ACF Office of Early Childhood Development Participant Feedback to improve the implementation of early childhood programs

Attachment A: Sample Questions for ECD Stakeholder Events

Respondents will be informed that their participation is completely voluntary and that their information will be kept private and their responses will not be associated with individual names. Events may be in-person or virtual.

The questions are designed to hear directly from participants on strategies to improve the implementation of early childhood programs through various stakeholder events. Questions used for each ECD Stakeholder Event will be tailored based on the agenda and the relevant audience and not all questions will be asked at every meeting. The questions below provide examples of the types of questions that we would ask participants at an ECD event. We anticipate asking 2-5 questions below for each event. The anticipated time that participants will need to answer the questions is 10 minutes.

Supports for Parents and Families

• From your experience, what supports healthy development and social and economic well-being from parents and families? How can we better engage parents to partners and advocate for early learning programs and policies?

Promising Approaches or Innovations

• From your experience, what are some promising and innovative strategies to support and strengthen families with young children?

• From your experience, what have been the most effective strategies to ensure that more children have access to high-quality early care and education?

• What are strategies for recruiting and retaining high-quality early childhood teachers that you have found to be effective? Do you have suggestions for creative strategies? What else could we be doing?

Engaging States and Local communities

• What do you think states/localities are doing to improve early care and education systems and transition to school and other child and family service systems?

• Have you engaged your community, state and national leadership to support and advance high quality early learning programs for children and families?

Barriers and Challenges

• What do you think are the factors that make it easier to coordinate across early childhood programs/initiatives?

• What do you think makes it hard or difficult to coordinate across programs and initiatives? What are barriers and challenges to serving families more holistically?

• What do you think are the obstacles/barriers have prevented us from “moving farther” in the last 5-10 years despite the evidence that the earliest years are the most important?

Recommendations for federal government

• What should the federal government do to make the coordination in early childhood better?

• In your experience, what type of technical assistance and support is needed?

• In your experience, what are some of the data and research needs in early childhood development?

Strategic Planning

• How might we build stronger movement to influence leaders and policy makers to act on the evidence?

• Where do we have a lot more work to do?

• What do you think we should be focusing more for the next 2-3 years?

• What do you think our top priority should be for our work in early childhood?

• What else do we need to do to support parents and families with young children in this country?

• How do you think federal, state, and local government can partner more effectively?

• What are strategic opportunities in the coming year for us to work together? What help do you need?

• How might ECD/ACF be a catalyst to create collective impact and support early learning and care of our nation’s children and their families?

General feedback)

• The webinar/meeting increased my knowledge and understanding about [add name of specific topic].

• I intend to apply what I learned in my work.

• Overall, the presenters enhanced my learning based on the information provided.

• The webinar/meeting was applicable and relevant to my state and program’s needs.

• I am satisfied with the overall quality of the webinar/meeting.

• Please share suggestions for other topics or for improving future webinars/meetings. (open text box)

Likert Scale Responses:

1. Strongly Disagree

2. Disagree

3. Neutral, neither agree nor disagree

4. Agree

5. Strongly Agree

PAPERWORK REDUCTION ACT OF 1995 (Pub. L. 104-13) STATEMENT OF PUBLIC BURDEN: Through this information collection, ACF is gathering information to learn about the barriers and challenges, innovative approaches, and practical solutions in early care and education and related child and family serving systems. Information collected during these sessions will be used by ACF in the development of future technical assistance, research agendas, and/or strategic planning and partnership development. Public reporting burden for this collection of information is estimated to average 10 minutes per respondent, including the time for reviewing instructions, gathering and maintaining the data needed, and reviewing the collection of information. This is a voluntary collection of information. An agency may not conduct or sponsor, and a person is not required to respond to, a collection of information subject to the requirements of the Paperwork Reduction Act of 1995, unless it displays a currently valid OMB control number. The OMB # is 0970-0XXX and the expiration date is XX/XX/XXXX. If you have any comments on this collection of information, please contact Melissa Brodowski at melissa.brodowski@acf.hhs.gov

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