. Markovitz and Marc W. Hernandez

Co-Principal Investigators of the Early Childhood T/TA Cross-System Evaluation Project

An agency may not conduct or sponsor, and a person is not required to respond to, a collection of information unless it displays a currently valid OMB control number. The OMB number for this information collection is 0970-0356 and the expiration date is 03/31/2018.

DISCUSSION TOPICS FOR INTERVIEWS

During the interview, we hope to learn more from you about several areas related to your work within ACF’s Early Childhood Training and Technical Assistance System, including:

• Your short- and long-term goals, and how they align and differ with those of the broader EC T/TA system;

• Your T/TA stakeholders, if and how you assess their needs, and how you adapt your services as a result;

• The specific T/TA services you provide and what if any records you maintain in regard to service provision and recipient feedback;

• The specific T/TA outcomes you measures, the data you collect, and analyses you conduct to assess achievement toward your goals;

• How you disseminate information and evaluate dissemination efficacy;

• Your perceptions of the quality and utility of the evaluation data you collect and use;

• How you evaluate the effectiveness of your T/TA efforts and your perspective on the effectiveness of those efforts;

• The data systems you use to make available and document the use of your T/TA services, tools and resources;

• The individuals who use your data systems;

• What additional research, data resources or tools could better support your T/TA activities; and

• Your general impressions about the T/TA system, as well as thoughts, ideas and input that will help us design a useful national evaluation.